The A-Z SEO Glossary for UK Businesses
SEO comes with a lot of jargon. This glossary explains the terms you are most likely to meet, in plain English. If you are new to the subject, start with our beginner's guide to SEO.
Published by SEO Consultants · Last reviewed
SEO terms A to Z
- Algorithm
- The set of rules a search engine uses to decide which pages to show and in what order.
- Alt text
- A text description of an image, read by screen readers and used by search engines.
- Anchor text
- The clickable words in a link.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours.
- Canonical tag
- Code that tells search engines which version of similar pages is the main one.
- Citation
- A mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's measurements of loading, responsiveness and visual stability. See Core Web Vitals explained.
- Crawling
- The process of search engine bots discovering pages by following links.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: qualities Google's quality raters look for in content.
- Featured snippet
- A highlighted answer shown at the top of some search results.
- Google Business Profile
- Google's free business listing, formerly Google My Business.
- Hreflang
- Code that tells search engines which language or country a page is for.
- Indexing
- Storing a page in a search engine's database so it can appear in results.
- Internal link
- A link from one page on your website to another.
- Keyword
- A word or phrase people type into a search engine.
- Meta description
- A short summary of a page that may appear under the title in search results.
- Noindex
- An instruction telling search engines not to include a page in results.
- Organic search
- Unpaid search results, as opposed to adverts.
- PPC
- Pay-per-click advertising. See SEO vs PPC.
- Redirect (301)
- A permanent instruction sending visitors and search engines from one URL to another.
- Robots.txt
- A file that tells search engine bots which parts of a site they may crawl.
- Schema markup
- Structured data that describes page content to search engines.
- Search intent
- The goal behind a search: to learn, compare, buy or find a specific site.
- SERP
- Search engine results page.
- Title tag
- The page title shown in browser tabs and usually as the headline in search results.
- XML sitemap
- A file listing the pages you want search engines to find.
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