SEO glossary
SEO glossary
Understand key SEO terms: canonical, crawling, DOM, noindex, sitemap and more.
- Canonical
- A signal of the preferred URL among identical/similar content, not a redirect.
- Crawling
- A crawler fetching a page. It is not the same as indexing.
- Indexing
- A search engine processing and potentially including a page in its index. Fetching does not guarantee inclusion.
- DOM
- The browser's current document structure, which scripts may change after loading.
- HTML
- Document markup. A saved HTML file can differ from the current DOM.
- Hreflang
- A declaration of alternate language/region versions. Reciprocal links need separate checks.
- JSON-LD
- A JSON format for structured data. Valid syntax does not imply full semantic validation.
- Meta description
- A proposed summary for search engines, not a guaranteed displayed snippet.
- Noindex
- An exclusion instruction for supported crawlers, not access control.
- Sitemap
- A list of preferred URLs aiding discovery, without an indexing guarantee.
- Alt text
- An alternative image description based on function. Decorative images may have empty alt.
- Core Web Vitals
- User-experience metrics that cannot be verified by parsing HTML alone.