Home Blog Search Engine Optimization 160 Essential SEO Terms You Should Know

160 Essential SEO Terms You Should Know

Last Edited April 19, 2026
by Garenne Bigby

SEO comes with a vocabulary problem. Read a few industry blogs and you’ll run into acronyms, jargon, and slang that mean nothing if you’re just starting out. This glossary covers 160 of the terms you’ll see most often in 2026, updated to reflect current Google terminology, retired concepts, and the newer layer of AI search that’s reshaping how people find content.

The list is alphabetical. If you want the why behind any of these terms, our beginner’s guide to SEO covers the basics, and our history of SEO traces how many of these terms came to be.

301 Redirection

Redirection is when you visit one site or page and are immediately directed to a different page, with a different URL. Redirection can be temporary or permanent. A 301 redirection is a permanent server redirection. There is not any difference if you are the user, but it does make a difference if you are the web developer. The permanent redirection is a way of telling search engines that the page the user is trying to access has changed its address permanently whatever page rankings the site already has in terms of SEO will be moved over to the new address. Please note this only happens with a 301 redirection and not with a temporary redirection.

Affiliate

Affiliate can mean many things in different contexts, but in terms of SEO, an affiliate site promotes services or products that are sold on other web sites or businesses in exchange for a commission or fees to do this service.

AI Overviews

Google’s AI-generated answer summaries that appear at the top of many search results, launched in the US in May 2024 and rolling out globally through 2025-2026. AI Overviews appear on roughly 30-48% of Google searches as of 2026, and about 60% of searches now end without a click because the AI answered the question directly. Pages cited in AI Overviews are almost always pages already ranking in the top 20 organic results — 97% by some measures — so classic SEO still drives AI-search visibility.

Algorithm

An algorithm or “algo” is a program utilized by search engines to determine what pages and sites to suggest when a user enters in a search query. You will hear the term used frequently when talking about the various programs, including Penguin and Panda, that search engines use to weed out “bad” sites that use tactics to improve their SEO ranking.

ALT Tag

A common but technically inaccurate name for the alt attribute on an HTML image. There’s no separate “ALT tag” element — the alt attribute lives inside the <img> tag. See ALT Text for how it’s used.

ALT Text

The text value of an image’s alt attribute. Alt text describes an image for screen readers (accessibility) and for search engines that can’t see the image. Well-written alt text is a short factual description of the image, optionally including a relevant keyword when it fits naturally. Required for WCAG compliance and useful for image-search rankings.

Analytics

This term refers to a software program that assists in gathering and analyzing data regarding a web site’s usage. Some programs do come at a cost, but others, such as Google Analytics, are free.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible text of a link to a web site or page. It is when you enter a web address and it becomes underlined and blue. You may have seen it numerous times before but never knew the term of what it was exactly. Anchor text also the users to click on the text directly and be directed to the web page. The text describes what the page is about and what you will see if you click on the text.

Astroturfing

Creating fake grassroots support or fake reviews to manipulate search rankings, social media trends, or brand perception. Astroturfing violates Google’s spam policies and most platform terms of service. Penalties range from algorithmic demotions to manual actions and account bans. Detection has gotten much more sophisticated with AI-assisted review fraud detection in 2026.

Authority

Authority describes the amount of trust a site is given for a search query. This authority comes from the related incoming links to the page from other trusted sites.

Authority Site

A site is considered an “authority site” when it has many incoming links from other related expert or hub sites. Authority sites have a higher pagerank and search results placement. The best example of what an authority site is would be Wikipedia.

B2B and B2C

These terms are similar and mean Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Customer (B2C).

Backlink

A backlink is any link into a page or site from another page or site. It is a link that is placed on another website that takes the user back to your site. Having a lot of back links with relevant anchor text is one of the best ways to improve your site’s search engine rankings.

BERT

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. A natural-language processing model Google launched into Search in October 2019, affecting about 10% of English queries at launch. BERT lets Google understand the relationships between words in a query, including prepositions and word order that historically tripped up search engines. It shifted SEO away from exact-match keyword targeting toward content that genuinely answers the query.

Black Hat SEO

This term refers to unethical or manipulative SEO practices. These tactics go directly against the rules dictated in Google’s best practices. It can hurt your site and even get it banned from search engines.

Blog

This familiar term refers to a website that provides content on a regular basis. Blogs are utilized by companies as well as by individual users. Content is published through a content management system, such as Blogger or WordPress, and when posts are published, each post is considered a “new page” that a search engines sees.

Bookmark

Users will bookmark web sites if they wish to go back to the site later. By bookmarking, the site’s link is saved in your web browser for reference. Social bookmarking sites allow users to share different web sites with other users. Having links to your site on social networking sites boosts your SEO.

Bot

Bot refers to a program that performs a task autonomously. Robots, spiders or crawlers are the most commonly used bots. Search engines will use bots to find and add sites to their search indexes.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of users who enter a site and leave without interacting with additional pages. In Google Analytics 4 (the current analytics platform since Universal Analytics was retired in July 2023), traditional bounce rate has been replaced by engagement rate, which measures the percentage of sessions that lasted 10+ seconds, included a conversion event, or had at least 2 page views.

Bread Crumbs

Hansel and Gretel used bread crumbs to find the way back home, and in a similar fashion, breadcrumbs are a way the user can understand where they are on a site and know how to get back to the root area or where they started.

Canonical Issues

Essentially canonical issues refer to duplicate content. It an issue that is difficult to avoid at times, but these issues can be resolved by using the noindex meta tag and 301 server redirects.

Canonical Tag

A canonical tag is an HTML link element that informs search engines about duplicate content pages’ web developers have created. It is placed in the HEAD section of the HTML structure. It informs the search engine that the current page is a copy of the page located under the address set in the canonical tag. The tag transfers all rankings to the canonical page.

Canonical URL

This URL is the best address on which a user can locate a piece of information. You may have more than one page that could refer to this information, but by specifying which URL is the canonical one assists search engines in understanding which address directs a user to the best source of information.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS is the part of the code that describes how different elements on your site look, such as the design style of your links, text, headers, etc.

Click Fraud

Click fraud refers to improper clicks on pay-per-click advertisements that are normally done by the publisher for the purposes of undeserved profit. Telling people to merely click on the advertisement just to accumulate clicks and profit lowers the advertiser confidence that they will be getting a return on the investment they have made in their advertisement space purchase.

Cloaking

Cloaking is taking a web page and building it into a way that displays different content to people and to search engines. It is a way of fooling search engine spiders into getting rankings for certain keywords but then giving users completely different and unrelated content. You could end up being completely banned from search engine results if you are caught cloaking.

CMS

CMS refers to a content management system. The best example of a CMS would be Blogger or WordPress, both services that allow content creation for publishers who are not exactly well-versed in coding skills and website development.

Code Swapping

This type of bait and switch practice is when a developer changes the site’s content after higher rankings are achieved.

Comment Spam

You will see comment spam frequently when you come across comments under a specific post or story for something that has absolutely nothing to do with the content above. Spam usually directs users to a completely different site or link.

Content

Content is the part of a web page that provides the substance and is of the most interest to the user. It is the text or copy in the site itself.

Contextual Advertisement

This type of advertisement is related to the content on the site.

Conversion

Conversion is seeking one’s quantifiable goal on a web site, whether that goal be number of clicks, subscriptions, signups and sales.

Conversion Form

Conversion forms allow the developer to collect information about the site visitor. The information helps you follow up with the leads you get from users clicking on your site.

Conversion Rate

This refers to the rate or percentage of users who “convert.”

Core Web Vitals

Google’s three metrics for page user experience, used as ranking signals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how fast the main content loads, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how quickly the page responds to user interactions (INP replaced First Input Delay in March 2024), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much the page jumps around during loading. Check your scores in Google PageSpeed Insights or the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Cost Per Click is the rate that is paid to a Pay Per Click Advertiser.

CPM

A CPM or cost per thousand impressions is a statistical metric used to quantify the average cost or value of a PPC advertisement.

Crawler

Crawler is a type of program that “crawls” or moves through the Internet or a specific web site by way of the link structure to gather data.

Deep Linking

Deep linking is making a hyperlink that refers to a page or image within a web site. This page is otherwise “deep” within the page itself and is not the main or home page of the site. Utilizing deep linking by linking to specific pages within your site with anchor text will improve the ranking of these pages.

Dofollow Link

Dofollow links are standard HTML links that do not have the rel=”nofollow” attribute. They are very valuable from an SEO perspective.

Domain

A domain is the unique main web address for your web site. You normally register for a domain for a monetary value and renew the domain periodically to keep it from being picked up by someone else. Search engine rankings do favor web sites with longer registrations as it shows stability in the site.

Domain Authority

A proprietary score developed by Moz (not a Google metric) that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages. Scored on a logarithmic 1-100 scale, Domain Authority replaced MozRank as Moz’s headline backlink-strength indicator. Similar third-party metrics include Ahrefs’ Domain Rating and Semrush’s Authority Score. None of these are confirmed ranking factors at Google, but they correlate usefully with ranking potential.

Doorway

A doorway or gateway is a web page that is created to attract traffic from a search engine. A doorway page is used to redirect users to a different site or page and is also known as implement cloaking.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is content that is similar or identical in substance to content on another site or page. The more duplicate content a page has is noticed by search engines but not in a positive manner. It does reduce the trust from the search engine. Sites like Google do not like sites that utilize the same piece of content repeatedly.

E Commerce Site

These types of web sites are those devoted solely to retail sales.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — Google’s framework for evaluating content quality, documented in the publicly released Search Quality Rater Guidelines. The first “E” (Experience) was added in December 2022 to emphasize first-hand experience with the topic. E-E-A-T isn’t a direct ranking signal but reflects the signals Google’s algorithms use to evaluate whether content genuinely helps users. Especially important for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics like health, finance, and legal content.

Featured Snippet

A box at the top of some Google search results that answers a query directly, pulled from a high-ranking page. Featured snippets take several formats: paragraphs, bulleted or numbered lists, tables, and videos. Earning a featured snippet typically requires ranking in the top 10 organic results and structuring content so Google can extract a clean, self-contained answer. With AI Overviews now occupying similar SERP real estate, featured-snippet strategy has become part of broader answer-optimization work.

Feed

Feed refers to content that is delivered to the user via special programs or sites, such as news aggregators.

Frames

Frames involve a type of web page design where two or more documents show up on the same screen within their own frame. Frames can be bad for SEO because bots sometimes fail to correctly navigate them. Also, it reduces the type of text and makes it difficult to read the content for most users.

Gadget or Gizmo

Gadgets or gizmos are small applications used on sites for specific functions, such as an IP address display or a hit counter.

Gateway Page

A gateway page is the same thing as a doorway page, which is a page that is designed solely to attract traffic from a search engine and redirect it to another site or page.

Google Ads

Google Ads is Google’s pay-per-click advertising program (renamed from “AdWords” in 2018). Advertisers bid on keywords and pay when users click their ads, which appear above, beside, or within organic search results. Google Ads also powers display, shopping, video (YouTube), and app campaigns. Paid ads sit separate from organic search results and don’t directly affect organic SEO rankings.

Google Bomb

An old SEO manipulation tactic where many sites would link to a single page using the same anchor text to make it rank for that phrase (famous early-2000s examples include “miserable failure” linking to a political page). Google has countered Google Bombs algorithmically since 2007, and the technique is effectively dead in 2026.

Google Bowling

A black-hat SEO technique where someone builds spammy backlinks pointing at a competitor’s site in an attempt to trigger a Google penalty against them. Modern Google is much better at distinguishing negative SEO from organic link building; Google Bowling rarely succeeds against well-established sites. For defenders, Google Search Console’s Disavow tool exists but is rarely needed.

Googlebot

Googlebot is Google’s version of the spider program.

Headings

Headings are text on your web site that is placed inside of a heading tag, H1 or H2. The text is larger and bolder than other text on the page and meant to stand out.

Helpful Content System

A Google ranking system launched in August 2022 that targets sites publishing content primarily for search engines rather than people. The Helpful Content system rewards sites whose content demonstrates genuine expertise and value, and demotes sites with high proportions of low-quality or AI-spam content. It was folded into Google’s core ranking systems in March 2024. Functionally, it’s the successor to the Panda update’s content-quality mission.

Hit

A hit occurs when a server sends an object, graphics, files or documents. It used to be the sole measurement of web traffic, but it is no longer as relevant.

Hub

A hub is an expert or trusted page that provides high quality content included in other related pages.

Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

HTML is the code part of your web site that search engines read. You should keep the HTML clean so that search engines can easily read your site. Put as much of your layout code in your CSS instead of your HTML to accomplish this objective.

Impression

An impression is also known as a page view or an event where a user visits a web page one time.

In-bound Link

These types of links are the source of trust and pagerank. An inbound link to your site from another trusted site will boost your SEO and ranking.

Index

As a noun, an index is a database of web sites and their content used by search engines. As a verb, to index means to add a web page to a search engine index.

Indexed Pages

Indexed pages are those pages on a site which have been indexed and are stored by search engines.

Inlink

An inlink is the same thing as an incoming or inbound link, meaning the links come from related pages that are sources of trust and boost your page’s ranking.

Internal Link

An internal link is a link from one page to another within the same web site.

JavaScript

JavaScript is scripting language that allows web administrators to apply special effects or changes to their site’s content as users browse in it. JavaScript is not always readable by search engines which can cause some difficulty when content is in JavaScript.

Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is the excessive reuse of the same keyword repeatedly on many pages within the same site. It can cloud search engines from determining which page is most relevant for the keyword.

Keyword Density

The percentage of a page’s total words that match a target keyword. Keyword density was a ranking factor in the earliest days of SEO, but modern Google algorithms (especially after BERT in 2019 and the Helpful Content system in 2022) explicitly discount keyword-stuffing. Keyword placement in prominent locations (title, H1, first paragraph) still matters; density as a metric does not.

Keyword Research

This type of research involves determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting a certain audience.

Keyword Spam/Keyword Stuffing

This is the practice of using the same keyword excessively within a site.

Keywords/Key Phrase

This refers to the single word or whole phrase a user will enter a search engine to find information on a specific topic.

Landing Page

A landing page is the page a user will “land” on when they click on a link in their search results.

Link

A link is an element on a web page that, when clicked on, directs the browser to another page or another part of the current page.

Link Bait

This practice involves attracting links through use of highly viral content. This content can be audio, video, images, graphics or written content.

Link Building

Link building is the practice of getting more inbound links to your web site for improved search rankings.

Link Exchange

A link exchange is reciprocal linking, many times facilitated through sites that are devoted to directory pages. Unlike directories, link exchanges allow links to site that are of no to little value and do not monitor for quality assurance.

Link Farm

Link farms are groups of web sites which all link together for the sole purpose of improving rankings. These entities are considered “black hat” SEO techniques and are highly frowned upon for ways of boosting your SEO rank.

Link Juice

Link juice is another word for trust, authority or page rank.

Link Love

Who does not need a little love every now and then? Link love refers to an outgoing link that passes trust to your site through another.

Link Partner

Two sites that are linked to each other solely for page ranking are known as link partners. They are synonymous with link exchanges or reciprocal linking.

Link Popularity

This term refers to a measure of the value of a web site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it.

Link Sculpting

Link sculpting is done by using the “nofollow” attribute of a link to make some links on your site unimportant from an SEO aspect. You can then sculpt the page ranks of certain pages within your site, making some stand out more amongst the others when it comes to SEO.

Link Spam

Link spam is also known as comment spam, and these comments are the ones you see where the poster includes unwanted links or unrelated text.

Link Text

Also, known as anchor text, this text is what is visible to users. Search engines utilize anchor text to determine the relevancy of the referring site and link to what is in the content on the landing page.

Long Tail

These types of searches include a longer, more specific set of search queries and are more narrow in nature. When someone is entering in a long tail search they are looking for highly specific information and are often considered more qualified. A great majority of searches are long tail in form.

Made for Advertisements (MFA)

These types of sites are designed as a venue for advertisements.

Mashup

A mashup is a web page that includes mostly single purpose software or other small programs, including links to such programs. They are popular with users and lead to good link bait.

Meta Description

This term refers to a brief description of no more than 160 characters about the contents of a web page and why a user would want to visit it. Meta description content is normally displayed on search engine results below the actual page title as a sample of the content on the page.

Meta Keywords

An HTML meta tag (<meta name="keywords">) historically used to tell search engines what keywords a page targeted. Google publicly announced in 2009 that it ignores the meta keywords tag, and no major search engine uses it as a ranking signal in 2026. The tag is effectively deprecated — don’t waste time filling it out.

META Tags

Meta tags include both the meta description and meta keywords. They are placed in the HEAD section of the HTML structure of your page and include information meant for search engines and not users.

Metadata

This data tells search engines what your web site is about for future searches.

Metric

A metric is a standard of measurement used by an analytic program.

Mirror Site

These sites are identical sites that are located at different addresses.

Mobile-First Indexing

Google’s practice of primarily using the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking. Google began the transition in 2016 and completed it for the entire web by September 2020. In 2026, there is no “desktop version” in Google’s index — everything is evaluated via the mobile rendering. Modern sites use responsive design (one HTML layout that adapts to device) rather than maintaining separate desktop and mobile URLs.

Monetize

To monetize from a site means to extract income from that site. One prime example of this practice is AdSense.

MUM

Multitask Unified Model. A natural-language model announced by Google in May 2021. MUM is multimodal (understands text and images together), multilingual (trained on 75+ languages), and reportedly 1,000 times more powerful than BERT. It powers many of Google’s complex-query and cross-modal search features. MUM extended the shift away from keyword-exact-match toward true semantic understanding of queries.

Natural Links

These are all links that your page has acquired naturally without you having to build them yourself.

Natural Search Results

These search results are the ones that are produced when conduct a keyword search and do not have any sponsorship or are not paid in any way.

Nofollow

Nofollow is a command found in the HEAD section of a page or within the individual link code that instructs bots to not follow any either links on the page or specific link.

Noindex

This command is found in the HEAD section of a web page or within the individual link code that instructs bots to not index the page or the specific link.

Nonreciprocal Link

When one site links to another but the second site does not link back to the first, the link is considered nonreciprocal. Less value is given to non-reciprocal links in terms of SEO value.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO practices are things you do outside of your page to improve your rankings, such as link building.

On-Page SEO

On-page practices are everything you do on your page to improve your rankings, including tuning the HTML structure, improving title tag and descriptions, checking keyword usage and improving internal linking structure.

Organic Link

These links are published only because the webmaster deems to add value for users.

Organic Search and Organic Search Results

An organic search occurs when you visit a search site like Google, enter in keywords and hit search. The results that appear from this search are organic search results.

Outlink

An outlink is another word for outgoing link.

Page Rank

PageRank is the original Google algorithm that ranked pages by the quantity and quality of links pointing to them. Named after Google co-founder Larry Page, PageRank remains part of Google’s internal ranking systems but is no longer a single dominant factor. Google retired the public PageRank score (the “Toolbar PageRank” metric visible in browser toolbars) in March 2016. Modern ranking uses hundreds of signals, with link-based authority being just one class among many.

Page Title

This is the name you give your web page and should generally contain keywords related to your business.

Panda

A Google algorithm update first released in February 2011 targeting low-quality, thin, or duplicate content. Panda was folded into Google’s core algorithm in 2016, and its content-quality mission has since been largely absorbed by the Helpful Content system (launched 2022) and Google’s 2026 core updates. The term “Panda” is now mostly historical.

Pay for Inclusion (PFI)

This is the practice of charging a fee to include a web site in a directory or search engine.

Pay Per Action (PPA)

This function is like Pay Per Click (PPC) with the exception that publishers are paid only when the “click” results in an actual conversion.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click is a contextual advertisement structure where advertisers pay ad agencies whenever a user clicks on their promoted ad. One example of PPC is Google Adwords.

Portal

A portal is a web service that offers features to entice a user into making that portal as their homepage. Think of Yahoo! and MSN as good examples of portals.

Proprietary Method

These are sales terms used by SEO service providers to say they can do something special to achieve top rankings.

Ranking Factor

A ranking factor describes one element of how a search engine ranks a page. This could be the contents of the title tag, the meta tag or number of inbound links, among other factors.

Reciprocal Link

Known as a link exchange or link partner, a reciprocal link is when two sites link to each other. They are not viewed upon highly by search engines because of the incestuous nature of connection.

Redirect

When a site is moved to a new domain, the old site domain will need to redirect the user to the new domain. This method is called a redirect.

Referrer String

A referrer string is when a piece of information is sent by a user’s browser as they go from page to page on the web. This information includes what sites the user was on before finding their site, and it helps developers understand just how users come to their site.

Robots.txt

This is a file in the root directory of a web site, and it is used to restrict content and notify search engines which areas of your site are restricted for them. It allows you to exclude certain pages from spiders.

ROI

ROI stands for “Return on Investment,” which is a use of analytics software to determine return on investment, weighing the cost and benefits of different SEO schemes.

RSS Feed

RSS stands for “really simple syndication,” which is a subscription to get updates on new content as it is posted to a site. If you have a blog, many readers will subscribe to your site via an RSS feed so that they will be alerted when you have posted new content.

Sandbox

An informal term for Google’s tendency to limit rankings for very new sites for a period of weeks or months after launch. Google has publicly denied the existence of a formal “sandbox,” but most SEOs observe the effect. The practical takeaway: expect 3-6 months before a new site ranks meaningfully for competitive queries.

Schema Markup

Structured data added to a page’s HTML that describes the content in a machine-readable way: is it an article, product, recipe, event, FAQ, or something else? Schema (from schema.org, the vocabulary jointly maintained by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex) is typically added as JSON-LD. Pages with valid schema are eligible for rich results in search (stars, prices, event dates, FAQ expansions) and for citation in AI Overviews. Validate with Google’s Rich Results Test.

Scrape

Scraping is copying content from a site, which is often done by automated bots.

Search Engine (SE)

A search engine is a program that searches a document or group of documents for matches associated with a user’s keyword phrase, giving a list of matches based on these searches.

Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP)

After you type in a search query into a search engine, the results you receive are listed on an SERP or search engine ranking page.

Search Engine Spam

Pages that are created to deceive search engines to give inappropriate or non-relevant content because of a keyword search.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing — an umbrella term for both paid search advertising (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads) and organic search optimization (SEO). In current industry usage, “SEM” often refers specifically to paid search, while SEO covers the organic side. Some agencies use SEM more narrowly, so confirm scope when contracting.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization — the practice of shaping a website so search engines (and increasingly AI search systems) understand it, crawl it efficiently, and rank it for queries it’s relevant to. Modern SEO covers three pillars: on-page (content and HTML), technical (site structure, speed, mobile-friendliness), and off-page (backlinks and brand signals). As of 2026, AI search optimization has become a fourth layer atop these fundamentals.

Sitemap

A sitemap is a special document created by a webmaster that details a map of all pages on a site. This sitemap makes it easier for users to navigate through the site.

Social Bookmark

This type of bookmark is a form of social media where users’ bookmarks are collected for public access.

Social Media

Sites or media created to share information among individuals, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are examples of social media. Search results now show up in search results so it is important to keep your site updated with links throughout social media.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

SMM involves promoting a brand or website through use of social media.

Sock Puppet

A sock puppet is an online identity that is intended to hide a person’s real identity or establish multiple user profiles.

Spam Ad Page

A spam ad page is a “made for advertisement” page that uses machine-generated text for content and offers zero value to users.

Spamdexing

Spamdexing is the practice of modifying web pages to falsely increase the chance of being ranked higher in search results.

Spammer

A spammer is a person use uses spam schemes.

Spider

A spider is more than a scary bug. It also is a computer program whose purpose is to scan the Internet, collecting information about web sites.

Spider Trap

Spider traps are endless loops of useless links created for the sole purpose of trapping a spider program.

Splash Page

Splash pages are graphics pages created to be flashy to users but dead ends to search engine spiders.

Splog

Splogs are spam blogs containing little to no value to human users and involve generated or made-up content.

Static Page

A page that has no dynamic content or variables are known as static pages. These types of pages are good for SEO due to their friendliness to spiders.

Stickiness

Web developers seek to reduce the bounce rate on their site, and one way to do this is to improve the site’s “stickiness,” meaning keeping users on the site longer.

Text Link

A text link is a plain HTML link that does not include graphic or special code.

The Fold

Like a newspaper, the “fold” refers to the point on your site where the page is cut off by the bottom of a monitor or browser window. The fold is known as the part where users do not continue unless they find the content that would be read by scrolling through the site of value. Search engines give value to content above the fold as this information is the first thing a user sees when visiting your site.

Time on Page

How long a user stays on one page before clicking to another is known as the time on page. This measurement indicates the quality or relevancy of that page’s content.

Title

The title is what appears in search engine results and is the first thing a user sees when entering a search query. It is what is included in a <title> HTML tag.

Title Tag

The title tag is only visible in one specific place to the user: your browser’s title bar.

Topic Cluster

A content-organization model where a central “pillar” page covers a broad topic comprehensively, and 8-15 “cluster” pages each go deep on a specific subtopic, linked back to the pillar. Topic clusters replaced one-page-per-keyword strategies because they signal topical authority to Google’s modern ranking systems and avoid keyword cannibalization. The model was popularized by HubSpot around 2017 and is now the default approach for serious content SEO.