Every term you keep seeing explained without using other jargon to explain it.
These are about how your website is built and whether search engines can read it properly.
A short written description you add to an image on your website. Search engines cannot see images the way humans do, so the alt text tells them what the image shows. Screen readers also use it for people who are visually impaired. A good alt text describes the image plainly: "Plumber fixing a kitchen tap under a sink" is more useful than "image1.jpg".
A line of code in a page's header that tells search engines: "This is the main version of this page." It matters when the same content appears at more than one web address, which can happen with product pages, filtered listings, or staging sites. Without a canonical tag, Google may index the wrong version or split its ranking signals across duplicates.
Three specific speed and stability measurements Google uses to assess how good the experience of visiting your page actually feels. The three are: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), which measures how long it takes the main content to appear on screen; CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), which measures whether elements on the page jump around while it loads; and INP (Interaction to Next Paint), which measures how quickly the page responds when someone clicks or taps something. Google uses these as a ranking factor.
Whether Google's automated bots (called crawlers or spiders) can actually get into your website and read its pages. If a page cannot be crawled, it will not appear in search results, no matter how good the content is. Broken links, blocked files, login walls, and certain website builders can all prevent crawling without you realising it.
Headings in HTML are numbered H1 through H6, with H1 being the most important. The H1 is the main title of a page. Search engines use it to understand what the page is about. A page should have one H1 and then use H2s and H3s to organise the rest of the content, the same way you would structure a document with a title and then subheadings. Using multiple H1s or skipping levels confuses both search engines and screen readers.
The secure version of HTTP, the protocol that transfers data between a browser and a website. If your site uses HTTPS, visitors see a padlock icon in their browser bar. Google has confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal. More practically, browsers now show a "Not Secure" warning on sites without it, which puts visitors off before they have read a single word.
Links on your website that point to other pages on the same website. They help search engines find all your pages and understand which ones are most important. They also help visitors navigate. A page with no internal links pointing to it is hard for Google to discover and easy for it to ignore.
The short summary that appears under your page title in search results. It does not directly affect your ranking, but it does affect whether someone clicks on your result. Google will sometimes rewrite it, but writing a clear, accurate one gives you the best chance of controlling what people see. Aim for around 150 characters.
An instruction you can add to a page that tells search engines not to include it in their index. Useful for pages you do not want showing up in results: thank-you pages, internal search results, draft pages, or admin areas. If a page has a noindex tag, it will not rank for anything, by design. The problem arises when the tag is applied by accident.
Lighthouse is Google's free auditing tool that gives your page a score out of 100 across four categories: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. PageSpeed Insights is the web version of the same tool. The Performance score is based largely on Core Web Vitals. A score in the 90s is good; below 50 on Performance usually means real problems for both users and search rankings.
A redirect sends visitors (and search engines) from one URL to another. A 301 redirect is permanent: it tells Google that the page has moved for good, and passes most of the original page's ranking value to the new address. A 302 redirect is temporary: it moves traffic without signalling a permanent change, so Google typically keeps the original URL in its index. Using a 302 when you mean a 301 can quietly cost you ranking power.
A plain text file that sits at the root of your website and gives crawlers instructions about which pages they are and are not allowed to visit. It does not prevent a page from appearing in search results if other sites link to it, but it does stop crawlers from reading the page's content. Accidentally blocking important pages in robots.txt is a common and hard-to-spot problem.
Code added to a page that labels its content in a standardised way so search engines know exactly what they are looking at. For example, schema can tell Google that a particular block of text is a business address, a product price, a review rating, or an event date. Google uses structured data to generate rich results (see below) in search. It does not guarantee them, but without schema, you cannot get them at all.
A file, usually called sitemap.xml, that lists all the pages on your website. You submit it to Google Search Console to help Google discover and track your pages. It is not a guarantee that every page will be indexed, but it removes one possible reason for pages being missed. Most website platforms generate one automatically.
The title of a web page as it appears in search results and in the browser tab. It is one of the strongest on-page signals for what a page is about. Search engines may rewrite it if they think yours is misleading or too long. Aim for around 60 characters, put the most important words near the front, and make it accurately describe the page.
These are about how search engines find, evaluate, and recommend businesses, and how AI tools are changing what that means.
The AI-generated answer box that Google places at the top of some search results pages, above all other results. It summarises information from multiple sources and sometimes includes links to the pages it drew from. Getting your content cited in an AI Overview is not something you can directly control, but pages that are well-structured, factually accurate, and clearly relevant to the query are more likely to be used as sources.
Optimising your website so that AI-powered search tools, including Google's AI Overview, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, and similar platforms, find, understand, and cite your content. Traditional SEO focuses on ranking in a list of links. ASEO focuses on being referenced inside an AI-generated answer. The two overlap significantly, but ASEO places extra weight on clarity, factual accuracy, structured content, and your overall credibility as a source.
Links from other websites that point to yours. They are one of the oldest and most significant ranking signals in SEO. The logic is straightforward: if a credible site links to you, it is a signal that your content is worth linking to. A small number of links from genuinely relevant, trusted sites is worth far more than a large number from irrelevant or low-quality ones. Buying links in bulk remains against Google's guidelines and can result in penalties.
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number. Citation consistency means that your business name, address, and phone number are identical everywhere they appear online: your website, Google Business Profile, Yelp, directory sites, social profiles, and anywhere else. Inconsistencies across these sources confuse search engines about which version is correct and can suppress your local rankings. Even small differences, like "St" versus "Street", can matter.
A score, usually between 0 and 100, that third-party tools like Moz or Ahrefs assign to a website to estimate how well it might rank in search results. It is worth knowing that domain authority is not a Google metric. Google does not use it. It is a proprietary score created by SEO software companies as a proxy for link strength and site credibility. Useful as a rough comparison tool, but not something to optimise for directly.
A box at the top of Google's search results that pulls a direct answer to a question from one of the ranking pages. It can be a paragraph, a numbered list, a table, or a short definition. The page shown in the featured snippet is almost always one that already ranks on the first page. Formatting your content clearly, with direct answers to specific questions, increases the chance of being selected.
The free listing Google provides for businesses, which shows up in Google Maps and in the right-hand panel of Google search results. It includes your address, opening hours, phone number, photos, reviews, and more. For local businesses, it is often the single highest-impact thing to get right. An incomplete or unverified profile means you may not appear in local searches at all.
These three metrics appear in Google Search Console. An impression is counted each time your page appears in search results, whether or not anyone clicks it. A click is counted when someone actually visits your page from the result. CTR (Click-Through Rate) is clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage. A page with many impressions but a low CTR is ranking but not compelling enough to click, often a sign that the title tag or meta description needs work.
The words and phrases people type into search engines when looking for something. In SEO, keywords refer both to the specific terms you want to rank for and to the process of figuring out which terms your potential customers actually use. The goal is to create content that matches what people search for, using their language rather than your internal terminology.
Optimising your online presence so that your business appears in search results for people in your geographic area. This includes your Google Business Profile, consistent NAP citations, location-specific pages on your website, and local reviews. Searches like "plumber near me" or "coffee shop in Bristol" are local searches. Local SEO is the discipline that determines whether you show up for them.
The original algorithm Google built in the late 1990s to rank web pages based on how many other pages link to them and how important those linking pages are. The idea was that links function like votes of confidence. PageRank still exists as a component of Google's ranking system, but it is one of hundreds of signals now, and Google stopped publishing PageRank scores in 2016. When people talk about "link juice" or "link authority", they are referring to the underlying idea behind PageRank.
A search result that displays extra information beyond just a title and description: star ratings, prices, availability, event dates, recipe details, and so on. Rich results are generated from schema markup on your page. They make your listing more visible and often increase click-through rates. Not every type of content qualifies, and Google decides whether to show them even if your markup is correct.
Search Engine Results Page. The page you see after typing something into Google, Bing, or another search engine. When someone in SEO talks about "ranking on the SERP", they mean appearing on that results page. The SERP has changed considerably over the years and now includes paid ads, map packs, featured snippets, AI Overviews, image carousels, and organic links, all competing for attention in the same space.
The underlying reason someone typed a particular search query. There are four common types: informational (they want to learn something), navigational (they want to find a specific website), commercial (they are researching before buying), and transactional (they are ready to buy or book). Google works hard to match results to intent, which means a page that does not match the intent behind a keyword will struggle to rank for it, even if the keyword appears throughout the text.
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