Reference
SEO glossary
The terms you will hear from an SEO agency, defined plainly, with an honest note where something matters less than it is usually made to sound.
A fair amount of SEO vocabulary exists to make ordinary ideas sound technical. Where a term is genuinely useful, it is defined below. Where it is mostly decoration, the definition says so.
- Anchor text
- The visible, clickable words in a link. It tells Google what the linked page is about, which is why varying it matters and why the same exact phrase repeated hundreds of times looks manipulative.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours. Still among the strongest ranking signals. Quality and independence matter far more than quantity. More on this
- Canonical tag
- A tag naming the preferred version of a page when the same content is reachable at several addresses. Prevents a page competing with copies of itself.
- Cannibalisation
- Two or more of your own pages targeting the same search, so neither ranks as well as one combined page would. Common, invisible from the inside, and usually expensive. More on this
- Core Web Vitals
- Three measurements of loading, responsiveness and visual stability. A real but small ranking signal, and a bigger deal for whether visitors stay. More on this
- Crawl budget
- Roughly, how much attention Google gives your site. Matters mainly on large sites, where filters and parameters can consume it on pages nobody searches for.
- Crawling
- Google following links to discover pages. A page nothing links to is hard to discover, which is why orphan pages are a problem.
- Doorway pages
- Near-identical pages built for different locations or terms that funnel users to the same place. Against Google's spam policies, and the pattern most new agency sites fall into with suburb pages.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. Not a score Google calculates, but a description of what its quality systems try to reward. Matters most in health and finance.
- Filters on a category page. The largest source of crawl waste on ecommerce sites, because every combination generates a URL. More on this
- Hreflang
- Markup telling Google which language and country version of a page to show. Only needed with genuinely separate market versions, and worse than useless if implemented partially. More on this
- Indexing
- Google deciding to store a page and make it eligible to rank. Crawled is not the same as indexed, and the gap between them is where most silent problems live.
- Local pack
- The map with three businesses shown above organic results for local searches. Decided by relevance, distance and prominence. More on this
- NAP
- Name, address and phone number. Should be written identically everywhere it appears, because inconsistency weakens local ranking signals.
- Nofollow
- A link attribute indicating the link should not pass authority. Appropriate for paid or untrusted links, not for ordinary citations.
- Noindex
- An instruction that a page should not appear in results. Correct for thank-you pages and most archive pages. Frequently applied by accident to pages that should rank.
- Organic search
- Unpaid search results, as distinct from ads. The channel SEO works on.
- Rendering
- Google executing JavaScript to see a page as a browser would. Queued and delayed, so content that only exists after rendering is at risk. More on this
- Schema markup
- Structured data describing what a page contains. Does not improve rankings directly; it changes how results can appear.
- SERP
- Search engine results page. Worth reading directly before targeting any term, because what already ranks tells you whether you can compete. More on this
- Soft 404
- A page returning a success status while showing nothing useful, such as a removed product redirected to the homepage. Google treats it as missing.
- Structured data
- See schema markup. Must describe what is genuinely on the page; marking up things that are not there is a manual-action risk.
- The idea that covering a subject thoroughly helps a site rank across it. Real in effect, though not a metric Google publishes.
- XML sitemap
- A file listing the URLs you want indexed. Should contain only indexable, canonical pages, never redirects or noindexed URLs.
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