72 SEO Terms Explained, an SEO Glossary

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial topic for nearly all online businesses, bloggers, publishers, and everyone who wants to operate online in any serious manner. Before diving into it, however, it’s essential to understand some basic SEO terms. That’s the purpose of this SEO glossary.

Just to give you a quick primer on getting traffic to your website, there are basically two kinds of traffic up for grabs: “free traffic” and “paid traffic.” Paid traffic includes all forms of advertising, such as pay-per-click (PPC), banner ads, and media buys. The most popular method for getting free traffic is SEO.

In this post, I won’t provide any SEO techniques or tricks. Instead, I’ll explain several terms related to SEO that I hope you’ll find useful. Understanding the language of the SEO community is the first step toward learning the actual techniques and tactics.

(Note. This SEO glossary isn’t the only glossary on this blog. A while ago I published a similar one on WordPress. Feel free to check it out.)

SEO Glossary

301 redirect

First let’s talk redirecting in general. Redirection happens when you visit one specific page and immediately after that you’re being automatically redirected to a different page (with a different URL).

Essentially, there are two types of redirection: temporary and permanent. From a user’s perspective there’s no difference between them, but there is one from a search engine’s perspective.

The 301 redirect is a permanent redirection. It informs search engines that the page they’re trying to access has changed its address permanently. This means that whatever rankings the page already has should be transferred to the new address (this doesn’t happen with a temporary redirection).

Algorithm

Algorithms are the complex mathematical formulas and processes that search engines use to determine the relevance and ranking of web pages in response to a search query. Google’s algorithm, for instance, considers hundreds of factors, including keywords, content quality, and user engagement metrics, to decide which pages to display in search results and in what order.

If you’re curious as to what each of those factors are and how important they are…well, bad luck, this is not made public. But there is a leak or two every now and then.

Alt tag

It’s an HTML attribute of the IMG tag. The IMG tag is responsible for displaying images. The alt tag/attribute is the text that gets displayed in case the image can’t be loaded (if the file is missing, for example).

To give you an example, here’s what a standard IMG tag could look like:

<img src="clock.jpg" alt="picture of a clock" />

Alt tags have some SEO value. The thing is that Google can’t (at least at the moment) see what the actual image presents, but it can read the alt tag. There’s no better way of informing Google what’s on your images than by using alt tags.

Analytics

Web analytics tools, like Google Analytics, collect data about website visitors and their behavior.

This data includes metrics such as the number of visitors, pages they visit, the duration of their visit, and how they arrived at the site (e.g., via search engines, social media, or direct traffic). Analyzing this data helps website owners understand their audience and improve their site’s performance.

Anchor text

Every link consists of two main elements. There’s the web address that the link is pointing to (the destination) and there’s the anchor text. The anchor text is the text that works as the link.

The easiest way of explaining this is to give you an example. Here’s a link to my resource and education page: online business resources. The anchor text is “online business resources”.

Anchor texts are particularly important for SEO. Whenever you’re trying to get a link back to your website it’s good to have a relevant keyword as the anchor text.

Backlinks

Backlink is simply a link placed on someone else’s website that points back to your site. Backlinks are one of the most important factors for SEO. Getting a lot of backlinks with relevant anchor texts is the shortest way of improving your search engine rankings.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Similar to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools provides insights and tools for managing a website’s presence in Bing’s search results.

It offers features such as site scanning for SEO issues, keyword performance tracking, and tools to submit sitemaps and URLs for indexing.

Black hat SEO

Like everything SEO has its dark side too. Black hat SEO is the name for all SEO practices that are known for being manipulative or unethical, and in the long run can hurt your website, or even get it banned from search engines.

Of course, there’s a very thin line between “perfectly fine” and “unethical” … one day some SEO practices are OK, and the other they are suddenly black hat, so there’s no exact list of such practices.

Bounce rate

This metric represents the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page and only for a couple of seconds.

A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors aren’t finding what they are looking for or that the page isn’t engaging enough to keep them on the site. Improving page content, design, and relevance can help reduce bounce rate.

Canonical tag

It’s an HTML link element that lets webmasters to inform search engines about duplicate content pages they’ve created. The tag is placed in the HEAD section of the HTML structure. Here’s what it looks like:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" />

This tag informs that the current page is a copy of the page located under the address set in the canonical tag (href).

When the same content is accessible through multiple URLs, it can confuse search engines and dilute ranking signals.

The main idea is that when a search engine sees this tag it does not rank that page, but transfers all the rankings to the canonical page. So in essence it’s very similar to the 301 redirect.

This helps consolidate duplicate content issues and ensures that link equity is attributed to the correct page.

Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR measures the effectiveness of a link by showing how often people click on it compared to how many people see it.

For example, if a search result is shown 100 times and clicked on 10 times, it has a CTR of 10%. A higher CTR generally indicates that the link is appealing and relevant to users.

Cloaking (page cloaking)

It’s a practice of taking a webpage and building it in a way so it displays different content to people and to search engines. That way, at least in theory, you can get good ranking for your desired keywords (by presenting an optimized page to the spiders) and then present real people with unrelated offers and content. While this might work from a marketing standpoint it can also get you penalized or even banned very quickly.

Content management system (CMS)

A CMS is software that helps users create, manage, and modify content on a website without needing extensive technical skills.

Popular CMS platforms like WordPress offer user-friendly interfaces and plugins that simplify tasks such as SEO, security, and design customization.

And speaking of WordPress, it’s actually the best platform of its kind out there. In other words, if you’re pondering which CMS you should use, the answer is simple – it’s WordPress!

Conversion rate (CR)

This metric shows the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a contact form. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) involves testing and tweaking various elements of a website to increase the likelihood that visitors will convert.

Core Web Vitals

A set of performance metrics introduced by Google to measure user experience on web pages. Core Web Vitals include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures loading performance;
• First Input Delay (FID), which measures interactivity;
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures visual stability.

Improving these metrics can lead to better user experiences and higher search engine rankings.

Crawl budget

Search engines are believed to allocate a crawl budget to each site, which is the number of pages their crawlers will visit and index in a given timeframe.

Efficiently managing crawl budget involves ensuring that important pages are easy to find and reducing the number of low-value pages (like duplicate content or outdated pages) that crawlers need to visit.

For example, you want to make sure that you link to your most important pages from the menus of the site or from the homepage.

Deep linking

Let me quote Wikipedia here:

On the World Wide Web, deep linking is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a website, instead of that website’s main or home page. Such links are called deep links.

Deep links are particularly valuable for SEO. Linking to specific pages within your site with a good anchor text improves the rankings of these pages. Essentially, building deep links is where SEO game is won or lost.

Domain authority

Developed by Moz, Domain Authority (DA) is a score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). The score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating a greater likelihood of ranking well. DA is calculated using multiple factors, including the quality and quantity of links pointing to the site.

Do-follow link

It’s a standard HTML link that doesn’t have the rel="nofollow" attribute. Do-follow links are the most valuable ones from an SEO perspective.

Domain name (and hosting)

Domain is your unique address on the internet. You can get a shiny new domain at GoDaddy for just $6 or so.

Hosting, or a web host, is where your website is kept/stored on the web. You need a web host to be a website owner. You can get really affordable hosting at Bluehost for $2.75 a month.

Duplicate content

If you have two separate pages within your website that have the same content on them (or very similar content) then you have duplicate content. Duplicate content is believed to be a bad thing for SEO. Google doesn’t like sites that use the same piece of content over and over again, and they often penalize them for it.

If you think that you are safe then think again. Let me give you an example. If your site runs on WordPress, and if you’re using similar categories and tags (like for example a tag “business” and a category “business”) then the listing pages for your tags and categories will probably be very similar if not exactly the same. That is a prime example of duplicate content.

Google Analytics

This free tool from Google provides in-depth insights into website traffic and user behavior. Users can track metrics such as page views, session duration, bounce rate, and conversion rates. Google Analytics also allows users to set up goals and events to measure specific user actions on their site.

Google Search Console

A free tool that helps webmasters understand how their site is performing in Google Search. It provides data on search queries, clicks, impressions, and average position. Users can also see which pages are indexed, submit sitemaps, and identify issues like crawl errors or mobile usability problems.

Everyone can open up an account. Just go here and sign up.

Heading tags (H1, H2, etc.)

HTML elements used to define headings and subheadings within a webpage’s content. The H1 tag is typically used for the main title of the page, while H2, H3, and so on are used for subheadings.

This is what a standard H2 looks like in HTML code:

<h2>Subhead Text</h2>

Proper use of heading tags helps search engines understand the structure and importance of content on a page, which can improve SEO.

HTTPS

This stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. It is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user’s computer and the site.

Websites with HTTPS encryption are considered more secure, and search engines like Google give preference to HTTPS sites over non-secure HTTP sites.

You can see if any site uses HTTPS by glancing over its icon in your browser’s address bar. If it has this padlock, it uses HTTPS:

Internal links

These are links that connect one page of a website to another page on the same website. Internal links help users navigate a site and establish a hierarchy of content. They also distribute link equity throughout the site, which can help improve the rankings of important pages.

For example, to add an internal link on a WordPress site, just highlight part of the text that you want to link and then pick a page by using the search box.

Keywords

There are many definitions of keywords. Let me share the one that matters for SEO.

Keywords are single words or whole phrases of a particular SEO importance for a given page or website.

For example, if I’m writing an article about choosing the best gardening equipment, my main keyword could be “gardening equipment“. It is the keyword I want to rank for because I want people to find this article when they input “gardening equipment” into Google.

Keyword cannibalization

This occurs when multiple pages on the same website target the same keyword and compete against each other in search engine rankings.

This can dilute the effectiveness of SEO efforts and confuse search engines about which page to rank for a specific keyword. Resolving keyword cannibalization often involves merging content or differentiating the target keywords for each page.

For example, if you have one page targeting “easy pasta recipes” and another page for “easy cheap pasta recipes” then those two pages are likely cannibalizing each other.

Keyword density

Keyword density is a number describing how often does a specific phrase appear in a piece of text. To calculate it you just have to divide the number of times your keyword appears in a piece of text by the total number of words this piece of text has. The final result will be expressed as a percentage score.

Keyword density is believed to have an effect on SEO. The reasoning behind it is that if a given phrase has a high density score then it means that the text is clearly about that phrase, so it probably should get good rankings for it. Unfortunately this practice doesn’t work so well like it used to in the past.

Keyword stuffing

If you take a random piece of text in English, some words will occur more frequently than the other. For example, words like: and, or, it occur very frequently, while words like: powerhouse, mushrooming occur very rarely. Keyword stuffing is a practice of taking a word or a phrase and repeating it very often in a piece of text. Usually to the point where the text no longer looks natural, all for the purpose of increasing keyword density of your desired phrase.

While working on keyword density is no longer believed to work, keyword stuffing does work, but it works against you. Stuffing your text with keywords is sure to backfire.

Landing page

A standalone web page created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after clicking on a link in an email, ad, or other digital location.

Landing pages are designed with a single focus or goal, known as a call to action (CTA), such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.

Latent semantic indexing (LSI)

The standard definition of LSI is truly impossible to understand so I’m not going to bring it up here. Instead here’s a more digestible one.

LSI is considered to be an important factor for search engines when ranking your page. It’s said that search engines analyze the content on your page and search for LSI keywords supporting your main keyword. If they find such keywords your page gets a boost in rankings for your main keyword.

LSI keywords are keywords that are similar to your main one – keywords that are usually found along your main keyword in the natural language.

For example, if your main keyword is “gardening equipment” and you’re using it a lot in your article it would be great to use some LSI keywords as well, such as: “plants“, “garden“, “vegetables“, “planting“, etc. These are the keywords that would be mentioned naturally in a genuine conversation.

In other words, LSI is a way of checking whether the text is genuine or just stuffed with random keywords purely for improving rankings.

Linkbait

It’s like fishing bite only for links. Basically, it’s a piece of highly viral content. Content that is most likely to attract a lot of links, hence – linkbait.

Creating linkbait content is usually very hard even though the principles are simple. There are a couple of ways you can choose: (1) create something really funny, (2) create something of exceptional quality, (3) create something that brings a lot of value for free.

Linkbait content is not only text. Videos, pictures, graphics, and audio work equally well.

Link building

This is one of the biggest SEO terms. Link building is simply a process of getting backlinks to your page. For example, if you’re publishing articles on ezinearticles.com with a link to your site then you’re doing some link building.

One more thing. Link building is considered to be the most important element of every SEO strategy. If you want to have a well ranked page you have to get backlinks to it.

Link farm

It’s a network of websites that link to each other for the sole purpose of increasing their rankings and PageRanks. Let me give you an example. If you ware to create a link farm (don’t!) you could launch four different websites, for example. Each on a different server. Then you would link page #1 to pages #2, #3, #4. Page #2 to pages #1, #3, #4, and so on. Basically, every page links to every other page. Such a network isn’t very powerful when it contains only four sites, but when they’re hundreds or thousands of them (which isn’t uncommon) then it’s a completely different story. BUT!

This is considered as a “black hat” SEO technique. Don’t take part in it unless you want your site to get penalized.

Link sculpting

By using the “nofollow” attribute of a link you can make some of the links on your site unimportant from an SEO point of view. Therefore, by using this attribute skillfully you can “sculpt” the PageRanks of certain pages within your website. You can increase the visibility of some pages by granting them with follow links and decrease the visibility of others by using nofollow links.

This whole technique requires a lot of practice and knowledge to do it properly. What’s more, many people believe that it’s no longer that effective due to Google’s new approach for handling nofollow links.

Long-tail keywords

These are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they are closer to making a purchase or finding specific information. Long-tail keywords typically have lower search volume but higher conversion rates because they attract more targeted traffic.

Meta description

It’s a short description of a blog/page/post used mostly by search engines. This description is not displayed anywhere on the blog.

Here’s how Google uses it. Whenever someone googles a specific keyphrase Google makes a decision which websites should be displayed and in what order. For each website Google displays a title and a short description. Google has two ways of putting this description together:

1. If the meta description of the website contains the keyphrase used by the user then Google displays the meta description.
2. If the meta description doesn’t contain the keyphrase then Google displays a fragment of the website’s content that does contain it.

If you’re using WordPress then meta description for each page or post can be set using the SEOPress plugin.

Meta keywords

It’s a list of keywords and keyphrases for each blog/page/post used mostly by search engines.

Nowadays, many people think that the major search engines don’t pay any attention to this element while ranking websites. And it’s probably the case. Nevertheless, setting proper keywords won’t do you any harm.

Therefore including your main keyword on the meta keywords list might be a good idea. For this post, I’d include SEO glossary and SEO terms.

If you’re using WordPress then meta keywords for each page or post can be set using the SEOPress plugin.

Meta tags

Meta tags consist of two main elements: meta description, and meta keywords. Meta tags are placed in the HEAD section of the HTML structure of your page. The information contained in those tags is usually not meant for the users but for the search engines. It helps them determine what the page is about. Therefore it might be worth to set them manually for each page or post within your blog.

If you’re using WordPress then all meta tags for each page or post can be set using the SEOPress plugin.

Mobile-first indexing

Google’s method of indexing and ranking content where the mobile version of a website is considered the primary version. With the increasing use of mobile devices to access the internet, mobile-first indexing ensures that mobile-optimized sites are prioritized in search results.

Natural links

All links your page has acquired naturally without you actively building them.

For example, if you’ve written a great post that gets viral on twitter and a lot of people end up linking to it because they like it so much, all those links are natural links.

Nofollow

“Nofollow” is a very popular term in today’s SEO. When in fact it’s just an optional attribute of a link. However, its “optionalism” doesn’t make it unimportant. In fact, it’s the most important attribute from a SEO standpoint.

By default every link is a follow link. This means that whenever a search engine encounters a link, it follows it. Checks where it leads to, and basically takes it as a vote. A vote by the linking website to the website that is being linked to. The nofollow attribute notifies the search engines that they shouldn’t even pay attention to such a link – no vote, no link juice.

From a user’s perspective nofollow links look exactly the same as their follow brothers and sisters.

In order to create a nofollow link just add one extra attribute to an HTML link:

rel="nofollow"

An example nofollow link:

<a href="http://wikipedia.org/" rel="nofollow">Wikipedia</a>

👉 You can learn more about nofollow links and how to use them here.

Noindex

A meta tag used to instruct search engines not to index a particular page. This is useful for pages that do not need to appear in search results, such as thank-you pages, login pages, duplicate content pages, your tag listings, and so on.

Off-page SEO

The are two main elements of SEO: “on-page” and “off-page”. Off-page practices are everything you do outside your page to improve its rankings.

Basically, the main element of off-page SEO is link building.

On-page SEO

The are two main elements of SEO: “on-page” and “off-page”. On-page practices are everything you do on your page to improve its rankings.

This includes things like: tuning the HTML structure, improving title tags and descriptions, making your site load faster, checking the keyword usage and density, improving the internal linking structure (the way your pages are linked to each other), etc.

Organic search

You’re doing organic search when you visit Google, input a phrase and push the search button.

Organic search results (natural search results)

When you do a search on Google the results will most often come in two columns. The column on the right presents the paid results (AdWords ads that someone has bought). The column on the left presents the organic search results.

Getting high rankings in organic search results is what the SEO game is all about.

PageRank

PageRank or PR is an algorithm first created by Larry Page (one of two founding fathers of Google) to calculate (although “estimate” might be a better word here) the importance of a given website. No one is 100% certain about how it actually works or what all the factors are because Google is not very open in that matter. However, one of commonly believed opinions are that one of the deciding factors is the number of backlinks a site has and the PageRanks of the sites linking to it. So basically, the more links you have, and the better PageRank these linking sites have the better your PageRank will be.

It’s not surprising but pages with highest PageRanks are usually ones that are highly recognizable and popular around the internet. For example, Google.com itself has a PR of 10. Facebook is PR9 website.

Nowadays, PageRank is no longer believed to be an important factor.

Page speed

The time it takes for a web page to fully load. Faster page speeds lead to better user experiences and can positively impact search engine rankings. Factors that affect page speed include server response time, image sizes, and the amount of code on a page.

Panda algorithm update

Introduced by Google in 2011, the Panda algorithm update aimed to reduce the prevalence of low-quality, thin content in search results and reward high-quality content. Sites affected by Panda often experienced significant drops in traffic and rankings if they relied heavily on low-quality content.

Penguin algorithm update

Launched by Google in 2012, the Penguin algorithm update targeted websites that engaged in manipulative link-building practices, such as buying links or participating in link farms. Penguin aimed to reduce the rankings of sites with unnatural link profiles.

RankBrain

A machine learning-based component of Google’s core algorithm that helps process and interpret complex search queries. RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to understand the meaning behind queries and provide more relevant search results, especially for unique or ambiguous queries.

Rich snippets

Enhanced search results that provide additional information beyond the standard title, URL, and meta description. Examples of rich snippets include star ratings, reviews, event dates, and product information. Implementing structured data on a website can help generate rich snippets, which can improve CTR.

Here’s an example of a rich snippet for a recipe query:

Robots.txt

This is a file. One that’s particularly important for SEO. It notifies the search engines which areas of your blog are restricted for them. Restricting search engines from accessing some of your pages might not sound that tempting at first but in fact it’s a valuable thing.

First of all, you can exclude all your admin pages from indexing (for example, pages in the wp-admin section of your WordPress blog). You can also use it to prevent search engines from seeing duplicate content on your site. What you do, for example, is prevent them from accessing the category listings on your blog, so only the tag listings are indexed, or the other way around. Very useful file.

Sandbox, supplemental index

Google is believed to have a second index called the sandbox (or the supplemental index). Not every new page appears in the main index straight away. Some of them are put into the sandbox until Google decides that they are worthy of appearing in the main index – the one you see whenever you do a standard search on Google. Websites that are placed in the sandbox don’t appear for normal searches. This means that being in the sandbox is the worst that can happen to your site.

Schema markup or structured data

A form of microdata added to a webpage’s HTML that helps search engines understand the content and context of the page.

Schema markup can enhance search results and lead to your pages being featured through rich snippets, providing users with more detailed information about the content before they click through to the site.

Search engine

What you see at google.com is a search engine. Essentially, search engines are software applications. Their main task is to search the internet for a given phrase. Search engines have specific algorithms for doing this. These algorithms have a way of deciding which sites should appear first in the search results (which sites are the most relevant).

The exact algorithms search engines use are not shared to the public. That’s why everybody involved with SEO can only guess what needs to be done to improve site rankings.

No surprise here, the biggest and most respected search engine is Google.

Search intent

The purpose behind a user’s search query. Understanding search intent helps create content that meets the needs and expectations of users. There are four main types of search intent:

• informational (looking for information),
• navigational (looking for a specific website or place),
• transactional (looking to make a purchase),
• commercial investigation (looking to compare products before buying).

SEM

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. In other words it means “marketing via search engines”. Marketing or promoting your products or services via search engines can be done in two main ways. You either optimize your site so it appears at a high spot in organic search results, or pay for the clicks directly, in which case your site is listed under the “sponsored listings” section.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a practice of improving site’s rankings in the search engines for given keywords. When doing SEO you need to take care of both on-page and off-page SEO. The actual tasks that need to be done are changing almost every day. What was working perfectly yesterday may not be working at all tomorrow. That’s just the reality of SEO. It’s why SEO is never a one-time task but an ongoing work.

SERP

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page (SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages). This is a page that gets displayed when you search for a keyword on Google or other search engine.

Spider (crawler, bot, robot)

Search engine spider is a special piece of software that browses the web, looks for new sites, checks what’s going on on them and sends the data back to Google (or other search engine) so they can index and rank these sites.

Supplemental result

Let me quote Wikipedia on this one.

Supplemental Result is a URL residing in Google’s supplemental index [i.e. sandbox], a secondary database containing pages of less importance, as measured primarily by Google’s PageRank algorithm. […] A supplemental page will still rank in search results, but only if there are not enough pages in the main index that are returned within the search.

Title tag

Every page has a title tag. From a user’s standpoint the title tag is visible only in one place – your browser’s title bar.

For example, the title tag of the page you’re reading right now is: “72 SEO Terms Explained, an SEO Glossary.” It’s a very important SEO factor. There’s no better way for search engines to find out what the page is about than by looking at the title tag, that’s why you need to spend a moment on coming up with a good title tag.

How to set up a title tag:

If you’re using WordPress then the whole thing is rather simple. First of all, every new post receives a title tag that’s the same as the title of the post. However, if you want to change the title tag you need a plugin – SEOPress, for example. This plugin provides a really simple way of changing the title tag of any page or post on your blog.

Traffic

The visitors who come to a website. Traffic can be categorized into different types, such as organic (from search engines), direct (typing the URL directly), referral (from other websites), and paid (from paid advertising). Analyzing traffic sources helps website owners understand how users find and interact with their site.

TrustRank

A link analysis technique used by search engines to identify trustworthy websites and reduce the impact of spam. TrustRank works by evaluating the quality and trustworthiness of links pointing to a site. Websites with high TrustRank scores are considered more authoritative and are more likely to rank well in search results.

URL (URI)

Not getting into boring technical details it’s simply the address of a specific web page.

User experience (UX)

The overall experience a user has when interacting with a website or web application. Good UX involves intuitive navigation, fast loading times, mobile optimization, and engaging content. Positive user experiences can lead to higher engagement, lower bounce rates, and better search engine rankings.

Voice search

A technology that allows users to perform searches by speaking into a device, such as a smartphone or smart speaker. Voice search queries are often longer and more conversational than typed queries. Optimizing content for voice search involves using natural language, answering common questions, and focusing on local SEO.

White hat SEO

As opposed to the black hat SEO, white hat SEO is a set of all SEO practices that search engines encourage you to use. Of course, there’s no official reference place or ranking for SEO practices, so in order to be up to date with what’s recommended and what isn’t, you have to constantly read the most popular SEO blogs, and some in-house Google blogs like these two: Official Google Blog, Google Search Central Blog.

XML sitemap

It’s a file (usually sitemap.xml). Its main function is to give search engines a map of all the different URLs that your blog contains (all pages, posts, archives, etc). With such a thing they can index your blog a lot quicker.

If you’re using WordPress you don’t have to create this file on your own. There’s a plugin for that: Google XML Sitemaps or SEOPress. I you aren’t you can visit a site like XML-Sitemaps.com and get one built there.

Is this glossary complete?

Most certainly not. There are tons of depths that SEO can go into, plus there are new concepts and topics being developed every year. However! This list gives you a good starting-point understanding of SEO and how to think of it as a website owner.