Glossary

The words of blog SEO, each with a real example.

Short, exact definitions of the terms you meet when a blog has to be found: what each one is, a piece of real markup, why it matters for a small business, the usual mistakes, and what CMSKite does about it.

• SEOCanonical URLA canonical URL is the address you tell search engines to treat as the real one when the same page can be reached at more than one address. You name it with a link tag in the page’s head, and search engines usually show and credit that address in their results.
• SEOHreflangHreflang is an attribute that tells search engines a page also exists in other languages, or for other countries, and gives the address of each version. Search engines use it to show a reader the version in their language, such as the Portuguese post to someone searching in Portuguese.
• SEOSitemapA sitemap is a file that lists the pages of a site you want search engines to find, usually in XML at an address like /sitemap.xml, with the date each page last changed. It helps search engines discover your pages; it does not make them rank.
• SEOSlugA slug is the part of a web address that names one page in readable words: in bakery.example/blog/wedding-cake-guide, the slug is wedding-cake-guide. It is usually made from the page’s title, in lowercase letters, with hyphens between the words.
• SEOMeta descriptionA meta description is a short summary of a page, written in a meta tag in its head, that search engines may show under the page’s title in their results. Readers of the page never see it; it is there to help a searcher decide whether to click.
• SEOStructured data (JSON-LD)Structured data is a description of a page in a vocabulary machines understand, usually schema.org: this is an article, this is its headline, this is who wrote it and when. JSON-LD is the format Google recommends for it, a block of JSON in a script tag that readers of the page never see.
• PlatformsHeadless CMSA headless CMS is a content management system that stores and edits content but does not build the pages that show it. Your website asks it for the content over an API and makes the pages itself. The “head” it leaves out is the part visitors see.
• PlatformsEmbed codeEmbed code is a short piece of HTML you paste into a page to show something that is hosted elsewhere: a video, a map, a booking form or a blog. It is usually a script tag, which draws the content into your page, or an iframe, which shows another page in a box on yours.
• SEONoindexNoindex is a rule that asks search engines not to show a page in their results. You set it with a robots meta tag in the page’s head, or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. The page stays live for anybody who has the link.
• SharingOpen GraphOpen Graph is a set of meta tags, such as og:title and og:image, that tells apps what to show when somebody shares a link: the title, picture and description in the preview card on WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn or Slack. The protocol is published at ogp.me.