SEO and Digital Marketing terms and definitions

Search engines pull data from multiple databases to show on the same SERP. It can be videos, images, snippets, shopping catalogs, news, etc.

UI stands for User Interface design. UI considers all the visual, interactive elements of a website to create an intuitive experience which doesn’t require the user to think too much. A UI designer will think about things like icons, buttons, typography, colour schemes, imagery and responsive design. Within web design, there is some overlap with UX, which stands for User Experience design.

UX is short for User Experience design. UX encompasses all aspects of a user’s interaction with a company and its products or services. A UX designer thinks about how the experience makes the user feel and aims to make it easier for them to accomplish desired tasks. Within web design, there is some overlap with UI, which stands for User Interface design.

UGC stands for user-generated content. Content created by users or customers, such as blog posts, videos, comments, reviews, etc.

User experience is the feeling users are left with after engaging with a brand. It covers interaction with the company, its product and/or services.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is a string of characters leading to a particular web resource.

An unnatural link is any link that Google identifies as deceptive or malicious. One unnatural link can result in a manual action on your website.

UGC Link stands for User Generated Content Link. In 2019, Google introduced the UGC link attribute, which is a way of labelling a link that has been placed by a user, such as a user comment or a forum post. A UGC link is similar to a nofollow link in that it does not have the same SEO benefits as a dofollow link.

UTM code, (also known as the UTM parameter), stands for Urchin Tracking Module code. To give you some back story, Urchin Software Corporation was acquired by Google in 2006, and their software was the start of what we now know as Google Analytics. UTM codes are text strings which can be added on to URLs to enable tracking via web analytics software such as Google Analytics. There are five standard parameters: utm_medium - identifies the channel e.g. organic, paid, email, affiliate, social utm_source - identifies the website that sent the traffic e.g. Google, Facebook utm_campaign - identifies the marketing campaign e.g. summer sale utm_content - identifies what specifically was clicked e.g. banner ad, text link utm_term - identifies search terms e.g. shoes

URL parameters are a way to pass information about a click through a URL. Here’s an example of a URL with URL parameters: http://example.com?product=1234&utm_source=google URL parameters appear after a question mark symbol (?) in a URL. Each URL parameter contains two parts - a key and a value. The key and the value are separated by an equals sign (=). In the example, ‘product’ is a key and ‘1234’ is a value. If you have multiple URL parameters, these are joined by an ampersand (&). In the example, ‘product=1234’ is the first URL parameter and ‘utmsource=google’ is the second URL parameter. In the example, the parameter ‘product=1234’ would modify the content to show a certain product to the user. The parameter ‘utmsource=google’ would track that the user had come from Google.