Search Optimization

A 301 redirect is an HTTP response indicating that a resource has moved permanently and directing clients and crawlers to its new URL.

A hyperlink from one website or page to a page on another website.

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions classified as non-engaged by a specific analytics platform; in Google Analytics 4, it is the inverse of engagement rate.

A canonical URL is the preferred representative URL for a set of duplicate or substantially similar pages.

Core Web Vitals are Google-defined user-experience metrics that assess loading performance, interaction responsiveness, and visual stability using real-world page data.

Crawlability is the extent to which search-engine crawlers can discover, request, render, and follow the pages and resources of a website.

A proprietary search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a domain is to rank in search engine result pages, scored on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100.

The practice of improving a product-detail page to increase qualified discovery, understanding, confidence and conversion.

Entity SEO is the practice of making identifiable people, organisations, products, places, and concepts—and their relationships—clear and consistent across content and machine-readable signals.

A set of qualities used in Google’s search-quality guidance to assess whether content and its creator appear helpful and trustworthy.

A structured collection of recurring questions and concise answers about a subject, product, service or process.

Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of improving how accurately and visibly an entity or its content is retrieved, represented, attributed, and cited in responses produced by generative search and answer systems.

Google’s service for monitoring a website’s presence, indexing, performance and technical issues in Google Search.

An HTML or HTTP annotation that identifies language or regional variants of a page to search engines.

Inbound marketing is a practice for attracting and helping prospective customers through useful, relevant content and experiences rather than relying only on unsolicited outreach.

Indexability is a page’s technical and policy eligibility to be included in a search engine’s index after it has been discovered and crawled.

Information architecture is the structural organisation and labelling of information environments to support usability, findability and understanding.

Internal linking is the practice of connecting pages within the same website through hyperlinks that help people and crawlers discover and understand content.

Keyword cannibalisation is an SEO diagnosis for situations where multiple pages with substantially overlapping intent compete or create ambiguity about the preferred page.

A knowledge graph is a structured representation of entities, their attributes and the relationships between them, organised for machine querying and reuse.

A robots directive requesting that a search engine exclude a page or resource from its searchable index.

The practice of improving an entity’s discoverability and consistency across multiple search environments, platforms and content formats.

A page with no crawlable internal links pointing to it from the rest of the website.

Page Authority is a proprietary Moz score, expressed on a logarithmic 1–100 scale, that predicts the relative likelihood of a specific web page ranking in search results.

Robots.txt is a site-root text file that communicates crawler access rules under the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Structured data vocabulary and syntax added to web content to describe entities and relationships in machine-readable form.

The practice of improving a website’s technical accessibility, content relevance and authority to earn visibility in unpaid search results.

An approach that combines search engine optimisation with user experience design to optimise not just search visibility but the entire journey from query to conversion.

Search Generative Experience was Google’s experimental Search Labs designation for generative-AI features in Search; it is now a legacy or transitional term associated with the development of AI Overviews and subsequent AI search experiences.

The underlying goal or task a person is trying to accomplish with a search query.

A website information-architecture pattern that groups related content into distinct topical sections with controlled internal linking.

Structured data is machine-readable information added to content using a defined vocabulary and format to describe entities, properties, and relationships explicitly.

The perceived depth, breadth and credibility of a source’s coverage of a defined subject area.

Usability testing is a research method in which representative participants attempt realistic tasks with an interface while researchers observe behaviour and gather feedback.

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file that lists canonical URLs and optional metadata to help search engines discover and monitor a website’s indexable resources.