SEO terms in plain English

The written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and read by search engines. Accessibility first, SEO second — the full story, including when an empty alt is correct, is in the alt-text guide.

The visible, clickable words of a link. Search engines read it as a description of the target page, which is why "see our pricing" beats "click here" — every time, in every context, including your own internal links.

A link from someone else's site to yours. Search engines treat backlinks as votes of confidence, weighted by the linking site's own authority. Quality dominates quantity: one link from a respected industry site outweighs a hundred directory entries.

The one URL you declare as the "real" address of a page when several URLs show the same content (with/without trailing slash, tracking parameters, www vs apex). Declared with a rel=canonical tag; getting it wrong — e.g. pointing canonicals at redirects — quietly splits your ranking signals.

Google's three user-experience metrics, measured on real visitors: LCP (how fast the main content appears — aim ≤2.5s), INP (how quickly the page responds to interaction — ≤200ms), and CLS (how much the layout jumps around — ≤0.1). A modest ranking input and a large "do people stay" input.

Roughly, how many of your URLs a search engine bothers to fetch per visit. Mostly a large-site concern — but redirect chains, broken links, and duplicate URLs waste it at any size, so hygiene helps everyone.

Crawling is a search engine fetching your pages; indexing is storing them for retrieval in results. A page must be crawlable AND indexable to rank — a perfect page that's blocked or noindexed is invisible, which is why technical checks come first in site optimization.

The share of people who see your result and click it. CTR falls off a cliff with position — the top results take most clicks, page two takes crumbs. It's also why titles and descriptions are worth real effort: they move CTR without moving position.

A third-party score (each vendor has its own) estimating a site's overall link strength. Google has said repeatedly it doesn't use any vendor's "domain authority" — treat these scores as rough comparative gauges between sites, not as a metric to optimize directly.

The same (or nearly the same) content reachable at multiple URLs, forcing search engines to guess which to rank — and splitting your signals across the copies. Fixed with canonical tags, redirects, or actually differentiating the pages.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the qualities Google's quality guidelines ask evaluators to look for. Not a single metric you can measure, but visible things feed it: real author names, working contact pages, honest about pages, and legal pages that exist.

How many times your result was shown, regardless of clicks. In Google Search Console, impressions × CTR ≈ clicks. Rising impressions with flat clicks usually means you're ranking for more queries, but too low — or your snippet isn't earning the click.

Links between pages of your own site. They guide crawlers to everything you've published, pass authority from strong pages to new ones, and tell search engines which page you consider canonical for a topic. The cheapest SEO lever most sites underuse.

The search phrase you want to be found for. In rank tracking, a keyword is the unit of measurement: you pick the phrases, the tracker reports your position for each. Choosing keywords a real customer would type matters more than choosing many.

Two or more of your own pages competing for the same query, so neither ranks as well as one would. The cure is giving every topic one canonical page and linking the others to it (see the internal-linking guide) — a rule worth writing down before you have 200 pages, not after.

An estimate (usually 0–100) of how hard it is to rank on page one for a keyword, based mostly on the strength of the sites already there. Useful for triage, but remember it's a vendor's model, not a law of nature — "difficulty 70" means "the incumbents are strong", not "impossible".

The process of finding which search phrases are worth targeting — balancing relevance, search volume, and how hard the competition is. Big suites sell volume databases for this; you can get surprisingly far with Google Search Console (queries you already appear for), your own site's language, and talking to customers.

The ranking value a link passes from one page to another (the folk term is "link juice"). Broken links and long redirect chains leak it; sensible link maintenance and internal linking preserve it.

A longer, more specific search phrase ("rank tracker for small agencies" vs "seo"). Each one gets fewer searches, but there are vastly more of them, they convert better, and they're easier to rank for. Most sites' realistic wins live in the long tail — here's how small sites win there.

The snippet candidate under your result's title. Not a ranking factor; very much a click factor. How to size and write them is covered in the meta-descriptions guide.

A meta directive telling search engines not to include a page in results. Right for thank-you pages and internal utilities; catastrophic when it leaks onto pages you want found. Worth auditing — it happens more often than anyone admits.

Visitors who arrive from unpaid search results. The end goal that rankings are a proxy for — which is worth remembering when a position improves but nobody shows up: rankings are the scoreboard, traffic is the prize.

Where your page appears in the organic (unpaid) results for a specific search — position 1 is the first organic result. Positions differ by country, device, and time of day, so a serious tracker measures a defined combination (keyword × country × device) rather than "the" ranking.

A unique website that links to you at least once. Fifty backlinks from one site count as one referring domain — which is why referring-domain counts are the saner measure of link growth than raw backlink counts.

A file at your domain root that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing — a blocked page can still appear in results from links alone, which surprises people annually.

Search Engine Results Page — the page Google shows after a search. Your "ranking" is your position on it. Modern SERPs mix classic blue links with ads, maps, AI summaries, and other features, which is why position 1 isn't worth what it was in 2015 — but it still beats position 11.

Everything on a results page that isn't a classic blue link: featured snippets, "people also ask" boxes, maps/local packs, image and video carousels, AI overviews. Features push organic results down the page, so the same position can deliver different traffic depending on what sits above it.

Your slice of the total visibility available across a set of keywords, compared with competitors — computed from who ranks where, weighted so position 1 counts far more than position 9. It's the single best number for "are we winning this market?", because it moves even when individual positions wobble — we've made the full case on the blog.

Pages with too little substance to be useful — a paragraph and a stock photo where an answer should be. Search engines demote it; users bounce off it. The fix is consolidation or genuine expansion, not padding.

Your page's headline in the search results and the strongest on-page signal you fully control. Length, structure, and why Google rewrites bad ones: the title-tags guide.

When the page Google chooses to rank for your keyword changes — say, your blog post starts outranking your pricing page for a buying-intent query. Position may barely move while conversions quietly fall, which is why it's worth tracking explicitly.

A machine-readable list of your site's canonical URLs, referenced from robots.txt, that helps search engines discover everything reliably. A good sitemap lists only real, indexable, 200-OK pages — no redirects, no errors, no noindexed strays.