SEO Glossary
Definitions of SEO terms, concepts, and technical jargon explained in plain English.
What Is a Broken Link? Finding and Fixing Dead Ends
A broken link points to a page that no longer exists — and every site accumulates them like dust. Here's why links rot, what dead ends really cost you, and a triage system for fixing them efficiently.
What Is NAP Consistency? A Sanity Check for Local SEO
Somewhere, an agency is charging a small business $400 a month to change "Street" to "St." across 300 directories. NAP consistency is real and worth getting right — it's just nowhere near that dramatic.
What Is Technical SEO? The Layer Your Rankings Sit On
Technical SEO is everything that determines whether search engines can fetch, render, and index your pages — before content quality even enters the conversation. Great articles on a broken foundation rank like bad articles.
What Is a Backlink? How Other Sites Vote for Yours
A backlink is a link from someone else's website to yours — and Google has treated these as votes of confidence since day one. Here's why a handful of links outweigh thousands, and how to earn the ones that count.
What Is Schema Markup? Types, Testing, and Rich Results
Schema markup is machine-readable labeling — usually a JSON-LD block — that tells search engines exactly what your page describes: a product, a recipe, an event, an organization. It doesn't boost rankings directly, but it makes your pages eligible for enhanced listings and feeds Google's entity understanding.
What Is Sitelinks? How Google Builds Those Extra Links
Those indented links under the first Google result aren't paid placements or something you configure. Here's how Google generates sitelinks from your site's architecture, and what you can actually do to influence them.
What Is On-Page SEO? The Stuff You Actually Control
People fine-tune keyword placement on pages whose canonical tags point at a dead staging server. On-page SEO is the part of ranking you fully control — which makes it the part worth doing in the right order.
What Is a Google Algorithm Update? A Survival Guide
Rankings that were stable for years can move 30 positions in a week when Google reshuffles its systems. Here's what an algorithm update actually is, how to diagnose whether one hit you, and what recovery genuinely looks like.
What Is YMYL? Why Google Judges Some Pages Harder
YMYL — Your Money or Your Life — is Google's label for topics where bad information causes real harm: health, finance, safety, legal decisions. Pages in these categories face measurably stricter quality evaluation, and generic SEO advice underestimates it.
What Is a Long-Tail Keyword? Small Searches, Big Wins
Everyone wants to rank for the big two-word keyword. Meanwhile, the specific five-word searches nobody fights over quietly convert at triple the rate. That's the long tail, and it's most sites' best opening.
What Is Cloaking? The SEO Trick Google Hates Most
Cloaking means showing search engine crawlers different content than human visitors see — deception at the protocol level, and one of the fastest routes to a manual penalty. Here's how it works, and how sites do it by accident.
What Is an External Link? Outbound Links Done Right
An external link points from your site to a page on a different domain. The interesting parts are in the markup: the rel attributes on that anchor tell crawlers exactly how much endorsement you're extending.
What Is a Rich Snippet? Stars, Prices, and Eligibility
A rich snippet is a search listing with extras — review stars, prices, recipe photos — generated from structured data on your page. Some types are thriving, some were quietly killed off, and markup alone guarantees nothing. Here's the honest state of play.
What Is a Featured Snippet? Winning Position Zero
A featured snippet is the answer box Google extracts from a ranking page and promotes above the ordinary results. It's won by formatting, not by rank alone - and it can be measured, targeted, and even declined.
What Is Link Building? An Auditor's Honest Take
Half the link building industry sells activity, not results. Here's what link building actually is, which tactics still earn rankings, and which ones quietly poison a backlink profile.
What Is a Topic Cluster? Site Architecture for Rankings
A topic cluster is a deliberate content structure: one broad pillar page linked bidirectionally to a set of specific supporting articles. It replaces the pile-of-disconnected-posts blog model with an architecture search engines can actually read.
What Is PageRank, and Does It Still Matter?
The little green toolbar died a decade ago, but the idea it displayed — PageRank — still runs inside Google's ranking systems in evolved form. Understanding how it flows through links changes how you build site architecture.
What Is a Meta Description? Why It Still Earns Clicks
Let's settle it upfront: meta descriptions don't affect rankings and haven't for many years. They affect whether humans click your result — which is a different, entirely worthwhile reason to write good ones.
What Is Alt Text? Writing Image Descriptions That Work
Alt text is the written stand-in for an image — read aloud by screen readers, shown when images fail, and used by Google to understand pictures. Here's how to write it well, with before-and-after examples.
What Is Pagination in SEO? Current Best Practice
Google admitted in 2019 that it had quietly ignored rel=prev/next for years — and a lot of pagination advice never caught up. Here's how Google treats paginated series today and how to keep page 47 of your catalog from becoming invisible.