The words people use when they sell you a website.

A DNS record that points a domain directly at a server's IPv4 address.

Root domains (example.com) historically needed an A record while subdomains (www.example.com) could use a CNAME. Most modern hosts work around this with their own flattening, which is why your host may ask for something that looks unusual.

Whatever is visible on screen before the visitor scrolls. Borrowed from newspapers, where it meant the top half of a folded front page.

There is no single fold any more — it lands in a different place on every device. Treat it as a priority order rather than a fixed line, and make sure the first screen answers what the business does and where it is.

A short written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown if the image fails to load.

Purely decorative images should have an empty alt attribute rather than a description, so screen readers skip them instead of announcing noise. Stuffing keywords into alt text is a spam signal and makes the site worse for the people the attribute exists for.

Software that records how people find and use a website: which pages they land on, where they came from, what they clicked.

Analytics measures behaviour, not truth. A page with few visits may be doing important work for the handful of people who reach it, and traffic that never contacts you is not obviously worth having.

A tag that tells search engines which address is the real one for a page, when the same content is reachable at more than one URL.

It is a strong hint, not an instruction. Google can and does pick a different canonical than the one you declare, usually when your internal links or sitemap contradict the tag.

A network of servers in many locations that each keep a copy of your site, so visitors are served from somewhere physically near them.

The gain is largest for visitors far from your origin server. For a business whose customers are all within one metro area, a CDN matters less than it is usually sold as, though it still helps with reliability and traffic spikes.

A Core Web Vital measuring how much the page jumps around while it loads. Scored 0 upward; Google treats 0.1 or less as good and anything above 0.25 as poor.

This is the metric behind tapping a button and hitting the wrong thing because an ad or image loaded above it. The usual cause is images and embeds without reserved dimensions.

The admin area that lets someone change the website's words and images without touching code. WordPress, Shopify and Webflow are all content management systems.

A CMS is a genuine cost, not a free feature: it adds a login to secure, software to update, and a surface to attack. Worth it when content changes weekly. Rarely worth it for a five-page site whose hours change once a year.

A DNS record that points one domain name at another name rather than at an IP address.

This is what most hosting providers ask you to add when connecting a domain, because it lets them change the underlying servers without you touching your DNS again.

Google's three headline measurements of real-world page experience: LCP for loading, INP for responsiveness, and CLS for visual stability.

The set changes. First Input Delay was retired in March 2024 and replaced by INP. Any advice older than that which still talks about FID is out of date, which is a useful way to date the article you are reading.

How much time and how many requests a search engine is willing to spend fetching pages from your site.

Google's own guidance is that this is not something most sites need to think about — it becomes relevant above roughly a million pages, or for large sites that change constantly. For a local business site it is almost always a distraction.

Google's public dataset of real Chrome users' performance measurements, aggregated over a rolling 28-day window.

This is the data Google actually uses for the page experience signal, not your Lighthouse score. Because the window is 28 days, a fix you shipped last week will not show up yet.

The system that translates a domain name people can remember into the numeric address computers use.

DNS changes are cached, so they are not instant. Lowering the TTL a day before a planned move is the difference between a cutover measured in minutes and one measured in days.

The company you rent your domain name from, such as Namecheap, Cloudflare or IONOS. Separate from whoever hosts the website.

Keep the registrar account in the business owner's name and email, not an agency's. Domains held in a contractor's account are the single most common way a business loses control of its own website.

The four qualities Google's human quality raters are asked to assess when judging a page, with Trust the most important of the four.

Not a ranking factor, despite constantly being described as one. Raters do not change rankings directly; their scores are used to evaluate whether algorithm changes worked. The distinction matters because you cannot set an E-E-A-T dial, you can only be the kind of site raters would score well.

In Google Analytics 4, the share of sessions that lasted over ten seconds, triggered a conversion, or included at least two pageviews.

GA4 replaced the old bounce rate with this and then reintroduced bounce rate as its inverse. If someone quotes you a bounce rate from a GA4 property, it does not mean what it meant in Universal Analytics.

The small icon shown in a browser tab and in bookmarks.

Google shows it next to your result on mobile search. It is a small thing that is disproportionately visible, and a surprising number of small business sites still ship the default.

The free business listing that produces the map result, hours, photos and reviews panel in Google Search and Maps.

Renamed from Google My Business in 2021, so older guides use the old name. For most local service businesses this listing drives more calls than the website does, and it is free. Claim it before spending anything on ads.

The encrypted version of the web protocol. The padlock in the address bar means traffic between the visitor and the site cannot be read in transit.

Certificates are free and automatic through Let's Encrypt, and have been for years. Being charged a line item for an SSL certificate on a standard brochure site is a reasonable thing to question.

The step after crawling, where a search engine decides to store a page and make it eligible to appear in results.

Crawled is not indexed, and indexed is not ranked. 'Crawled — currently not indexed' in Search Console usually means Google fetched the page and judged it not worth storing, which is a content problem rather than a technical one.

A Core Web Vital measuring how quickly the page responds visually after a tap or click. Google treats 200 milliseconds or less as good and over 500 milliseconds as poor.

Replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024. It is stricter than FID because it measures every interaction across the visit, not just the first one.

A technique where pages are pre-built as static files but quietly rebuilt on a schedule, so visitors get static-file speed with content that still updates.

This is our default for pages that change occasionally, like a blog post or a location page. It is the reason a content edit can take up to an hour to appear rather than showing instantly.

The programming language that runs in the visitor's browser and makes a page interactive.

Search engines do execute it, but doing so costs them time and it is not guaranteed. Content that only exists after JavaScript runs is at a disadvantage compared to content present in the initial HTML.

A Core Web Vital measuring how long until the largest visible element finishes rendering. Google treats 2.5 seconds or less as good and over 4 seconds as poor.

Usually the hero image or headline. It is a better proxy for 'the page felt ready' than older metrics, because it measures the thing the visitor is actually looking at rather than an internal browser event.

Google's automated auditing tool that loads a page in a simulated environment and scores performance, accessibility, SEO and best practices out of 100.

Lab data, not field data. The score is a simulation on a throttled connection and moves several points between runs on identical code. Chasing a perfect 100 is a poor use of budget; Google ranks on CrUX field data, not on this number.

The block of three business listings with a map that appears near the top of Google results for searches with local intent.

Ranking here is driven mostly by your Google Business Profile, proximity to the searcher, and reviews — not by the same factors that rank your website. A business can own the local pack with a mediocre site, or have a beautiful site and be invisible in it.

The short summary tag for a page, often used as the grey text under the title in search results.

Not a ranking factor, and Google rewrites it most of the time to match the query. Still worth writing, because when it is used it decides whether anyone clicks.

Google's practice of using the mobile version of a page as the version it indexes and ranks.

Completed for all sites in 2023. Content that only appears on the desktop layout is, for practical purposes, content Google does not see.

Keeping your business name, address and phone number written identically everywhere they appear online.

The theory is that mismatches make it harder to confirm you are one business rather than several. Treat exact-match obsession with some scepticism — Google resolves entities better than it used to — but a wrong phone number on a directory is a real lost call regardless of any ranking effect.

A tag telling search engines not to include a page in results, even though they are allowed to fetch it.

The classic mistake is blocking a page in robots.txt and adding noindex at the same time. If crawlers cannot fetch the page, they never see the noindex, and the URL can persist in results anyway.

Tags that control the title, description and image shown when a link is shared on social platforms and in messages.

Without them, a shared link renders as a bare URL or picks an arbitrary image. Most platforms cache aggressively, so fixing a bad preview usually means clearing that platform's cache, not just changing the tag.

An instruction sending a visitor from one URL to another. A 301 declares the move permanent; a 302 declares it temporary.

Use 301 when retiring a URL for good, so ranking signals pass to the new address. Using 302 for a permanent move is the most common reason a site loses rankings after a redesign.

Building one site whose layout adapts to the screen it is viewed on, rather than maintaining a separate mobile site.

The settled default for well over a decade. If a proposal offers a separate mobile site as a paid add-on, that is a sign the underlying build is dated.

A file at the root of a domain telling automated crawlers which paths they may request.

It controls crawling, not indexing, and it is a request that only well-behaved crawlers honour. It is a public file, so it is the wrong place to list anything you want kept private.

Machine-readable data added to a page describing what it is — a business, an article, a person — using the shared schema.org vocabulary.

The rule that gets sites penalised is marking up content that is not visible on the page. Describing what a visitor can see is fine; inventing ratings or FAQs that appear nowhere is a manual-action risk.

Google's free tool showing which queries surfaced your site, which pages are indexed, and what technical problems Google found.

The only source of query data straight from Google. Any agency reporting on your search performance should be able to show you this, and you should own the property rather than being a guest on theirs.

A machine-readable list of the pages on a site that you want search engines to know about.

It helps discovery; it does not force indexing, and listing a page does not make it rank. A sitemap full of URLs that redirect or return errors is worse than a short accurate one.

The readable part of a URL that identifies one page, such as the last segment of /blog/why-your-site-is-slow.

Changing a slug changes the URL, which breaks every existing link to it unless you add a 301. Worth getting right at publish time rather than tidying later.

A site delivered as pre-built files rather than assembled by a server on each request.

Fast, cheap to host, and very hard to hack, because there is no database or admin login in the request path. The tradeoff is that content changes require a rebuild, which is what ISR exists to smooth over.

How long between requesting a page and the first byte of the response arriving.

Not a Core Web Vital, but it sets the floor for LCP: nothing can render before the response starts. A high TTFB usually points at slow hosting or an overloaded database rather than anything about the page's design.

How long a DNS record may be cached before it must be looked up again, in seconds.

Drop it to a few minutes a day before a migration and raise it afterwards. Attempting a cutover while a 24-hour TTL is still in force is how a move turns into a day of split traffic.

The W3C's international standard for making web content accessible, organised into three conformance levels: A, AA and AAA. Version 2.2 was published in October 2023.

Level AA is the benchmark referenced in most policy and litigation. For private US businesses there is no federal regulation naming a specific version, but courts and settlements routinely use WCAG AA as the yardstick, so it is the practical standard regardless. This is general information, not legal advice.

Work produced by one company and sold under another company's name.

Common in web design, and not inherently a problem — but it is worth asking directly who will actually build and maintain your site, because it determines who you can reach when something breaks at 6pm on a Friday.