The SEO terms you'll run into across Unhidden, explained in plain English.
A written description attached to an image in the HTML. Google can't see images — it reads their alt text — and screen readers speak it aloud to visually-impaired visitors.
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — the framework Google's quality raters use to judge whether content deserves to rank. Not a direct ranking factor, but what many ranking signals try to measure.
The HTML tags that give a page its outline — H1 is the main headline, H2s are sections, H3s are subsections. Google reads them to understand what the page covers and how it's organized.
An HTML attribute that lists the language and country versions of a page, so Google can send searchers to the right one. Every version must also reference itself, or Google may ignore the whole set.
The secure version of HTTP — it encrypts everything between the visitor and the site, shown as the padlock in the browser. A confirmed (lightweight) Google ranking signal since 2014.
Links from one page of your site to another. They're how Google discovers your pages, how authority flows between them, and how you signal which pages matter most.
A score from 0 to 100 estimating how hard it is to reach the first page of Google for a keyword. Under 30 is realistic for a small site; over 70 usually needs serious authority.
A short summary of a page written in the HTML, which Google often shows as the grey snippet under the title in search results. Not a ranking factor, but a good one wins more clicks.
Google ranks pages based on their mobile version, not the desktop one — the smartphone crawler is the one that counts. If content is missing or broken on mobile, it's missing for ranking too.
An instruction — in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header — telling search engines not to show a page in results. Useful for thank-you pages; catastrophic when left on a page you want found.
Visitors who arrive by clicking an unpaid search result, as opposed to ads, links from other sites, or typing your address directly.
When a searcher clicks a result, quickly returns to Google, then tries another result. Google publicly played down this behavior as an individual ranking signal, but leaked API documentation exposed a click-based "Navboost" system hinting at pogo-sticking.
An instruction that forwards a visitor from one URL to another before the page loads. A 301 (permanent) redirect passes most link value to the new address; chains of redirects waste crawl time and dilute it.
A small text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which parts they may visit. It controls crawling, not indexing — a page blocked here can still appear in results, just without its content read.
What the searcher is actually trying to do — learn something, find a specific site, compare options, or buy. Pages that match the intent rank; pages that fight it don't.
How many times a keyword is searched in an average month, usually averaged over the last 12 months.
Search Engine Results Page — the page of results you see after searching. "Ranking" means appearing on it, ideally in the top 10.
Machine-readable labels (usually JSON-LD) added to a page that tell search engines exactly what it contains — an article, a product, an FAQ. It powers rich results like stars, prices, and FAQ dropdowns.
The page title written in the HTML — the blue clickable headline Google shows in search results. Keep it roughly 50–60 characters so it doesn't get cut off.