SEO glossary

The SEO glossary.

The technical and on-page terms behind search rankings, defined for marketers. No jargon tax, just what each one means and how to use it.

the words behind the rankings ✍
Alt text The text describing an image for screen readers and search engines, which helps accessibility and image search. Anchor text The visible, clickable words of a link, which give search engines context about the destination page.
Backlink A link from another website to yours, one of the strongest signals of authority in search.
Canonical tag An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a duplicate or similar page is the master to index. Core Web Vitals Google's set of user-experience metrics, loading, interactivity and visual stability, that factor into rankings. Crawl budget The number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given period, worth managing on large sites. Crawlability How easily search engine bots can access and move through your site's pages.
Domain authority A third-party score predicting how well a whole domain can rank, based largely on its backlink profile. Dwell time How long a visitor stays on your page after clicking from search before returning, a signal of usefulness.
Hreflang An HTML attribute that tells search engines the language and region a page targets, for international sites.
Indexation Whether a page is stored in a search engine's index and therefore eligible to appear in results.
Keyword difficulty An estimate of how hard it would be to rank on page one for a keyword, based on the competition.
Link building The practice of earning links from other sites to increase your authority and rankings. Local SEO Optimizing to appear in local search and maps results, centered on your Google Business Profile and local signals. Long-tail keyword A longer, more specific search phrase with lower volume but clearer intent and less competition.
Meta description The short summary under a result's title, which doesn't affect rankings but strongly affects click-through.
Nofollow link A link marked so it doesn't pass ranking authority, used for paid, untrusted or user-generated links.
Page speed How fast a page loads and becomes usable, which affects both rankings and conversions.
Rich result A search result enhanced with extra visual detail, like stars, prices or FAQs, powered by structured data. Robots.txt A file that tells crawlers which parts of your site they may or may not crawl.
Schema markup Structured-data code that labels your content for search engines, making rich results possible. Search volume The average number of times a keyword is searched in a given period, used to size the opportunity.
Title tag The clickable headline of a search result and the page's title in the browser tab, a core on-page ranking element.
XML sitemap A file listing your important URLs to help search engines discover and crawl them.
301 redirect A permanent redirect that sends users and search engines from an old URL to a new one, passing most of its authority.

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