Glossary of SEO and blog terms
The words you meet in Search Console, in SEO advice and in your website settings, each explained in a few lines for the owner of a small business, with how to check it on your own site.
3
- 301 redirect
- A 301 redirect is the server's answer that a page has moved permanently: anyone who opens the old address, people and Google alike, is sent automatically to the new one.
A
- AI Overviews
- AI Overviews are summaries written by generative AI that Google Search shows at the top of some results pages, with the key information on a question and links to the web pages where you can read more.
- Alt text
- Alt text is a short text description of an image, written in the image's alt attribute. Screen readers read it aloud, and Google uses it to understand what the image shows.
- Average position
- Average position is the Search Console metric that shows roughly where your link appeared in Google results, where 1 is the top, averaged over all the times it was shown.
B
- Backlink
- A backlink is a link on another website that points to a page on your site, for example from a supplier, a local newspaper or a review site.
C
- Canonical tag
- A canonical tag is a line in the head of a page, rel=canonical, that tells search engines which address is the main version of that page when the same content can be reached at more than one address.
- Core Web Vitals
- Core Web Vitals are three measurements of what real visitors experience on a page: how fast the main content loads (LCP), how quickly the page responds to a tap or click (INP) and how stable the layout stays (CLS).
- Crawling
- Crawling is how Google finds and downloads pages: an automated program called Googlebot visits addresses it has discovered, mostly through links and sitemaps, and downloads their text, images and videos.
- CTR (click-through rate)
- CTR, or click-through rate, is the share of times your link was shown in Google results that ended in a click: clicks divided by impressions. Search Console shows it as average CTR in the Performance report.
G
- Google Search Console
- Google Search Console is a free service from Google that shows how your website appears in Google Search: which searches show it, how often people click, which pages are indexed and which problems Google found.
I
- Impressions
- Impressions are the number of times a link to your site appeared on a page of Google results that someone opened, whether or not they clicked it. Search Console shows them in the Performance report.
- Indexing
- Indexing is the step where Google analyses a page it has crawled and stores it in the Google index, a large database of pages. Only a page in the index can appear in Google's results.
- Internal link
- An internal link is a link from one page of your website to another page of the same website: a menu item, a button, or a link inside the text of a blog post.
L
- Long-tail keyword
- A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase that fewer people type than a short, broad term, but that says much more precisely what the person wants.
M
- Meta description
- A meta description is a tag in the head of a page that holds a short summary of what the page offers. Google sometimes shows it as the text under your title in search results.
N
- NAP (name, address, phone number)
- NAP stands for name, address and phone number, the three details that identify a local business. NAP consistency means writing them the same way on your Google Business Profile, your website and every other site that lists you.
- Nofollow link
- A nofollow link is a link marked rel=nofollow, telling Google you'd rather not associate your site with the linked page or have it crawled from your site. Sponsored and ugc are variants that also say why.
- Noindex
- Noindex is a rule, written in a page's robots meta tag or sent in an HTTP header, that tells Google and other search engines that support it not to show that page in search results.
R
- robots.txt
- robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your site, such as example.com/robots.txt, that tells search engine crawlers which addresses on the site they may and may not visit.
S
- Search intent
- Search intent is the goal behind a search: what the person actually wants when they type a query, such as an answer, a specific website, a comparison or a place to book and buy.
- Soft 404
- A soft 404 is a page that tells visitors it doesn't exist, or shows almost nothing, while the server reports that it loaded fine. Google treats it as an error page and leaves it out of search.
- Structured data
- Structured data is a standardized format, usually written with the schema.org vocabulary, that labels the information on a page for search engines: for example your business name, address and opening hours.
T
- Title tag
- A title tag is the title element in the head of a page: a short line that names the page, which Google uses, along with other text, to write the clickable headline of your search result.
X
- XML sitemap
- An XML sitemap is a file in XML format that lists the addresses of the pages on your site you want search engines to find, optionally with the date each one last changed.