SEO terms inplain English.

Anchor text is the clickable words of a link. It gives readers and search engines a clue about what the linked page is about.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines use these links as one signal when judging a page.

Your backlink profile is the full set of links pointing to your site, including who links, where, with which anchors and how that mix looks.

A branded anchor uses your company or product name as the link text. It's the most common anchor type on natural, editorial links.

A contextual link sits inside the main body of a page, surrounded by relevant text, rather than in a footer, sidebar or list of links.

Disavow is a Google Search Console tool that asks Google to ignore chosen backlinks. It's meant for rare cases, not routine clean up.

A dofollow link is an ordinary link with no rel attribute telling search engines to ignore it, so it can pass ranking signals.

An editorial link is one a publisher chooses to add because it helps their readers, not because of a payment or an exchange.

An exact match anchor uses the precise keyword you want to rank for as the link text. Overusing it is a common sign of manipulated links.

A link audit is a review of the links pointing to your site, checking quality, relevance, anchors and whether each link is still live.

Link building is the work of earning links from other websites to yours, usually through content, outreach, partnerships and PR.

Link building pricing varies by site quality, effort and model. A very low price per link usually signals low quality sites or bulk placements.

Link decay is the slow loss of backlinks over time as pages are deleted, edited, redirected or sites close down.

Link equity is the idea that links pass value from one page to another. It's a useful model, but Google doesn't publish how it works.

A link exchange is an agreement where two sites link to each other. Done at scale it breaks Google's guidance on link schemes.

A link farm is a site or group of sites that exist only to hold lots of outbound links. Google calls it a link scheme and devalues it.

A link gap analysis compares your backlinks with competitors' to find sites that link to them but not to you, as outreach targets.

Link velocity is how fast a site gains or loses backlinks over time. Unusual jumps can look unnatural, though Google hasn't set a safe rate.

Nofollow is a link attribute that tells search engines you don't vouch for the linked page, so it usually passes little or no ranking credit.

Off-page SEO covers the actions taken outside your own site that affect search visibility, mainly links, mentions and brand reputation.

A PBN is a group of sites built or bought to pass links to a money site. Google treats this as a link scheme and it carries real risk.

A reciprocal link is one of a matching pair, where site A links to site B and site B links back. A few are normal, many look like a scheme.

A referring domain is a unique website that links to you. Ten links from one site count as one referring domain.

The sponsored attribute marks a link as paid or part of an ad or sponsorship, which is what Google asks publishers to use for such links.

The ugc attribute marks links added by users, such as comments and forum posts, so search engines know the site owner didn't place them.

SaaS link building is earning links for software companies, where the aim is usually to reach buyers searching for tools and solutions.

A toxic link is a backlink from a spammy or manipulative site that could harm trust in yours. Most low quality links are simply ignored.

Blogger outreach is contacting bloggers and site owners to earn a mention, guest post or link, usually by email with a clear reason to say yes.

Broken link building means finding dead links on other sites and offering your own page as a working replacement.

Digital PR is earning online press coverage and links by pitching newsworthy stories, data or expert comment to journalists and publications.

A guest post is an article you write, or have written, for another website's blog, usually with an author bio or link back to you.

Journalist requests are public calls from reporters for expert quotes. Answering well can earn a mention and often a link in an article.

Link insertion means adding a link to your page inside an article that's already published, instead of writing a new post for it.

The skyscraper technique means finding a popular page with many links, making a better version, then asking linkers to look at yours.

A sponsored post is content a brand pays a publisher to run. Google asks that links in paid content use the sponsored or nofollow attribute.

An unlinked mention is when a site names your brand but doesn't link to you. A polite request can often turn it into a link.

White label link building is link work done by a provider that an agency resells under its own name, with the provider staying behind the scenes.

Authority Score is Semrush's 0 to 100 rating of a domain's overall quality, based on links, traffic and spam signals. It's not a Google metric.

Click-through rate is the share of people who saw your result in search and clicked it. Google Search Console reports it for each query and page.

Domain Authority is a Moz score from 1 to 100 that predicts how well a site may rank. It's a third-party estimate and not used by Google.

Domain Rating is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for the strength of a site's backlink profile. It's a third-party estimate, not a Google metric.

Keyword difficulty is a tool's estimate of how hard it would be to rank on page one for a term. Each tool calculates it differently.

Organic traffic is the visitors who arrive from unpaid search results. Tools can only estimate it for other people's sites.

A 301 redirect sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one permanently, and is the standard fix after moving a page.

A 404 error means a URL doesn't exist on the server. A few are normal, but dead pages with backlinks waste the links pointing to them.

A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page when similar or duplicate versions exist.

Core Web Vitals are Google's measures of loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability, based on how real visitors experience your pages.

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given period. It matters mostly for large sites.

Duplicate content is the same or very similar text available at more than one URL. It's usually a clean up issue, not a penalty.

Google Search Console is a free Google tool showing how your site appears in search, including queries, clicks, indexing and errors.

Indexing is when a search engine stores a page so it can appear in results. Indexable means a page is allowed to be indexed, not that it is.

An internal link points from one page on your site to another. It helps visitors navigate and helps search engines find and weigh your pages.

Noindex is a directive telling search engines not to include a page in their results. A noindex page can still be crawled.

An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it, so visitors and crawlers can't easily reach it through your site.

Robots.txt is a text file at the root of your site that tells crawlers which areas they may or may not request. It isn't a security tool.

Schema markup is code from the schema.org vocabulary that labels what a page contains, such as a product, article, FAQ or organization.

Structured data is information in a fixed, machine readable format that tells search engines exactly what a page's content means.

An XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs you want search engines to find. It helps discovery but doesn't guarantee indexing.

A content cluster is a set of related pages on one subject, linked to each other, with one main page and several focused supporting articles.

E-E-A-T is Google's quality framework of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, used by human raters to assess content quality.

A featured snippet is a highlighted answer shown at the top of Google results, pulled from a web page that Google judges to answer the query.

Keyword cannibalization is when several pages on your site target the same query, so they compete and none ranks as well as one strong page could.

A meta description is a short summary of a page in its HTML. Google may show it under the title in results, but often writes its own.

On-page SEO is the optimization of things on the page itself, such as content, titles, headings, internal links and images.

A pillar page is a broad, in-depth page on a core topic that links out to more detailed articles covering each subtopic.

Search intent is the goal behind a query, such as learning, comparing, buying or finding a site. Matching it matters more than matching keywords.

SEO is the practice of making a website easier for search engines to find, understand and show to people searching for what it offers.

A SERP is the page a search engine shows after a query. It can include ads, AI summaries, snippets, maps and ordinary blue links.

Thin content is a page with little or no original value for readers, such as near empty pages, scraped text or filler written to catch searches.

Topical authority is the idea that a site covering one subject in depth is seen as a better source on it. It's an SEO concept, not a Google metric.

YMYL pages cover topics that can affect a person's health, finances, safety or wellbeing, so Google holds them to a higher quality standard.

AEO is optimizing content so answer engines, from AI assistants to featured snippets, can find it, understand it and quote it accurately.

An AI crawler is a bot that fetches web pages to train AI models or to answer user questions. You can allow or block most through robots.txt.

AI Overviews are Google's generated summaries at the top of some results, with links to the web pages the summary draws on.

A brand mention is any reference to your company name online, linked or not. Both search engines and AI tools may use them as signals.

An AI citation is when an AI tool names or links your page as a source in its answer. Whether you get one varies from run to run.

In search, an entity is a distinct, identifiable thing such as a brand, person or place that search engines can recognize and connect facts to.

GEO is the practice of improving how often and how accurately generative AI tools mention or cite your brand and content in their answers.

LLM visibility is how often and how accurately large language model tools mention, describe or recommend your brand in response to questions.

llms.txt is a proposed plain text file at a site's root that gives AI tools a short, curated guide to its most useful pages.