Not Sure What Those SEO Terms Mean? Check Out Our Easy Glossary!
Confused by SEO jargon? Our SEO glossary breaks down essential SEO terms with clear, concise definitions so you can confidently grow your online visibility.
Understanding SEO can feel overwhelming—especially when you’re bombarded with technical language. That’s why we’ve created this SEO glossary: to help marketers, business owners, and beginners navigate the most important SEO terms without the confusion.
Whether you’re auditing your site, building backlinks, optimizing on-page content, or managing crawl errors, knowing the right terminology is essential. This glossary includes all the critical SEO terms—technical, on-page, off-page, and even black hat techniques—organized alphabetically for easy reference.
From basics like “Alt Text” and “Anchor Text” to advanced concepts like “Crawl Budget,” “Schema Markup,” and “Parasite SEO,” each entry gives you a clear, actionable definition. No fluff, no filler—just straight-to-the-point explanations written in plain English.
Bookmark this page and refer back whenever you’re working on an SEO campaign, reading industry blogs, or decoding a report from your SEO tools. The more you understand these terms, the more confident you’ll be in making strategic decisions for your website.
0-9
| 301 Redirect | A permanent redirect from one URL to another, used to pass SEO value to a new page. |
| 302 Redirect | A temporary redirect that tells search engines the original page will be back. |
| 404 Error | A “Page Not Found” error shown when a webpage doesn’t exist anymore. |
A
| Above the Fold | The portion of a webpage visible without scrolling; crucial for capturing user attention. |
| Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) | A Google-backed project designed to make web pages load faster on mobile devices. |
| Ad Impressions | The number of times an advertisement is displayed, regardless of clicks. |
| ADA Compliance | Ensuring web content is accessible to individuals with disabilities, aligning with the Americans with Disabilities Act. |
| AhrefsBot | A web crawler used by Ahrefs to index web pages and links. |
| AJAX | A web development technique that allows web pages to update asynchronously by exchanging data with a web server behind the scenes. |
| Algorithm | A set of rules used by search engines to rank web pages in search results. |
| Algorithm Update | Changes made by search engines to their ranking algorithms, impacting website rankings. |
| Alt Attribute | HTML attribute providing alternative text for images, aiding accessibility and SEO. |
| Alt Text | Descriptive text for images that helps search engines understand visual content. |
| Analytics | The collection and analysis of data regarding website usage to inform decisions. |
| Anchor Text | The clickable text in a hyperlink; important for keyword relevance in SEO. |
| Article Spinning | The practice of rewriting content to create multiple versions, often used in blackhat SEO. |
| Article Syndication | Republishing content on third-party sites to reach a broader audience. |
| Authority | The perceived credibility and trustworthiness of a website, influencing its ranking. |
| Authority Site | A trusted, high-quality website with strong backlinks and good SEO metrics. |
| Auto-Generated Content | Content created automatically by software, often lacking quality and depth. |
B
| Backlink | A link from another website pointing to your site, essential for SEO. |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | A free service by Microsoft to help monitor and maintain a site’s presence in Bing search results. |
| Bingbot | The web crawler used by Bing to index web content. |
| Black Hat SEO | Unethical SEO practices that violate search engine guidelines. |
| Bounce Rate | The percentage of visitors who leave a site after viewing only one page. |
| Branded Keywords | Search terms that include a brand’s name or variations. |
| Breadcrumb Navigation | A navigational aid showing users their location within a site’s hierarchy. |
| Breadcrumbs | Navigation links that show users and search engines where they are on a site. |
| Bridge Page | A web page created solely to redirect visitors to another site, often used in affiliate marketing. |
| Broken Link | A hyperlink that leads to a non-existent or unavailable web page. |
C
| Cache | Stored versions of web pages to reduce server load and speed up loading times. |
| Canonical Tag | A tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the original. |
| Canonical URL | The preferred version of a web page when multiple versions exist, preventing duplicate content issues. |
| Cart Abandon Rate | The percentage of online shoppers who add items to their cart but do not complete the purchase. |
| ccTLD (Country Code Top-Level Domain) | A domain extension specific to a country, such as .uk for the United Kingdom. |
| Click-Through Rate (CTR) | The ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page or email. |
| Cloaking | A blackhat SEO trick where different content is shown to search engines than users. |
| Content Calendar | A schedule outlining when and where content will be published. |
| Content Curation | The process of gathering and sharing relevant content from various sources. |
| Content Marketing | Creating and distributing valuable content to attract and engage a target audience. |
| Content Pruning | Removing low-performing or outdated pages to improve site quality. |
| Conversion Rate | The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on a website. |
| Crawl Budget | The number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. |
| Crawler | A bot that systematically browses the internet to index web content for search engines. |
| Crawling | The process search engines use to discover pages on the web. |
| CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) | A stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML. |
| CTR (Click-Through Rate) | The ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page or email. |
D
| De-indexing | The removal of a web page from a search engine’s index, making it no longer appear in search results. |
| Disavow Tool | A feature in Google Search Console that allows webmasters to tell Google to ignore certain backlinks. |
| Dofollow Link | A link that passes SEO value from the referring site to the linked site. |
| Domain Authority | A metric by Moz that predicts how well a site will rank in search engines. |
| Domain Authority (DA) | A metric developed by Moz to predict how well a website will rank on search engines. |
| Duplicate Content | Content that appears on multiple web pages, either within the same site or across different sites. |
E
| E-A-T | Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness, is a concept used by Google to assess the quality of content and its creators. |
| Ecommerce SEO | The practice of optimizing online stores to improve visibility in search engine results. |
| Engagement Metrics | Data points that measure how users interact with a website, such as time on site and pages per session. |
| External Link | A link that points to a page on a different website. |
F
| Featured Snippet | A summary of an answer to a user’s query displayed at the top of Google’s search results. |
G
| Google Analytics | Google Analytics or GA4 free tool by Google that provides insights into website traffic and user behavior. |
| Google Bot | Google’s web crawling bot that indexes web pages for the search engine. |
| Google My Business | A tool that allows businesses to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. |
| Google Sandbox | A theory that new websites are temporarily held back from ranking. |
| Google Search Console | A free service by Google that helps monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot a site’s presence in Google Search results. |
| Guest Blogging | Writing content for another website to gain exposure and backlinks. |
| Guest Posting | Publishing articles on other websites to gain backlinks and traffic. |
H
| Header Tags (H1-H6) | HTML elements used to define headings and subheadings on a web page. |
| Hidden Text | Text that’s invisible to users but visible to search engines; considered blackhat. |
| Hreflang Tag | An HTML attribute that specifies the language and geographical targeting of a web page. |
| HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) | The standard language for creating web pages and web applications. |
I
| Indexing | The process of adding a webpage into a search engine’s database. |
| Internal Link | A hyperlink that points to another page within the same website. |
J
| JavaScript SEO | The practice of optimizing websites built with JavaScript for search engines. |
K
| Keyword | A word or phrase that users enter into search engines to find information. |
| Keyword Cannibalization | When multiple pages on the same site target the same keyword, causing competition between them and weakening SEO. |
| Keyword Density | The number of times a keyword appears on a page compared to total word count. |
| Keyword Difficulty | A metric that indicates how hard it would be to rank for a specific keyword. |
| Keyword Research | The process of finding relevant keywords your target audience is searching for. |
| Keyword Stuffing | Overusing keywords in content to manipulate rankings (blackhat tactic). |
L
| Landing Page | A standalone page created for a marketing or advertising campaign, optimized for conversions. |
| Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) | A method used by search engines to understand related keywords and context. |
| Link Bait | High-quality content designed to attract backlinks naturally. |
| Link Building | The process of getting other websites to link to your site to improve authority. |
| Link Equity | The value or ranking power passed from one site to another through links. |
| Link Farming | A blackhat SEO tactic where a group of websites excessively link to each other to boost rankings. |
| Link Juice | The SEO value passed from one page to another via backlinks. |
| Link Profile | A collection of all the backlinks pointing to a website. A diverse and clean link profile supports SEO health. |
| Local SEO | Optimization efforts that help businesses appear in local search results. |
| Long-Tail Keyword | A more specific, longer search phrase with lower competition but higher conversion potential. |
| LSI Keywords | Related terms and phrases that give context to your main keyword. |
M
| Manual Action | A penalty issued by Google when a site violates its webmaster guidelines. |
| Manual Penalty | A Google action that lowers rankings for violating guidelines. |
| Meta Description | A short summary of a page that appears in search engine results. |
| Meta Keywords | An outdated tag once used to list targeted keywords—largely ignored by modern search engines. |
| Meta Tags | Snippets of code in a webpage’s HTML that help search engines understand content. |
| Mobile-First Indexing | Google’s approach of indexing the mobile version of a website over its desktop version. |
N
| NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) | Consistent business info across local listings; critical for local SEO. |
| Negative SEO | The act of sabotaging a competitor’s rankings using unethical tactics like toxic backlinks. |
| Niche Edits | Adding a backlink to an existing post or page; often used in blackhat or grayhat strategies. |
| Nofollow Link | A link that does not pass SEO value to the linked page. |
| Nofollow Tag | An attribute on a link that tells search engines not to pass link equity to the target page. |
| Noindex Tag | A tag that tells search engines not to include a page in search results. |
O
| Off-Page SEO | Optimization done outside your site (like link building and social signals). |
| On-Page SEO | Optimization of individual pages for keywords, structure, and user experience. |
| Organic Traffic | Visitors who arrive at your site from unpaid (organic) search engine results. |
| Orphan Page | A webpage with no internal links pointing to it, making it hard for search engines to discover. |
P
| Page Authority (PA) | A Moz metric predicting how well a specific page will rank on search engines. |
| Page Experience | Google’s set of signals measuring how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. |
| Page Speed | How fast a page loads, which impacts rankings and user experience. |
| Parasite SEO | A blackhat/grayhat tactic of publishing content on high-authority third-party sites to rank in SERPs. |
| PBN (Private Blog Network) | A network of websites built to link to a main site and manipulate rankings—considered blackhat SEO. |
| Penalty | A negative action taken by search engines that lowers a site’s rankings due to guideline violations. |
| Pillar Page | A comprehensive page that covers a broad topic and links to more specific cluster content. |
R
| Redirect | A way to send users and search engines from one URL to another. |
| Redirect Chain | A series of multiple redirects from one URL to another; can hurt SEO. |
| Referring Domain | A website that contains a backlink pointing to your site. |
| Robots.txt | A file that tells search engine bots which pages to crawl or ignore. |
S
| Schema Markup | Structured data added to a webpage to help search engines understand the content and enhance SERP features. |
| Scraped Content | Content copied from other websites, often used in blackhat strategies. |
| Search Console (Google) | A free tool that helps monitor and troubleshoot your site’s visibility in Google search. |
| Search Engine | A software system like Google or Bing that indexes, ranks, and retrieves content based on user queries. |
| Search Intent | The reason behind a user’s search—like finding info, buying, or navigating. |
| Search Volume | The number of times a specific keyword is searched for in a given timeframe. |
| Semantic SEO | Optimizing content to focus on meaning and related topics rather than just keywords. |
| SEO Audit | A full analysis of a website’s SEO health and performance. |
| SERP (Search Engine Results Page) | The page users see after searching on Google or Bing. |
| Silo Structure | Organizing content into themed groups to strengthen topical authority. |
| Site Audit | A comprehensive analysis of a website’s SEO health, structure, and performance. |
| Sitemap | A file that lists all important URLs on a website to help search engines crawl and index them. |
| Skyscraper Technique | An SEO strategy where you find top-performing content, improve it, and promote your version. |
| Spam Score | A measure (from tools like Moz) indicating the likelihood that a site might be penalized. |
| Structured Data | A standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. |
T
| Technical SEO | The process of optimizing your website’s infrastructure to help search engines crawl and index your content more effectively. |
| Thin Content | Pages with little or no value to users, often flagged by search engines as low-quality. |
| Title Tag | The clickable title shown in search engine results—crucial for SEO and CTR. |
| Toxic Backlinks | Low-quality or spammy links that can negatively affect rankings. |
| Toxic Link | A backlink from a suspicious or spammy site that could harm your rankings. |
| Traffic | The number of visitors coming to a website. |
| Trust Flow | A metric that evaluates the quality of a site based on its backlink profile. |
U
| URL Slug | The readable part of a URL after the domain name. |
| URL Structure | The format of a URL that helps both users and search engines understand the content. |
| User Experience (UX) | How easy and enjoyable a site is to use; a growing SEO factor. |
| User-Generated Content (UGC) | Content created by users, such as comments or reviews—can be both beneficial or risky for SEO. |
W
| Web 2.0 Backlinks | Links built on platforms like Tumblr, Blogger, or Medium—often used in parasite SEO. |
| Web 2.0 Sites | Platforms like Medium or Blogger used in parasite SEO for link building. |
| White Hat SEO | Ethical SEO practices that follow search engine guidelines. |
X,Y,Z
| XML Sitemap | A structured file submitted to search engines listing all the URLs on a site for crawling. |
| YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) | Pages that can affect users’ health, finances, or safety—held to a higher quality standard by Google. |
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