SEO Glossary

Google's AI-generated answer that appears at the top of many SERPs, synthesising information from multiple sources and citing them as links.

When multiple pages on the same site compete for the same query — diluting rankings and CTR for both.

An HTML hint that tells Google which version of a duplicate or near-duplicate URL should be indexed and ranked.

The percentage of impressions that result in a click. The single most important Search-Console-visible metric for snippet quality.

Google's three real-user performance metrics — LCP, INP, CLS — that contribute to ranking and that you can measure with Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the four signals Google's quality raters score, and a proxy for what the ranking algorithm rewards.

The answer-box result that appears above position #1 on many Google SERPs, pulled and displayed verbatim from a ranking page.

An HTML attribute (or HTTP header / sitemap entry) that tells search engines which language and region each version of a multilingual page targets.

Links between pages on the same domain. The cheapest, most controllable way to influence what Google ranks and how authority flows through your site.

The recommended format for structured data on web pages — a JSON object inside a script tag that describes the page in a machine-readable way.

The short HTML attribute that summarises a page for search engines and social previews — and the rules Google actually applies to it.

A plain-text file at the root of your site that tells search engine crawlers which paths they should or shouldn't crawl.

The umbrella term for structured data on a web page. The vocabulary is schema.org; the recommended format is JSON-LD.

What the user is actually trying to do when they type a query. The single most important input to deciding what kind of page to write.

An XML file listing the canonical URLs of your site, used to tell search engines what to crawl and when each page was last updated.

Machine-readable data on a web page that explicitly describes its content. The conceptual umbrella that includes schema.org markup.

The HTML <title> element that becomes the blue link in Google's search results. Measured in pixels, not characters.