87 terms defined, free reference

SEO Glossary

Every SEO term you need to know, defined clearly with why it matters and how to fix it. Covers technical SEO, on-page, off-page, Core Web Vitals, AI search optimization, and analytics.

Technical SEO On-Page SEO Off-Page SEO AI & GEO Core Web Vitals Analytics & Metrics

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Technical SEO

Page Indexing Report

The Page indexing report is Search Console's list of every URL Google knows about on your site, split into indexed and not indexed, with a specific reason given for each URL Google chose not to index. It was previously called the Index Coverage report, and the older Excluded and Error groupings were merged into a single Not indexed status.

URL Inspection

URL Inspection is the Search Console tool that reports Google's current knowledge of a single URL: whether it is indexed, when it was last crawled, which canonical Google selected against the one you declared, and how the page rendered. It also offers a live test that fetches the page as Googlebot right now.

Crawl Stats Report

The Crawl stats report, found under Settings in Search Console, records 90 days of Googlebot activity on a site: total crawl requests, total download size and average response time, broken down by response code, file type, purpose (discovery or refresh) and Googlebot type. It also reports host status for robots.txt, DNS and server connectivity.

Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given timeframe, determined by crawl rate limit (how fast Googlebot can crawl without overloading your server) and crawl demand (how much Google wants to crawl based on popularity and freshness).

Canonical Tag

A canonical tag (rel="canonical") is an HTML element that tells search engines which version of a page is the preferred, authoritative copy when multiple URLs serve similar or identical content. It prevents duplicate content issues by consolidating ranking signals to one URL.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file at the root of a website (example.com/robots.txt) that tells search engine and AI crawlers which pages and directories they are allowed or disallowed from accessing. It uses User-Agent directives to control access per crawler.

Redirect Chain

A redirect chain occurs when a URL redirects to another URL, which then redirects to yet another URL, creating a series of sequential hops (e.g., Page A → 301 → Page B → 301 → Page C). Each hop adds latency and dilutes the link equity passed to the final destination.

301 Redirect

A 301 redirect is a permanent server-side redirect that tells search engines a page has permanently moved to a new URL. It passes approximately 90-99% of the original page's link equity (PageRank) to the new URL and instructs search engines to update their index.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file (typically at /sitemap.xml) that lists all the important URLs on your website along with metadata like last modification date, change frequency, and priority. It helps search engines discover and crawl your pages more efficiently.

Noindex

Noindex is a robots meta tag directive (meta name="robots" content="noindex") that tells search engines not to include a specific page in their search index. The page can still be crawled, but it will not appear in search results.

Indexation

Indexation is the process by which search engines add web pages to their searchable database (index). A page must be crawled, rendered, and evaluated before it can be indexed. Only indexed pages can appear in search results.

Hreflang

Hreflang is an HTML attribute (rel="alternate" hreflang="x") that tells search engines which language and regional version of a page to serve to users in different locations. It links together translated or localized versions of the same content.

Orphan Page

An orphan page is a page on your website that has no internal links pointing to it from any other page. It exists in your sitemap or can be accessed directly via URL, but no other page on your site links to it.

Structured Data

Structured data is code (typically JSON-LD format) added to web pages that helps search engines understand the content in a machine-readable way. It uses the Schema.org vocabulary to describe entities like articles, products, FAQs, events, and organizations, enabling rich results in search.

Schema Markup

Schema markup is a standardized vocabulary (developed by Schema.org and supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex) used to annotate web content with structured data. Common schema types include Article, Product, FAQPage, HowTo, LocalBusiness, Organization, BreadcrumbList, and Review.

HTTPS

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is the encrypted version of HTTP that uses SSL/TLS certificates to secure data transmitted between a user's browser and the web server. Google has confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal since 2014.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is substantively similar or identical content that appears on multiple URLs, either within the same website (internal duplicates) or across different websites (external duplicates). Search engines must decide which version to index and rank.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is the practice of connecting pages within your website using hyperlinks. Internal links distribute link equity (PageRank) across your site, help search engines understand your site structure and content hierarchy, and guide users to related content.

Log File Analysis

Log file analysis is examining your server's access logs to see exactly which URLs search engine crawlers requested, when, how often and what status codes they received. It is the only record of what crawlers actually did, rather than what they were invited to do.

Title Tag

A title tag is an HTML element (<title>) that specifies the title of a web page. It appears in browser tabs, search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline, and social media shares. It is the single most important on-page SEO element.

Meta Description

A meta description is an HTML meta tag that provides a brief summary of a web page's content. It appears below the title tag in search engine results and is typically 150-160 characters long. Google has confirmed meta descriptions are not a direct ranking factor.

H1 Tag

An H1 tag is the primary heading element on a web page, indicating the main topic of the page's content. Best practice is one H1 per page, containing the primary keyword, with subsequent headings (H2, H3) creating a logical content hierarchy.

Alt Text (Alternative Text)

Alt text (alternative text) is an HTML attribute added to image tags that describes the content and function of an image. It serves as a text alternative when images can't be displayed, is read by screen readers for accessibility, and helps search engines understand image content.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is a framework from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to evaluate the quality of web content. While not a direct ranking algorithm, it influences how Google's algorithms assess content quality.

Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages on the same website target the same keyword or search intent, forcing them to compete against each other in search results. Instead of one strong page ranking, Google must choose between multiple weaker options.

Content Structure

Content structure refers to how information is organized on a web page using headings (H1-H6), paragraphs, lists, tables, and other formatting elements. Well-structured content uses a clear hierarchy, front-loads important information, and creates self-contained sections that can be extracted by AI engines.

Image Optimization

Image optimization is the process of reducing image file sizes and improving delivery without sacrificing visual quality. It includes compression, format selection (WebP, AVIF), responsive sizing, lazy loading, and descriptive alt text. Optimized images load faster and consume less bandwidth.

Topic Authority

Topic authority is the degree to which a site is treated as a credible source across an entire subject area rather than for a single query. It is built by covering a topic comprehensively and consistently, and it influences how readily individual pages on that topic rank.

Semantic SEO

Semantic SEO is optimising for meaning and relationships between concepts rather than for exact keyword strings. It treats a page as being about entities and their attributes, which is closer to how modern search systems actually interpret content.

Search Intent

Search intent is what a searcher is actually trying to accomplish with a query, usually classified as informational, navigational, commercial investigation or transactional. It determines what kind of page can satisfy the query at all.

Intent Gap

An intent gap is the distance between what a page offers and what searchers for its target query actually want. It shows up as impressions without clicks, or as a page that ranks briefly and then falls back.

Keyword Clustering

Keyword clustering is grouping queries that should be served by the same page, usually because they share search intent and return substantially the same results. It decides how many pages a topic needs rather than which keywords to target.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is everything you control on the page itself: titles, meta descriptions, headings, content, internal links, images and markup. It is the half of SEO that requires no one else's cooperation.

Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is generating large numbers of pages from a template and a structured data source, typically one page per product, location, comparison or dataset row. The pages share a layout and differ in their data.

SEO Copywriting

SEO copywriting is writing content that serves a search intent well while remaining genuinely useful to read. It is ordinary copywriting with an added constraint: the page must satisfy the query that brought the reader.

Disavow

Disavowing is telling Google to ignore specific inbound links when assessing your site, by uploading a plain text file of URLs or domains to the disavow tool. The tool is not in the Search Console navigation and is reached by URL, which is a deliberate signal that most sites should never use it.

Backlink

A backlink (also called an inbound link or incoming link) is a hyperlink from one website to another. Backlinks are one of Google's most important ranking signals because they act as votes of confidence from other websites, indicating that your content is valuable and trustworthy.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search results, scored on a scale of 1-100. Ahrefs has a similar metric called Domain Rating (DR). Neither is a Google ranking factor, but both correlate with ranking ability.

Link Equity

Link equity (also called link juice or PageRank) is the ranking value passed from one page to another through hyperlinks. When a high-authority page links to another page, it passes a portion of its authority through that link, boosting the linked page's ranking potential.

Referring Domain

A referring domain is a unique website that contains at least one backlink pointing to your site. One referring domain can provide multiple backlinks, but the diversity of referring domains is more important than the total number of individual links.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink. Search engines use anchor text as a signal to understand what the linked page is about. Natural anchor text profiles include a mix of branded, exact-match, partial-match, and generic text.

UR (URL Rating)

URL Rating is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for the backlink strength of a single page, as distinct from Domain Rating which scores a whole domain. Both are third-party models rather than Google metrics.

TF and CF (Trust Flow, Citation Flow)

Trust Flow and Citation Flow are Majestic's two backlink metrics. Citation Flow scores link quantity and Trust Flow scores link quality by proximity to a seed set of trusted sites. They are usually read as a ratio rather than individually.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is everything influencing your rankings that happens outside your own site: backlinks, brand mentions, reviews, citations and third-party coverage. It is the half of SEO you influence rather than control.

Link Bait

Link bait is content created specifically to earn backlinks: original research, free tools, data studies, or strong opinions on contested topics. The term describes intent rather than a technique, and covers both genuinely valuable and purely provocative work.

Link Exchange

A link exchange is a reciprocal arrangement where two sites link to each other, either directly or through a third site to disguise the pattern. Google's link spam policies treat excessive reciprocal linking as a link scheme.

Link Farming

Link farming is operating or participating in a network of sites created primarily to link to each other and pass ranking signals. It is one of the oldest link schemes and one Google's spam systems specifically target.

Local Citation

A local citation is any online mention of a business's name, address and phone number, whether or not it links to the site. Directories, data aggregators, review platforms and industry listings are the usual sources.

NAP Consistency

NAP consistency means your business Name, Address and Phone number appear identically everywhere they are published: your site, your Google Business Profile, directories and aggregators. Formatting differences count as inconsistencies.

Map Pack

The map pack, also called the local pack, is the block of three local business results shown with a map above the organic listings for queries with local intent. It is ranked separately from organic results using proximity, relevance and prominence.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is publishing an article on another site, usually with a link back to your own. It ranges from genuine contribution to a relevant publication through to paid placement on sites that exist to sell links.

Parasite SEO

Parasite SEO is publishing content on a high-authority third-party domain in order to rank using that domain's authority rather than your own. Google's site reputation abuse policy targets the version of this done at scale for commercial gain.

Rank and Rent

Rank and rent is building a site that ranks for commercially valuable local queries, then renting the leads or the site itself to a local business. The operator owns the asset and the business pays for its output.

White Label SEO

White label SEO is work performed by one provider and delivered under another agency's brand. The client sees only the agency; the fulfilment happens elsewhere, typically for audits, content, link building or reporting.

Google Maps SEO

Google Maps SEO is optimising to appear in Google Maps results and the map pack, driven by your Google Business Profile rather than your website. It shares almost nothing mechanically with ranking a page.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing content to get cited by AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The term was formalized by Princeton researchers who found specific content strategies can boost AI visibility by up to 40%.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of optimizing content specifically for AI-powered search features like Google AI Overviews, Bing's AI chat, and featured snippets. AEO focuses on providing direct, structured answers that AI can extract and display.

LLM Seeding

LLM seeding is the practice of creating and distributing content across the web in a way that trains large language models (LLMs) to associate your brand with specific topics, products, or solutions. It involves building consistent brand mentions across authoritative sources that LLMs use as training data.

AI Crawler

AI crawlers are web crawlers operated by AI companies to collect and index web content for use in AI search results and model training. Major AI crawlers include GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI/ChatGPT), ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic/Claude), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), and Google-Extended (Gemini).

AI Citation

An AI citation occurs when an AI search engine (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) references your content as a source in its generated response, typically with a link back to your page. Citations are distinct from mentions (brand named without a link) and recommendations (AI actively recommends your product).

AI Overview (Google)

AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience / SGE) are AI-generated answer summaries that appear at the top of Google search results for qualifying queries. They synthesize information from multiple sources and display expandable citation cards linking to the referenced pages.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed web standard (similar to robots.txt) that provides AI crawlers with a curated shortlist of a site's most important pages and their descriptions. It gives LLMs explicit guidance on which content to prioritize when learning about a website.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, published by Anthropic in November 2024, that lets AI assistants call external tools and read live data. In SEO it means connecting a client like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Codex to an SEO platform's server, so the model queries your rankings, traffic and crawl data as typed rows rather than a pasted screenshot.

Information Gain

Information gain is how much genuinely new information a page adds beyond what already ranks for the same query. Search and AI systems increasingly favour sources that contribute something the existing results do not, rather than sources that restate the consensus competently.

Relevance Engineering

Relevance engineering is the practice of shaping content and markup so that retrieval systems can match it precisely to the questions it answers, rather than optimising for a keyword. It emphasises entity clarity, structural cleanliness and self-contained claims over keyword placement.

Entity Salience

Entity salience is how prominent and unambiguous a given entity, such as a person, product, company or place, is within a piece of content. Search and AI systems use it to decide what a page is actually about, independently of its keywords.

Atomic Facts

An atomic fact is a single self-contained claim that can be lifted from a page and remain true and comprehensible without its surrounding context. "An SEO audit costs $2,000 to $7,500 for a mid-size site" is atomic; "costs vary considerably" is not.

LLM Prompt Coverage

LLM prompt coverage is the share of a defined set of prompts where your brand appears in the generated answer. It is the AI-search equivalent of share of voice, and it replaces ranking position as the unit of measurement because generated answers have no ranked list.

AI Visibility

AI visibility is how often and how prominently a brand appears in answers generated by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews. It is measured as coverage across a prompt set rather than as a position, because generated answers do not rank sources in a list.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of specific page experience metrics that Google uses as ranking signals: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measuring loading speed, INP (Interaction to Next Paint) measuring interactivity, and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measuring visual stability.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the largest visible content element (usually a hero image, video, or large text block) to render on screen. Google's threshold is under 2.0 seconds for a 'good' score (lowered from 2.5s after the March 2026 update).

FCP (First Contentful Paint)

First Contentful Paint (FCP) measures the time from when the page starts loading to when any content (text, image, SVG) is first rendered on screen. Target is under 0.4 seconds for AI search optimization, under 1.8 seconds for a 'good' Google score.

INP (Interaction to Next Paint)

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures the responsiveness of a page to user interactions (clicks, taps, key presses) by tracking the time from the interaction to the next visual update. It replaced FID (First Input Delay) as a Core Web Vital in March 2024. Target: under 200ms.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the visual stability of a page by quantifying how much the visible content shifts during loading. It scores unexpected layout shifts caused by images without dimensions, dynamically injected content, web fonts, and ads. Target: under 0.1.

Page Speed

Page speed refers to how quickly a web page loads and becomes interactive, encompassing metrics like TTFB (Time to First Byte), FCP, LCP, and total load time. Google uses page speed as a ranking signal via Core Web Vitals, and it directly affects both user experience and AI search citations.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free Google service that reports how a site performs in Google Search. It publishes Google's own records about your site: the queries it served you for, the clicks and impressions those earned, which URLs it indexed and why it skipped the rest, and any manual action taken against you.

Google Discover

Google Discover is the personalised content feed in the Google app and on the Chrome mobile home screen. It surfaces content based on a person's interests and activity rather than in response to a query, which makes it a push surface rather than a search results page. Search Console has reported on it since April 2019.

Platform Property

A platform property is a Search Console property type, launched 7 July 2026, whose subject is a social account rather than a domain. Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube accounts can each be verified by signing in to them, and Google then reports how that account's content performs on Google Search, Discover and News.

Search Console Insights

Search Console Insights is a simplified, narrative view built on Search Console data, optionally combined with Google Analytics. It highlights which content is performing, how people are finding it, which queries bring people in, and what is trending, presented as plain-language cards rather than as the filterable tables of the Performance report.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the volume of visitors who arrive at your website through unpaid search engine results. In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), it's tracked as sessions where the source/medium is google/organic, bing/organic, or other search engines. It excludes paid ads, direct visits, referral traffic, and social traffic.

CTR (Click-Through Rate)

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on your search result after seeing it. It's calculated as clicks divided by impressions. In Google Search Console, CTR is reported per query and per page.

Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings refer to the position at which your website appears in search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific search queries. Rankings are tracked by position (1-100+), with positions 1-10 being page 1 of Google results.

Rich Results

Rich results (formerly called rich snippets) are enhanced search result formats that display additional visual information beyond the standard title, URL, and description. Examples include star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, recipe cards, product prices, event dates, and how-to steps.

Search Visibility (Share of Voice)

Search visibility (also called share of voice or SOV) measures the percentage of total available search impressions your website captures across a defined keyword set compared to competitors. It's a more comprehensive metric than individual keyword rankings because it accounts for search volume and SERP features.

Impressions

An impression is counted each time your site appears on a search results page a searcher views, for most result types even if they never scroll down to it. Google Search Console reports impressions per query and per page, and they are the raw measure of how much search demand currently sees you.

Clicks

A click in Google Search Console is counted when a searcher clicks a result that sends them to your site. Clicks are reported per query and per page, and they are the closest thing search data has to a bottom line: demand that actually arrived.

Queries (Search Console)

Queries are the search terms your site appeared for, as reported in Google Search Console's Performance report with clicks, impressions, CTR and position for each. They are Google's own record of what people typed before seeing you, with one caveat: rare queries are anonymized and never shown as rows.

Average Position

Average position is Google Search Console's ranking metric: the average of your site's topmost position across every impression for a query or page, where 1 is the top result and lower numbers are better. It is an average over all countries, devices and days in the range, not a single live rank.

Branded Query

A branded query is a search that includes your company, product or sub-brand name, including misspellings: the searcher already knows you and is navigating to you. In Search Console, branded queries are isolated with a regex query filter listing every spelling of your brand terms.

Non-Branded Query

A non-branded query is a search that describes a problem, product category or question without naming any provider: the searcher does not know you yet, or has not decided. Non-branded clicks are the demand your content, rankings and technical work compete for and win.

Content Groups

Content groups are named sets of pages analysed as units: a blog section, a product template, a topic cluster, a publish era. Google Search Console has no native grouping feature, so groups are built with page filters ('URLs containing' or a regex) or maintained by a tool on top of GSC data.

KD (Keyword Difficulty)

Keyword difficulty is a tool-generated score, usually 0 to 100, estimating how hard it would be to rank on the first page for a query. Every tool calculates it differently, most commonly from the backlink profiles of the pages currently ranking.

MSV (Monthly Search Volume)

Monthly search volume is the estimated number of times a query is searched per month, usually averaged over the previous twelve months. Every figure outside Google Ads is a model, and even Google's own numbers are bucketed averages rather than exact counts.

SEO Score

An SEO score is a composite number produced by an auditing tool from its own weighted checks. There is no standard definition, so a 78 in one tool and a 42 in another can describe the same site without either being wrong.

Zero-Click Search

A zero-click search is one where the searcher gets their answer on the results page and never visits a site. Featured snippets, knowledge panels, People Also Ask and AI Overviews all produce them.

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