Welcome to the world of SEO! Like any specialized field, it’s filled with its own language, acronyms, and jargon. Feeling lost in a sea of terms like “SERP,” “backlink,” and “canonicalization”? You’ve come to the right place.
This SEO glossary is your go-to reference for understanding the essential terminology you’ll encounter on your journey to mastering search engine optimization. We’ve broken down the terms into logical categories to make them easier to digest. Bookmark this page—you’ll be referring to it often!
Foundational SEO Concepts
These are the absolute basics—the core ideas that form the foundation of everything we do in SEO.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
- Search Engine: A program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user. The most popular examples are Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
- SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The page that a search engine returns after a user submits a search query. It typically includes organic results, paid ads, and other features like featured snippets.
- Keyword: A word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine. Your goal is to have your website show up when users search for keywords relevant to your business.
- Search Intent: The underlying goal or reason a user has for conducting a search. The four main types are Informational, Navigational, Commercial, and Transactional.
- Algorithm: A complex set of rules and calculations that search engines use to retrieve data from their index and deliver the best possible results for a query. Google’s algorithm is constantly being updated.
On-Page SEO Terms
On-Page SEO refers to the optimization of elements on your website itself to improve rankings and user experience.
- Title Tag: The HTML title of a webpage that appears on SERPs and in browser tabs. It’s a major ranking factor and should include your primary keyword.
- Meta Description: The short blurb of text (around 155-160 characters) that appears under your title tag on a SERP. While not a direct ranking factor, a compelling meta description increases your click-through rate.
- Header Tags (H1, H2, H3): HTML tags used to structure your content. The H1 is your main page title, followed by H2s for sub-sections. They help search engines and users understand the hierarchy of your content.
- Alt Text (Alternative Text): A description of an image in your site’s HTML. It’s crucial for accessibility (for screen readers) and helps search engines understand the content of your images.
- Internal Link: A link from one page on your website to another page on the same website. Internal links help with site navigation, distribute page authority, and help search engines understand your site structure.
- URL Slug: The part of a URL that comes after the domain name (e.g., in yoursite.com/seo-glossary, the slug is seo-glossary). It should be short, descriptive, and include your keyword.
- E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): A set of guidelines from Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines used to assess the quality of a webpage. It’s especially important for “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics.
Off-Page SEO & Link Building Terms
Off-Page SEO refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings.
- Backlink (or Inbound Link): A link from another website to your website. Backlinks are one of the most powerful ranking factors, acting as “votes of confidence” from other sites.
- Link Building: The process of actively acquiring backlinks to your website from other relevant, high-quality sites.
- Domain Authority (DA): A search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on SERPs. It’s a third-party metric, not used by Google, but is useful for gauging a site’s overall strength.
- Anchor Text: The clickable text in a hyperlink. Descriptive anchor text (e.g., “read our guide to on-page SEO”) provides context to both users and search engines about the linked page’s content.
Technical SEO Terms
Technical SEO ensures that a website can be effectively crawled and indexed by search engines.
- Crawling: The process by which search engine bots (spiders) discover your webpages by following links.
- Indexing: The process of storing and organizing the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed on a SERP.
- Sitemap.xml: A file that lists all the important URLs on your website, acting as a “map” to help search engines find and crawl your content more efficiently.
- Robots.txt: A text file that gives instructions to search engine crawlers about which pages or files on your site they should or should not crawl.
- HTTPS: A secure protocol for data transfer. Having an SSL certificate (which enables HTTPS) is a confirmed, albeit small, ranking signal and is essential for user trust.
- Core Web Vitals: A specific set of metrics Google uses to measure user experience, focusing on loading speed (LCP), interactivity (FID), and visual stability (CLS).
- Schema Markup (Structured Data): A code vocabulary you can add to your site’s HTML to help search engines better understand your content and represent it more effectively in the SERPs (e.g., with star ratings, event times, etc.).
- Canonical Tag: An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a URL is the “master” copy when you have duplicate or very similar content across multiple URLs. This prevents issues with duplicate content.
Analytics & Measurement Terms
These are the metrics you’ll use to measure the success of your SEO efforts.
- Organic Traffic: Visitors who come to your website from unpaid search engine results.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. (Note: Google Analytics 4 replaces this with “Engagement Rate”).
- Conversion: The completion of a desired action on your site, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter.
- Ranking: The position of your website on a SERP for a specific keyword.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of users who click on your link after seeing it on a SERP. It’s calculated as (Clicks ÷ Impressions) x 100.