SEO Glossary: 100+ SEO Terms and Definitions

Above the fold refers to the part of a webpage a visitor can see before scrolling.

Important information, such as the main heading, page purpose, primary offer, or next action, should normally be easy to find here. Putting every important element above the fold can still make a page feel crowded.

An algorithm is a set of systems and processes a search engine uses to find, assess, organise, and display information.

Google uses many ranking and quality systems rather than one simple formula. Be cautious of anyone claiming to know every ranking factor.

Alt text is a written description added to an image through its HTML alternative-text attribute.

It helps people using screen readers understand an image and can give search engines useful context. Good alt text describes the image’s purpose without stuffing keywords.

Anchor text is the clickable wording used in a link.

For example, in “read our technical SEO guide,” the words “technical SEO guide” are the anchor text. Descriptive anchor text helps people and search engines understand the destination.

Answer engine optimization describes attempts to make content easier for search engines, assistants, and answer systems to understand and present as a direct response.

Strong AEO work usually relies on familiar SEO foundations: accurate content, clear answers, useful topic coverage, accessible pages, sound technical work, and trusted sources.

AI Mode is a Google Search experience designed to answer more detailed or multi-part questions through an AI-generated response with links and supporting sources.

Website owners do not need separate AI-only markup to be eligible. Useful original content and solid SEO foundations remain important.

An AI Overview is an AI-generated summary that may appear in Google Search for certain questions.

It can use information from several sources and include links for readers who want to explore the topic further.

Average position is a Google Search Console metric reporting the average position of a website’s highest-ranking result across recorded impressions.

It is aggregated data, not a precise daily ranking for every user, device, query, or location.

A backlink is a link from another website to your website.

Backlinks can help search engines discover pages and understand relationships between sites. Their value depends heavily on relevance, trust, placement, context, and quality.

Black-hat SEO refers to tactics that attempt to manipulate rankings while violating search-engine policies.

Examples include cloaking, hidden text, doorway pages, link schemes, keyword stuffing, and scaled low-value content. These tactics can result in ranking losses or removal from search results.

Bounce rate is an analytics metric used to describe sessions that did not meet a platform’s engagement criteria.

In Google Analytics 4, it is the percentage of sessions that were not considered engaged sessions. A high bounce rate is not automatically an SEO problem.

A breadcrumb is a small navigation trail that shows where a page sits within a website’s structure.

For example: Home → Resources → Technical SEO → Crawl Budget. Breadcrumbs help users move between related sections and clarify site hierarchy.

A broken link points to a URL that no longer works or does not return the expected destination.

Common fixes include updating the destination, restoring the missing page, redirecting the old URL, or removing the link.

A cached page is a stored version of a webpage held temporarily by a browser, server, content delivery network, or search system.

Caching can improve loading speed, but an outdated cache may show an older version after a website has changed.

A canonical tag is an HTML element that identifies the preferred version of a page when identical or highly similar content is available through multiple URLs.

It is a signal rather than an absolute command. Canonicals should point to live, indexable URLs that represent the intended primary version.

A citation is a reference or link showing where a statement, fact, or answer came from.

In AI search, citations may appear beside generated answers and lead users to supporting webpages.

A click is recorded when a user selects a search result that takes them to a property outside the search platform.

Review clicks alongside impressions, click-through rate, queries, pages, countries, and devices.

Click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click: clicks ÷ impressions × 100.

CTR can be affected by ranking position, search intent, brand recognition, title wording, result layout, competing features, and whether the query requires a website visit.

Cloaking is showing search engines substantially different content from that shown to users in an attempt to manipulate rankings.

Cloaking violates Google’s spam policies.

A content brief is a set of instructions guiding the research, writing, structure, and optimisation of a page.

A useful brief may cover audience, search intent, primary topic, related questions, required sections, internal links, sources, CTA, and limitations—without forcing a writer to copy competing pages.

A content cluster is a group of related pages organised around a central topic.

It commonly includes a hub or pillar page, supporting articles, contextual internal links, and clear subject relationships.

Content decay describes a gradual decline in a page’s organic visibility or traffic.

Possible causes include outdated information, stronger competitors, changed intent, lost links, technical issues, demand changes, or SERP changes.

A content gap is a topic, question, comparison, use case, or stage of the customer journey that a website does not cover well.

Content-gap research compares current coverage against reader needs, competitors, search demand, and business opportunities.

A conversion is a valuable action completed by a visitor, such as a purchase, quote request, booked call, form submission, download, or email signup.

Not every conversion has the same business value.

Core Web Vitals are user-experience metrics used to assess loading performance, visual stability, and responsiveness.

They should be reviewed as part of page experience rather than treated as the only measure of SEO performance.

Crawl budget is the amount of crawling activity a search engine is willing and able to spend on a website.

It is usually a greater concern for large, frequently changing, or technically complex sites than for smaller sites with clean architecture.

A crawler is automated software that discovers and requests webpages and other resources.

Googlebot is Google’s main web crawler.

Crawling is the process search engines use to discover and request new or updated URLs.

A page being crawled does not mean it will automatically be indexed or ranked.

Deindexing means removing a page or website from a search engine’s index.

A page may be deindexed intentionally through a noindex directive or because of access issues, duplication, quality concerns, policy violations, or other indexing decisions.

Disavowing links means submitting a file to Google asking it to disregard selected backlinks when assessing a website.

This is an advanced action and should not be used merely because links look unfamiliar or low quality.

A domain is the main address used to identify a website.

In https://lyftech.co/seo-glossary/, the domain is lyftech.co.

Domain Authority is a third-party metric created by Moz to estimate the ranking strength of a domain.

It is not a Google metric or a direct Google ranking factor. Scores from different SEO tools are not interchangeable.

A doorway page is created mainly to rank for similar queries and direct users elsewhere without providing enough independent value.

Examples may include large numbers of near-identical city or keyword pages funneling visitors to one service page.

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

It is part of Google’s quality-evaluation guidance, not a single public score. Accurate information, real experience, identifiable authors, reliable sources, and transparent business details can support trust.

An entity is a distinct person, organisation, place, product, concept, or other identifiable thing.

Search systems can use entities and their relationships to understand meaning beyond exact keyword matching.

Entity SEO is the practice of making the people, organisations, products, topics, and relationships connected to a website clear and consistent.

It may involve strong brand information, about and author pages, structured data, relevant internal links, and reliable references.

Evergreen content remains useful for a long period instead of being tied to a short-lived event.

Definitions, tutorials, checklists, and foundational guides are often evergreen, although they still need fact-checking and updates.

An external link points from one website to a different website.

External links can help readers verify claims, access original research, or learn from an authoritative source.

Faceted navigation lets visitors filter products or listings by attributes such as size, colour, price, brand, location, or rating.

It can create many URL combinations. Without controls, these URLs may cause crawling, duplication, and indexing problems.

A featured snippet is a highlighted extract that may appear near the top of Google’s search results to answer a query.

Common formats include paragraphs, lists, tables, steps, and definitions. A page cannot force Google to show a featured snippet.

First-party data is information a business collects directly through its website, customers, products, surveys, sales systems, or research.

Search Console data, customer questions, product usage, enquiries, and original experiments can support stronger, more distinctive content.

Generative engine optimization describes work intended to improve a brand or website’s visibility within AI-generated responses.

Useful GEO work generally overlaps with SEO, digital PR, content quality, entity clarity, technical accessibility, and brand reputation.

Google Business Profile is the platform businesses use to manage how eligible local businesses appear across Google Search and Google Maps.

Profiles can include business details such as name, address, service area, phone number, opening hours, categories, services, products, and photos.

Google Search Console is a free Google platform that helps website owners review how their properties perform in Google Search.

It includes data on clicks, impressions, CTR, average position, indexing, sitemaps, page experience, enhancements, manual actions, and security issues.

Googlebot is the name used for Google’s web-crawling software.

It requests webpages, follows eligible links, and sends resources for further processing.

A heading tag is an HTML element used to organise page sections. Heading levels range from H1 to H6.

A clear heading structure helps readers scan a page and understand how sections relate. Headings should describe content rather than repeat keywords.

Helpful content is created primarily to benefit the intended audience rather than manipulate search rankings.

Useful people-first content is reliable, clear about its purpose, and adds meaningful value instead of publishing large volumes of low-value pages.

Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to identify language or regional versions of a webpage.

It helps search engines select the most suitable version for users in different languages or locations. It does not replace canonical tags, translations, or sound international site architecture.

An impression is generally recorded in Search Console when a search result containing a link to a website is shown or considered visible under that feature’s rules.

The calculation can differ between result formats.

A search index is a database of information gathered and processed from webpages and other resources.

Search engines use this stored information when selecting results for a query.

Indexing is the process of analysing and storing information from a crawled page so it may become eligible to appear in search results.

Crawling does not guarantee indexing, and indexing does not guarantee rankings.

Indexability describes whether a search engine is technically permitted and able to index a page.

It may be affected by noindex directives, status codes, access restrictions, canonical signals, rendering problems, unsupported content, and search-engine decisions.

An internal link connects one page on a website to another page on the same website.

Internal links help readers find related resources and help crawlers discover pages. They can also communicate hierarchy and subject relationships.

JavaScript SEO is technical work that helps search engines access, render, understand, and index websites relying heavily on JavaScript.

Common issues include important content missing from rendered HTML, non-crawlable links, slow rendering, blocked scripts, client-side errors, or delayed metadata.

A keyword is a word or phrase used to describe a topic or represent what someone may search for.

Modern SEO should not treat a keyword as an exact phrase that must be repeated. A page should answer the wider intent and cover relevant concepts naturally.

Keyword cannibalisation describes multiple pages from the same website competing for the same or highly similar search intent.

Several pages mentioning the same term is not automatically cannibalisation. A real issue exists when overlapping pages divide signals or cause the wrong page to rank.

Keyword density is the percentage of words on a page made up by a particular keyword.

There is no universal ideal percentage. Repeatedly forcing a phrase into content can hurt readability and become keyword stuffing.

Keyword research is the process of studying how people search for information, products, services, or solutions.

It can include query language, demand, intent, competition, seasonality, related questions, business relevance, and conversion potential.

Keyword stuffing is the excessive or unnatural repetition of words and phrases in an attempt to manipulate rankings.

It may appear in page copy, headings, footers, metadata, image text, or lists of locations and variations.

A landing page is designed around a particular audience, offer, campaign, service, product, or action.

In SEO, it can also mean the page a visitor first enters through organic search.

Link equity is an industry term used to describe ranking value or authority passed through links.

The value associated with a link can depend on relevance, context, page quality, placement, crawlability, and link attributes.

A link scheme is a practice that creates, buys, exchanges, or manipulates links mainly to influence rankings.

Paid or sponsored links should be marked with suitable attributes and should not be sold as hidden ranking manipulation.

A local citation is an online mention of a business’s core information.

It commonly includes business name, address, phone number, and website, and may appear in directories, local organisations, industry sites, news publications, maps, and listings.

The local pack is a group of local business results shown for searches with local intent.

It commonly includes business names, ratings, locations, opening details, and a map.

Local SEO is the process of improving a business’s visibility for searches connected to a physical area or service location.

It may include Google Business Profile work, reviews, local landing pages, local links, citations, location content, website optimisation, and conversion tracking.

A long-tail keyword is a specific search query that usually has clearer intent than a broad topic.

Long-tail does not always mean a query has many words or low search volume. Specificity is usually the key characteristic.

A manual action occurs when a human reviewer at Google determines that a website or page violates Google’s spam policies.

It can affect part or all of a site. Owners can review reported manual actions in Search Console and request reconsideration after fixing the problem.

A meta description is HTML text that summarises a webpage.

Search engines may use it to create a search-result snippet, though they can choose other text when it better matches a query.

A meta robots tag provides page-level instructions about indexing and search-result presentation.

Common directives include noindex, nofollow, nosnippet, noarchive, and max-snippet. Some controls are also available through the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.

Mobile-first indexing means Google primarily uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking.

Important content, metadata, structured data, internal links, and images should remain available on mobile.

NAP stands for name, address, and phone number.

These details should accurately represent a business across its website, Google Business Profile, and important third-party listings.

Natural language processing refers to technologies used by computers to process and interpret human language.

Search systems use language understanding to examine meaning, context, relationships, and intent—not only exact keywords.

Negative SEO describes attempts to harm another website’s search performance through malicious actions.

The term is often used too broadly. Ranking declines are more commonly caused by site issues, competition, demand shifts, algorithmic changes, or inaccurate analysis.

Nofollow is a link attribute used to tell search engines that the publisher does not want to associate a link with a normal endorsement signal.

It can be used when sponsored or ugc are not more accurate descriptions.

Noindex is a directive asking supported search engines not to include a page in their search index.

A crawler generally needs access to a page to see its noindex directive, so blocking the URL in robots.txt can prevent the instruction from being read.

Off-page SEO includes work performed outside a website that may affect its visibility, authority, reputation, or discovery.

Examples include editorial links, digital PR, brand mentions, reviews, local citations, expert contributions, and community participation.

On-page SEO is the process of improving the content and HTML elements of individual webpages.

It may include intent alignment, title tags, headings, copy, internal links, image descriptions, metadata, content structure, and conversion elements.

Organic search refers to unpaid search-engine listings selected by a search system.

Organic results are separate from paid advertisements, although both can appear on the same results page.

An orphan page has no discoverable internal links pointing to it from other pages on the same website.

It may still be found through a sitemap, backlink, feed, or direct URL, but its discovery and relationships can be weaker.

Page experience refers to how users experience and interact with a webpage.

It can involve mobile usability, loading performance, responsiveness, visual stability, security, intrusive elements, accessibility, and readability.

PageRank is a system originally developed by Google to assess webpages partly through links between pages.

Modern Google Search uses many systems and signals. Public toolbar PageRank scores are no longer available.

Pagination divides a larger set of content or products across several URLs.

Common examples include product categories, blog archives, search listings, and forum threads. Important items should be reachable with crawlable links.

A pillar page is a central resource covering a broad subject and linking to more focused supporting pages.

It may also be called a hub page or cornerstone page.

A primary keyword is the main phrase selected to represent a page’s topic and search intent.

It is a planning reference, not a phrase that must be repeated at a fixed percentage.

A query is the word, phrase, question, image, or other input a person uses to search.

A single page can receive impressions and clicks from hundreds or thousands of related queries.

Query deserves freshness is an industry term for situations where newer information is likely to be more useful because a topic changes quickly.

Examples include news, product launches, prices, sports results, software updates, laws, and live events. Not every query rewards recent publication.

Ranking describes the position or visibility a search result receives for a query.

Rankings can differ by location, device, language, time, search context, personalisation, and result type.

A redirect automatically sends users and crawlers from one URL to another.

301 and 308 are permanent redirects; 302 and 307 are temporary. Redirects should point to the closest relevant destination instead of sending every removed URL to the homepage.

Rendering is the process of loading and processing webpage resources so the final page output can be understood.

For JavaScript-heavy sites, rendered output can contain content that was not in the initial HTML response.

A rich result is a search result with additional visual or interactive features generated from supported information and structured data.

Adding valid structured data can make a page eligible for supported features, but does not guarantee one will appear.

A robots.txt file contains rules about which URLs supported crawlers may access.

It is mainly a crawling control and should not be relied on to remove a page from Google Search. Use noindex or access protection for that purpose.

Schema markup is a commonly used name for structured data based on the Schema.org vocabulary.

It can describe organisations, people, products, articles, events, breadcrumbs, and local businesses. Markup should match visible page content.

Search engine optimization is the process of improving a website so search engines can discover, understand, index, and present its content to relevant users.

SEO can include technical work, content, site structure, user experience, links, local visibility, and performance measurement.

Search intent is the purpose behind a search query.

Common categories include informational, navigational, commercial investigation, transactional, and local. A page should satisfy what a searcher needs.

A search result is an individual listing or feature displayed in response to a query.

Results can include organic links, ads, local listings, images, videos, shopping listings, featured snippets, AI responses, and news results.

Semantic SEO focuses on meaning, context, entities, relationships, and complete topic coverage rather than exact keyword repetition.

A semantic approach answers connected questions and explains how relevant concepts relate to one another.

SERP stands for search engine results page.

It is the page a search engine displays after a user submits a query.

A sitemap is a file that lists selected URLs and provides information that may help search engines discover and crawl site content.

A sitemap does not guarantee crawling, indexing, or rankings, although it remains useful for many websites.

A soft 404 occurs when a page appears missing or useless but returns a successful HTTP status code instead of an appropriate error code.

For example, a removed product page may say “Product not found” while returning a 200 status.

The sponsored attribute identifies links created as part of advertising, sponsorships, paid placements, or similar commercial arrangements.

Its HTML value is rel="sponsored".

Structured data is machine-readable information added to a webpage to describe its content using a supported format and vocabulary.

Google commonly processes JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa depending on the feature and implementation.

Technical SEO focuses on the systems that affect how search engines access, render, understand, index, and serve website content.

It may include crawling, indexing, site architecture, canonicals, redirects, status codes, JavaScript rendering, structured data, performance, mobile setup, and international targeting.

Thin content provides little useful or original information for its intended purpose.

Word count alone does not determine whether content is thin. A short definition can be complete, while a long page can still offer little value.

A title tag is an HTML element that provides a title for a webpage.

Search engines may use it when creating a search-result title, though they can generate another title when it better represents a page.

Topical authority is an industry concept describing how strongly a website or author demonstrates depth, accuracy, experience, and recognition within a subject area.

It is not a public Google score. Organisation, originality, reputation, helpful content, internal links, sources, and genuine experience matter.

Traffic refers to visits or users reaching a website.

Traffic can come from organic search, paid search, social media, referrals, email, direct visits, advertising, or AI assistants. More traffic is not always better if it is not relevant.

The ugc attribute identifies links placed within user-generated content, such as comments, forum posts, community profiles, or user submissions.

Its HTML value is rel="ugc".

URL stands for uniform resource locator. It is the address used to access a resource on the web.

A readable URL can help users understand a page before opening it.

A URL parameter is additional information added to a URL, usually after a question mark.

Parameters are often used for tracking, filtering, sorting, site search, and application states. They can create duplicate or low-value URL combinations when not managed carefully.

SEO visibility is an estimated measure of how prominently a website appears across a selected group of search queries.

Platforms calculate visibility differently. It should not be confused with actual clicks, revenue, conversions, or complete market share.

Voice search allows a person to submit a query by speaking rather than typing.

Voice queries may be conversational, but still depend on intent, useful content, local relevance, page accessibility, and sound technical SEO.

White-hat SEO refers to practices intended to improve search visibility while respecting search-engine policies and serving users.

Examples include fixing technical issues, publishing useful content, improving site organisation, earning editorial links, improving accessibility, and maintaining accurate business information.

An XML sitemap is a sitemap written in XML format.

It can list canonical URLs and provide optional information about certain images, videos, or news content. Submitting one through Search Console can help owners review processing.

A zero-click search occurs when a user does not click an external search result after searching.

This can happen when an answer appears directly in Search, a local action occurs, the user changes query, the query is navigational, or they stop searching. It does not always mean the search produced no value.