seo glossary
SEO glossary: the terms in plain language
Hreflang, Core Web Vitals, structured data — what these words actually mean and why they affect your business visibility. No jargon, with examples.
- SEO (search engine optimisation)
- The set of practices that help a page rank higher in Google and other search engines without paid ads. Covers technical health, content and authority.
- Keywords
- The words and phrases people type into search engines. A good page answers real queries — like "website development price" — not just the company's own jargon.
- Technical SEO
- The site's "health" in the eyes of search engines: speed, mobile version, sitemap, robots.txt, correct indexing. Without it even the best content stays invisible.
- Meta title and meta description
- The headline and snippet shown in Google results. They decide whether someone clicks your page — every page should have unique ones.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's speed and usability metrics: how fast content loads, how stable the layout is, how quickly the page responds. They directly affect rankings and conversion.
- hreflang
- An HTML hint telling search engines which language each page version is in. Critical in Latvia, where sites are often in Latvian, English and Russian.
- Structured data (schema.org)
- Machine-readable markup explaining to search engines and AI what is on the page: services, prices, FAQs, reviews. Helps win rich results and appear in AI answers.
- Backlinks
- Links from other sites to yours. Search engines treat them as votes of trust — one link from a respected industry site beats a hundred low-quality ones.
- Indexing
- The process where a search engine "reads" and stores your page in its database. If a page isn't indexed, it doesn't exist in search results — check it in Google Search Console.
- SERP
- Search Engine Results Page. Today it holds more than blue links: AI Overviews, maps, FAQ blocks and images — each of them can be won.
- AI search (AI Overviews, chatbots)
- Answers generated by AI — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude. They cite pages with clear structure, direct answers and structured data; optimising for it is also called GEO or AEO.
- llms.txt
- A simple text file in the site root that concisely tells AI models what your site is and where the key content lives — like robots.txt, but for the AI era.
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