Echorank Glossary

A

• A/B testing

  A/B testing is a method used to compare two versions of a marketing campaign, webpage or application to determine which performs better.

• Above the fold

  Above the fold refers to the portion of a webpage visible before the user scrolls.

• Absolute link

  A link that spells out the full destination address, including protocol and domain, so it resolves the same from anywhere.

• Access log

  A server file recording every incoming request with details such as time, IP address and user agent; useful for traffic and bot analysis.

• Affiliate link

  A tracked URL that credits a specific partner when visitors click through and purchase, earning that partner a commission.

• AI Lens

  AI Lens is an Echorank tool that compares the raw HTML of a page with its rendered output to measure how much of your content AI crawlers can actually read.

• AI visibility

  AI visibility describes how often and how prominently a brand appears in the answers produced by AI assistants and answer engines.

• Algorithm

  An algorithm is a set of rules or calculations used to process information and determine outputs such as search rankings.

• Alt text

  A written description attached to an image in HTML; screen readers announce it and search engines use it to understand the image.

• AMP

  Accelerated Mobile Pages, a Google-backed framework of stripped-down HTML intended to make mobile pages load near-instantly.

• Anchor text

  The visible, clickable words of a link, signalling to readers and search engines what the destination page is about.

• Answer engine

  An answer engine is a system that responds to a query with a direct answer instead of a list of links.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  Software that performs tasks associated with human thinking, such as language understanding; it underpins modern ranking systems and answer engines.

• Authoritativeness

  How much trust a site or author has earned on a subject; one pillar of the E-E-A-T quality framework.

• Auto-generated content

  Content produced by scripts or models with little human input; risky for rankings when it adds no original value.

B

• B2B

  Business-to-business: companies selling to other companies, with marketing built around niche queries and long buying cycles.

• B2C

  Business-to-consumer: selling directly to individuals, usually with broader audiences and shorter purchase paths.

• Backlink (external link)

  A link pointing to your site from another domain; a core credibility signal in ranking systems.

• Barnacle SEO

  Gaining visibility by attaching to high-authority platforms such as marketplaces, directories and review sites instead of relying only on your own domain.

• Bing Webmaster Tools

  Microsoft's free console for monitoring how a site is crawled, indexed and ranked in Bing.

• Black hat SEO

  Tactics that break search engine rules, such as cloaking and link schemes, trading short-term gains for penalty risk.

• Bounce rate

  The share of sessions that end after a single page view, with no further interaction.

• Branded keyword

  A query containing a company or product name, capturing searchers already aware of the brand.

• Breadcrumb

  A small navigation trail showing where the current page sits in the site hierarchy.

• Broken link

  A link whose destination no longer resolves; it hurts user experience and wastes crawl attention.

• Browser

  The application, such as Chrome or Safari, that requests, renders and displays web pages.

• Business directory

  A listings site publishing company names, addresses and details; consistent listings support local visibility.

C

• Cache

  A stored copy of previously fetched content, kept so it can be served again without being regenerated.

• Caching

  The practice of saving and reusing copies of pages or assets to cut load times and server work.

• Caffeine

  Google's 2010 indexing infrastructure overhaul, built to index fresh content continuously rather than in batches.

• Canonical URL

  The address you declare as the definitive version of a page when several URLs carry the same content.

• Carousel

  A rotating or swipeable row of results or images, common both in search features and on-page galleries.

• Category page

  A page grouping related products or articles; often the main entry point for mid-funnel queries in e-commerce.

• ccTLD

  A country-code top-level domain, such as .fr or .ca, tying a site to a specific country.

• CDN

  A content delivery network: geographically distributed servers that serve assets from a location near each visitor.

• Citation

  A mention of a business's name, address and phone number on another site, with or without a link; an input to local rankings.

• Citation Flow

  Majestic's 0-100 metric estimating a URL's link power from the quantity of links pointing at it.

• Click depth

  How many clicks a page sits from the homepage; deeply buried pages are crawled and ranked less easily.

• Click-through rate

  Clicks divided by impressions: the share of people who saw a listing and clicked it.

• Clickbait

  Headlines engineered to provoke clicks through curiosity or exaggeration, often underdelivering on the page itself.

• Client-side rendering

  Building the page in the browser with JavaScript after a minimal HTML shell loads; it can complicate crawling.

• Cloaking

  Serving different content to crawlers than to human visitors; a direct guideline violation.

• CLS

  Cumulative Layout Shift, a Core Web Vital measuring how much page elements move around while loading.

• CMS

  A content management system, such as WordPress, that lets non-developers publish and manage site content.

• Commercial intent

  Searches from people comparing options before buying, typically phrased with words like best, review or versus.

• Content gap analysis

  Comparing your coverage against competitors to find topics they rank for that you have not yet addressed.

• Content hub

  A structured cluster of interlinked pages around one theme, typically a pillar page plus supporting articles.

• Content is King

  The long-running maxim that the substance and usefulness of content outweigh technical tricks over time.

• Content marketing

  Earning attention by publishing genuinely useful or entertaining material rather than direct advertising.

• Conversion

  A visitor completing the action a page exists for: a purchase, signup, download or enquiry.

• Conversion rate

  Conversions divided by visitors; the percentage of traffic that completes the goal.

• Core Web Vitals

  Google's user-experience metrics covering loading, interactivity and visual stability, used as ranking inputs.

• Cornerstone content

  The handful of comprehensive pages a site treats as its most important, linked to heavily from elsewhere.

• CPC

  Cost per click: what an advertiser pays for each click in paid search or display.

• CPM

  Cost per mille: the price of a thousand ad impressions.

• Crawl budget

  The number of URLs a search engine is willing to fetch from a site within a given period.

• Crawl error

  A failure encountered when a bot tries to fetch a URL, such as a server error, timeout or missing page.

• Crawler

  An automated program, also called a spider or bot, that follows links and downloads pages for indexing.

• Crawler directive

  An instruction, via robots.txt, a meta robots tag or an HTTP header, telling bots what to crawl or index.

• Crawling

  The discovery phase in which bots fetch pages and follow their links to find more.

• CSS

  Cascading Style Sheets: the language controlling how HTML looks, including layout, color and typography.

• CTA

  A call to action: the button or line that tells visitors what to do next.

D

• De-indexed

  Removed from a search engine's index entirely, whether through a penalty or a noindex directive.

• Disavow

  Telling Google to ignore specific inbound links you cannot remove, using its disavow tool.

• DNS

  The Domain Name System: the lookup layer translating human-readable domains into server IP addresses.

• DoFollow

  The everyday label for a normal link carrying no nofollow attribute, meaning it passes ranking signals.

• DOM

  The Document Object Model: the browser's live, scriptable representation of a rendered page.

• Domain age

  How long a domain has existed; any trust correlation comes mostly from its accumulated history rather than age itself.

• Domain Authority

  Moz's 1-100 prediction of how well a domain will rank, based largely on its link profile.

• Domain history

  Everything a domain was used for before you owned it; past penalties or spam can linger.

• Domain name registrar

  The accredited company where domain names are bought and renewed.

• Domain Rating

  Ahrefs' 0-100 measure of a domain's backlink strength.

• Doorway page

  A thin page built only to rank for a query and funnel visitors elsewhere; against guidelines.

• Downtime

  Periods when a site is unreachable; frequent outages erode the trust of both users and crawlers.

• Duplicate content

  The same or nearly identical content reachable at multiple URLs, splitting ranking signals between them.

• Dwell time

  How long a searcher stays on a page before returning to the results.

• Dynamic content

  Page content assembled per request or per user rather than stored as fixed HTML.

• Dynamic URL

  An address generated from query parameters rather than a fixed, readable path.

E

• E-A-T

  Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: Google's original content quality framework, since extended to E-E-A-T.

• E-commerce SEO

  Optimizing online stores: category structure, product pages, faceted navigation and review markup.

• E-E-A-T

  Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: the criteria Google's quality raters use to judge content credibility.

• Engagement

  How visitors interact once they arrive: scrolling, clicking, time spent and return visits.

• Evergreen content

  Material that stays relevant for years and keeps earning traffic without constant rewrites.

F

• Faceted navigation

  Filter systems on listing pages; powerful for users but hazardous for crawl budget when every combination gets its own URL.

• Favicon

  The small site icon shown in browser tabs and in some search results.

• Featured snippet

  The highlighted answer box shown above the classic results, extracted from one of the ranking pages.

• Fetch as Google

  The former Search Console feature for viewing a page as Googlebot sees it, since replaced by the URL Inspection tool.

• First Input Delay

  A retired Core Web Vital measuring the delay before a page reacted to the first interaction, replaced by INP.

• Focus keyword

  The single query a page is deliberately built to answer.

• Footer

  The bottom region of every page, typically carrying legal links, contact details and secondary navigation.

• Freshness

  How recently content was published or meaningfully updated; it matters most for time-sensitive queries.

G

• Gateway web page

  Another name for a doorway page: thin content built purely as a ranking entry point.

• Generative AI

  Models that produce new text, images or code from prompts; the technology behind AI assistants and answer engines.

• Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

  Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring and optimizing content so that generative AI systems cite it in their answers.

• Geo redirect

  Sending visitors to a different URL based on their detected location.

• Google AI Overviews

  The AI-generated summaries Google shows above results, synthesized from multiple sources with citations.

• Google Alerts

  A free service that emails you when new pages matching your chosen terms are indexed.

• Google algorithm

  The full system of ranking calculations Google applies to order results, refined continually.

• Google Autocomplete

  The query predictions that appear as you type in the search box; a window into common phrasings.

• Google Business Profile

  The business listing, formerly Google My Business, that powers Maps results and the local panel for companies.

• Google Lighthouse

  An open-source audit tool scoring pages on performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.

• Google Quality Guidelines

  The published rules describing which practices Google considers manipulative and penalty-worthy.

• Google Sandbox

  The unconfirmed theory that brand-new domains are held back from ranking strongly for a period.

• Google Search Console

  Google's free console showing how it crawls, indexes and ranks your site, including the queries you appear for.

• Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines

  The manual given to human raters who evaluate result quality; a public blueprint of what Google wants content to be.

• Google Tag Manager

  A container system for deploying analytics and marketing tags without editing site code.

• Google Trends

  A free tool charting how search interest in a topic changes over time and by region.

• Google update

  Any change to Google's ranking systems, from silent tweaks to named core updates that reshuffle results.

• Googlebot

  Google's crawler: the bot that fetches pages for its index.

• Gray hat SEO

  Tactics sitting in the ambiguous zone between accepted practice and outright violations.

• Guest posting

  Writing articles for other sites, usually in exchange for exposure and a link back.

H

• Header tag

  The HTML heading elements h1 through h6 that give a page its outline structure.

• Heading

  A section title marked up with a header tag, helping readers and crawlers scan the structure.

• Headline

  The user-facing title of a piece, often the h1, whose job is to earn the click and set expectations.

• Helpful content update

  Google's ranking system rewarding content written for people and demoting content produced mainly to rank.

• Holistic SEO

  Treating rankings as the outcome of overall site quality, spanning content, UX, speed and security, rather than isolated tweaks.

• Homepage

  A site's root page and usually its strongest URL, distributing authority through its links.

• Hreflang

  The attribute telling search engines which language and regional versions of a page exist and who each is for.

• .htaccess file

  An Apache configuration file controlling redirects, rewrites and access rules at directory level.

• HTML

  HyperText Markup Language: the structural language every web page is built from.

• HTTP

  The protocol browsers and servers use to exchange web content.

• HTTPS

  HTTP secured with TLS encryption; the standard today and a confirmed lightweight ranking signal.

• Hummingbird

  Google's 2013 core rewrite that shifted matching from individual keywords toward the meaning of whole queries.

• Hyperlink

  The clickable connection between one document and another: the basic unit of the web.

I

• Image carousel

  A swipeable strip of images, either on a page or as a search feature.

• Image compression

  Shrinking image file sizes with minimal visible loss to speed up page loads.

• Image SEO

  Optimizing images with descriptive filenames, alt text, compression and modern formats so they load fast and rank in image search.

• Image sitemap

  A sitemap, or sitemap extension, listing image URLs so crawlers can discover them reliably.

• Impression

  One appearance of your listing in a set of search results, whether or not it was clicked.

• Inbound link

  A link arriving at your site from an external domain; the same thing as a backlink.

• Index

  The searchable database of pages a search engine has crawled and stored.

• Index Coverage report

  The Search Console report, now called Page indexing, showing which URLs are indexed and why others are not.

• Indexing

  The stage after crawling in which a page is processed, understood and stored for retrieval.

• Informational intent

  Searches made in order to learn something: how-tos, definitions and explanations.

• Intent

  The underlying goal behind a query; matching it decides which page format can rank.

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

  The Core Web Vital measuring how quickly a page visibly responds to user input across the whole visit.

• Internal link

  A link between two pages on the same site, distributing authority and defining site structure.

• IP address

  The numeric network address identifying a device or server on the internet.

J

• JavaScript

  The programming language of interactive web pages; heavy reliance on it complicates crawling and rendering.

• JSON-LD

  The JSON-based format Google recommends for adding structured data to pages.

K

• Keyword

  Any word or phrase people type, or say, into a search engine.

• Keyword cannibalization

  Multiple pages on one site competing for the same query, splitting signals and destabilizing rankings.

• Keyword density

  The percentage of a text made up of a given term; an obsolete optimization target.

• Keyword difficulty

  An estimate of how hard it would be to outrank the current results for a query, usually based on their link strength.

• Keyword mapping

  Assigning each target query to a specific page so a site covers demand without overlaps.

• Keyword metric

  Any measurement attached to a query, such as volume, difficulty, cost per click or trend, used to compare opportunities.

• Keyword research

  Keyword research is the process of identifying and analyzing search terms used by people when searching for information.

• Keyword stuffing

  Cramming a term unnaturally often into a page; an old spam tactic that now backfires.

• KGR (Keyword Golden Ratio)

  A ratio comparing how many pages target a phrase in their title against its search volume, used to spot easy long-tail opportunities.

• Knowledge Graph

  Google's database of entities, such as people, places and organizations, and the relationships between them.

• Knowledge Panel

  The information box about an entity shown beside search results, drawn from the Knowledge Graph.

• KPI

  A key performance indicator: the metric a team agrees to judge success by.

L

• Landing page

  The page a visitor arrives on from a search result, ad or link; often purpose-built for one campaign or query.

• Large Language Model (LLM)

  A neural network trained on massive text collections to understand and generate language; the technology behind AI assistants.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

  The Core Web Vital measuring how long a page's main content takes to appear.

• Lazy loading

  Deferring images or other assets until they are about to scroll into view, cutting initial load weight.

• Link accessibility

  Whether links can actually be followed by all users and crawlers: real anchors, visible and reachable without scripts.

• Link bait

  Content deliberately crafted to be so useful, novel or provocative that other sites link to it.

• Link building

  The practice of earning or acquiring backlinks to strengthen a site's authority.

• Link equity

  The ranking value a link transfers from one page to another; informally called link juice.

• Link exchange (reciprocal links)

  Mutual linking arrangements between sites; at scale, treated as a link scheme.

• Link farm

  A network of sites existing mainly to interlink and inflate authority; classic penalty territory.

• Link profile

  The overall picture of a site's backlinks: how many, from where, with what anchors, and how natural.

• Link rot

  The gradual decay of the web as linked pages disappear or move, leaving broken links behind.

• Link scheme

  Any coordinated attempt to manufacture links that would not exist on merit, whether bought, swapped or automated.

• Link velocity

  The rate at which a site gains or loses backlinks over time; unnatural spikes attract scrutiny.

• Link volume

  The raw count of links pointing at a page or domain, before any quality weighting.

• Local business schema

  Structured data describing a business's name, address, hours and offerings for search engines.

• Local pack

  The map-plus-listings block shown for queries with local intent.

• Local query

  A search that implies a place: a city name, near me phrasing, or a service usually bought locally.

• Local SEO

  Optimizing to appear for searches in a geographic area through profiles, citations, reviews and local pages.

• Local teaser

  The lighter local result block, a map with brief listings, shown for some hospitality and venue queries.

• Login form

  The username-and-password gate to an account area; content behind it is invisible to crawlers.

• Long-tail keyword

  A longer, more specific query with modest volume but clearer intent and easier competition.

• LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

  A 1980s text-analysis technique; in SEO folklore, LSI keywords are related terms, a concept Google says it does not use.

M

• Manual penalty (manual action)

  A human reviewer at Google flagging a site for guideline violations, with a notice in Search Console.

• Mention rate

  Mention rate is the share of AI answers to relevant prompts in which a given brand is mentioned.

• Meta description

  The page summary in the HTML head that search engines may display as the snippet; it influences clicks, not rankings.

• Meta keywords

  A defunct meta tag once used to declare a page's topics; ignored by Google for ranking.

• Meta robots tag

  The in-page tag controlling indexing and link-following behavior for that URL.

• Meta tags

  The head-section tags describing a page to browsers and crawlers: title, description, robots and more.

• Microdata

  An HTML attribute syntax for embedding structured data inline; largely superseded by JSON-LD.

• Mirror website

  A full copy of a site hosted at a different address; without canonicalization, a duplicate-content problem.

• Mobile SEO

  Ensuring a site works, loads fast and ranks on phones, where most searches now happen.

• Mobile-first indexing

  Google indexing and ranking based on the mobile version of your pages rather than the desktop version.

• MozRank

  Moz's discontinued logarithmic link-popularity score, an early approximation of PageRank.

N

• NAP

  Name, Address and Phone: the business details whose consistency across the web underpins local rankings.

• Natural link (editorial link)

  A link someone gave freely because your content deserved it; the kind guidelines want.

• Navigation

  The menu and link systems that let visitors move through a site.

• Navigational intent

  Searches aimed at reaching a specific known site or page.

• Negative SEO

  Attempts to damage a competitor's rankings, for example by pointing toxic links at their site.

• Noarchive tag

  A robots directive asking search engines not to store a cached copy of the page.

• NoFollow

  The rel attribute telling search engines a link is not an endorsement and should not pass authority.

• NoIndex tag

  The directive telling search engines to keep a page out of their index.

• Nosnippet tag

  A directive preventing search engines from showing any text or video snippet for the page.

O

• Off-page SEO

  Everything done away from your own site to build authority: links, mentions, reviews and PR.

• On-page SEO

  Optimizing what is on the page itself: content, headings, titles, internal links and markup.

• Open Graph

  Meta tags controlling how a URL previews when shared on social platforms.

• Organic snippet

  A standard unpaid listing, made up of title, URL and description, in the results.

• Organic traffic

  Visits arriving from unpaid search listings.

• Orphaned page

  A live page no internal link points to, making it hard for crawlers and users to find.

• Outbound link

  A link from your page to another domain.

P

• Page Authority

  Moz's 1-100 prediction of an individual page's ranking strength.

• Page speed

  How fast a page loads and becomes usable; both a user-experience factor and a ranking input.

• PageRank (link juice)

  Google's foundational algorithm scoring pages by the quantity and quality of links pointing at them.

• Pagination

  Splitting long listings across a numbered sequence of pages.

• Paid traffic

  Visits bought through advertising rather than earned organically.

• Panda

  Google's 2011 algorithm targeting thin and low-quality content, later folded into the core systems.

• Parasite SEO

  Publishing on high-authority third-party domains to piggyback on their ranking power.

• PBN

  A private blog network: a ring of sites owned solely to link to a money site; a penalizable scheme.

• Penguin algorithm

  Google's 2012 update targeting manipulative link profiles, now running in real time within the core.

• People Also Ask

  The expandable question boxes in results revealing related queries and their answers.

• People-first content

  Google's phrase for content written to help a reader, as opposed to content assembled to rank.

• Permalink

  A page's permanent, stable URL.

• Personalization

  Adjusting results per user based on location, history and context, which is why two people can see different rankings.

• PHP

  A widely used server-side language powering platforms such as WordPress.

• Pigeon

  Google's 2014 update tying local results more closely to traditional ranking signals.

• Pogo-sticking

  A searcher bouncing back from a result and clicking a different one; a sign the first did not satisfy.

• PPC

  Pay-per-click advertising, in which you pay only when someone clicks the ad.

• Prominence

  In local search, how well known a business appears to be through reviews, mentions and links, beyond mere proximity.

• Protocol

  The scheme portion of a URL declaring how the resource is fetched.

• Pruning

  Removing or consolidating weak pages so a site's overall quality profile improves.

• Purchased link

  A link paid for to influence rankings; it must be marked nofollow or sponsored or it violates guidelines.

Q

• Query

  Whatever the user actually typed or spoke into the search box.

R

• Rank-tracking

  Rank-tracking is the process of monitoring the position of keywords or webpages in search results over time.

• RankBrain

  Google's 2015 machine-learning system that helps interpret unfamiliar queries by meaning.

• Ranking factor

  A ranking factor is an element or criterion used by a search system when determining the position of a result.

• Ranking position

  Ranking position identifies the order in which a result appears for a particular query.

• Readability score

  A numeric estimate of how easy a text is to read, such as the Flesch scales.

• Redirection

  Forwarding one URL to another, permanently with a 301 or temporarily with a 302, preserving users and most equity.

• Referral traffic

  Visits arriving via links on other sites, as distinct from search or direct visits.

• Referrer

  The URL a visitor came from, passed along in the request headers.

• Referring domain

  A unique domain that links to you at least once; usually a better health measure than raw link counts.

• Rel=canonical

  The link element declaring which URL is the master version of duplicated or similar content.

• Rel=sponsored

  The attribute marking paid or advertising links.

• Rel=ugc

  The attribute marking links created by users, such as comments or forum posts.

• Related searches

  The alternative queries search engines suggest alongside or below the results.

• Relative link

  A link written from the current location instead of as a full address.

• Relevance

  How closely a page matches what a query is actually asking; the first filter before authority matters.

• Rendering

  Executing a page's code to produce what a user, or crawler, actually sees.

• Responsive design

  One layout that adapts fluidly to any screen size; the recommended approach for mobile.

• Rich snippet

  A result enhanced with extras such as stars, prices or FAQs, drawn from structured data.

• Robots.txt

  The root file telling crawlers which parts of a site they may or may not fetch.

• ROI

  Return on investment: what a marketing effort earned relative to what it cost.

• Root domain

  The registrable domain itself, including all of its subdomains and pages.

S

• SaaS

  Software as a service: software delivered by subscription in the browser rather than installed locally.

• Schema.org

  The shared vocabulary, backed by the major search engines, for describing content with structured data.

• Scraped content

  Content lifted from other sites and republished without added value; both a quality and a legal problem.

• Search engine

  The system that crawls, indexes and ranks the web to answer queries.

• Search forms

  On-site search boxes; their result URLs usually should not be indexable.

• Search history

  A user's past queries, which engines use to personalize what they show next.

• Search operator

  Special query syntax, such as site: or quotation marks, that refines what a search returns.

• Search result

  A single listing returned for a query, whether paid or organic.

• Search volume

  The estimated number of times a query is searched per month.

• Seasonal trend

  Predictable demand cycles in which interest for a topic rises and falls with the calendar.

• Seed keyword

  The short starting phrase from which a keyword-research session expands.

• SEM

  Search engine marketing: the umbrella term for winning search visibility, in practice usually meaning paid search.

• Semantic search

  Ranking by the meaning and intent of queries and content rather than literal word matches.

• SEO

  Search engine optimization: improving a site so it earns more, and better, organic search traffic.

• SEO audit

  A structured review of a site's technical health, content and links, ending in a prioritized fix list.

• SEO myth

  A widely repeated belief about rankings that evidence does not support.

• SEO-friendly URL

  A short, readable address that describes the page instead of a string of parameters.

• SERP

  A SERP, or search engine results page, is the page a search engine returns in response to a query.

• SERP analysis

  Studying what currently ranks for a query, including formats, strength and features, before deciding to compete.

• SERP feature

  Any result element beyond the classic organic listings: snippets, packs, panels, ads and AI overviews.

• SERP visibility

  The share of available search real estate a site captures across its tracked queries.

• SERP volatility

  How much rankings churn day to day; spikes usually mean an algorithm update is rolling out.

• Server-side rendering

  Generating the full HTML on the server before sending it, so browsers and crawlers receive complete pages.

• Share of market

  Your slice of an industry's total sales or customers.

• Share of Search

  Share of Search is a brand's proportion of total search interest within its category, compared with competitors.

• Share of voice

  The portion of total visibility, organic, paid or media, that your brand owns versus competitors.

• Sitelinks

  The extra shortcut links sometimes shown beneath a top result, pointing to key pages of that site.

• Sitemap

  A machine-readable file, usually XML, listing a site's URLs to help engines discover them.

• Sitewide links

  Links appearing on every page of a site, typically in headers or footers.

• Slug

  The final, human-readable part of a URL path identifying the page.

• Spammy tactic

  Any manipulation aimed at rankings rather than users; the umbrella term in search spam policies.

• SSL certificate

  The certificate enabling encrypted HTTPS connections and the padlock in the address bar.

• Status code

  The server's numeric reply to a request, such as 200 for success, 301 for a move or 404 for missing.

• Structured data

  Machine-readable annotations describing page content, enabling rich results.

• Subdomain

  A named division before the root domain, treated partly as its own site.

T

• Technical SEO

  The infrastructure side of optimization: crawlability, indexation, speed, rendering, canonicalization and security.

• Thin content

  Pages offering little substance or originality relative to what the query deserves.

• Thumbnail

  A small preview image representing content in listings and features.

• Time on page

  How long visitors spend on a page before moving on; a rough engagement proxy.

• Title tag

  The HTML title of a page, shown in browser tabs and usually as the headline of its search listing.

• TLD

  A top-level domain: the final suffix of a domain name, such as .com or .org.

• Traffic

  The overall volume of visits a site receives.

• Transactional intent

  Searches from people ready to act: buy, sign up, book or download.

• Trust Flow

  Majestic's 0-100 metric weighing link quality by proximity to a curated set of trusted sites.

U

• UGC

  User-generated content: reviews, comments, forum posts and other visitor contributions.

• Universal Search

  Blending verticals such as images, video, news and maps into one results page.

• Unnatural link

  A link that exists to manipulate rankings rather than because it was deserved.

• URL

  Uniform Resource Locator: the full web address of a resource.

• URL folder

  A directory segment within a URL path used to organize content.

• URL parameter

  The key-value pairs after a question mark in a URL, often creating duplicate variants of a page.

• URL Rating

  Ahrefs' 0-100 measure of an individual URL's backlink strength.

• User agent

  The identifier a browser or bot sends naming itself in each request.

• UTM code

  Tagging parameters appended to URLs so analytics can attribute traffic to a campaign.

• UX (user experience)

  The overall quality of using a site: clarity, speed and ease; increasingly inseparable from search performance.

V

• Voice search

  Spoken queries made through assistants; longer, conversational phrasing that favors direct answers.

W

• Webmaster guidelines

  The published rules, now called Google Search Essentials, defining acceptable practice.

• Website navigation

  The overall system of menus and links structuring how a site is explored.

• White hat SEO

  Working entirely within guidelines: earning rankings with quality, relevance and genuine links.

• Word count

  The length of a text; a descriptive statistic, not a ranking target.

X

• X-Robots-Tag

  An HTTP header carrying robots directives, useful for non-HTML files such as PDFs.

• XML

  Extensible Markup Language: the format sitemaps and many feeds are written in.

Y

• Yahoo

  The veteran web portal whose search results have been powered by Bing for years.

• Yandex

  The dominant search engine in Russia and neighboring markets.

• YMYL

  Your Money or Your Life: topics affecting health, finances or safety, held to the strictest quality standards.

• Yoast

  The widely installed WordPress plugin handling titles, sitemaps and on-page SEO checks.

Z

• Zero-click searches

  Queries answered directly on the results page, so no listing receives the click.