15 SEO terms every beginner should know

SEO reports are full of jargon. Here are the terms you will see most.

  • SERP: the search engine results page.
  • Keyword: the words people type into a search box.
  • Search volume: how often a keyword is searched per month.
  • Keyword difficulty: how hard it is to reach the first page.
  • Organic traffic: visitors from unpaid search results.
  • Backlink: a link from another website to yours.
  • Referring domain: a website that links to you (one domain can send many backlinks).
  • Anchor text: the clickable words of a link.
  • Nofollow: a link attribute that asks search engines not to pass trust.
  • Indexing: the search engine storing your page so it can appear.
  • Canonical tag: tells search engines which address is the main version of a page.
  • Meta description: the summary that often appears under your title in results.
  • Core Web Vitals: Google's loading, interactivity and visual stability measures.
  • Crawl budget: how many of your pages a search engine is willing to crawl.
  • Domain authority: a score estimating how strong a site's link profile is.

Bookmark this list and check the SEO tools page to see each idea in action.

A few more you will meet

  • Long-tail keyword: a longer, more specific search with less competition.
  • Search intent: the reason behind a search, such as to learn, compare or buy.
  • 301 redirect: a permanent move from one address to another.
  • Structured data: code that describes your content (products, articles, businesses) to search engines.
  • Thin content: pages with too little useful text to rank.
  • Orphan page: a page no other page on your site links to.

How these fit together

A typical SEO task uses several of these at once. To improve a product page, you might check its title and meta description, add structured data, fix a redirect chain pointing to it, add internal links from related guides, and track its main keyword's position. Knowing the terms makes reports and conversations with developers much easier.

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