Technical SEO

Technical SEO Glossary

Under-the-hood optimizations that help search engines crawl and index your site

16 terms

1 term

Breadcrumbs

A navigation element showing the user's location within a website's hierarchy (e.g., Home > Blog > SEO > Keyword Research), which also appears in Google search results when properly marked up with structured data.

Technical SEO

3 terms

Canonical URL

An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the preferred, authoritative URL when multiple URLs serve the same or very similar content.

Technical SEO

Core Web Vitals

Google's set of real-world user experience metrics — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — used as ranking signals in the Page Experience update.

Technical SEO

Crawlability

The ability of search engine bots to access, navigate, and read the pages on your website without encountering technical barriers.

Technical SEO

2 terms

Hreflang

An HTML attribute that specifies the language and optional regional targeting of a web page, helping search engines serve the correct language or regional version of a page to users in different countries or language groups.

Technical SEO

HTTPS

HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure — the encrypted version of HTTP that secures data transmission between a user's browser and a web server using TLS/SSL certificates, protecting against data interception and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Technical SEO

2 terms

Indexing

The process by which a search engine stores and organizes crawled web pages in its database so they can be retrieved and displayed in search results.

Technical SEO

Internal Linking

Links from one page on your website to another page on the same website — used to help users navigate, distribute link equity (PageRank) between pages, and signal to search engines the relative importance and topical relationships of your content.

Technical SEO

1 term

JavaScript SEO

The practice of ensuring that JavaScript-rendered content on websites is properly crawled, rendered, and indexed by search engines — addressing the challenges that arise when content is generated dynamically in the browser rather than served in static HTML.

Technical SEO

1 term

Mobile-First Indexing

Google's practice of using the mobile version of a website's content as the primary version for indexing and ranking — meaning Google crawls and evaluates your mobile site, not your desktop site, when determining how to rank your pages.

Technical SEO

1 term

Open Graph

A protocol developed by Facebook that uses `<meta>` tags in a page's `<head>` to control how content appears when shared on social media platforms — defining the title, description, image, and URL shown in link previews.

Technical SEO

1 term

Page Speed

The amount of time it takes for a web page to load and become usable for a visitor — a direct Google ranking factor measured by Core Web Vitals metrics including Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift.

Technical SEO

1 term

Robots.txt

A plain text file at the root of a website (e.g., example.com/robots.txt) that instructs search engine crawlers which pages or sections they are and are not allowed to crawl.

Technical SEO

1 term

Schema Markup

Structured data code added to a web page's HTML that helps search engines understand content context and enables rich results like star ratings, FAQs, breadcrumbs, and event details in the SERP.

Technical SEO

1 term

URL Structure

The format and organization of a website's URLs — including their length, use of keywords, directory hierarchy, and readability — which affects both search engine understanding of page content and user experience.

Technical SEO

1 term

XML Sitemap

A file (typically in XML format) that lists all the important URLs on a website, helping search engines discover and crawl content more efficiently.

Technical SEO