Core Basic SEO Terminology
- Anchor Text – Text-based hyperlinks on a page.
- Alt Text – Descriptive hidden descriptions on images.
- Headings – Headings on the page.
- SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.
- SERP – Search Engine Results Page.
Glossary Table of Contents
Core Website Structure & Hierarchy
How your website is built and organised:
Information Architecture (IA)
What it means: This is the “file cabinet” type system of the website. It’s how you group and organise your pages so that they make sense to a human visitor. Information needs to be easy to access, clear and generally aid the user.
Why SEOs care: If a human can’t find your pages, or find them easily, Google’s crawling bots can’t either. User experience is also a core principle and ranking factor for Google.
Sitemap (Visual vs. XML)
Visual Sitemap: A drawn-out map or chart showing how your pages connect (like a family tree). It’s used for planning website builds and new page architecture.
Figure 1: Example of our website’s visual sitemap. (https://y-a-i.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml)
XML Sitemap: A hidden list of code that serves as a roadmap for Google crawling. You submit this to Google Search Console to provide Google with exactly the pages that you want to be considered for indexing.
URL Slug Structure
What it means: The very last part of a web address that identifies a specific page. For example, in https://y-a-i.co.uk/blog/, the slug is blog.
Why SEOs care: Keeping slugs short and relevant to keywords improves both user experience and search engine rankings. Avoid ugly slugs like: [mysite.com/p=123](https://mysite.com/p=123).
Taxonomy (Categories & Tags)
What it means: How you sort your content. Categories are broad buckets (Example: Recipes). Tags are narrow details (Example: Gluten-Free).
Why SEOs care: Using taxonomies correctly prevents your site from becoming a cluttered mess. They are used to organise, group and classify content. They can also be used to improve navigation and streamline content management (such as resource areas, filtered by their categories and tags, so that users can select the different categories of recipes they want and then select only the gluten-free recipes.
Breadcrumb Navigation
What it means: The text trail at the top of a page that shows where you currently are:
Figure 2: A live example of breadcrumb navigation.
Why SEOs care: Breadcrumbs help users get back to broader pages easily, and Google displays these in the search results through structured data (Schema). They are particularly important for large eCommerce websites.
Content & On-Page Elements
The things you physically put on a webpage to help it rank:
H1 - H6 Tag Hierarchy
What it means: The heading tags are used to structure a page like a book outline template.
- H1: The book title (use only one per page, containing your main keyword.
- H2: The chapters.
- H3: Sub-sections inside those chapters.
Why SEO’s care: Google crawls and reads the headings first (reading HTML files from top to bottom); so headings play a vital role in the way search engines digest your content.
Body Copy Placeholders (Contextual Relevance)
What it means: Fake text, such as Lorem Ipsum, that is used during design to show where writing will go and is styled on a page.
Why SEO’s care: In SEO, we want to replace these quickly with real, keyword-rich content. Design layouts should also match and adapt to the SEO content provided, not the other way around. This is why content writing for new websites is such an important task at the design and build stage.
Image Alt Text
What it means: A hidden text description that is attached to an image. If an image fails to load or a visually impaired user reads it with a screen reader, the text describes what the image is.
Why SEO’s care: Descriptive alt text is highly important for accessibility. Google cannot “see” images as humans do. Alt text also tells Google, or the search engine, what the image represents, helping you rank in Google and search engine image results.
Anchor Text Strategy
What it means: Anchor text is the actual clickable, coloured words in a hyperlink. Your anchor text strategy needs to be used to link pages together, as well as to select effective and useful anchor text.
Why SEO’s care: Instead of saying ‘click here’ or ‘visit our website’, your anchor text should use descriptive keywords (such as ‘check out our beginner SEO checklist’). This tells Google what the linked page is about. You should also always avoid just pasting a link and use anchor text for styling and SEO purposes.
Meta Title & Description Fields
What it means: Your website’s digital billboard on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). They control how your page looks when being served as a search result in the search engine. The Meta Title is the blue headline, and the Meta Description is the grey snippet below it.
To display fully, the Meta Title should not exceed around 59 characters, and the Meta Description around 159 characters. Titles should be separated with | (vertical bar or pipe) as this is the smallest pixel size compared to other choices, such as – (hyphen), which can even make 59 characters break on the display in the search engine result.
Technical & Performance Logic
Behind-the-scenes mechanics that affect how Google ranks your site:
Internal Link Mapping
What it means: Strategic linking of your webpages to each other. Such as linking from a blog post back to service pages. Breadcrumbs are also a key part of this internal link structure.
Why SEOs care: It acts like a web, which allows crawlers such as Google bots to reach older and deeper pages so they get noticed and indexed. Transfers authority between pages if a certain page has built up authority by being referenced by external websites.
Mobile-First Layout
What it means: Designing your website for mobile phones first, then ensuring that the page also displays well on the desktop version.
Why SEOs care: Google practices “Mobile-First Indexing”. This means that Google judges your entire website based on the mobile experience.
Lazy Loading Containers
What it means: A setting where images only load when you are about to scroll down to them. Instead of loading every element the second you open a page.
Why SEOs care: It makes your website load faster, with page speed being a big Google ranking factor. (Especially against websites where web speed is unoptimised and poor).
Pagination vs. Infinite Scroll
What it means: How you display long lists, such as article/blog/news content. Pagination breaks things into pages. Infinite scroll keeps loading content forever as you scroll down.
Why SEOs care: Google struggles to crawl pages that are deep within an infinite scroll. Every element can also load on the page where the infinite scroll is active, which can create a massively slow page, especially if it’s a blog area with individual images for each post that load within the scroll. For SEO, traditional pagination is usually the best option.
Canonical Tag Placement
What it means: An HTML element on a webpage that tells Google that the page is either self-referencing (explicitly points to the page’s own URL as the master, authoritative copy) or is a reference to another page other than itself.
Why SEOs care: Self-referencing canonicals need to be set up correctly on unique pages, or the page will not index correctly. Canonical tags to other pages tell Google that the content is a duplicate of another original page, and that Google needs to index and reference the original page. This is very important for e-commerce pages, such as colour variations that change the URL of a page without changing any of the content. This can often be missed on Shopify websites.
Schema Markup Breakouts (Structured Data)
What it means: Extra bits of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) code that give Google specific information, which you can then define depending on the page. With some being able to appear in the rich snippets in the SERP.
Why SEOs care: It turns search results into rich snippets. Images can appear, along with star ratings and pricing, which can massively increase click-through rates.
Rich Snippets
What it means: Standard Google SERP results only show a blue title, green URL, and a grey description. A Rich Snippet is an upgraded result with additional visual information, such as star ratings, product prices, recipe cooking times or images.
Why SEOs care: You get them by using Schema Markup to explicitly tell Google the data points on your page. If Google likes what it sees, it rewards you with an enhanced snippet.
User Signal Design
How users behave on your site sends trust signals and demonstrates site quality to Google. You can find out more information on the design of pages for user experience in our detailed CRO Glossary.
Call to Action (CTA) Placement
What it means: Buttons or links that tell a user what to do next (usually a conversion event). Such as “buy now” or “contact us”.
Why SEOs care: Good SEO brings users who are potential customers to the website. Great CTA placement turns them into customers.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Buffers
What it means: Ensuring elements on the page don’t suddenly jump or shift around when loading. This can cause people to accidentally click the wrong button and negatively affect the user experience.
Why SEOs care: Google tracks this as a metric within “Core Web Vitals”. If you have a bad cumulative layout shift, then your website is marked as having a negative user experience, which hurts Google rankings.
Interstitials & Pop-up Logic
What it means: The timing rules for pop-ups, such as a pop-up for lead forms or sign-up for newsletters.
Why SEOs care: The pop-up logic needs to be nuanced and timed so that it doesn’t immediately fire, disrupt and cause poor user experience.
Footer Link Clusters
What it means: The group of links sitting at the very bottom of the website in the footer area.
Why SEOs care: It’s a clean safety net at the bottom of a page to aid in navigation. It’s also a great way to add global links across all pages on the website to increase the total number of internal links.
Navigation Depth (The 3-Click Rule)
What it means: The rule that a user should be able to get from the homepage to a target page in 3 clicks or fewer.
Why SEOs care: If a main service page takes 5 or 6 clicks to find, it is buried too deep. Google’s bots will likely give up before they can even find the page. This can cause indexing issues for major pages.
