---
title: "SEO Glossary - Complete Guide to SEO Terms | SERPView"
description: "A plain-English glossary of SEO and Google Search Console terms, from 301 redirects to YMYL. Clear definitions for beginners and professionals."
url: https://serpview.com/glossary
---

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# SEO Glossary 

There is nothing most comprehensive in this world, but we've tried to cover whatever makes sense in our SEO and Google Search Console glossary. 

[ A ](#A)[ B ](#B)[ C ](#C)[ D ](#D)[ E ](#E)[ F ](#F)[ G ](#G)[ H ](#H)[ I ](#I)[ J ](#J)[ K ](#K)[ L ](#L)[ M ](#M) N [ O ](#O)[ P ](#P)[ Q ](#Q)[ R ](#R)[ S ](#S)[ T ](#T)[ U ](#U) V  W [ X ](#X)[ Y ](#Y) Z 

##  \# 

[  301 Redirect A permanent redirect from one URL to another that tells browsers and search engines the old URL has moved for good. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/301-redirect) 

[  302 Redirect A temporary redirect that sends users and crawlers to another URL while signaling that the original URL should remain the primary page. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/302-redirect) 

##  A 

[  Anchor Text The visible, clickable text in a hyperlink that provides context about the content of the linked page. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/anchor-text) 

[  Annotations Notes or markers added to analytics charts to document important events, changes, or campaigns that may affect website performance. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/annotations) 

[  Average Position The average rank at which a web page appears in search engine results pages (SERPs) for a given keyword. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/average-position) 

[  Alt Text The text attribute on an <img> tag (alt="...") that describes the image for screen readers and search engines. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/alt-text) 

[  Accessibility (a11y) The practice of making websites usable by people with disabilities, including those using screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technologies. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/accessibility) 

##  B 

[  Backlink A link from one website to another, viewed as a vote of confidence and a key ranking factor in SEO. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/backlink) 

[  Black Hat SEO Aggressive SEO tactics that violate search engine guidelines, risking penalties or bans from search results. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/black-hat-seo) 

[  Brand Keywords Search queries that include your company name, product names, or other branded terms that indicate direct brand interest. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/brand-keywords) 

##  C 

[  Content Decay The gradual decline in organic traffic and rankings for a piece of content over time as it becomes outdated or loses relevance. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/content-decay) 

[  Core Web Vitals A set of Google metrics measuring real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/core-web-vitals) 

[  Crawling The process by which search engines discover and scan web pages to index their content. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/crawling) 

[  Click-Through Rate (CTR) The percentage of users who click on a link after seeing it in search results or advertisements. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/click-through-rate) 

[  Crawl Budget The limited number of URLs a search engine bot will crawl on your site within a given timeframe, determined by crawl rate and crawl demand. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/crawl-budget) 

[  Canonical Tag An HTML link element that tells search engines which version of a duplicate or similar page should be treated as the primary URL. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/canonical-tag) 

##  D 

[  Domain Authority A search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/domain-authority) 

[  Duplicate Content Content that appears in substantially similar form at more than one URL, which can split ranking signals and confuse search engines about which page to index. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/duplicate-content) 

##  E 

[  E-E-A-T Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — Google's quality framework used by human Quality Raters to evaluate page quality. Strongly correlates with rankings. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/eeat) 

[  Entity A specific, named thing — a person, place, brand, product, or concept — that search engines and AI models recognize and understand as a distinct unit of meaning. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/entity) 

##  F 

[  Flesch-Kincaid The most widely used readability formula. Combines average sentence length and average syllables per word into either a 0–100 Reading Ease score or a US school grade level. Developed in 1975 by Rudolf Flesch and J. Peter Kincaid for the US Navy. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/flesch-kincaid) 

##  G 

[  Google Search Console A free Google tool that helps website owners monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot their site's presence in search results. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/google-search-console) 

[  Googlebot Google's web crawler that discovers and downloads web pages to add them to Google's search index. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/googlebot) 

[  Generative Engine Optimization The practice of making content easy for AI answer engines and AI Overviews to understand, extract, trust, and cite. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/geo) 

##  H 

[  Headline The clickable title of an article, blog post, or webpage that appears in search results, social shares, and at the top of the page itself. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/headline) 

[  Hreflang An HTML or XML sitemap annotation that tells search engines which language or regional version of a page should be shown to users. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/hreflang) 

[  HTTP Status Code The server response code that tells browsers and crawlers whether a URL loaded, redirected, moved, or failed. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/http-status-code) 

##  I 

[  Image SEO The practice of optimizing images on a webpage for search engines and Google Images, including alt text, file names, compression, and structured data. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/image-seo) 

[  Indexing The process by which search engines store and organize content discovered during crawling. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/indexing) 

[  Internal Linking Links that connect one page of a website to another page on the same website. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/internal-linking) 

[  Indexability The ability of a web page to be stored in a search engine's index and shown in search results, determined by technical factors and rules. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/indexability) 

##  J 

[  JSON-LD A JavaScript-based structured data format that embeds schema markup in a page without changing visible HTML. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/json-ld) 

##  K 

[  Keyword Words or phrases that users enter into search engines to find information, products, or services. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/keyword) 

[  Keyword Cannibalization When multiple pages on the same website compete for the same keywords, potentially hurting rankings for all affected pages. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/keyword-cannibalization) 

[  Keyword Difficulty A metric that estimates how difficult it would be to rank for a specific keyword in organic search results. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/keyword-difficulty) 

[  Keyword Density The percentage of times a keyword appears in content compared to the total word count, calculated as (count / total words) × 100. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/keyword-density) 

[  Keyword Stuffing The practice of overloading a webpage with a target keyword or phrase in an attempt to manipulate search rankings. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/keyword-stuffing) 

##  L 

[  Link Building The process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own to improve search engine rankings. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/link-building) 

[  Long-Tail Keywords Longer, more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when closer to making a purchase or finding specific information. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/long-tail-keywords) 

[  llms.txt A proposed text file that summarizes important website pages for AI assistants and large language model crawlers. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/llms-txt) 

##  M 

[  AI Overview The AI-generated answer block that Google surfaces at the top of many search results — also the generic industry shorthand for the AI-synthesized answers now returned by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/ai-overview) 

[  Meta Description An HTML element that provides a brief summary of a web page's content, displayed in search results. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/meta-description) 

[  Moz Metrics A family of third-party SEO scores developed by Moz — including Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Spam Score — that estimate a site's ranking strength on a 0–100 scale. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/moz-metrics) 

##  O 

[  Open Graph A set of meta tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) that control how a page appears when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, and other social platforms. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/open-graph) 

[  Orphan Pages Pages that exist on a website but have no internal links pointing to them, making them harder for users and crawlers to discover. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/orphan-pages) 

[  Organic Search Unpaid search engine results that appear based on their relevance to the search query rather than advertising. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/organic-search) 

##  P 

[  Page Authority A score that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engine results pages. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/page-authority) 

[  Power Words Emotionally charged words (free, proven, instant, ultimate) that trigger curiosity, urgency, or trust — proven to lift click-through rate on headlines and CTAs. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/power-words) 

##  Q 

[  Query Counting A metric that measures the total number of unique search queries driving traffic to your website, indicating SEO diversity and reach. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/query-counting) 

##  R 

[  Readability Score A numerical score, typically Flesch Reading Ease (0–100) or Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (US school grade), that estimates how easy a piece of text is to understand based on sentence length and word complexity. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/readability-score) 

[  Rich Results Enhanced Google search results that show extra information such as ratings, FAQs, breadcrumbs, images, or product details. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/rich-results) 

[  Robots.txt A text file that tells search engine crawlers which pages or sections of a website they can or cannot access. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/robots-txt) 

##  S 

[  SERP (Search Engine Results Page) The page displayed by search engines in response to a user's search query. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/serp) 

[  Stop Words Common English words (the, a, and, of, to) that are typically filtered out before keyword analysis because they carry little SEO relevance on their own. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/stop-words) 

[  Search Intent The underlying goal or purpose behind a user's search query. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/search-intent) 

[  Striking Distance Keywords where a website ranks on positions 11-20 (page 2) that could potentially reach page 1 with optimization effort. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/striking-distance) 

[  Structured Data Code added to webpages that helps search engines understand and display content in rich, enhanced ways. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/structured-data) 

[  Schema.org The shared vocabulary behind structured data markup used by Google and other platforms to understand entities, pages, products, FAQs, articles, and more. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/schema-org) 

##  T 

[  Title Tag An HTML element that specifies the title of a web page, displayed in search results and browser tabs. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/title-tag) 

[  Topic Clusters A content strategy that groups related content around a central pillar page to establish topical authority and improve SEO. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/topic-clusters) 

[  Topical Authority A site's demonstrated depth and credibility across a topic area, built through comprehensive content, entity coverage, internal links, and trust signals. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/topical-authority) 

##  U 

[  URL Slug The part of a URL that identifies a specific page, usually the last segment after the domain — typically a lowercase, hyphen-separated version of the page title. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/url-slug) 

##  X 

[  XML Sitemap A file that lists all important pages on a website to help search engines discover and crawl content. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/xml-sitemap) 

##  Y 

[  YMYL Your Money or Your Life — Google's classification for pages that can significantly impact a person's health, financial stability, safety, or well-being. Subject to the highest E-E-A-T scrutiny. ](https://serpview.com/glossary/ymyl) 

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