On-Page & Content

A brand SERP is the search results page that appears when someone searches for a brand or company name.

A meta description is an HTML meta tag that summarizes a page's content in one or two sentences.

The meta keywords tag is a meta element in the <head> of a page where site owners once listed keywords for the page.

Meta tags are meta elements in the <head> of an HTML page.

Open Graph is a protocol that defines how a web page is displayed when it is shared on social networks or in messaging apps.

Pixel width is the horizontal space a title or meta description takes up in a search result.

In SEO, a search snippet is the short description shown below the title link of a search result.

A title link is the clickable title of a result in Google Search.

A title rewrite happens when Google shows a different title in search results than the one in a page's <title> element.

A title tag is the HTML <title> element inside a page's <head>.

Twitter cards, now called X cards, are meta tags in a page's <head> that control how a shared link looks as a preview on X, with title …

Above the fold is the part of a web page that is visible in the browser window when the page loads, before anyone scrolls.

Alt text (alternative text) is a short written description of an image, placed in the alt attribute of an HTML img element.

Boilerplate is standard text that is reused with little change in many documents.

Heading hierarchy is the outline of a page built from the HTML elements <h1> to <h6>.

Headings (H1–H6) are the HTML elements <h1> through <h6> that name and structure the sections of a web page.

An image file name is the name of the image file on the server, such as red-running-shoe.jpg.

Image SEO (image optimization) is the set of practices that help images appear in Google Search and Google Images while keeping page load …

PDF SEO covers measures that help PDF files appear in search results and display sensibly.

Text-to-HTML ratio (also code-to-text ratio) is the share of a page's HTML that is visible text.

Video SEO covers the steps that help videos get found, indexed and displayed in search engines: in regular Google Search, in Google Videos …

WebP is an image format developed by Google for the web.

YouTube SEO is the optimization of videos and channels so they appear and get clicked more often in YouTube search and recommendations.

10x content is an SEO industry concept for content that should be ten times better than the best result already ranking for a topic.

AI-generated content is text, images, audio or video created fully or partly with generative AI.

An author byline is the line that names who wrote a piece of content.

Comment spam is unwanted posts under articles or in forums, usually generated automatically and carrying links to other sites.

Content in SEO means everything on a website that users and search engines evaluate: text, images, video, audio and interactive elements …

In SEO, content quality describes how well a page serves what the searcher is looking for.

Content syndication means that content you already published appears again on one or more other websites, with your permission.

Doorway page refers to a page built to rank for specific search queries that sends visitors on to a different destination.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Gated content is content that visitors can only access after a step such as filling in a form with a name and email address.

Helpful content is content that Google describes as created primarily to benefit people rather than to attract search traffic.

People-first content is content written for people with a specific need and judged by how useful it is to them.

Readability describes how easily readers can understand a written text.

The Search Quality Rater Guidelines are Google's public handbook for the people who evaluate search results and web pages on its behalf …

Thin content describes pages that give visitors little or no added value.

Unique content is content that exists in this form on only one page and gives readers something of their own.

User-generated content (UGC) is content that users create instead of the site owner, such as reviews, forum posts, comments, photos and …

YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) describes topics where inaccurate or misleading content could harm people.

A content audit is a systematic review of the content on a website to decide which pages to keep, update, consolidate or remove.

Content brief is a working document written before a text is produced.

Content decay is the gradual decline of rankings, impressions and clicks on a page that used to perform well.

Content freshness describes how current a piece of content is relative to a search query.

Content gap analysis compares a website's content with what the audience searches for and what competitors cover, to find missing or weak …

A content hub is a section of a website that gathers content on one topic or for one audience and links it together.

Content marketing is a marketing approach in which a company creates and distributes useful content to attract and keep a clearly defined …

Content pruning is the deliberate review of existing pages with the goal of updating, merging or removing those that perform poorly or are …

Content refresh means revising an existing page so that it matches current facts and the current search intent again.

A content strategy is the plan behind a website's content.

Cornerstone content is the term SEOs use for the most important pages or articles of a site on a core topic.

An editorial calendar is a schedule that lists which content gets published, on which date, in which channel and who is responsible for it.

Evergreen content is content that stays relevant over a long period, so people keep searching for and reading it.

An FAQ page (FAQ stands for "frequently asked questions") collects questions customers often ask about a product, service or topic and …

Holistic content is an SEO term for content that treats a topic comprehensively and covers the different questions and angles searchers …

A hub page is, in SEO, a page that collects links to the content on one topic.

A pillar page is a comprehensive page on a broad topic that links to more detailed pages and is linked back from them.

Topical authority is an SEO idea that a website becomes a trusted source on a subject when it covers that subject broadly and in depth.

Topical map has a geographic meaning (a map showing terrain), but in SEO it is a plan: an overview of the topics, subtopics and pages a …

A topic cluster is a group of pages on one website that together cover a main subject.

In SEO, an entity is a uniquely identifiable thing, such as a person, organization, place, product or concept, that search engines can …

Keyword cannibalization happens when several pages of the same website target the same search query or intent and, according to reports …

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a page compared to the total number of words.

Keyword proximity is the distance between the words of a search phrase within a text, counted as the number of words that separate them.

Keyword stuffing is the practice of filling a web page with keywords or numbers to manipulate rankings in Google Search results.

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a statistical technique from natural language processing.

Lemmatization is a natural language processing technique that reduces inflected word forms to their dictionary form, the lemma.

LSI keywords is an SEO term for words that relate to a main keyword, such as synonyms and neighboring concepts.

Semantic search is a search method that interprets the meaning and intent of a query and returns results that match that meaning, even …

Stemming is a method that reduces inflected or derived words to a common stem, so that "fishing," "fished" and "fisher" are all treated as …

TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency) is a weighting method from information retrieval.

Topic modeling is a text-mining technique that finds the main themes in a large set of documents without labeled training data.

Anchor text (link text) is the visible, clickable text of a link.

Breadcrumb navigation (breadcrumbs) is a row of links, usually above the main content, that shows the path from a website's home page to …

A call to action (CTA) is an element that asks visitors to take a specific next step.

A click path (also clickstream) is the sequence of pages a visitor views on a website, in the order they were viewed.

An entry page is the first page of a visit in web analytics.

Footer links are links in the footer of a website.

Heatmap (or heat map) is a visualization that uses color to show values: warm colors mark high values, cool colors low ones (Coursera).

Homepage is the page at the root of a domain or subdomain, for example https://example.com/.

Internal linking is the set of links that point from one page of a website to another page on the same website.

Intrusive interstitials are page elements that obstruct the view of the content, usually for promotional purposes, according to Google.

A landing page is a page that visitors reach after clicking an ad, an email link or a search result and that is built around one goal …

Link juice (also called link equity) is an informal SEO term for the value a link is thought to pass from the page it sits on to the page …

A mega menu is a website navigation element that opens a large panel with many links, usually grouped in columns, when a visitor hovers …

PageRank sculpting is a historical SEO tactic.

SEO silo (siloing) means grouping a website's pages by topic into separate sections, usually through URL folders and internal links that …

Site architecture (also called website structure or information architecture) describes how the pages of a website are grouped, named and …

Usability is how easy and effective an interface is to use.

User experience (UX) covers all aspects of a person's interaction with a company, its services and its products.

A user journey is the sequence of steps a person takes to reach a goal, such as choosing and buying a product.

User signals are measurable behavior data from searchers, such as click-through rate in search results, returning to the results page …

Website navigation is the set of elements that lead visitors and crawlers from page to page.