SEO Glossary
Understand the language of search engines. A comprehensive guide to common SEO terminology.
Alt Text
A short, descriptive piece of text that explains the relationship between an image and your content. It helps search engines understand what your image is about and improves accessibility for visually impaired users.
Anchor Text
The visible, clickable text part of a hyperlink. It tells users and search engines something about the page you're linking to.
Backlink
A link from one website to a page on another website. Search engines often use backlinks as a ranking signal, viewing them as a 'vote of confidence'.
Breadcrumbs
A navigational aid that helps users understand their location on a website. Search engines can also use breadcrumbs to understand site structure.
Canonical URL
The preferred version of a web page when multiple URLs have identical or similar content. It tells search engines which version to index and show in search results.
Crawling
The process by which search engines discover updated content on the web, such as new sites, pages, changes to existing sites, and dead links.
Duplicate Content
Substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
Indexing
The storing and organizing of content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it's eligible to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.
Keyword Stuffing
The practice of excessively repeating the same words or phrases on a web page in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. This is against search engine spam policies.
Meta Description
A brief summary of a web page's content. While not a direct ranking factor, it often appears as the snippet below the title link in search results and can influence click-through rates.
Nofollow
An attribute added to a link telling search engines not to pass authority (PageRank) to the linked website.
PageRank
An algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results by evaluating the quantity and quality of links to a page.
Robots.txt
A text file placed in the root directory of a website that tells search engine crawlers which pages or files they can or cannot request from your site.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
The page displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a searcher. It typically includes organic search results, paid ads, and other search features.
Sitemap
A file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines read this file to crawl your site more intelligently.
Structured Data / Schema
A standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. It helps search engines understand the content and enables special search result features (rich snippets).
Title Link / Title Tag
An HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. It is displayed as the clickable headline in search engine results and is crucial for usability, SEO, and social sharing.