30 terms
The SEO glossary, in plain English
Definitions of the SEO terms that actually matter — canonical, Core Web Vitals, crawl budget, JSON-LD and more. Tap any term for the full explanation.
- Alt text
- A text description of an image, read by screen readers and used by search engines to understand what the image shows.
- Anchor text
- The clickable text of a link — descriptive wording helps search engines and users understand where the link leads.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours — high-quality backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking signals.
- Canonical URL
- A tag that tells search engines which version of a duplicate or similar page is the master version to index.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
- A Core Web Vital measuring unexpected layout movement while a page loads — aim for a score under 0.1.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's set of user-experience metrics — LCP, CLS, and INP — that feed directly into rankings.
- Crawl budget
- The number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given window — wasting it on junk URLs hurts indexing.
- Crawlability
- How easily search engine bots can reach and navigate the pages on your site.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust — the quality signals Google's raters use to judge content.
- Hreflang
- An attribute telling Google which language and region a page targets, for multilingual or multi-regional sites.
- Indexing
- The process of a search engine storing a page so it can appear in results — crawling and indexing are not the same thing.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint)
- A Core Web Vital measuring how quickly a page responds to user input — it replaced FID in 2024. Aim for under 200ms.
- JSON-LD
- Google's recommended format for structured data — a script block that describes your content to enable rich results.
- Keyword cannibalization
- When multiple pages target the same keyword and compete with each other, weakening all of them in search.
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
- A Core Web Vital measuring how fast the largest visible element renders — aim for under 2.5 seconds.
- Meta description
- The summary shown under your title in search results — it doesn't rank pages but heavily influences click-through rate.
- noindex
- A directive telling search engines not to show a page in results — the page can still be crawled.
- nofollow
- A link attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking authority through that link.
- Open Graph
- Meta tags that control how your page looks when shared on social media — title, description, and preview image.
- Organic traffic
- Visitors who arrive from unpaid search engine results rather than ads, social, or direct links.
- Rich results
- Enhanced search listings — star ratings, FAQs, images, prices — that structured data makes eligible in the SERP.
- Robots.txt
- A file at your site root that tells crawlers which URLs they may or may not request.
- Schema markup
- Structured data, usually written in JSON-LD, that labels your content type so search engines can parse it precisely.
- SERP
- Search Engine Results Page — the page of results a search engine returns for a query.
- Sitemap (XML)
- A file listing your important URLs to help search engines discover and prioritize crawling them.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable markup that describes your content so search engines can understand and enhance it.
- Title tag
- The clickable headline in search results and browser tabs — the single strongest on-page signal. Aim for 50–60 characters.
- TTFB (Time to First Byte)
- The time from a request to the first byte of the server's response — a slow TTFB delays everything after it, including LCP.
- Canonicalization
- The process of choosing the single preferred URL when several addresses serve the same or near-identical content.
- Crawl-delay
- A robots.txt directive asking bots to wait a set interval between requests, to reduce server load.
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