SEO Glossary Essential Terms & Definitions

Backlink

A link from one website to another.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visitors who leave a site after viewing only one page.

Canonical URL

The preferred version of a web page when multiple URLs contain similar or identical content.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The ratio of users who click on a search result compared to the total number who see it.

Content Gap

Topics or keywords that competitors rank for but your website does not.

Core Web Vitals

A set of Google metrics measuring real-world user experience: loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

Crawl Budget

The number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given timeframe.

Domain Authority

A search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search results.

Duplicate Content

Substantively similar content appearing at multiple URLs on the same site or across different sites.

Featured Snippet

A highlighted search result box that appears at the top of Google's organic results, extracted from a web page.

Google Search Console

A free Google tool that helps website owners monitor and troubleshoot their site's presence in Google Search results.

Hreflang

An HTML attribute that tells search engines which language and regional version of a page to show to users.

Indexation

The process by which search engines discover, crawl, and store web pages in their database for retrieval in search results.

Internal Linking

Links that connect one page of a website to another page on the same website.

Keyword Cannibalization

When multiple pages on the same website compete for the same search query, splitting ranking signals.

Keyword Difficulty

A metric estimating how hard it would be to rank on the first page of search results for a given keyword.

Long-Tail Keywords

Longer, more specific search phrases that typically have lower search volume but higher conversion intent.

Meta Description

An HTML attribute that provides a brief summary of a web page's content, often displayed in search results.

Noindex

A directive that tells search engines not to include a specific page in their search results index.

Organic Traffic

Visitors who arrive at your website through unpaid search engine results.

PageRank

Google's original algorithm for measuring the importance of a web page based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to it.

Redirect (301/302)

A way to send users and search engines from one URL to a different URL automatically.

Robots.txt

A text file at the root of a website that instructs search engine crawlers which pages or sections should not be crawled.

Schema Markup

Structured data code added to web pages that helps search engines understand the content and display rich results.

Search Intent

The underlying purpose or goal behind a user's search query.

SERP Features

Special result types that appear on search engine results pages beyond traditional organic listings.

Sitemap

An XML file that lists all important pages on your website, helping search engines discover and crawl your content.

Title Tag

An HTML element that specifies the title of a web page, displayed in browser tabs and search engine results.

URL Inspection

A Google Search Console tool that provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about a specific URL.

XML Sitemap

A machine-readable file listing URLs on a website to help search engines crawl and index content efficiently.