SEO Glossary - T

Taxonomy

Taxonomy in SEO is the term to describe how you classify and organise the structure of pages on your site and the links between them.

A well organised taxonomy helps your users and Google understand the relationships between different pieces of content on your site and the relationships between them.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is any part of the SEO process which is aimed at increasing the crawlability and indexability of a website. Examples would include looking at things such as page speed, sitemaps, structured data (schema) and navigation amongst others.

Terms of Service

Some people refer to Google’s Guidelines as their Terms of Service.

TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency)

Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) in very simple terms is a formula that measures the importance of a word to a specific document.

It is a term you might hear some people use, but while in some small way it may be a part of Google algorithms very deep down, it is very unlikely to have much if any importance.

It’s a concept that real devotees of Information Retrieval may want to read up on, but for day to day SEO it’s not likely to be something to worry about.

Thin Content

Pages that have little or no value for end users. Try to avoid thin content as Google doesn’t deem it helpful and it could cause you issues if seen in excess.

Tiered Link Building

Tiered Link Building is a Blackhat link building technique where to protect the site they are aiming to rank (often what they would call the “money site”) they will aim to get some backlinks to the money site using Whitehat link building techniques, like Digital PR, and then once they have these they will buy or create spam links to the webpage that has given them the organic link.

The theory being that if they increase the PageRank of the linking web page it will pass through more PageRank to the “money site” and increase it’s rankings while minimising the risk of it being penalised for spam links.

Title (page)

The Title HTML element of a webpage is one of the more important on-page SEO factors. Your page title is a strong indicator to Google as to what your page is about and will often be used as the anchor text of the link in the Google Search Results Page, so can also influence users on whether to click the link or not.

Top Level Domain (TLD)

The top level domain for a domain is the .com, .uk, .fr, etc. It can send a signal to Google, most specifically for many (though not all, as some such as .ai and .io are used much more generically) geographic TLDs such as .uk, .fr, .de where Google will take it that the domain is targeting the location that matches the TLD.

Topical Authority

Topical Authority is an SEO concept that shows that websites can, over time, build up a corpus of content around a topic such that Google (and visitors) will start to consider them an authority in that topical area.

This allows a site with topical authority to start to rank well for keywords that match that topic even against larger sites that might have higher levels of general authority, but which aren’t specialists in that area.

Topical Authority Score

Topical Authority Score (TAS) is a metric we developed at KeywordsPeopleUse to measure the Topical Authority of all the websites we discover are ranking on the first page of Google when we perform Keyword Clustering on sets of keywords related to a topic.

This is an excellent byproduct of the Keyword Clustering process carried out by our keyword clustering tool as it gives an excellent view of the competitor landscape for a topical area as well as a comparison of where sites relate to each other in coverage.

Toxic Link

Toxic link is a term coined by SEOs to describe a link that may be actively harming your websites ability to rank.

Toxic links can be backlinks (from other websites to yours) or external links (from your website to a third party website).

Traffic

Traffic is the shorthand word for the number of website visitors you receive over a given period. You can segment traffic by the source of the traffic or the amount of traffic different pages on your site generate.

Transactional Intent

Transactional Intent is a term used to classify search queries where the user is trying to find a specific product or service that they wish to buy. The user is ready to buy and is probably only trying to answer the questions such as where is the cheapest to buy, the most trustworthy place to buy from or the place that can deliver the fastest.