SEO Glossary: Terms, Jargon & Concepts A–Z
Sixty SEO terms defined in one or two sentences, from 301 redirects to YMYL. Bookmark it for the next time a report or an agency uses a word you do not recognise.
301 redirect
Permanent redirect from one URL to another, passing most ranking signals.
404
HTTP status for a page that does not exist.
Alt text
Description of an image in HTML, used for accessibility and image search.
Anchor text
The visible, clickable text of a link.
Authority
A site’s perceived trustworthiness and strength, largely from links and mentions.
Backlink
A link from another website to yours.
Black hat SEO
Tactics that violate search engine guidelines.
Bounce rate
Share of sessions with no further interaction (replaced by engagement rate in GA4).
Breadcrumbs
Navigation showing a page’s position in the site hierarchy.
Canonical tag
Tag declaring the preferred URL among duplicates.
Citation (local)
A mention of a business’s name, address and phone on another site.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Clicks divided by impressions.
Cloaking
Showing different content to search engines than to users; prohibited.
Content pruning
Removing or merging low-value pages to strengthen a site.
Core Web Vitals
Google’s page experience metrics: LCP, INP and CLS.
Crawl budget
Resources a search engine allocates to crawling a site.
Crawler / spider / bot
Software that discovers and reads web pages.
Disavow
Telling Google to ignore specific backlinks.
Do-follow
A normal link that passes authority (as opposed to nofollow).
Domain Authority / Rating
Third-party scores estimating link strength.
Duplicate content
Substantially identical content at multiple URLs.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.
Faceted navigation
Filtering systems on e-commerce sites that can create many URLs.
Featured snippet
An answer box at the top of results.
Google Business Profile
Google’s free listing for local businesses.
Guest post
An article published on another site, usually with a link back.
Hreflang
Attribute linking language or regional versions of a page.
Impressions
Times a page appeared in search results.
Index
A search engine’s database of pages.
Internal link
A link between pages on the same site.
Keyword
A word or phrase people search for.
Keyword density
Percentage of words that are the keyword; not a useful target.
Keyword difficulty
Estimated competition for a keyword.
Knowledge panel
An entity information box in results.
Link building
Earning backlinks.
Link insertion / niche edit
A link added into an existing article.
Link velocity
The rate at which a site gains links.
Local pack / map pack
The map and three listings shown for local searches.
Long-tail keyword
A specific, lower-volume search phrase.
Meta description
HTML summary shown under the title in results.
Mobile-first indexing
Google indexing the mobile version of pages.
Nofollow
Link attribute asking search engines not to pass authority.
Off-page SEO
Signals from outside your site, mainly links and mentions.
On-page SEO
Optimisation of content and HTML on a page.
Orphan page
A page with no internal links pointing to it.
PageRank
Google’s original link-based ranking algorithm.
People Also Ask
Expandable related questions in results.
PBN
Private blog network; a link scheme.
Ranking factor
A signal used to order results.
Rich result
An enhanced search result from structured data.
Robots.txt
File controlling crawler access.
Schema markup
Structured data vocabulary from schema.org.
Search intent
The goal behind a search.
SERP
Search engine results page.
Silo / topic cluster
Grouping related content around a pillar page.
Sitemap
XML file listing URLs for crawlers.
Thin content
Pages with little useful content.
Title tag
The HTML title shown in results and browser tabs.
White hat SEO
Guideline-compliant SEO.
YMYL
Your Money or Your Life: topics Google holds to higher standards.
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