SEO Terms

A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines a page has moved permanently, and passes most of its ranking authority to the new URL. A 302 redirect signals a temporary move and...

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that AI-powered search tools like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity cite your content...

Agentic search is when an artificial intelligence (AI) agent conducts research, comparisons or multi-step queries autonomously on behalf of a user, without that user typing each in...

AI Mode is a Google search feature that generates a conversational, AI-written answer directly on the results page instead of returning a traditional list of blue links. It synthes...

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results, above organic listings. Google synthesises content from multiple sources to answer the quer...

A Featured Snippet is a boxed answer Google pulls from a single ranking page to answer a query directly in search results. An AI Overview is a generated summary Google synthesises...

In marketing, an algorithm is the set of rules and signals a platform uses to decide what content to show, to whom and in what order. Google's algorithm ranks search results. Meta'...

An algorithm update is a change a platform makes to how it ranks or surfaces content, whether that is Google adjusting search rankings or a social network changing what appears in...

Alt text, short for alternative text, is a written description attached to an image in a page's code. It's read aloud by screen readers for vision-impaired users and read by search...

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text used in a hyperlink. Search engines like Google read anchor text as a signal about what the linked page is about. A link saying 'accounti...

Anchor text types describe the different kinds of clickable text used in a hyperlink. The four main categories are exact match (the target keyword word for word), partial match (a...

A backlink is a hyperlink from one website pointing to another. When a site links to yours, Google treats it as a signal of credibility. Not all backlinks carry equal weight. A lin...

Brand mentions as a ranking signal refers to how often your business name, product or people are referenced across the web, even without a hyperlink pointing back to your site. Sea...

Branded search is when someone types your business name, or a close variant of it, into a search engine. It includes searches like the company name alone, the name plus a product,...

A breadcrumb is a small trail of links, usually near the top of a page, showing the path from the homepage down to the page you're on. For example: Home > Shoes > Running Shoes > M...

A canonical tag is an HTML element that tells search engines which version of a URL is the authoritative (or 'canonical') one. It prevents duplicate content issues by consolidating...

Canonicalisation is how you tell search engines which version of a page is the master copy when several URLs show the same or near-identical content. It's done with a canonical tag...

ChatGPT Search is the web-search capability built into ChatGPT, allowing users to ask questions and receive answers synthesised from live web sources. Instead of returning a list o...

A citation is any online mention of your business's name, address and phone number (NAP), whether or not it links back to your site. Citations appear on directories, maps and indus...

A content hub is a group of related pages built around one central topic, usually a broad pillar page linked to a set of narrower supporting articles. The structure signals to sear...

Content pruning is the practice of removing, merging or updating underperforming pages on a website to improve overall site quality signals. It's used to clear out thin, duplicate...

A content refresh is the deliberate update of an existing published page to restore or improve its search rankings. It usually involves updating facts, expanding thin sections, imp...

Conversational search is how people query search engines and AI assistants using natural, full-sentence questions rather than fragmented keywords. Instead of typing 'best CRM small...

Core Web Vitals are three things Google measures to decide if a web page feels good to use: how fast it loads, how quickly it reacts when you tap something, and whether stuff jumps...

Field data and lab data are two different ways of measuring Core Web Vitals. Field data comes from real visitors using your site in real conditions, collected by Google's Chrome Us...

Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. Google allocates each site a crawl budget based on how fast your server responds and...

Crawl depth is how many clicks it takes to reach a page starting from your homepage. A page one click away has a crawl depth of one. A page buried five clicks deep has a crawl dept...

Crawlability refers to how easily search engine bots (Google's Googlebot, Bing's Bingbot) can access and navigate the pages on your website. If a page cannot be crawled, it cannot...

Digital PR is the practice of earning coverage, mentions and backlinks from online publishers, journalists and industry sites through newsworthy stories, data, or campaigns. It sit...

Disavow is a tool inside Google Search Console that lets you tell Google to ignore certain backlinks when it evaluates your site. You submit a list of spammy or unnatural links poi...

Domain Authority is a score created by third-party SEO tools to estimate how well a website is likely to rank in search engines based on its backlink profile. It is not a metric Go...

Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) are third-party scores that estimate how strong a website's backlink profile is, and how likely it is to rank in search results because...

The same or substantially similar content appearing on multiple URLs — either within your own site or across different sites. Duplicate content dilutes search ranking signals becau...

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It's the framework Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines use to judge whether content and the pe...

Entity SEO is the practice of helping search engines and AI systems clearly understand what your business, brand or person is, rather than just what keywords you use. It focuses on...

Faceted navigation is the filter and sort system on ecommerce and listing sites that lets shoppers narrow results by size, colour, price or brand. Each filter combination often gen...

Faceted SEO is the practice of managing how filter-generated pages (colour, size, price, brand) on ecommerce or listing sites get crawled and indexed by search engines. Faceted nav...

FAQ Schema is a type of structured data that marks up question and answer content in code so search engines can read it as a distinct format. It uses Schema.org's FAQPage type to t...

A featured snippet is a summary answer pulled from a webpage and displayed at the top of Google search results, above all organic listings. Also called position zero, it gives user...

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of structuring your content so that AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot inclu...

A Google Business Profile (GBP), formerly called Google My Business (GMB), is the free listing that controls how your business appears on Google Search and Google Maps. It shows yo...

Guest posting is writing an article for another website in exchange for a byline, a link back to your own site, or both. Marketers use it to build backlinks, reach a new audience a...

Heading tags are HTML elements (H1 through H6) that define the hierarchical structure of content on a web page. The H1 is the main page heading, appearing once. H2 tags are major s...

HowTo schema is a type of structured data, code added to a web page that describes content in a format search engines can read directly, used to mark up step by step instructions....

Hreflang is a piece of code that tells Google which version of a page to show to which visitors based on their language or region. It's used by sites that publish the same content...

Image SEO is the practice of making images on a website easier for search engines to understand and faster for visitors to load. It covers file naming, alt text, file size, format...

An image sitemap is a file that lists the images on your website so search engines can find and index them, even if those images aren't easily discoverable through normal crawling....

Index bloat is when a website has far more pages indexed by Google than it has genuinely useful content for. It usually happens through filtered category pages, tag archives, or th...

Index management at scale is the practice of deliberately controlling which pages on a large website get crawled and indexed by Google, rather than letting every URL fight for atte...

The process by which search engines discover, crawl and store web pages in their database so they can be returned in search results. A page must be indexed before it can rank.

Information gain is a concept from a Google patent describing how a search engine can score a page based on how much new information it adds compared to other results already ranki...

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a Core Web Vitals metric that measures how quickly a page responds when someone clicks, taps or presses a key. Google records every interaction d...

A hyperlink from one page on your website to another page on the same website, used to guide visitors through content and distribute SEO authority across the site.

Internal link equity is the concept that authority and ranking value flow between pages on the same site through hyperlinks. Pages with many strong inbound links, external or inter...

International SEO is the practice of configuring a website so search engines show the correct country or language version of a page to the correct audience. It covers site structur...

JavaScript SEO is the practice of making websites built with JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue or Angular fully visible to search engine crawlers. Search bots need to render th...

A keyword is a word or phrase that people type into a search engine. In SEO, it refers to the specific terms you deliberately optimise your content around so search engines underst...

Keyword cannibalisation happens when two or more pages on the same website target the same search query. Instead of one strong page ranking well, Google splits its confidence acros...

A score from 0 to 100 that estimates how difficult it would be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword, based primarily on the authority and content quality of comp...

Keyword mapping is the process of assigning each target keyword or search intent to exactly one page on your site. It stops multiple pages from competing for the same search term a...

Keyword research is the process of finding the words and phrases people type into search engines, then grouping them by what the searcher actually wants. It tells you which topics...

A knowledge graph is a structured database that maps entities (people, places, organisations, products, concepts) and the relationships between them. Search engines and AI systems...

A Knowledge Panel is the information box Google displays on the right side of search results when someone searches for a brand, person, place or organisation. It pulls from the Goo...

Link building is the practice of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. These links — called backlinks — act as votes of confidence in Google's ranking algorithm. A...

Link equity, also called link juice, is the ranking value a webpage passes to another page through a hyperlink. Search engines treat links as votes of confidence. A page with stron...

Link reclamation is the process of finding backlinks your site has lost, broken or never received credit for, then fixing them. It covers three cases: dead links pointing to pages...

Link sculpting is the practice of deliberately directing internal link equity toward the pages you most want to rank. It started as a technique using the nofollow attribute to bloc...

Link velocity is the rate at which a website gains new backlinks over a given period, usually measured monthly. It's not the total number of backlinks a site has, it's how fast tha...

LLM optimisation is the practice of structuring your content, brand signals and authority so that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are more likely to ci...

LLM Visibility is how often and how favourably a brand, product or piece of content appears in responses generated by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini...

The local pack is the box of three business listings with a map that Google shows above regular search results for searches with local intent, like "plumber near me" or "cafes in F...

Local SEO is the practice of optimising a business's online presence so it appears in search results for people searching in a specific location. It covers Google Business Profile,...

Log file analysis is the process of reviewing a website's raw server logs to see exactly which pages search engine crawlers, like Googlebot, requested and when. Unlike crawling too...

A search query with three or more words that targets a narrow, specific intent. Lower volume than broad terms, but higher purchase intent and far less competition.

Long-tail keywords are specific search phrases, typically three or more words, that describe a narrow topic or intent. Each phrase attracts fewer searches than a short generic term...

LSI Keywords stands for Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords, a term used in SEO circles to describe words and phrases related in meaning to a main keyword. The name is borrowed from...

A machine-readable brand is your brand identity described so consistently across the web that search engines and large language models (LLMs) can confidently identify it as one dis...

A meta description is a short HTML tag that describes what a page contains. It appears under your page title in search results. Google uses it to help searchers decide whether to c...

Mobile-first indexing is Google's practice of using the mobile version of a webpage as the primary basis for ranking and indexing, rather than the desktop version. If your mobile p...

NAP consistency means your business Name, Address and Phone number (NAP) appear identically across every website, directory and platform that lists you. Google uses NAP matching as...

An HTML attribute added to a link (`rel="nofollow"`) that tells search engines not to pass SEO authority (PageRank) to the destination page. Required on paid links and typically us...

Noindex is a directive you place on a web page to tell search engines not to include it in their index. Pages with a noindex tag can still be crawled and visited, but they will not...

On-page SEO is the practice of optimising the content and HTML elements of individual web pages to help them rank higher in search results. It covers everything you control on the...

Organic traffic is visitors who arrive at your site without you paying for that specific click. The term usually means search engine organic traffic, where someone types a query in...

An orphan page is a page on your website that has no internal links pointing to it from anywhere else on the site. Search engines and visitors can only find it through a direct URL...

Page experience is Google's umbrella term for how a web page feels to actually use, separate from what it says. It bundles Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS security and...

Pagination is how a website splits long content, like a product category or blog archive, across multiple numbered pages. Rel prev/next was an HTML tag that told Google which pagin...

People Also Ask is a Google search feature that displays a box of related questions mid-page on the search results. Each question expands to show a short answer pulled from a web p...

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that synthesises answers from multiple web sources instead of returning a list of links. Answer engines broadly are AI tools that respond...

The pillar-cluster model is a content structure where one broad pillar page covers a topic at a high level and links out to several narrower cluster pages, each covering a specific...

Product schema is structured data added to a webpage's code that tells search engines exactly what a product is, including its price, availability, brand and review rating. It's wh...

Programmatic SEO is a technique for producing many landing pages automatically from a template and a data set instead of writing each page by hand. Each page targets a slightly dif...

A redirect chain is a sequence of two or more redirects a browser or search engine must follow before reaching the final page. URL A sends the visitor to URL B, which then sends th...

A referring domain is a unique website that contains at least one link pointing to your site. Referring domain count is one of the strongest predictors of SEO authority: a site wit...

Referring domain quality is a measure of how trustworthy, relevant and authoritative the websites linking to your site are, rather than simply how many link to you. A single link f...

Render budget is the finite time and computing resource Google allocates to running a page's JavaScript before indexing it. If a page needs JavaScript to show its content and Googl...

Review schema is structured data added to a web page's code that tells search engines a page contains reviews or ratings. When implemented correctly it can trigger star ratings, re...

Reviews as a ranking signal refers to the way customer reviews on platforms like Google Business Profile influence how a business appears in local search results and the map pack....

Rich results are search engine results that display more than a basic blue link and description. They include visual enhancements like star ratings, FAQs, product prices, recipe im...

robots.txt is a plain text file that sits at the root of your website and tells search engine crawlers which pages or sections they should and should not crawl. It follows the Robo...

Schema for large language models (LLMs) refers to structured data markup and content architecture choices that help AI systems accurately read, interpret and represent your busines...

Schema markup is code added to a web page that tells search engines exactly what the content means, not just what it says. It uses a shared vocabulary from Schema.org to label thin...

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google that shows how your site performs in Google Search. It reports clicks, impressions, average ranking position and click-throug...

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving a website so it ranks higher in unpaid search results. It covers what's on the page, how other sites link to it, and h...

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving a website's visibility in unpaid search results. It covers technical site health, content relevance and the authority...

Search intent is the underlying goal a person has when they type a query into a search engine. Understanding intent determines what type of content you need to create and where in...

Search intent types are the four categories a search query falls into based on what the searcher actually wants: informational (learning), navigational (finding a specific site), c...

Search volume is the estimated number of times a keyword is searched in a given location over a month. It is the primary metric used to assess the traffic potential of targeting a...

Semantic keywords are the related words, phrases and entities search engines expect to see around a topic, identified using Natural Language Processing (NLP). Instead of matching e...

Semantic search is a search engine's ability to understand the meaning and intent behind a query, not just the exact words typed. Instead of matching keywords literally, semantic s...

An SEO audit is a systematic review of a website to identify what is helping and what is hurting its ability to rank in search engines. A complete audit covers technical health, on...

SEO content is written, video or visual content created with the specific goal of ranking in search engine results and attracting organic traffic. It combines keyword research, sea...

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. It's the page a search engine shows after someone types a query. A SERP contains a mix of organic results, paid ads, featured snippets,...

SERP Feature Targeting is the practice of optimising content and markup to appear in non-standard Google search result placements, not just the standard blue link listing. These pl...

Search Generative Experience (SGE), now branded as AI Overviews by Google, is an AI-generated answer block that appears at the top of some search results pages. Instead of showing...

Share of Search is the percentage of all search demand in a category that goes to your brand name specifically, rather than a competitor's or a generic term. It's calculated from s...

Sitelinks are the extra links Google sometimes shows underneath a search result, usually for a brand or navigational query, pointing to other pages on the same site such as Contact...

A sitemap is a file that lists the URLs on your website. The XML version is built for search engine crawlers, telling them which pages exist and when they were last updated. The HT...

A soft 404 is a page that looks empty or broken to a visitor, showing something like 'no results found' or 'page not available', but still returns a 200 OK status code to search en...

Status codes are the three-digit signals a server sends every time a browser or search engine requests a page. They tell the requester what happened: the page loaded fine (200), it...

Structured data for AI is machine-readable markup added to web pages so that AI systems, search engines and language models can correctly identify what a page is about, who publish...

Structured data types are the named categories in the schema.org vocabulary, such as Article, Product, FAQPage, LocalBusiness and Review, that tell search engines what kind of cont...

A subdirectory is a folder within your main website, like yoursite.com/blog. A subdomain is a separate section that sits in front of your domain, like blog.yoursite.com. Both organ...

Technical SEO covers the non-content changes to a website that affect how search engines find, crawl, index and rank pages. It includes site speed, crawlability, structured data, m...

Template-driven pages are web pages generated from a single design and content structure, with only the data changing between them. Think suburb pages, product category pages or co...

Thin content is pages that offer little genuine value to the reader, whether that is auto-generated filler, near-duplicate pages, doorway pages or articles padded to hit a word cou...

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is the time between a browser requesting a web page and receiving the first byte of the server's response. It measures server processing, network latency...

The title tag is an HTML element in the head of a web page that defines the page's title. It appears in three places: the browser tab, bookmarks and the blue clickable headline in...

Topical authority is how much a search engine trusts a website to be a reliable source on a given subject. It's built by publishing a well-connected body of content that covers a t...

A toxic backlink is a link pointing to your website from a low-quality, spammy or manipulative source that can damage your search rankings rather than help them. They typically com...

An unlinked brand mention is when a website names your business, product or website without hyperlinking back to your site. Search engines can still associate the mention with your...

Vector search is a method of retrieving information by comparing meaning rather than matching exact words. It converts content into numerical representations called embeddings, the...

Video SEO is the practice of optimising video content so it ranks in search results and video platforms like YouTube. It covers titles, descriptions, transcripts, thumbnails, struc...

An XML sitemap is a file that lists a site's pages in a format search engines can read, helping crawlers find and index content. An HTML sitemap is a normal page on the site listin...

YouTube SEO is the practice of optimising video titles, descriptions, tags and content so they rank higher in YouTube search results and get recommended more by YouTube's algorithm...

Zero-click search happens when a user types a query into a search engine and gets their answer directly on the results page, without clicking through to any website. The answer com...