SEO terminology you will meet every day

You will read audits, tool reports and documentation full of jargon. Most of it describes just four things: URLs, server responses, the page's head, and links. Learn these, and the rest of the vocabulary falls into place.

Anatomy of a URL

¹https://²www.³example.com⁴/hiking-boots/men/⁵?color=brown&sort=price⁶#reviews

1. 1Scheme
2. 2Subdomain
3. 3Domain
4. 4Path
5. 5Parameters
6. 6Fragment

Part	SEO notes
Scheme	Use https. The http version should redirect to it.
Subdomain	www and the bare domain are different hosts. Pick one and redirect the other.
Path	Readable words separated by hyphens. Google recommends hyphens over underscores. Paths are case-sensitive.
Parameters	?key=value&key2=value2. Filters, sorting and tracking can create many URLs with the same content.
Fragment	#section. Google generally ignores fragments, so content must not depend on them.

HTTP status codes

Every time a browser or crawler requests a URL, the server answers with a status code.

Code	Meaning	What Google does
200	OK	Considers the content for indexing. This does not guarantee indexing.
301, 308	Moved permanently	Follows the redirect. A strong signal that the target is the new URL.
302, 307	Moved temporarily	Follows it, but treats it as a weak signal. The old URL may stay in results.
404, 410	Not found, or gone	Drops the URL from the index over time. Does not harm the rest of the site.
429, 5xx	Too many requests, or server error	Slows crawling. URLs that keep failing are eventually removed.

A soft 404 is a page that says "not found", or is empty, but returns 200. It confuses search engines and should return a real 404 or 410.

The page head

The <head> holds information about the page that visitors do not see directly. These tags matter most for SEO:

<head>
  <title>Men's hiking boots | Example Outdoor</title>
  <meta name="description" content="Waterproof hiking boots for men, sizes 40 to 47.">
  <meta name="robots" content="noindex">           <!-- only if the page must stay out of search -->
  <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/hiking-boots/men/">
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="lt" href="https://example.com/lt/zygio-batai/vyrams/">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
</head>

• title: the main source of the title link in results.
• meta description: may be used as the snippet.
• robots: page-level rules such as noindex. The same rules can be sent as an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.
• canonical: the preferred URL when duplicates exist. Google treats it as a strong signal, not a command.
• hreflang: links language or country versions of the page.
• viewport: needed for the page to work properly on phones.

Links

• An internal link points to another page on the same site. Internal links help discovery and show which pages matter.
• An external link points to another site.
• A backlink is an external link from another site to yours.
• Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. Descriptive anchor text helps users and search engines understand the target.

Links can carry rel values that tell Google about the relationship:

rel	Use it for
sponsored	Paid links, ads and sponsorships
ugc	Links in user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts
nofollow	Other links you do not want to vouch for. It is also accepted for paid links

Metrics you will hear about

• Impressions, clicks, CTR, average position: Search Console metrics, covered in the Search Console lesson.
• Search volume: an estimate of how often a query is searched per month. Every tool estimates it differently, especially for small markets.
• Keyword difficulty: a tool vendor's estimate of how hard it is to rank. It is not a Google metric, and each tool calculates it differently.
• Domain authority or domain rating: vendor scores (from Moz and Ahrefs, for example) based mostly on the tool's own link data. They can be useful for comparing sites, but they are not Google metrics, and Google publishes no domain-level score of its own.

When a number comes from a third-party tool, ask how the tool calculates it before making decisions with it.