Search Engines & SEO
Publishing a page is not the same as being findable, and the gap between the two has its own vocabulary. This category separates crawling from indexing, which is where most confusion starts, then works through the controls: the title tag, heading structure, the robots meta tag, noindex and nofollow, canonical handling of duplicate content, schema markup and the rich results it can earn. It pays particular attention to the problem this audience actually hits — a page that renders in the browser rather than in the HTML arrives at a crawler as an empty div, and social and chat preview bots do not run JavaScript at all, which is why a shared link comes back with a blank card. The fixes, in order of effort, are covered on the JavaScript SEO and prerendering pages.
33 terms in this category
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable wording of a link. Search engines read it as a short description of the page at the other end, written by whoever placed the link.
Backlink
A backlink is a link on someone else's site that points at yours. Search engines read it both as a route to your page and as a small vote of confidence in it.
Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb navigation is the small trail near the top of a page showing where it sits in the site, such as Home, then Guides, then Exporting CSV. Each step before the last is a link.
Content Cluster
A content cluster is a group of pages on one subject — a broad pillar page and a set of narrower pages beneath it, linked to each other so the whole group reads as a single body of work.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to fetch from one site in a given period. For most sites it is not a real constraint.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is substantially the same text reachable at more than one URL, on a single site or across sites. It is a consolidation problem, not a penalty.
Featured Snippet
A featured snippet is the boxed answer shown above the first ordinary result, lifted word for word from a page the search engine has already indexed.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners. It reports which queries brought people to your pages, which pages Google has indexed, and what stopped it indexing the rest.
Heading Structure
Heading structure is the order and nesting of the H1 to H6 elements on a page. Read on their own, they should give a usable outline of what the page covers.
hreflang
hreflang is an annotation telling search engines that a page has equivalent versions in other languages or for other countries, and which version suits which audience.
Image SEO
Image SEO is the set of choices that make pictures on a page findable and cheap to load: descriptive file names, useful alt text, the right format and size, and markup that explains what the image shows.
Indexability
Indexability is whether a page is technically allowed into a search engine's index. It is eligibility, not a promise — an indexable page can still be left out.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page of a site to another page on the same site. It is how both readers and crawlers find their way past the home page.
JavaScript SEO
JavaScript SEO is the work of making a page whose content is built by script still crawlable, renderable and indexable — and making sure the many crawlers that never run JavaScript still get something useful.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the work of finding out which words and phrases people actually type into a search engine, and roughly how often, before deciding what a page should say.
Long-Tail Keyword
A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase — usually three or more words — that individually draws few searches a month but faces far less competition than the short phrase inside it.
Mobile-First Indexing
Mobile-first indexing means Google crawls and indexes a site using a smartphone crawler, so the mobile version of a page is the version that gets stored and ranked.
nofollow
nofollow is a value in a link's rel attribute saying the publisher does not vouch for the destination. Since March 2020 Google treats it as a hint rather than an instruction.
noindex
noindex is a directive telling a search engine not to keep a page in its index. It only works if the crawler is allowed to fetch the page and read it.
Orphan Page
An orphan page is a page on your own site that nothing links to. It exists at its address, but no other page points at it, so crawlers and visitors have no route in.
Page Speed
Page speed is how quickly a page becomes useful to the person who opened it — not one number, but a set of measurements covering when content appears and when the page responds to input.
Prerendering
Prerendering is running a page's JavaScript once, ahead of time, and saving the result as a static HTML file — so that what a crawler downloads is the finished page rather than an empty container.
Responsive Design
Responsive design is building one page that adapts to whatever screen opens it, using flexible layout and CSS media queries, instead of maintaining separate mobile and desktop versions.
Rich Result
A rich result is a search listing displayed with extra features beyond the plain title, URL and description — star ratings, images, prices, breadcrumbs or a recipe card.
Robots Meta Tag
The robots meta tag is a line in the head of an HTML page that tells search engines how to treat that one page. It controls indexing and display, not crawling.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured data added to a page using the schema.org vocabulary, stating in machine-readable form what the page is about — a product, an event, a person, a recipe.
Search Engine Indexing
Indexing is the step where a search engine stores a fetched page so it can be returned for queries. It happens after crawling, and it does not follow automatically from it.
Search Intent
Search intent is what a person is actually trying to do when they type a query — learn something, reach a particular site, compare options or act — as opposed to what the words literally say.
SERP
A SERP is a search engine results page — everything a search engine returns for a query, including adverts, answer boxes and carousels. The list of ordinary blue links is now the smallest part of it.
Soft 404
A soft 404 is a URL that returns a success status while the page itself says the content is missing. The words say not found; the HTTP response says everything is fine.
Title Tag
The title tag is the HTML element that gives a page its name. Search engines usually show it as the clickable headline in a result, and the browser prints it on the tab.
URL Structure
URL structure is how the address of a page is put together — the words in the path, the separators between them, and how many levels deep the page sits.
Viewport Meta Tag
The viewport meta tag is one line in the head of an HTML document that tells a mobile browser to lay the page out at the device's own width instead of pretending to be a desktop screen.