The vocabulary you will meet in any SEO tool or audit — how search works, how links and structure fit together, and the signals that earn rankings.
Each term below is the short version. For the how-to behind them, start with SEO fundamentals, then dig into the keyword research process and tighten each page with on-page SEO.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Keyword | A search query you want to rank for. |
| Search intent | What the searcher actually wants — to learn, compare, or buy. |
| SERP | Search Engine Results Page. |
| Featured snippet | An answer box pulled to the top of results. |
| Long-tail keyword | A longer, more specific query with lower volume but higher intent. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Backlink | A link from another site to yours; a trust signal. |
| Anchor text | The clickable text of a link. |
| Internal link | A link between pages on your own site. |
| Canonical URL | The master version of a page among duplicates. |
| Nofollow / dofollow | A link attribute telling search engines whether to pass authority through the link. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Crawling | How search bots discover and read the pages on your site. |
| Indexing | Storing a crawled page so it can appear in results. |
| XML sitemap | A file listing your URLs to help search engines find them. |
| Robots.txt | A file that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may access. |
| Structured data | Schema markup that describes a page so engines can show rich results. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Domain authority | A third-party score estimating how strongly a domain can rank. |
| E-E-A-T | Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — quality signals Google weighs. |
| Topical authority | The depth of coverage that makes a site look like it owns a subject. |
| Link equity | The ranking value a link passes from one page to another. |
| Ranking | The position your page holds for a query on the results page. |
Where to go next: build depth on a subject with topical authority and content clusters, route that authority with internal linking, earn trust through link building basics, and prove it worked in measuring SEO performance.
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