Findability
How easily the content on a website can be discovered, both internally (by users) and externally (by search engines).
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Footer Link
Links that appear in the bottom section (or “footer”) of a website.
The search engine founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998. Google marked a radical departure from human-edited web directories, relying on web...
Conversion
When a user completes a desired action on a website. Examples of conversions include: Completing a purchase. Adding items to a shopping cart. Completing a...
Conversion Rate
The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which website users complete a desired action. This is calculated by dividing the total number of conversions by...
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The process of improving the number or quality of conversions that occur on a website. Some popular CRO tactics include testing changes to website design,...
Correlation
The extent to which a relationship exists between two or more elements. Often used in SEO research to infer relationships of variables on search rankings...
Crawl Budget
The total number of URLs search engines can and want to crawl on a website during a specific time period.
Crawl Error
URLs that a search engine bot is unable to crawl. URLs that return a status code error.
Crawler
A program search engines use to crawl the web. Bots visit webpages to collect information and add or update a search engine’s index.
Crawling
The process of gathering information, using a crawler, from the billions of public webpages to update, add, and organize webpages in a search engine’s index.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets describe how HTML elements (e.g., color, fonts) should appear on webpages and adapt when viewed on different devices.
Customer Journey
All of the potential moments (or touchpoints) at which a prospect is exposed to or engages with a brand. All of these interactions are designed...
Data
All the hard numbers that represent real customers – the who, what, where, when, why, and how – all of which is needed to make...
Dead-End Page
A webpage that links to no other webpages. So called because once a user or bot arrives on this page, there is no place to...
Deep Link
A link pointing to any webpage other than the homepage. A link pointing to content within a mobile app.
De-index
When Google removes a website or webpage, either temporarily or permanently, from search results, specifically its search index. Google provides a Remove URLs tool in...
Directory
A list of websites, usually separated by related categories and maintained by human editors. Depending on the directory, inclusion could be free or paid. In...
Breadcrumb
A navigational element that helps users easily figure out where they are within a website. See: Website Navigation
Broken Link
A link that leads to a 404 not found. Typically, a link becomes broken when: A website goes offline. A webpage is removed without implementing...
Cache
A technology that temporarily stores web content, such as images, to reduce future page loading times.
Cached Page
A snapshot of a webpage as it appeared when a search engine last crawled it.
Canonical URL
An HTML code element that specifies a preferred website URL, when multiple URLs have the same or similar content, to reduce duplicate content.
ccTLD
A country-code top-level domain. For instance, a company based in the United Kingdom would have a domain like this: www.example.co.uk, where uk is the ccTLD.
Clickbait
Content that is designed to entice people to click, typically by overpromising or being intentionally misleading in headlines, so publishers can earn advertising revenue.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an organic search result. This is calculated by dividing the total number of organic...
Cloaking
Showing different content or URLs to people and search engines. A violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
CMS
Stands for Content Management System. A web-based application that lets people create, upload, and manage digital assets.
Co-Citation
How frequently two websites (or webpages) are mentioned together by a third-party website, even if those first two items don’t link to (or reference) each...
Comment Spam
Poorly written comments, often off-topic and self-promotional, posted by spambots in the hopes of getting a free (but ultimately worthless) link.