A glossary for the jargon.
- CRAWLING: search engines finding and reading pages
- INDEXING: storing a page so it can appear in results
- SERP: the search engine results page
- ORGANIC: unpaid search results, as opposed to advertisements
- IMPRESSION: your page appearing in results for a search
- CTR: click-through rate, clicks divided by impressions
- BACKLINK: a link from another site to yours
- ANCHOR TEXT: the visible text of a link
- CANONICAL: the declared preferred version of a page
- NOINDEX: a directive telling engines not to index a page
- ROBOTS.TXT: a file controlling which paths crawlers may request
- SITEMAP: a file listing your pages for discovery
301: a permanent redirect, which transfers ranking signals 302: a temporary redirect, which does not
- ALT TEXT: text describing an image
- META DESCRIPTION: the summary sometimes shown under your title in results
- STRUCTURED DATA: markup describing what content is
- CORE WEB VITALS: performance measures based on real visitor experience
- E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, a framework for content quality
- LONG TAIL: longer, more specific queries with lower volume and higher intent
