The SEO glossary

Answer engine optimization is shaping content so AI assistants and answer boxes can quote it: clear answers, solid sourcing and structure.

A backlink is a link to your site from another website. Links from trusted, relevant sites are one of the strongest ranking signals.

A canonical URL is the preferred address of a page when the same content is reachable at several. It tells search engines which one to index.

Click-through rate is the share of people who see your result in search and click it: clicks divided by impressions.

A content brief is a short plan for an article: the keyword, the reader's intent, the angle, the questions to answer and the sources to use.

A content refresh is updating an existing page so it stays accurate and competitive. Pages decay as facts, competitors and search results change.

Core Web Vitals are Google's measures of page experience: how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page responds, and how stable it is.

Crawl budget is how many pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given time. It only becomes a problem on large sites.

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality guidelines use to judge whether content deserves to rank.

A featured snippet is an answer extracted from a web page and shown at the top of Google's results, above the normal listings.

Google Search Console is Google's free tool that shows how your site performs in search: which queries bring clicks, which pages are indexed, and what's wrong.

Indexing is when a search engine stores a page in its database so it can appear in results. A page that isn't indexed can't rank.

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a site tell search engines instantly when a URL is new or changed, so it can be crawled sooner.

Internal links are links from one page of your site to another. They help readers navigate and help search engines find pages and understand how they relate.

Keyword cannibalization is when several pages on your site target the same search, so they compete with each other and none ranks as well as one strong page could.

Keyword research is finding the search terms your audience uses, and judging which are worth writing a page for.

A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase. It has less volume than a broad term but is easier to rank for and clearer in intent.

A meta description is a short summary of a page in its HTML. Search engines often show it under the title, and a good one earns more clicks.

A pillar page is a comprehensive guide to a broad topic that links to more detailed pages on each of its subtopics.

Programmatic SEO creates many pages from a template and a dataset, each targeting a specific search. Done well it scales; done badly it's spam.

robots.txt is a text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing.

Schema markup is structured data added to a page, usually as JSON-LD, that tells search engines exactly what the page contains so it can qualify for rich results.

Search intent is the reason behind a search: what the person wants to find, learn or do. Matching it is the biggest factor in whether a page can rank.

SEO is the practice of making a website easier for search engines to find and understand, and more useful to the people searching, so it earns more unpaid traffic.

A SERP, or search engine results page, is the page a search engine shows for a query: ads, organic results, and features like snippets and answer boxes.

A sitemap is a file that lists the pages of a site you want search engines to find, often with the date each last changed.

Thin content is a page with little original value: too short, shallow, duplicated or padded. Search engines tend not to index or rank it.

The title tag is the HTML title of a page. It is the clickable headline in search results and a strong signal of what the page is about.

A topic cluster is a group of related pages: a broad pillar page on a subject, and detailed pages on its subtopics that all link back to it.

Topical authority is how thoroughly a site covers a subject. Search engines tend to trust sites that cover a topic in depth over sites that touch it once.