Glossary
SEO terms, explained simply.
The words you will meet in audits, reports and guides, in one or two plain sentences each.
- AI Overview
- A summary written by AI at the top of some Google results, often with links to the sources it used.
- Alt text
- A short description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines to understand the image.
- Anchor text
- The clickable words of a link. It hints at what the linked page is about.
- Authority
- A score estimating how strong a website or page is, mostly from the links pointing to it.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours.
- Canonical tag
- A tag that tells search engines which address is the main version of a page when several show the same content.
- Citation
- A mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website, such as a directory.
- Core Web Vitals
- Measurements of loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability that reflect how a page feels to use.
- Crawl
- The process of a program visiting pages and following links to discover and read a website.
- Crawl budget
- How many pages a search engine is willing to read on your website in a given period.
- CTR (click through rate)
- The share of people who see your result and click it.
- Disavow file
- A list you can give Google of links you want it to ignore, usually spammy ones.
- Domain
- The main address of a website, such as caqa.com.au.
- Featured snippet
- A short answer shown in a box at the top of some results, taken from one page.
- Hreflang
- A tag that tells search engines which language and country each version of a page is for.
- Indexing
- Adding a page to the database of a search engine so it can appear in results.
- Intent
- What the searcher is trying to do: learn something, compare options, buy, or reach a particular website.
- Internal link
- A link from one page on your website to another page on the same website.
- Keyword difficulty
- An estimate of how hard it would be to reach the top results for a keyword.
- Keyword gap
- Keywords your competitors rank for that you do not, or where they rank higher.
- llms.txt
- A plain text file at the root of a website that summarises the site and links to key pages for AI tools.
- Local pack
- The map and short list of businesses shown for searches with local intent.
- Meta description
- A short summary of a page that search engines often show under the title.
- Mixed content
- Insecure http files loaded on a secure https page, which browsers may block.
- NAP
- Name, address and phone number. Keeping them consistent everywhere helps local rankings.
- Noindex
- An instruction telling search engines not to include a page in their results.
- Orphan page
- A page with no internal links pointing to it.
- Redirect
- An instruction that sends visitors and search engines from one address to another.
- Robots.txt
- A file that tells crawlers which parts of a website they may visit.
- Schema (structured data)
- Code that describes the content of a page in a standard format search engines understand.
- Search Console
- A free Google service showing how your website performs in Google search.
- SERP
- Search engine results page: the page of results for a search.
- Sitemap
- A file listing the pages of a website so search engines can find them.
- Title tag
- The page title shown in browser tabs and usually as the headline in search results.
- Visibility
- A measure of how often your website appears near the top for the keywords you track.
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