A – B
- Alt Text
- A short written description attached to an image, read by screen readers and search engines since they can't "see" pictures. Also shown if the image fails to load.
- Backlink
- A link from another website pointing to yours. Search engines treat backlinks as a vote of confidence — more (quality) backlinks generally means more trust.
- Bounce Rate
- The percentage of visitors who leave a page without interacting further (clicking a link, scrolling, visiting another page). A high bounce rate isn't always bad — it depends on what the page was supposed to do.
C – D
- Canonical URL
- A tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the "main" one, used when the same content is reachable from more than one URL, to avoid duplicate-content confusion.
- Crawling
- The process where a search engine's automated bot visits pages on the web and follows links to discover new ones — the first step before a page can be indexed.
- Domain Authority
- A third-party score (not an official Google metric) estimating how likely a website is to rank, based mostly on the quantity and quality of backlinks it has.
I – K
- Indexing
- After crawling a page, a search engine may add it to its index — a giant database of pages it can show in search results. A page can be crawled but not indexed if it's low quality or blocked.
- Internal Link
- A link from one page on your site to another page on the same site. Helps visitors (and search engines) find related content and understand your site's structure.
- Keyword Density
- The percentage of times a specific word or phrase appears in a piece of text relative to the total word count. Useful for spotting overuse ("keyword stuffing"), not a strict target to hit.
M – O
- Meta Description
- A short summary (ideally under ~155 characters) shown below a page's title in search results. Doesn't directly affect ranking but strongly affects whether people click.
- Meta Title
- The clickable headline shown in search results (ideally under ~60 characters before it gets cut off). Usually the same as, or close to, a page's
<title>tag. - Organic Traffic
- Visitors who arrive at your site through unpaid search results, as opposed to paid ads or social media links.
R – S
- Readability
- How easy a piece of text is to read and understand, usually estimated from sentence length and word complexity. Simpler writing tends to keep readers on the page longer.
- Robots.txt
- A small text file at the root of a website that tells search engine crawlers which parts of the site they're allowed (or not allowed) to crawl.
- Schema Markup
- Structured data added to a page's code (often as JSON-LD) that explicitly tells search engines what kind of content a page contains — an article, a product, an organization, and so on.
- Sitemap
- An XML file listing all the important pages on a website, submitted to help search engines discover and crawl content more efficiently.
- Slug
- The part of a URL that identifies a specific page in readable form, e.g. the
best-free-seo-toolsinexample.com/best-free-seo-tools.
T – U
- Title Tag
- The HTML element (
<title>) that defines a page's title — shown in browser tabs, bookmarks, and usually as the clickable headline in search results. - UGC (User-Generated Content)
- Content created by visitors rather than the site owner — comments, reviews, forum posts. Can add fresh, unique content to a page, but usually needs moderation.