SEO Series 3. SEO Glossary 2025

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Search engine optimisation (SEO) often feels like learning a new language. Acronyms everywhere (SERPs, CTR, E-E-A-T…), technical jargon tossed around in strategy meetings, and Google rolling out updates faster than marketers can tweet about them.

At OTINGA, we believe clarity is power. That’s why we’ve built this SEO Glossary 2025 – called it as your dictionary, playbook, or even a cheat sheet – we gather it all in one place. Before we go further into this SEO series so you will get an idea of what the meaning for each of SEO term or acronym used.

Some fact:

  • 61% of marketers say SEO jargon confuses clients (HubSpot, 2024).
  • “SEO Glossary” queries grew +45% YoY (SEMrush, 2025).
  • 70% of junior marketers report they Google definitions daily during tasks (Moz Blog, 2025).

Also imagine you are in the situation where you’re in a client pitch and someone asks, “What’s the difference between crawl budget and crawl depth?” Instead of fumbling, you’ll nail the explanation with confidence. That’s our promise.

Below is a curated glossary of 100+ SEO terms that you need to master in 2025. We’ve blended definitions from Moz SEO Glossary, Ahrefs SEO Glossary, WordPress.com Blog, Clarke (2025), and real-world usage included the SEO event like WomeninSEO and BrightonSEO talks.

Number

  • 2xx status codes: A status codes that indicate the request for a page has succeeded. (e.g., 200 OK).
  • 4xx status codes:A status codes that indicate the request for a page resulted in error. (e.g., 404 Not Found).
  • 5xx status codes:A status codes that indicate the server’s errors and unable to deliver the request. (e.g., 503 Service Unavailable).
  • 10 blue links: Traditional SERP layout with ten organic results.
  • 10x content: a term invented by Rand Fishkin to indicate that the content that is 10x better than anything else on the web for that same topic,
  • 301 Redirect: It permanently redirect users to the new URL and tells search engines that the page has moved permanently; passes link equity.
  • 302 Redirect: it indicates that the web page is temporary redirect; original URL expected to return.
  • 304 Not Modified: it uses the cached version, a redirection HTTP response codes from a server indicating that the client’s resource unchanged, thus there is no need to retransmit it.
  • 404 Error: a status code signifies that the requested page or resource is not found by the server.
  • 410 Gone: a status code indicates that the requested resource removed permanently.

A – C

  • Advanced search operators: Special commands (e.g., site: intitle:) to refine searches.
  • Algorithm: The set of rules a search engine uses to rank results; updated frequently; multiple times a year).
  • Ambiguous intent:  a search phrase where the user’s goal is unclear and requires further specification (e.g., “apple”).
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): A lightweight HTML framework for fast mobile pages (now niche/legacy).
  • Amplification: Spreading the word about your brand; your content via social, paid, PR, creators.
  • Application programming interface (API): Interface to request features/data from another service.
  • Alt text: Short image descriptions in HTML for accessibility and SEO.
  • Anchor text: The clickable words or text in a hyperlink, which you link to pages, use by Google to understand the content of the linked page. It uses natural, descriptive wording. In 2025, natural, entity-driven anchors outperform keyword-stuffed ones.
  • Ad impression: a metric used in digital advertising to count of how often an ad was displayed regardless of whether it was clicked or not.
  • ADA website compliance: refers to the conformance with accessibility requirements (US). set by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
  • Article Spinning: or content spinning, is where you are rewriting one article to create many “new” pieces of content. It can be done manually or using an automated software but might led to low-quality content if not careful.
  • Article syndication: Republishing the same article on third-party sites
  • Auto generated / computer-generated content: Content produced by code or models; (programmatically); must meet helpfulness and quality standards.
  • Asynchronous (Async): Lets the browser continue rendering while a task completes like assembling your web page.
  • Backlink: or called inbound links is a link from another website that point to yours, usually analyse by Search engines to check how important a page is.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools: Microsoft’s free suite for monitoring Bing visibility and troubleshoot your website’s appearance in Bing’s search results.
  • Bots / crawlers / spiders – Automated agents or a web crawler that discover and fetch pages. Google call it Googlebot while Microsoft, Bingbot
  • Black hat SEO: a SEO practices or tactics that focuses on finding and exploiting algorithmic loopholes, which violate search engine guidelines.
  • Bounce Rate: % of visitors leaving after one page without second interaction (GA4 reframes it as Engagement). E.g. if someone visited your home page and then left before viewing any other pages, that would be a bounced session.
  • Browser: A software that allows you to access information on the web like Chrome or Firefox.
  • Brand Authority: is a score from 1-100, to estimate brand strength developed by Moz. With Brand Authority, Moz makes the elusive but powerful idea of brand into concrete and actionable data.
  • Branded content: is ancy created by brands promoting their products, services, or values.
  • Branded keywords: are the words and phrases that are associated with your brand, products, or services.
  • Breadcrumb navigation: are internal or hierarchical links that show users a page’s location around your site.
  • Bridge/gateway Page: Pages built only to send users elsewhere usually used by affiliate to send traffic to an affiliate link.
  • Broken Link: is a link on a web page that link to a dead resource; fix or remove.
  • Bundling:  merge multiple sources into a single resource.
  • Caching: A saved version of your website
  • Cached page: Stored copy of a page kept by a search engine.
  • Canonical Tag (rel=“canonical”): A snippet of HTML code that telling search engines which defines the main version of duplicate/near duplicate pages to avoid duplicate content penalties.
  • Canonical URL: The version Google chooses to represent a set of duplicates aka the main version of duplicates.
  • Cascading Style Sheet (CSS): the code that control look and layout on website (ex: fonts and colors).
  • Citations (local) or “business listing,”: a citation is a web-based reference to a local NAP (name, address, phone) across the web
  • Client-side & server-side rendering: Client-side is where the file is executed in the browser or server. Server-side is where the files are executed at the server and the server sends them to the browser in their fully rendered state.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): The ratio of clicks divided by impressions on your URLs.
  • Cloaking: Displaying distinct content to search engines than what you show to human visitors.
  • Commercial investigation queries:  A searcher queries to compare options they have before decide what products to buy that best suits with them.
  • Crawl/ Crawling: The process of discovering URLs by search engines
  • Crawler: an internet program designed to discover and process pages for indexing and showing them the best results in the SERPs.
  • Crawl Budget: The average number of pages a crawler chooses to crawl on your site during a timeframe.
  • Crawl depth: How many clicks from the homepage a page is.
  • Crawler directives: Instructions (e.g., robots.txt, meta robots) for what bots may crawl/index on your site.
  • Crawlability: How easily bots can access content on your pages.
  • Critical rendering path: The steps a browser follows to convert or render the HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a viewable web page.
  • Channel: The different vehicles by which you can get attention and acquire traffic, such as organic search and social media.
  • Content Delivery Network (CDN): Distributed servers globally that speed up delivery.
  • Country code top level domain (ccTLD): refers to domains associated with countries. E.g, .ru is the recognized ccTLD for Russia.
  • Conversion rate: The ratio of visits to conversions. Conversion rate answers how many of my website visitors are filling out my forms, calling, signing up for my newsletter, etc.?
  • Co-citation: occurs when two documents are cited together by other documents
  • Customer journey: a mapping of a consumer’s steps taken from their initial awareness of a brand to the purchase of a product or service, and their experiences beyond this point.
  • Co-occurrence: a keywords show up together on pages about a certain topic.
  • Content Gap Analysis: finding topics competitors cover that you don’t
  • Content Hub: Interlinked cluster of content around a core or similar topic.
  • Content relevance: how closely a page meets the searcher’s need, interests, and preferences of the reader.
  • Core Web Vitals: a metrics use by Google’s Page Experience to measure user experience i.e. loading, interactivity, stability.
  • Cornerstone content: a collection of prioritise articles for key topics on your website that you want to rank for in search engines.

D – H

  • Domain Authority (DA):  a Moz metric used to predict a domain’s ranking ability between 0–100 estimate of ranking potential; best used as a comparative metric (ex: comparing a website’s DA score to that of its direct competitors).
  • Deindexed: When a URL, section of URLs, or an entire domain has been removed from a search engine index. It can happen for many reason. E.g. when a website receives a manual penalty for violating Google’s quality guidelines.
  • Directory links (local): an aggregate list of local businesses, containing NAP: name, address, phone number and other information like their website. “Directory” can also refer to a type of unnatural link that violates Google’s guidelines: “low-quality directory or bookmark site links.”
  • Distance (local): a distance physical proximity, or the location of the searcher and/or the location specified in the query.
  • Domain Authority (DA): Moz metric (0–100) predicting a domain’s ranking ability.
  • Domain Name Server (DNS): Turns domain names (e.g. otinga.com”) into IP addresses (e.g: “127.0.0.1”) so that browsers can load the page’s resources.
  • The Document Object Model (DOM): the html document structure the browser can access and change by things like JavaScript.
  • Domain name registrar: A company that manages the reservation of internet domain names. Example: GoDaddy, Hostinger and more
  • Domain Rating (DR): The relative strength from 0-100 of a website’s authority based on its backlink profile.
  • Domain structure: a way a website’s domain name and its subdomains and directories are organized.
  • Duplicate Content: Identical or near-identical content shared between domains or between multiple pages of a single domain.
  • Doorway Page: a pages designed to rank for similar search queries.
  • Dwell Time: a time between a SERP click and the user returning to the SERP.
  • Dynamic URL: URL whose content depends on variable parameters.
  • Dofollow Link: a normal link that transfers PageRank, aka a “followed” link.
  • Editorial Link: a naturally earned link that points to your site (that you didn’t ask or pay for.)
  • Ego bait: a tactic in digital marketing that involves creating content designed to attract mentions from named people andengagement of influential individuals or experts in a particular field.
  • Email Outreach: The process of putting your content/product towards relevant people by sending them targeted emails.
  • Entity-based SEO: an approach in SEO that focuses on optimising around entities and relationships, not just keywords.
  • Entry Page: The first page a searcher views on your site
  • Evergreen Content: Content that stays relevant over time.
  • External Link: a link from your site to another site.
  • Engagement: Data that represents How users interact with your site (i.e. clicks, time, scroll, etc.) from search results.
  • E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): Google’s key framework for evaluating content quality.
  • Featured Snippet: a direct answers box at the top of SERPs (“position zero”).
  • Follow: The default state of a link, “follow” links pass PageRank
  • Featured snippets: a direct organic answer boxes that appear at the top of SERPs for queries.
  • Faceted navigation: Often used on e-commerce websites, it filters/sorts many URL variants to help visitors more easily locate the URL they’re looking for. E.g, you could sort a clothing page by price: low to high, or filter the page to view only size: small.
  • Fetch and Render tool: A tool available in Google Search Console that allows you to see a web page how Google sees it.
  • File compression/minification: The process of reducing the size of the file by removing unnecessary code to speed up pages.
  • Gated Content: Content that visitors can only access after providing their contact information.
  • Gateway Page: A gateway page is a web page designed to rank for particular search queries without offering useful information or answering the user’s search query. When clicked from SERP, the page will redirect the visitor to a different page.
  • Google Analytics: A web analytic platform (free or paid for upgraded version) that helps website owners get insight how people engage (behaviour) and traffic with their website. Google Analytics goals: What actions are you hoping people take on your website? Whatever your answer, you can set those up as goals in Google Analytics to track your conversion rate. Google Analytics is a free web tracking tool offered by Google to analyze how visitors interact with your website.
  • Google Alerts: a Google’s free service that monitors and notify users for new content that match their search query.
  • Google Tag Manager: A hub that manage tracking tags from  multiple website.
  • Googlebot / Bingbot: How major search engines like Google and Bing crawl the web; their “crawlers” or “spiders.”
  • Google My Business listing: A free listing available to local businesses.
  • Google Quality Guidelines: Published guidelines from Google detailing tactics that are forbidden because they are malicious and/or intended to manipulate search results.
  • Google Search Console: (previously known as Google Webmaster Tools), it’s a Google’s free platform that allows site owners to monitor their site performance.
  • Google Algorithm: Set of rules used by Google to rank matching results when a user performs a search.
  • Google Autocomplete: Search suggestions given by Google when entering a search.
  • Google Bombing: is a practice in which individuals or groups intentionally manipulate search engine rankings to produce unexpected or humorous results.
  • Google Business Profile: Free business listing from Google that shows up in maps and web search results.
  • Google Caffeine: introduced by Google in 2010, its a Google’s web indexing system whereas the crawler that goes out and finds the content.
  • Google Dance: Slang term describing the volatility a new website or page experiences when Google is trying to determine where it should rank.
  • Google major Algorithm programmed updates:
    • Penguin – released by Google in 2012 to downgrade sites that engaged in manipulative link schemes and keyword stuffing.
    • Hummingbird – released by Google in 2013 to better understand natural language search queries. It emphasized the meaning of search queries over individual keywords
    • Pigeon – released by Google in 2013 improve search results for local search queries.
    •  
    • Panda – is an algorithm update launched in an effort to filter out sites with lower-quality, thin content. Today, it’s part of Google’s core algorithm. A Google algorithm update that targeted low-quality content.
  • Google Knowledge Graph: entity database and the relationships between them.
  • Google Knowledge Panel: SERP feature that provides information about the main subject of the query.
  • Google Penalty: is a punishment a human reviewer can impose on website for violating Google’s webmaster quality guidelines.
  • Google manual action: Human-applied demotion/removal issued by Google to sites that violate or do not comply with their guidelines.
  • Google Sandbox: Alleged filter by Google that prevents new websites from ranking in Google’s top results.
  • Google Webmaster Guidelines: Best practices from Google to help them find, index, and rank your site.
  • Grey Hat SEO: a SEO tactics that sit between white and black hat.
  • Guest blogging: Often used as a link building strategy, guest blogging involves pitching an article (or idea for an article) to a publication in the hopes that they will feature your content and allow you to include a link back to your website. Just be careful though. Large-scale guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links are a violation of Google’s quality guidelines.
  • Guestographic: Infographic created by you but published on other websites.
  • Geographic modifiers: Terms that describe a physical location or service area. For example, “pizza” is not geo-modified, but “pizza in Seattle” is.
  • HTML: Hypertext markup language is the language used to create web pages.
  • H1 tag: HTML heading that’s most used to mark up a web page title.
  • Header tags: An HTML element used to designate headings HTML headings H1–H6 that structure content in descending order to set apart headings and subheadings from the rest of the content on a webpage.
  • Hreflang: A html tag that attribute to Google about alternate versions of a web for different language/region.
  • Hilltop Algorithm: Algorithm adopted by Google in 2003 to identify authoritative web pages to rank.
  • Holistic SEO: The practice of improving all aspects of a website to rank higher in search engines.
  • HTTP 200 Response Code: a succes status response code from a server for successful HTTP requests from a client.
  • HTTPS/TLS: Encrypted version of HTTP that protects the communications between your browser and server for secure browsing from attackers.

I – N

  • Image carousels: Horizontally scrollable image results in SERPs.
  • Image compression: A process of reducing file size without losing quality to speed up web pages
  • Image sitemap: A sitemap listing your image URLs on a website.
  • Index: A search engine database of discovered pages.
  • Indexing: a process of storing and organising content after crawling/rendering where Google stores your page in its database.
  • Index Coverage report (GSC): A report in Google Search Console that shows your site the indexation status  and issues.
  • Index bloat: it occurs when there are too many low-value URLs are indexed.
  • Indexability: A search engine’s ability to analyze and store a web page in its database.
  • Intent: In SEO, it refers to what the searcher wants (informational, commercial, transactional, navigational)
  • Internal links: Links on your own same site, between pages
  • Informational queries: A query in which the searcher is looking for information, such as the answer to a question.
  • Internet protocol (IP) address: a numeric address that identifies a host on the internet, so it easier for humans to remember (ex: “otinga.com”) but the internet needs these numbers to find websites.
  • Inbound Link: Link from another site to your website.
  • Informational Query: Query where someone wants to find information, not products.
  • Interstitial ad: Full-screen interactive ads that cover the interface of the website or app.
  • JSON-LD: JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is a format for structuring your data. For example, schema.org can be implemented in a number of different formats, JSON-LD is just one of them, but it is the format preferred by Google.JavaScript: A programming language that adds dynamic elements to static web pages.
  • JavaScript SEO: A part of technical SEO that make JS-heavy sites crawlable and renderable.
  • Keyword: Words and phrases that the web page is relevant for.
  • Keyword Clusters: Groups of related terms targeted together.
  • Keyword Difficulty: is a metric provided by various SEO tools intended to estimate How hard it is to rank (tool-specific metric).
  • Keyword Explorer: A Moz tool for in-depth keyword research and discovery.
  • Keyword stuffing: A spammy tactic involving the overuse of important keywords and their variants in your content and links.
  • Keyword stemming: Process of reducing a word to its ‘stem’ or ‘root’ (e.g., flowers, flowery -> flower).
  • Keyword density: a metric that tells us how frequently a keyword is used within a piece of content in relation to the overall word count.
  • Keyword cannibalization: it happens when a single website unintentionally targets the same keyword across multiple posts or pages.
  • Kanban: A scheduling system.
  • Key performance indicator (KPI): is a measurable value that indicates how well an activity is achieving a goal.
  • Local queries: A query in which the searcher is looking for something in a specific location, such as “coffee shops near me” or “gyms in Brooklyn.”Login forms: Refers to pages that require login authentication before a visitor can access the content.
  • Landing page: a web page design to target a visitor “lands” specific marketing campaign/action after clicking on a link.
  • Lazy loading: A way of deferring the loading of an object until it’s needed. This method is often used to improve page speed.
  • Local pack: A pack of typically map for three local business listings that appear for local or nearby intent searches such as “oil change near me.”
  • Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): Outdated buzzword but still used to mean semantically related terms.
  • Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA): is a technique in natural language processing and computational linguistics used to analyze relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain.
  • Long-tail keywords: a specific, lower volume, longer queries (containing more than 3 words) with higher intent phrases.
  • Link accessibility: How easily a link can be found by users/bots.
  • Link equity: The value or authority paased via a link to its destination.
  • Link volume: The quantity of links on a page.
  • Link building: While “building” sounds like this activity involves creating links to your website yourself, link building actually describes the process of earning links to your site for the purpose of building your site’s authority in search engines. The process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website.
  • Link exchange: Also known as reciprocal linking, an agreement of two website to link each other to increase backlink rank. And excessive use of it violates Google’s quality guidelines.
  • Link Explorer: Moz’s tool for link discovery and analysis
  • Link profile: describe all the backlink/inbound links to a select domain, subdomain, or URL (quantity, quality, diversity, etc.) a website has.
  • Linked unstructured citations: References to a business’ complete or partial contact information on a non-directory platform (like online news, blogs, best-of lists, etc.).
  • Link bait: Content specifically designed to attract backlinks.
  • Link juice: is the value that one page or website can pass to another page or website through a link.
  • Link farm: Group of websites created to link to each other to improve search engine rankings.
  • Link popularity: The number of backlinks that point to a website.
  • Link reclamation: The process of trying to regain lost or broken links.
  • Link rot: Natural tendency for links to become broken on the web over time.
  • Link scheme: Links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results.
  • Link spam: Irrelevant links placed on pages to improve search engine rankings.
  • Link text or anchor text,” is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink on a webpage.
  • Link velocity: The rate at which a website’s backlink profile is growing.
  • Local business schema: Structured data markup placed on a web page for local businesses that helps search engines understand information about a business.
  • Local citation: is anything that you mention about your business including NAP: business’s name, address, and phone number online.
  • Local pack: SERP feature that appears for local queries and displays local Google business listings.
  • Local search marketing: the process of improving a local business’s that search customers in person to be visible online.
  • Local SEO: The process of ‘optimizing’ local online presence to show up and rank higher in relevant local searches.
  • Log file analysis: Where you analyze the crawl behaviour of search engine bots in server logs to discover opportunities to improve SEO.
  • LSI keywords: Misnomer for semantically related words and phrases. (LSI keywords don’t exist.)
  • Meta robots tag: a HTML code that provide crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index web page content.
  • Meta tag: Snippets of code that tell search engines important information about your web page.
  • Meta descriptions: a short summary often used for SERP snippets.
  • Meta keywords: Meta tags that give some search engines (not Google) more information about a page’s content
  • Meta redirect: Code that tells the web browser to redirect the user to a different URL after a set amount of time.
  • Minification: removing process of any unnecessary characters from the source code without altering functionality. Whereas compression makes something smaller, minification actually removes things.
  • Mobile-first indexing: Google indexes/ranks primarily from mobile content.
  • MozBar: Chrome extension showing Moz metrics for the selected page, like DA, PA, title tag, and more.
  • Mirror website: is a copy of a site hosted on another server.
  • Navigation: A list of menu links that help users and bots to find content and navigate. Often, these appear in a list at the top of your website (“top navigation”), on the side column of your website (“side navigation”), or at the bottom of your website (“footer navigation”).
  • Navigational queries: A query in which the searcher is trying to get to a specific site (e.g., “BBC News”).
  • NoIndex tag: A meta tag that instructions a search engine not to index the page it’s on.
  • NAP: In SEO, NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number, which are key details in a business’s online profile, and critical for local SEO.
  • Natural Language Understanding (NLU): is enabling computers to understand and interpret human language as it is spoken or written, recognizing the nuances, intent, and sentiment behind the words.
  • Natural Link: is a type of external link created voluntarily by a website owner or content creator.
  • Negative SEO: When a competitor uses black-hat tactics to attempt to sabotage the rankings of a competing website or web page.
  • NoFollow: it’s a tag that tells Google not to take a link into account for ranking purposes.tLinks marked up with rel=”nofollow” do not pass PageRank. Google encourages the use of these in some situations, like when a link has been paid for.
  • Noopener: refers to the rel=”noopener” HTML attribute that’s added to links set to open in a new browser tab or window for security reasons.
  • Noreferrer: HTML attribute that prevents referrer information passing through a link.
  • Not Provided in Google Analytics: Keyword data that Google omits from sharing with you in Google Analytics.

O – S

  • On-Page SEO: Optimising elements (titles, content, schema, UX) and code within your site to rank higher on Search engines.
  • Off-Page SEO: External signals like backlinks, mentions, and PR. Any efforts improve its search engine rankings.
  • Open Graph Meta Tags: Snippets of code that control how URLs preview when shared on social media.
  • Organic Search Results/traffic: an earned, non-paid from a search engine that can’t influenced by advertisers.
  • Orphan Page: Page with no internal links pointing to it.
  • Outbound Link: Link from your site to an external site
  • PageRank: Google’s original algorithm system link-based importance (still foundational) that estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. A formula that judges the value of a page by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it.
  • Pages per session or page depth: a pages per session describes the average number of pages people view of your website in a single session.
  • Page speed: How fast a page loads and becomes interactive.
  • Paid link: A backlink that you pay for.
  • Pagination: A website owner can Splitting long lists into separate pages especially when they have very large pages. The hallmarks of a paginated page are the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags, indicating where each page falls in the greater sequence. These tags help Google understand that the pages should have consolidated link properties and that searchers should be sent to the first page in the sequence.
  • People Also Ask boxes: A box in some SERPs featuring a list of questions related to the query and their answers.
  • Personalization: Refers to the way a search engine will modify a person’s results tailored by location, history, device.
  • Pillar page: A comprehensive hub page for a topic cluster.
  • Prominence: In the context of the local pack, prominence refers to businesses that are well-known offline/online.
  • Protocol: The “http” or “https” scheme how data transfer for preceding your domain name between the server and browser.
  • Programming language: Writing instructions in a way a computer can understand. For example, JavaScript is a programming language that adds dynamic (not-static) elements to a web page.
  • Page Authority (PA): Similar to DA, predicts a single page’s ranking ability.
  • Purchased links: Exchanging money, or something else of value, for a link. If a link is purchased, it constitutes an advertisement and should be treated with a nofollow tag so that it does not pass PageRank.
  • Pruning: In an SEO it refers removing/merging low-value pages in order to increase the quality of the site overall.
  • Pogo-Sticking: Back-and-forth process between the SERPs and its results when a searcher is unable to find the content they want; a bad UX sign.
  • Primary / secondary Keyword: A main focus term and supporting terms which a web page is created and optimized.
  • Private Blog Network (PBN): a network of websites created solely to link out to another website (manipulate links) and improve its organic search visibility.
  • Query: What the user types or speaks into the search bar.
  • Query Deserves Freshness (QDF):  is one of the search ranking system in Google designed to show fresher content for the search queries where it would be expected.
  • Qualified traffic: When traffic is “qualified,” it usually means that the visit is relevant to the intended topic of the page, and therefore the visitor is more likely to find the content useful and convert.
  • Qualified lead: If you use your website to encourage potential customers to contact you via phone call or form, a “lead” is every contact you receive. Not all of those leads will become customers, but “qualified” leads are relevant prospects that have a high likelihood of becoming paying customers.
  • Ranking: Ordering search results by relevance to the query.
  • RankBrain: a machine learning system developed by Google to better understand new and long-tail search queries and return more relevant search results.
  • Referral Traffic: Traffic sent to a website from another website. E.g. if your website is receiving visits from people clicking on your site from a link on Facebook, Google Analytics will attribute that traffic as “facebook.com / referral” in the Source/Medium report.
  • Resource pages: Commonly used for  outbound link, useful for link building, resource pages typically contain a list of helpful links to other websites. If your business sells email marketing software, for example, you could look up marketing intitle: “resources” and reach out to the owners of said sites to see if they would include a link to your website on their page.
  • Rendering: The process of a browser turning a website’s code into a viewable page.
  • Render-blocking scripts: A script that forces your browser to delay rendering; defer or inline wisely wait to be fetched before your browser can fully render a page.
  • Responsive design: Google’s preferred design pattern for mobile-friendly websites, responsive design allows the website to adapt to fit whatever device it’s being viewed on.
  • Regional keywords: Refers to keywords unique to a specific locale. Use Google Trends, for example, to see whether “pop” or “soda” is the more popular term in Kansas.
  • Relevance: In the context of the local pack, relevance is how well a local business matches what the searcher is looking for
  • Redirection: When a URL is moved from one location to another. Most often, redirection is permanent (301 redirect).
  • Rel=canonical: A tag that allows site owners to tell Google which version of a web page is the original and which are the duplicates.Robots.txt: Files that suggest which parts of your site search engines should and shouldn’t crawl. Request to have Google review your site after fixing problems identified in a manual action or security issues notification.
  • Related searches: are search queries related to the keyword you type into a search engine. After you type in your search query, scroll to the bottom of the SERP. There, you’ll find a list of related searches.
  • Relative URL: This article explains what a relaitive URL is, how it is different from absolute URLs and how it affects SEO.
  • Resource pages: are web pages that curate and link out to useful industry resources.
  • Rich snippet: A snippet is the title and description preview that Google and other search engines show of URLs on its results page. A “rich” snippet, therefore, is an enhanced version of the standard snippet. Some rich snippets can be encouraged by the use of structured data markup, like review markup displaying as rating stars next to those URLs in the search results. Google search result with additional data shown alongside it, usually from structured data on the page.
  • Robots.txt: A file that tells search engines where they can and can’t go on your site. File telling bots which pages not to crawl.
  • Search intent: The reason behind a search query.
  • Search term (or search query): a word or set of words that a person enters on a search engine like Google to generate specific results.
  • Search visibility: an estimated percentage of clicks a website gets from its organic rankings for one or more keywords.
  • Search algorithm: List of rules used by search engines to rank matching results when a user performs a search.
  • Search volume: an average monthly search term, that users enter a particular search query into a search engine
  • Search forms: Refers to search functions or search bars on a website that help users find pages on that website.
  • Search Quality Rater Guidelines: Guidelines for human raters that work for Google to determine the quality of real web pages.
  • Search engine: An information retrieval program that searches for items in a database that match the request input by the user. Examples: Google, Bing, and Yahoo
  • Search engine poisoning: When malicious hackers create dummy websites that appear to be legitimate search engine results. Their goal is to steal personal information or install malware.
  • SERP features: Results displayed in a non-standard format. SERP features are the elements of search engines’ search result pages that aren’t traditional organic search results. They provide additional and related information on the search query.
  • Search engine results page (SERP)/ Search results/traffic: the page that list a webpage results in a search engine in response to a particular search query.
  • Seasonal trends: Refers to the popularity of keywords over time, such as “Halloween costumes” being most popular the week before October 31.
  • Seed keywords: The term we use to describe the primary words that describe the product or service you provide. Seed keywords are words or phrases used in the keyword research process as the starting point to unlock more keyword suggestions.
  • Sentiment: How people feel about your brand.
  • Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): Protocol for establishing a secure private connection between networked computers.
  • Secondary keywords: Terms closely related to the keyword you want to target.
  • Schema Markup: a Code that helps search engines to better understand and represent your content(recipes, events, FAQs).  in the search results.
  • Schema.org: Code that “wraps around” elements of your web page to provide additional information about it to the search engine. Data using schema.org is referred to as “structured” as opposed to “unstructured” — in other words, organized rather than unorganized. E.g. by labelling it with additional information that helps the search engine understand it.
  • SEO: The practice of optimizing a website or webpage to get more high-quality traffic from a search engine’s organic results.
  • SEO Audit: The process of evaluate a performance assessment of your website to see how well it’s in search engines.
  • SEO Silo: The grouping together of topically related web pages via internal links structure.
  • Share of Voice: How your brand’s visibility versus competitors in the market.
  • Short-Tail Keywords:  Broad, high search volumes.
  • Sitelinks: An extra internal links to other pages or sections of a page that appear under SERP results.
  • Sitemap (XML): A file listing important URLs for discovery. and index your content.
  • Sitewide Link: Outbound link that appears on every page of a website.
  • SRCSET: an HTML image attribute that specifies the list of images to show for different browser situations. The browser will pick the most optimal image version, based on the screen size and resolution.
  • Structured Data: other way to say “organized” data
  • Spammy tactics: Like “black hat,” spammy tactics are those that violate search engine quality guidelines. A standardized way to provide additional information about a web page to search engines, social networks and other services.
  • Scraped content: Taking content from websites that you do not own and republishing it without permission on your own site.
  • SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate: used to encrypt data to prove your site’s identity to passed between the web server and browser of the searcher.
  • Spam Score: A Moz metric used to quantify a likelihood a domain shows spammy signals by using a series of flags that are highly correlated with penalized sites.
  • Spamdexing: Deliberate manipulation of search engine results using techniques that are against their guidelines.
  • Sponsor Link attribute: that shows a link is an advertisement, paid placement, sponsorship, or affiliate link.
  • Scroll depth: it tracks how far users scrolls your pages.
  • Scrum board: A method of keeping track of tasks that need to be completed to accomplish a larger goal.
  • Subdomain: A subdivision placed before the website’s root domain directory (e.g., shop.example.com) It is represented by an addition at the front of the root domain name.

T – Z

  • Taxonomy SEO: Optimizing for search engines by Structuring content and navigation to improve findability.
  • Technical SEO: Optimising crawlability, speed, Core Web Vitals, HTTPS. Making technical adjustments can help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages.
  • TF-IDF : Statistical measure of a term’s importance in a document set.
  • Title Tag: The page title shown in SERPs and browser tabs (aim ~50–60 chars).
  • Traffic: Visits to a website.
  • Thin content: Pages content with little value to users.
  • Thumbnails: a small preview image thumbnails, a smaller version of a larger image
  • Transactional queries: The searcher wants to do something (i.e. buy, sign up). If keyword types sat in the marketing funnel, transactional queries would be at the bottom.
  • Tiered link building:  involves creating links to external pages that link to your website or page, proceed with caution.
  • Time on page: The amount of time someone spent on your page before clicking to the next page. Because Google Analytics tracks time on page by when someone clicks your next page, bounced sessions read as 0.
  • Top-level domain (TLD): is an extension follows the last dot symbol in a domain name (e.g., .com, .co.uk). It has the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet.
  • Transactional Query: where someone is looking to purchase something but hasn’t yet decided where to buy it from.
  • Topical Relevance: In link-building and SEO context, how closely two pages align by subject.
  • Transport Layer Security (TLS): An updated, more secure version of SSL. Used interchangeably with SSL.
  • TrustRank: Algorithmic approach to separate useful pages from spam.
  • UGC Link attribute: that shows a link is user-generated content (UGC). Used for comments, forum posts, or any other content sections where users can add content.
  • Universal Search:  was introduced in 2007 as an expansion of search results to incorporate other media formats, so it show a mixed results (news, images, maps, video) on one SERP.
  • Unnatural links: Google describes unnatural links as Links not editorially placed; can trigger penalties. This is a violation of their guidelines and could warrant a penalty against the offending website.
  • URL / slug / parameters / folders: Uniform Resource Locators are the locations or address / human-readable tail / query values / path structure. for individual pieces of content on the web. It occur after the TLD (“.com”), separated by slashes (“/”). E.g. in “otinga.com/blog” we could say “/blog” is a folder.
  • User Intent/Signals: Purpose of a query / behavioural feedback (clicks, dwell).
  • URL Rating (UR) : The strength of a target page’s backlink profile on a 0–100 scale, with 100 being the strongest.
  • UTM code: An urchin tracking module (UTM) is a simple code that you can append to the end of your URL to track additional details about the click, such as its source, medium, and campaign name.
  • Vertical search: Search engine dedicated to a specific area of focus.
  • Voice Search: using voice to interact with a search engine (rather than by text).
  • Website Authority: A metric from SEO tool provides that measures specific metric of site strength.
  • Website hit: refers to any request made to the server hosting the website, including requests for individual elements such as HTML pages, images, stylesheets, scripts, etc.
  • Website Structure: How a site is organized and its web pages interlinked.
  • Web spam: is any online content created to manipulate search engine rankings
  • White hat SEO: A SEO practices that compliant, user-first practices with Google’s quality guidelines.
  • X-robots-tag: Like meta robots tags, this tag provides crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index web page content.
  • Webmaster guidelines: Guidelines published by search engines like Google and Bing for the purpose of helping site owners create content that will be found, indexed, and perform well in search results. The X-Robots-Tag is an HTTP header sent from a web server that contains the directives for the web crawlers such as Googlebot.
  • YMYL Pages: Pages about topics that could impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.
  • Zero-Click Search: answer provided on the SERP features (snippets, Knowledge Graphs) without requiring a click.

Your next Action Plan 

  • Bookmark this glossary and share it with new starters.
  • Use consistent terminology in decks, proposals, and reports for clarity.
  • Audit your own understanding → can you explain each term in plain English?
  • Use glossary terms in client decks, proposals, and reports
  • And don’t forget to subscribes us and get the copy of the OTINGA SEO Glossary 2025 for you to keep.

References 

  • Celis, V., Skylark, A., Bloomfield, B. & Ocean, M. (2025) SEO Tutorial for Beginners.
  • Clarke, A. (2025) SEO 2025 Strategies. Independently Published.
  • McDonald, J. (2022) SEO Fitness Workbook. JM Publishing.
  • Moz (2025) ‘SEO Glossary’. Available at: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/seo-glossary
  • Ahrefs (2025) ‘SEO Glossary’. Available at: https://ahrefs.com/seo/glossary
  • WordPress.com (2025) ‘SEO Basics’. Available at: https://wordpress.com/blog

Read next: SEO Series 4: What is SEO?

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