Clear definitions of the most common SEO terms. Core concepts covering search engines, content, technical SEO, and the AI era.
An AI-generated summary answer at the top of Google's search results, compiled from multiple sources; formerly known as…
The set of mathematical rules that determines which signals search engines evaluate, and with what weight, when ranking…
The descriptive text defined in an image’s HTML alt attribute; essential for accessibility and critical for image SEO…
Accelerated Mobile Pages — an open-source HTML framework launched by Google for pages that load extremely fast on…
The clickable visible text of a hyperlink; it provides search engines with a strong clue about the topic…
When the same content exists at multiple URLs, the rel="canonical" link tag is used to tell the search…
The search feature OpenAI integrated into ChatGPT that uses live web search to generate source-backed answers to user…
Cumulative Layout Shift — a Core Web Vitals metric that measures the amount of unexpected shifting of content…
A set of three core metrics (LCP, INP, CLS) that Google uses as a page experience signal and…
Crawl budget — the number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on a site within a…
A bot program that automatically crawls web pages and collects their content, enabling search engines to build their…
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the four criteria Google uses in its quality rater guidelines to assess the…
Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the three-letter pre-2022 version of E-E-A-T; Google added the "Experience" dimension to this framework…
External link — a link from one page to a page on a different domain; it helps a…
Indexability — whether a page is technically able to enter a search engine's index; the absence of all…
Indexing — the process by which a page is added to a search engine's database and made eligible…
Interaction to Next Paint — a Core Web Vitals metric that measures the browser response time for all…
Internal link — a link from one page to another within the same domain; it manages site architecture,…
LSI — evaluating words that are semantically related to a topic together; a concept widely used in the…
Largest Contentful Paint — the load time of the largest content element within a page's visible area; the…
When large language models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) cite or reference a web page as a source in…
Local SEO — the efforts to help businesses with a physical location or service area rank higher in…
Long-tail Keyword — a keyword that generally consists of 3 or more words, has lower Search Volume, but…
A short summary defined in a page's HTML in the <meta name="description"> tag; it appears below the title…
The text defined in the <title> tag of a page's HTML and shown as the blue headline in…
The approach in which Google primarily uses the mobile version of a website for ranking and indexing evaluation;…
A metric developed by Moz that estimates, on a scale of 1 to 100, the ranking potential of…
The algorithm developed by Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that calculates the importance of web pages…
An AI-powered "answer engine" — a search platform that generates sourced, cited, and verifiable answers to user questions…
The resources and time a search engine allocates to render JavaScript-heavy pages; a critical concept for modern SPA…
A results display in search results that includes enhanced elements such as stars, price, and images, beyond the…
The standard text file found in a site's root directory that tells crawlers which URLs are allowed to…
Labeling a page's content in a structured format using the Schema.org vocabulary so that search engines can better…
Search Intent — what a user actually wants to do when typing a search query; it is divided…
Search Engine Marketing — the umbrella term for all organic (SEO) and paid (PPC) marketing activities aimed at…
Search Engine Optimization — the collective term for all efforts made to help a web page appear higher…
Search Engine Results Page — the results page a user sees after entering a query into a search…
An XML file that presents search engines with a list of all important URLs on a site; it…
Structured data — formatted data that describes a page's content to search engines in a machine-readable way using…
The HTTP status code that refers to permanently redirecting one URL to another; it transfers all SEO value…
An HTTP status code that refers to a URL being temporarily redirected to another URL; the search engine…
The HTTP status code indicating that the requested URL could not be found on the server; returned for…
