SEO glossary — terms, explained

What this category covers

Everything between a crawler arriving at your site and a person choosing a result: how a page enters an index, what decides where it appears, and which of those levers anybody outside a search engine actually controls.

Crawling and indexing — how a page is discovered and stored
Queries and intent — what somebody is actually asking for
On-page structure — headings, titles, the shape of a page
Internal links and site architecture
Technical health — speed, canonicals, redirects, duplication
The metrics: impressions, positions, clicks

Why these words matter

One word, one meaning

Most arguments about SEO are two people using one word for two things. A definition you can link to ends the argument in a sentence instead of a meeting.

AI search inherits all of it

An assistant reads the pages a crawler can reach. A site that cannot be crawled cannot be quoted, so these terms are the floor under the newer ones rather than a legacy beside them.

It names what is countable

Each term here points at something that can be measured — pages indexed, impressions, positions. The words that cannot be measured are the ones that turn into folklore.

Who needs this vocabulary

SaaS

Long buying cycles, and most of the research happens before anybody talks to sales.

E-commerce

Thousands of near-identical pages, where duplication and canonicals decide what is visible.

Marketplaces

Inventory that changes daily, so crawling and indexing are an operational problem.

Local business

A handful of pages and a map listing, where structure matters more than volume.

Media and publishing

Archives large enough that internal linking is the difference between read and buried.

Agencies

Explaining the same twelve words to every new client, in writing, once.

Terms in this category305 terms

A18

Ad Rank7 min read AdSense6 min read AdWords5 min read Affiliate Marketing6 min read Ahrefs7 min read AJAX5 min read Algorithm Update5 min read AlsoAsked5 min read Alt Text5 min read Amazon A9 Algorithm6 min read AMP5 min read Anchor text5 min read AnswerThePublic6 min read Apache5 min read Article Schema7 min read Attribution Model7 min read Audience Segmentation6 min read AVIF6 min read

B16

Backlink6 min read Backlinks6 min read Baidu Webmaster Tools5 min read Bing Places for Business7 min read Bing Webmaster Tools6 min read Black Hat SEO7 min read Botify6 min read Bounce Rate7 min read Brand SERP6 min read Branded Anchor5 min read Breadcrumb Schema5 min read Breadcrumbs6 min read Broken Link Building6 min read Broken links8 min read Browser Caching6 min read Business Profile8 min read

C38

D12

DeepCrawl5 min read Digital PR5 min read Direct Answer7 min read Disallow7 min read Disavow File6 min read Display Advertising6 min read DMP6 min read Domain Authority7 min read Domain migration6 min read Domain Rating6 min read Duplicate Content6 min read Dynamic rendering6 min read

E5

E-commerce SEO6 min read Editorial Calendar7 min read Engagement Rate7 min read Evergreen Content6 min read Exact-Match Anchor4 min read

F6

Facebook Business Manager7 min read Faceted navigation6 min read FAQ Schema5 min read Featured Snippet5 min read FID6 min read First-Party Data6 min read

G16

GA6 min read Geo-Targeting4 min read Geotargeting5 min read GMB5 min read Google Ads7 min read Google Business Profile6 min read Google Discover6 min read Google Keyword Planner5 min read Google Merchant Center5 min read Google News7 min read Google Posts7 min read Google Shopping6 min read Google Trends7 min read gTLD6 min read GTM6 min read Guest Posting7 min read

H11

H1 Tag5 min read Header Bidding6 min read Heading Hierarchy5 min read Heatmap7 min read Hotjar6 min read hreflang5 min read Hreflang Return Tag6 min read HTTP status codes7 min read HTTPS3 min read Hub and spoke model7 min read Hydration6 min read

I11

i18n6 min read IA6 min read Image Optimisation5 min read Image Optimization6 min read Image Pack6 min read Indexation4 min read Infinite Scroll7 min read Influencer Marketing6 min read INP5 min read Internal Linking5 min read International SEO6 min read

J2

JavaScript SEO4 min read JS4 min read

K6

Keyword Cannibalisation5 min read Keyword Difficulty7 min read Keyword Gap6 min read Keyword Research5 min read Keyword Volume6 min read Knowledge Panel4 min read

L21

M10

Majestic8 min read Map Pack6 min read Marketplace SEO8 min read Max-Snippet4 min read Meta Description6 min read Meta Robots Tag5 min read Microdata7 min read Mixed Content3 min read Mobile-First Indexing6 min read Moz7 min read

N12

Naked URL Anchor6 min read NAP7 min read NAP Consistency4 min read Navigation6 min read Near-Duplicate Content3 min read Negative SEO6 min read Nginx4 min read Noarchive5 min read Nofollow6 min read Nofollow Link6 min read Noindex7 min read Nosnippet4 min read

O5

Off-Page SEO5 min read On-Page SEO6 min read Online Reviews2 min read Organisation Schema3 min read Orphan Page5 min read

P22

Q1

Quality Score6 min read

R21

S35

T10

Tableau8 min read Technical SEO8 min read Third-Party Data7 min read Title Tag5 min read Topical Authority6 min read Topical Relevance4 min read Toxic Backlink4 min read Traffic Acquisition6 min read Trailing Slash4 min read TTFB6 min read

U8

UGC7 min read UGC Link4 min read Universal Search6 min read Unlinked Brand Mention3 min read URL Parameters6 min read URL structure5 min read User-agent7 min read UX5 min read

V4

Video Carousel4 min read VideoObject Schema4 min read Voice Search Optimization6 min read Vue.js7 min read

W3

WebP6 min read White Hat SEO6 min read WordPress7 min read

X4

X-Robots-Tag6 min read XML6 min read XML Sitemap6 min read XPath6 min read

Y3

YAML4 min read Yandex Webmaster5 min read YouTube SEO7 min read

#5

301 redirect7 min read 302 redirect7 min read 404 error6 min read 410 Gone5 min read 500 error6 min read

How to use this category

1

Start from the word you just heard

Search it, read the lead. Every definition answers the question in its first sentence, so a term costs you thirty seconds, not an article.

2

Follow the related terms

Each page names the terms it depends on. Two or three hops is usually the whole subject you needed.

3

Check it against your own site

A definition is worth little until you look at your own numbers through it. That is what the tool at the bottom of this page is for.

Common mistakes

Optimising for a phrase nobody searches, because it was easy to rank for.
Treating a position as a result. A position is an input; a visit is a result.
Copying a checklist without reading what any of its items do.
Comparing numbers from two tools that measure different things and calling the gap an error.

Questions about this category

Is SEO still relevant if assistants answer the question?

Yes, and for a mechanical reason: an assistant answers from pages it can retrieve. Being retrievable is what SEO has always described. What changes is the destination — a citation inside an answer rather than a link in a list.

What is the difference between SEO and GEO?

SEO is about a page's place in a list of results. GEO is about whether a generative system quotes it in an answer. They share the crawling and the content, and differ in what counts as success.

How often do these definitions change?

The mechanics change slowly and the interfaces change fast. Where a term depends on one search engine's current behaviour, the page says so and names its source.

Do I need to know all of them?

No. This is a reference, not a syllabus. The terms are cross-linked so you can read one and stop.

The other categories

GEO and AI searchThe vocabulary of being found inside an answer rather than in a list of links: how a system retrieves, what it quotes, and what any of that can be measured with.Trust and E-E-A-TExperience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust — the signals that decide whether a page is treated as a source or as noise, by a search engine and by a system writing an answer.MeasurementThe words for counting what happened — impressions, share of voice, coverage, sampling, windows, confidence — and, for each of them, what it cannot tell you.Marketing and growthThe commercial vocabulary around search — what an auction actually reports, who your real competitors are, how attention turns into revenue, and the frameworks used to decide what to write next.

See whether assistants quote you

Reading a definition tells you what the word means. The Vectorscope tells you what your own site looks like to the systems that use it.

Open the Vectorscope

Search engine optimisation