Glossary
SEO & e-commerce terms, explained in plain English.
Definitions of the terms I use in SEO, e-commerce and marketing automation. Every entry opens with a short definition and continues with the longer explanation, examples and what it means for your website.
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Canonical TagAn HTML link element (rel="canonical") that tells search engines which URL is the preferred version when several pages have the same or...Read more Core Web VitalsGoogle's three page-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).Read more CrawlabilityHow easily search engine bots can access and move through a website's pages by following links. Pages that are blocked, broken or...Read more Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)A Core Web Vitals metric that measures how much visible page content moves unexpectedly while the page loads and during use. Good...Read more
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GA4Google Analytics 4, Google's current analytics platform. It tracks users and events across web and apps and replaced Universal Analytics in 2023.Read more Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)Optimising content so it gets cited and summarised by AI-driven search experiences such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, rather than...Read more
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IndexabilityWhether a crawled page is allowed and able to be stored in a search engine's index. A page must be indexable before...Read more Interaction to Next Paint (INP)A Core Web Vitals metric that measures how quickly a page visibly responds to user interactions such as clicks, taps and key...Read more Internal LinkingLinks between pages on the same website. They help visitors navigate, pass authority between pages and show search engines how the site...Read more International SEOSEO for websites that target multiple countries or languages: choosing a URL structure, implementing hreflang, localising content and building authority per market.Read more
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Landing PageA standalone page built for one goal, such as a sign-up or purchase, that visitors 'land' on from an ad, email or...Read more Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)A Core Web Vitals metric that measures how long it takes for the largest visible element in the viewport, usually a hero...Read more llms.txtA proposed plain-text file at the root of a website that gives large language models a curated overview of the site's most...Read more Local SEOOptimising a business to appear in location-based searches such as 'plumber near me', mainly through the Google Business Profile, reviews, local citations...Read more Looker StudioGoogle's free dashboarding tool (formerly Data Studio) that connects to GA4, Search Console, BigQuery and other sources to build shareable, interactive reports.Read more
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Off-Page SEOEverything done outside your own website to improve its authority and rankings, mainly earning backlinks from other sites, plus brand mentions and...Read more On-Page SEOOptimising the elements on a page itself, such as content, headings, title tags, meta descriptions, internal links and images, so search engines...Read more Organic TrafficVisitors who reach a website by clicking an unpaid result in a search engine, as opposed to paid ads, social media or...Read more
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Search Engine Marketing (SEM)Marketing through search engines, in practice mostly paid ads (Google Ads) that appear above or beside the organic results. Often contrasted with...Read more SEOSearch engine optimisation: the practice of improving a website so it ranks higher in the organic (unpaid) results of search engines like...Read more SERPSearch Engine Results Page: the page a search engine shows after a query, including organic results, ads, and features like featured snippets,...Read more Structured DataCode (usually JSON-LD using Schema.org vocabulary) added to a page so search engines understand what it is about, for example a product,...Read more
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