Web, SEO & design terms defined clearly
A working glossary of web development, SEO, design and digital-marketing terms — maintained by the Web Accuracy team and updated as the industry moves.
Alt Text
Descriptive text attached to an image via the HTML alt attribute. Screen readers announce it to visually-impaired users, and search engines use it to understand what an image depicts — which is why descriptive, keyword-aware alt text improves both accessibility and SEO.
Backlink
A hyperlink from another website pointing to yours. High-quality backlinks from authoritative, topically relevant domains remain one of the strongest ranking signals in Google search.
Canonical URL
The definitive URL for a page when multiple URLs could show similar content. Declared via a <link rel="canonical"> tag, it consolidates ranking signals and prevents duplicate-content dilution.
Core Web Vitals
Googles set of user-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). All three are ranking factors and all three are measurable in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.
Crawl Budget
The number of URLs Googlebot is willing to fetch from your site in a given time period. Large sites with wasteful URLs (faceted navigation, duplicates) can run out of crawl budget before important pages are reached.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
A Core Web Vitals metric measuring unexpected visual movement of page elements. Reserving image dimensions, avoiding late-injected content and preloading fonts keeps CLS near zero.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the framework Googles Quality Raters use to assess content. Real author bylines, credentials, reviews and citations all feed E-E-A-T signals.
Featured Snippet
A short answer pulled from a ranking page and displayed at the top of Google results. FAQPage and HowTo schema, combined with concise, well-formatted answers, significantly increase the chance of earning a featured snippet.
Hreflang
HTML or sitemap attribute that tells search engines which language and region a page targets. Critical for multi-country sites to avoid duplicate-content issues across locales.
Internal Linking
Hyperlinks between pages on the same website. Strategic internal linking distributes ranking authority and helps both users and crawlers discover important pages.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
A Core Web Vitals metric measuring how quickly the largest visible element on the page renders. A good LCP is under 2.5 seconds; under 1.5 seconds is excellent.
Meta Description
A short summary of a page set via a <meta name="description"> tag. Not a direct ranking factor, but strongly influences click-through rate from search results.
Open Graph
A set of HTML meta tags (og:title, og:description, og:image, etc.) that control how a URL appears when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and most social platforms.
PageSpeed Insights
A free Google tool that analyses page performance in both lab (Lighthouse) and field (CrUX) conditions, reporting Core Web Vitals and recommending optimisations.
robots.txt
A text file at the root of a site instructing crawlers which paths they may or may not request. Crucially it does NOT stop indexing — to prevent indexing, use a <meta name="robots" content="noindex">.
Schema Markup
Structured data, usually serialised as JSON-LD, that describes page content to search engines using the schema.org vocabulary. Enables rich results like FAQs, breadcrumbs, ratings and more.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
The practice of improving a websites quality, relevance and authority so it ranks higher for commercial and informational search queries. Modern SEO blends technical, content and link-building work.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
The page Google or another search engine returns for a query. Modern SERPs include organic results, ads, featured snippets, local packs, AI Overviews and more.
Sitelinks Searchbox
A search field that appears directly inside a sites Google listing. Enabled by adding a WebSite schema with a potentialAction SearchAction pointing to your on-site search URL template.
XML Sitemap
A machine-readable file listing a sites URLs with optional priority, changeFrequency and lastModified hints. Helps search engines discover content, especially on large sites.
Speakable Schema
A schema.org specification identifying which parts of a page are best suited for voice assistants (Google Assistant, Alexa). Adds SpeakableSpecification objects pointing to CSS selectors like h1 and p.
Structured Data
Information on a page encoded so machines can unambiguously parse it — typically via schema.org JSON-LD. Foundation of rich results, knowledge panels, and AI Overviews.
Technical SEO
The subset of SEO focused on crawlability, indexability, site speed, mobile-friendliness, structured data, internal linking and security — the infrastructure layer underneath content.
Web Accuracy is a digital product agency from Delhi & Ranchi,
building web, mobile, UI/UX, AI/ML and AR/VR solutions
for Indian businesses and global clients since 2015.
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