SEO Glossary
Every SEO term you'll encounter, explained in plain language — no jargon required.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Structuring content so answer engines — featured snippets, voice assistants, AI chatbots — can extract and cite it directly.
- Alt text
- A text description of an image, read by screen readers and used by search engines to understand images.
- Anchor text
- The clickable words of a link. Descriptive, natural anchor text helps rankings; over-optimized exact-match anchors can hurt them.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours — one of the strongest ranking signals.
- Canonical URL
- The 'official' version of a page you tell search engines to index when duplicates exist.
- Citation (local SEO)
- A mention of your business name, address and phone number on a directory or website.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's page-experience metrics: loading (LCP), interactivity (INP) and visual stability (CLS).
- Crawling
- How search engines discover pages by following links.
- Domain Rating / Authority
- Third-party scores (Ahrefs DR, Moz DA) estimating a site's link strength. Useful for comparison; not Google metrics.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — the quality framework Google's human raters use, especially for health and finance topics.
- Entity
- A uniquely identifiable thing — a business, person, product — that search engines understand and connect to related entities.
- Featured snippet
- The direct-answer box above regular results, extracted from a ranking page.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Improving how often and how accurately generative AI systems (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) mention your brand.
- Google Business Profile
- Your free business listing on Google Maps and local results — essential for local SEO.
- Hreflang
- Markup telling search engines which language/region version of a page to show which users.
- Indexation
- Whether a page is stored in a search engine's index — a prerequisite for ranking at all.
- Internal link
- A link between pages on your own site, distributing authority and helping users and crawlers navigate.
- Keyword cannibalization
- When multiple pages target the same query and compete with each other, weakening both.
- Knowledge Graph
- Google's machine-readable model of entities and their relationships, powering knowledge panels and AI answers.
- Local pack
- The map plus three business listings shown for local searches.
- Meta description
- The summary shown under your title in search results — it doesn't rank pages directly, but it wins clicks.
- NAP
- Name, Address, Phone number — must be consistent everywhere for local SEO.
- Niche edit / link insertion
- Adding a link into an existing, already-indexed article on another site.
- Noindex
- A directive telling search engines not to index a page.
- Organic traffic
- Visitors from unpaid search results.
- Programmatic SEO
- Publishing many template-driven pages from structured data to capture long-tail demand at scale.
- Redirect (301)
- A permanent forwarding from one URL to another, passing most ranking value.
- Robots.txt
- A file telling crawlers which parts of your site they may access.
- Schema markup
- Structured data code that labels your content (business, article, FAQ) so machines understand it precisely.
- Search intent
- What the searcher actually wants — information, comparison, or to buy. Pages must match it to rank.
- Sitemap (XML)
- A machine-readable list of your pages that helps search engines crawl your site completely.
- Title tag
- The clickable headline in search results — one of the strongest on-page ranking factors.
- YMYL (Your Money Your Life)
- Topics affecting health, money or safety, held to Google's strictest quality standards.
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