SEO & Digital Marketing Glossary

The unpaid listings a search engine ranks on merit, as opposed to paid ads.

The practice of improving a website so it earns more visibility and traffic from unpaid search results.

Any result on a search page beyond a standard blue link, such as AI Overviews, featured snippets and map packs.

The main, top-level heading on a web page, marked up with the HTML <h1> element.

An HTML tag that summarises a page and is often shown as the snippet under its title in search results.

The main search query a page is designed to rank for.

The HTML title tag, shown as the clickable headline of a page in search results.

A broad search term of one to three words with high search volume and strong competition.

Google’s free tool for monitoring how a website is crawled, indexed and performs in Google Search.

Links created or bought mainly to manipulate search rankings, in breach of Google’s spam policies.

How a website’s pages are organised, grouped and linked together.

An HTTP response header that tells search engines whether and how to index a URL, including non-HTML files.

An online advertising model where the advertiser pays a fee each time someone clicks their ad.

Promoting a website in search engine results, most often through paid search ads such as Google Ads.

An AI-generated summary Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to its sources.

The instruction, question or input given to a generative AI model to produce a response.