SEO Glossary
Definitions for the SEO terms that show up in audits, reports, proposals, and tool dashboards, written without the marketing-jargon padding.
How to use this glossary
This glossary is intended as a working reference rather than a textbook. The definitions are written for people who encounter these terms in proposals, dashboards, and meetings and want to be confident they understand what is actually being discussed. Where a term has a precise technical meaning, HTTP status codes, schema types, Core Web Vitals thresholds, we describe it accurately and reference the underlying standard so you can verify and dig deeper. Where a term is contested or has shifted in meaning over time (we treat link building, E-E-A-T, and the boundary between content and SEO carefully here), we describe the current consensus rather than pretending more certainty than the discipline supports. We update entries as the underlying standards change rather than leaving outdated information live; the move from FID to INP in Core Web Vitals is the kind of change we propagate through the glossary as soon as it lands.
What this glossary deliberately does not include
We have kept the glossary focused on terms that show up in actual SEO work today. We do not include obsolete tactics or metrics that no longer matter (most of the early-2000s SEO vocabulary), we do not include vendor specific marketing language dressed up as industry terminology, and we do not include the sort of speculative or proprietary terms that appear in agency pitch decks but never make it into the broader practice. If a term you expected to find is not here, that is intentional, and if you think we have missed something genuinely useful, tell us and we will consider adding it. We maintain the glossary by hand precisely so we can hold an quality line on what belongs and what does not.
How to read the entries
Each entry is written to be useful in isolation but cross referenced where related terms exist. If a definition mentions another term that has its own entry, you can usually find it nearby in the alphabetical listing. The entries are deliberately concise, long enough to convey the meaning and the most useful surrounding context, short enough to function as a quick lookup rather than a deep-dive. For deeper treatment of the larger topics (Core Web Vitals, accessibility, schema), the corresponding longer guides in the resource library go into the implementation detail this format cannot.
- Algorithm update
- A change to how a search engine ranks results. Major Google updates (Core Updates, spam updates) often shift rankings broadly and are documented publicly.
- Alt text
- The text alternative for an image, declared via the alt attribute. Used by screen readers and as an SEO signal for image content.
- Anchor text
- The visible, clickable text inside a hyperlink. Search engines use anchor text as a relevance signal.
- Backlink
- A link from another website pointing to yours. Quality, relevance, and natural intent matter more than raw count.
- Black-hat SEO
- Tactics that violate search engine guidelines (link schemes, cloaking, content scraping). Risky and often penalized.
- Breadcrumbs
- Navigational links that show a page's place in the site hierarchy. Useful for users and a ranking surface in some SERPs.
- Canonical tag
- An HTML element (rel="canonical") that tells search engines which URL is the preferred version when multiple URLs serve similar content.
- Crawl budget
- The number of URLs a search engine is willing to crawl on your site within a period. Important for large sites.
- Crawlability
- Whether and how easily a search engine can access pages on your site.
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Clicks divided by impressions. In SEO, the CTR for a query and ranking position influences whether the result keeps the position.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's user-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
- Disavow file
- A file submitted to Google asking it to ignore specific links pointing at your site. Used sparingly; Google generally handles spam links automatically.
- Domain authority
- A third party score (popularized by Moz) estimating ranking strength. Not used directly by Google.
- Duplicate content
- Substantively identical content available at multiple URLs. Causes indexation and ranking issues if not handled with canonicalization or redirects.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. A framework Google's quality raters use to evaluate content; particularly important for YMYL topics.
- Entity
- A discrete, identifiable thing (person, place, organization, concept). Search engines build a knowledge graph of entities and relationships.
- Featured snippet
- An excerpt displayed at the top of Google's results, pulled from a high ranking page. Targeted via clear, direct answers and structured content.
- Google Search Console
- Google's free tool for monitoring how a site appears in search, impressions, clicks, indexation, errors, Core Web Vitals.
- Heading tags
- HTML elements (H1–H6) defining heading hierarchy. Used by screen readers and search engines to understand structure.
- hreflang
- An HTML attribute that signals the language and regional targeting of a page to search engines.
- Indexation
- The state of a page being included in a search engine's index and therefore eligible to appear in results.
- INP
- Interaction to Next Paint. The Core Web Vital that measures interaction responsiveness across the page lifetime; replaced FID in 2024.
- Internal link
- A link from one page on your site to another. Distributes authority and helps search engines understand site structure.
- LCP
- Largest Contentful Paint. The Core Web Vital that measures time to render the largest visible element. Target: under 2.5 seconds at the 75th percentile.
- Long-tail keyword
- A more specific, lower-volume query (often three or more words). Often higher intent and easier to rank for.
- Meta description
- The HTML attribute summarizing a page, often shown in search results. Not a direct ranking factor but influences click-through.
- NAP
- Name, Address, Phone. Contact information that needs to be consistent across local citations.
- Nofollow
- A link attribute (rel="nofollow") telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through the link.
- Off-page SEO
- Signals from outside your site that affect rankings, primarily links and brand mentions.
- On-page SEO
- Optimization elements you control directly on each page: titles, headings, content, internal links, schema.
- Organic traffic
- Visits arriving from unpaid search results.
- Pagination
- Splitting long content or product lists across multiple pages. Has implications for crawl, indexation, and canonicalization.
- People Also Ask (PAA)
- A SERP feature showing related questions Google suggests. Targetable through Q&A-shaped content.
- Redirect (301/302)
- Server responses that send users and search engines from one URL to another. 301 is permanent; 302 is temporary.
- Rendering
- How a search engine processes a page's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to determine its content. Important for JavaScript-heavy sites.
- robots.txt
- A file at the root of your site that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not crawl.
- Schema markup
- Structured data added to a page (typically as JSON-LD) so search engines can better understand its content and entities. Vocabulary defined at schema.org.
- Search intent
- What a user is trying to accomplish with a query. Commonly classified as informational, commercial, navigational, or transactional.
- SERP
- Search engine results page.
- Sitemap (XML)
- A file listing the URLs on your site you want search engines to know about.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable markup describing the meaning of page content. Schema.org is the most common vocabulary.
- Title tag
- The HTML element defining the page's title. Used as the headline in search results and a strong on-page signal.
- Topical authority
- The breadth and depth of a site's content on a topic, used by search engines to assess credibility on that topic.
- User signals
- Behavioral signals (click, dwell, return-to-SERP) that may influence rankings indirectly.
- White-hat SEO
- Tactics aligned with search engine guidelines. Sustainable; doesn't carry penalty risk.
- YMYL
- "Your Money or Your Life", Google's term for topics that can affect a person's health, finances, safety, or wellbeing. Held to a higher quality bar.