SEO glossary

31 search terms in plain words, each with an example and a free way to check it.

New to search? Start with the beginner’s SEO guide, then look up any word you meet here.

A

  • Alt text: A short written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines to understand the picture.
  • Anchor text: The clickable words of a link. Clear anchor text tells readers and search engines what the linked page is about.

B

  • Backlink: A link from another website to yours. Links from trusted, relevant sites are one of the signals search engines use.

C

  • Canonical URL: The one address you tell search engines is the main version of a page when similar versions exist.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): The share of people who see your result in search and click it. A clear title and description raise it.
  • Core Web Vitals: Google’s measures of how fast a page appears, how quickly it responds and how stable it is while loading.
  • Crawling: When a search engine’s program visits pages and follows links to find content. A page it cannot reach cannot be listed.

D

  • Duplicate content: The same or nearly the same text on more than one page. It makes it harder for search engines to pick the right one.

E

  • E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: the qualities Google’s guidelines ask reviewers to look for in content.

F

  • Featured snippet: A box at the top of some results that answers a question directly, taken from a web page.

G

  • Google Business Profile: Your free business listing on Google Search and Maps, with your hours, photos, reviews and contact details.
  • Google Search Console: A free Google tool that shows how your site appears in search, which searches bring visits and what problems exist.

I

  • Indexing: When a search engine stores a page so it can be shown in results. A page that is not indexed cannot appear.
  • Internal link: A link from one page of your site to another page of the same site.

K

  • Keyword: A word or phrase people type into a search engine. Pages are written to match the words customers really use.
  • Keyword density: How often a keyword appears on a page compared with the total number of words.

L

  • Local citation: A mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website or directory.
  • Local pack: The map and short list of businesses that Google shows for searches with local intent.
  • Long-tail keyword: A longer, more specific search phrase. It is searched less often but usually shows clearer intent.

M

  • Meta description: The short summary under a result’s title in search. It does not change your position but affects clicks.
  • Mobile-first indexing: Google mainly uses the phone version of a page to decide how it is listed.

O

  • Organic traffic: Visits that come from unpaid search results, not from ads.

R

  • Redirect: An instruction that sends visitors and search engines from one address to another.
  • Review score: Your average star rating together with how many reviews you have and how recent they are.
  • Robots.txt: A small file on your site that tells search engine crawlers which areas they may or may not visit.

S

  • Schema markup: Extra code that labels the facts on a page, such as business details, reviews and questions, for search engines.
  • Search intent: The reason behind a search: to learn something, to find a place, to compare, or to buy.
  • SERP: The search engine results page: the list of results shown after a search.
  • Sitemap: A file that lists the pages of your site you want search engines to find.

T

  • TF-IDF: A way of finding the words that matter on a page: words used often there but not common everywhere.
  • Title tag: The page title shown in browser tabs and as the blue headline of a search result.

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