SEO reports are full of jargon. Here are the terms you will see most.
- SERP: the search engine results page.
- Keyword: the words people type into a search box.
- Search volume: how often a keyword is searched per month.
- Keyword difficulty: how hard it is to reach the first page.
- Organic traffic: visitors from unpaid search results.
- Backlink: a link from another website to yours.
- Referring domain: a website that links to you (one domain can send many backlinks).
- Anchor text: the clickable words of a link.
- Nofollow: a link attribute that asks search engines not to pass trust.
- Indexing: the search engine storing your page so it can appear.
- Canonical tag: tells search engines which address is the main version of a page.
- Meta description: the summary that often appears under your title in results.
- Core Web Vitals: Google's loading, interactivity and visual stability measures.
- Crawl budget: how many of your pages a search engine is willing to crawl.
- Domain authority: a score estimating how strong a site's link profile is.
Bookmark this list and check the SEO tools page to see each idea in action.
A few more you will meet
- Long-tail keyword: a longer, more specific search with less competition.
- Search intent: the reason behind a search, such as to learn, compare or buy.
- 301 redirect: a permanent move from one address to another.
- Structured data: code that describes your content (products, articles, businesses) to search engines.
- Thin content: pages with too little useful text to rank.
- Orphan page: a page no other page on your site links to.
How these fit together
A typical SEO task uses several of these at once. To improve a product page, you might check its title and meta description, add structured data, fix a redirect chain pointing to it, add internal links from related guides, and track its main keyword's position. Knowing the terms makes reports and conversations with developers much easier.
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