Chapter 1: SEO 101

10 blue links

The format search engines used to display search results; ten organic results all appearing in the same format.

Black hat

Search engine optimization practices that violate Google's quality guidelines.

Crawling

The process by which search engines discover your web pages.

De-indexed

Refers to a page or group of pages being removed from Google's index.

Featured snippets

Organic answer boxes that appear at the top of SERPs for certain queries.

Google My Business listing

A free listing available to local businesses.

Image carousels

Image results in some SERPs that are scrollable from left to right.

Indexing

The storing and organizing of content found during crawling.

Intent

In the context of SEO, intent refers to what users really want from the words they typed into the search bar.

KPI

A "key performance indicator" is a measurable value that indicates how well an activity is achieving a goal.

Local pack

A pack of typically three local business listings that appear for local-intent searches such as "oil change near me."

Organic

Earned placement in search results, as opposed to paid advertisements.

People Also Ask boxes

A box in some SERPs featuring a list of questions related to the query and their answers.

Query

Words typed into the search bar.

Ranking

Ordering search results by relevance to the query.

Search engine

An information retrieval program that searches for items in a database that match the request input by the user.

SERP features

Results displayed in a non-standard format.

SERP

Stands for "search engine results page" — the page you see after conducting a search.

Traffic

Visits to a website.

URL

Uniform Resource Locators are the locations or addresses for individual pieces of content on the web.

Webmaster guidelines

Guidelines published by search engines like Google and Bing for the purpose of helping site owners create content that will be found, indexed, and perform well in search results.

White hat

Search engine optimization practices that comply with Google's quality guidelines.