Opsis Digital
Glossary

The shared language of digital growth.

From SEO to performance marketing, from content to AI visibility, we have gathered the terms you meet in our work and defined them plainly.

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A12 terms
Attribution
Deciding which touchpoints get credit for a conversion, and how much.
A/B test
Running two versions at once to see which performs better, with the traffic split at random.
Anchor text
The visible, clickable words in a link — a signal for what the linked page is about.
AI Overviews
Generated summaries shown above traditional results, assembled from sources the model considers reliable.
Audience segmentation
Splitting the market into groups that deserve different messages or different budgets.
ASO
Improving visibility and conversion inside the App Store and Google Play — keywords, creative, ratings and localisation, measured on installs that stay.
Allow Command
The robots.txt directive that permits crawling of a path, typically to carve an exception out of a broader block.
AMP
A restricted HTML framework that served pre-cached, very fast mobile pages.
Alt Text
The text alternative that describes an image to screen readers and to search engines.
Average Position
The mean position of a site’s results across the impressions it received.
Average Session Duration
The mean time visitors spend on a site per session.
Above The Fold
The part of a page visible before the visitor scrolls.
B11 terms
Bounce rate
The share of sessions that end without a second interaction.
Brand awareness
How many people in your category recognise you before they need you.
Backlink
A link from another site to yours — historically the strongest signal of authority in search.
Bid strategy
The rule set that decides what you offer in each auction, manual or automated.
Brand mention
Being named in an article or discussion, with or without a link back.
Breadcrumb
A trail of links showing where a page sits in the site hierarchy.
Blog Content
Articles published in a site’s editorial section to serve informational and commercial queries.
Brand Anchor Text
A link whose visible text is the brand name.
Broken Link
A link pointing at a URL that no longer returns a working page.
Black Hat Link Building
Acquiring links through tactics that violate search engine guidelines.
Black Hat SEO
Tactics that try to manipulate search results in ways search engines explicitly prohibit.
C42 terms
Conversion rate
The share of visitors who complete the action a page was built for.
CAC
Everything spent to win one paying customer, media and salaries included.
Crawl budget
How many pages a search engine is willing to crawl on your site in a given period.
Canonical tag
Markup that tells search engines which version of a duplicated page is the primary one.
Core Web Vitals
Google’s field measurements of loading, interactivity and layout stability, collected from real users rather than lab tests.
CPC
What you pay for one click, set by the auction rather than by your bid alone.
CPM
The cost of a thousand impressions — the currency of reach buying.
CPA
Media spend divided by the conversions it produced.
CTR
The share of impressions that turn into clicks — how compelling your listing, ad or result is once it has been seen.
Creative testing
Running variants of an ad against each other to find what actually earns attention.
Content pillar
A theme the brand intends to own, deep enough to carry a year of publishing.
Crawling
The process by which a search engine bot follows links and requests pages to discover what a site contains.
Crawl Depth
How many clicks a page sits from the home page, and therefore how easily a crawler reaches it.
Cloaking
Serving search engines different content from the content shown to visitors.
Client Side Rendering
Sending a near-empty HTML shell and building the page in the browser with JavaScript.
Critical Rendering Path
The sequence a browser must complete — HTML, CSS, layout, paint — before anything appears on screen.
Cache
Stored copies of a response, kept so the next request can be answered without rebuilding it.
CDN
A network of servers that delivers a site’s files from a location near the visitor.
CMS
The system editors use to create, edit and publish a site’s content.
Cookies
Small files a site stores in the browser to remember state between requests.
CSS
The language that controls how a page looks and is laid out.
CSS Sprite
Combining several small images into one file and showing parts of it with CSS positioning.
Code 200
The response saying the request succeeded and the content follows.
Code 301
A permanent redirect: this URL has moved for good and the new one should replace it.
Code 302
A temporary redirect: the resource is elsewhere for now, but this URL remains the canonical one.
Code 400
A bad request: the server could not understand what was asked of it.
Code 403
Forbidden: the server understood the request but refuses to serve it.
Code 404
Not found: there is no resource at this URL.
Code 410
Gone: the resource existed, has been removed deliberately, and is not coming back.
Code 500
An internal server error: the application failed while handling the request.
Code 502
Bad gateway: one server received an invalid response from another it depends on.
Code 503
Service unavailable: the server cannot handle the request right now, usually through overload or maintenance.
Code 504
Gateway timeout: a server waited too long for a response from an upstream service and gave up.
Code 509
Bandwidth limit exceeded: the hosting account has used its allowance for the period.
Country Code Top-Level Domain
A two-letter top-level domain assigned to a country, such as .tr, .de or .fr.
Commercial Intent
A query from someone who intends to buy but is still comparing options.
Category Content
The written content on a category or listing page that explains what the section covers.
Content Marketing
Winning attention and trust by publishing material an audience values, rather than by interrupting them.
Click
A visit that began with someone choosing your result on a search results page.
Conversion Rate Optimization
The practice of increasing the share of visitors who complete the action a page is built for.
Citation Flow
A Majestic metric estimating a site’s link influence from the quantity of links pointing at it.
Compound Anchor Text
An anchor combining a brand name with a keyword, such as “Opsis Digital SEO services”.
D11 terms
Digital PR
Earning coverage, mentions and links by giving publications and communities something genuinely new to report — data, research or a defensible point of view.
Disallow Command
The robots.txt directive that tells a bot not to crawl a path.
Dynamic Rendering
Serving a pre-rendered HTML version to crawlers while browsers run the JavaScript application.
DOM Content Loaded
The event fired when the HTML document has been parsed, without waiting for images and stylesheets.
Domain
The address people use to reach a site, and the boundary most search signals are measured within.
Domain Age
How long a domain has been registered.
Domain Authority
A third-party score estimating how likely a domain is to rank, based on its link profile.
Duplicate Content
The same or near-identical content available at more than one URL.
Direct Traffic
Visits analytics cannot attribute to a referrer, reported as if the visitor typed the URL.
Dofollow Link
A normal link with no rel attribute restricting it, so it passes authority to its destination.
Disavow File
A text file submitted to Google listing links you do not want counted towards your site.
E6 terms
Entity
A person, brand or concept a search engine recognises as a distinct thing rather than a keyword string.
Editorial calendar
The schedule of what gets published, by whom, and what each piece is meant to achieve.
Embargo
An agreement that a story will not be published before an agreed time.
Evergreen Content
Content that stays useful long after publication because the question it answers does not expire.
Exit Page
The last page a visitor viewed before leaving the site.
Exact Match Anchor Text
A link whose visible text is exactly the keyword the destination page targets.
F10 terms
Funnel
The path from first contact to purchase, split into stages you can measure separately.
First-party data
Data you collected yourself, with consent, from your own customers and site.
Frequency
How many times the average person in your audience saw the ad.
Featured placement
Being selected by store editors for a collection, story or front-page slot.
Featured Snippets
A short extract lifted to the top of results to answer a query directly.
First Contentful Paint
The moment the browser paints the first piece of content — text, image or canvas — on screen.
First Meaningful Paint
The point at which a page’s primary content becomes visible, rather than just its first pixel.
First Input Delay
How long a page takes to respond to a visitor’s first interaction.
FTP
A protocol for moving files between a computer and a server.
Fetch As Google
The former Search Console feature for fetching a URL as Googlebot; now part of the URL Inspection tool.
G10 terms
GEO
Making your brand the source AI assistants quote, using clear entity data, consistent facts and content a model can extract and attribute.
Guest post
An article written for someone else's publication, credited to an author from your team.
Googlebot
Google’s crawler: the software that requests pages, renders them and feeds the index.
Gzip Compression
Compressing text responses — HTML, CSS, JavaScript — before they travel over the network.
Generic Top-Level Domain
A top-level domain not tied to a country, such as .com, .net, .org or newer options like .app.
Google Analytics
The analytics platform most sites use to measure traffic, behaviour and conversions.
Google Tag Manager
A container that lets marketing teams deploy and manage tracking tags without a release.
Google Trends
A free tool showing relative search interest for a term over time and by region.
Google Business Profile
The free listing that controls how a business appears in Google Search and Maps.
Google Discover
The feed that surfaces content to users based on their interests, without a search query.
H8 terms
Hub and spoke
A content structure where one hub page links out to focused supporting pages on the same topic.
HTML Sitemap
A human-readable page that links to the important sections of a site.
Heading Tags
The H1–H6 elements that express the hierarchy of a page’s content.
Hreflang Tag
Annotations that tell search engines which language and region each version of a page is meant for.
Hosting
The service that stores a website’s files and answers requests for them.
Htaccess File
A per-directory configuration file on Apache servers, commonly used for redirects and access rules.
HTTP Status Codes
The three-digit codes a server returns with every response, saying what happened to the request.
Hidden Links
Links deliberately made invisible to visitors — same colour as the background, zero-size text, off-screen positioning.
I14 terms
Indexing
Whether a crawled page is actually stored and eligible to appear in results.
Internal linking
Links between your own pages, used to pass authority and signal topic relationships.
Impression share
How often your ad appeared compared with how often it was eligible to appear.
Install attribution
Deciding which campaign gets credit for an install, on platforms that deliberately limit tracking.
Index
The archive a search engine builds from crawled pages and serves its results from.
Image Sitemap
Sitemap entries that list the images a page contains so they can be discovered and indexed.
Image Compression
Reducing the file size of an image while keeping the quality a visitor actually perceives.
Image Resizing
Serving an image at the dimensions it is actually displayed at, rather than scaling a large file in the browser.
IP Address
The numeric address identifying a server or device on a network.
Informational Intent
A query made to learn something rather than to buy or to reach a specific site.
Image Title
The title attribute on an image, shown as a tooltip on hover.
Image Optimization
Preparing images so they load fast, describe themselves properly and can be found in image search.
Impression
One appearance of a result on a search results page a user viewed.
Infographic
A visual presentation of data or a process, designed to be understood quickly and shared.
J2 terms
Jump Link
An anchor link that moves a visitor to a specific section within the same page.
JavaScript
The language that adds behaviour to a page — and the most common reason content fails to be indexed.
K7 terms
Keyword cluster
A group of related queries served by one page or one set of connected pages.
Keyword field
The 100-character hidden field on the App Store that feeds search matching.
Keyword
A word or phrase a page is built to answer, chosen because people search for it.
Keyword Research
The work of finding what your market searches for, how often, and with what intent.
Keyword Density
How often a target term appears in a page relative to its total word count.
Keyword Stuffing
Repeating or hiding a term unnaturally in an attempt to manipulate rankings.
Keyword Cannibalization
Several pages on the same site competing for the same query, so none of them wins cleanly.
L14 terms
LTV
The margin a customer produces over the whole relationship, not just the first order.
Landing page
The page a campaign sends traffic to, built for one action rather than general browsing.
Lookalike audience
An audience the platform builds by finding people similar to a list you supplied.
Localisation
Adapting the listing for a market — language, examples, screenshots and keywords — rather than translating it.
Link earning
Getting links because a page deserves citing, rather than because you paid or traded for it.
Lazy Loading
Deferring the download of an image or component until it is about to enter the viewport.
Log File Analysis
Reading raw server records to see exactly which URLs bots and users requested, when and with what response.
Lighthouse
An open-source auditing tool that scores performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO in a lab environment.
Latent Semantic Indexing
A document-retrieval technique from the 1980s, often misquoted in SEO as a ranking method.
Long Tail Keywords
Longer, more specific queries with lower volume and usually clearer intent.
Link Juice
The informal name for the ranking value a link passes from one page to another.
Link Farm
A site or network of sites that exists mainly to host links to other sites.
Link Bait
Content created specifically because people in a field will want to reference it.
Local SEO
Work aimed at visibility in searches with a location attached, and in map results.
M4 terms
Media list
The vetted set of journalists, newsletters and communities a story is offered to.
Meta Description
The page summary a search engine may show beneath the title in results.
Meta Keywords
A meta tag that once listed a page’s target keywords for search engines.
Money Anchor Text
An anchor containing the commercial terms the destination page sells on.
N8 terms
Newsjacking
Adding a useful expert angle to a story that is already running.
News Sitemap
A sitemap limited to articles published in the last two days, used to surface fresh content quickly.
Noindex Tag
A meta robots directive telling search engines to keep a page out of the index.
Navigational Intent
A query aimed at reaching a specific site or page the searcher already has in mind.
New Users
Visitors analytics has not seen before, identified by a first-party identifier.
Nofollow Tag
A rel attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through a link.
Naked Link
A link whose anchor text is the URL itself.
Negative SEO
Deliberate attempts to damage another site’s search performance.
O5 terms
Outreach
Contacting editors, writers and community owners to place a piece of work with them.
Original data
A finding only you can publish, drawn from your platform, customers or operations.
On Page SEO
Everything on the page itself that affects how it is understood and ranked: content, titles, structure, links and markup.
Organic Traffic
Visits that arrive from unpaid search results.
Other Anchor Texts
Anchors that are neither brand nor keyword — “click here”, “this study”, “read more”.
P10 terms
Pitch
The short message that offers a story to a specific journalist or editor.
Pagination Tags
The markup and links that connect a sequence of pages in a list or archive.
Protocol
The rules governing how a browser and a server exchange requests and responses — HTTP and its successors.
Proxy
An intermediary server that makes requests on a client’s behalf.
Pop-up
An overlay shown on top of page content, usually to capture an email or announce an offer.
PageSpeed Insights
Google’s tool reporting both lab measurements and real-user field data for a URL.
Pogo Sticking
When a searcher clicks a result, returns to the results page almost immediately, and clicks another.
Paid Traffic
Visits that arrive from advertising rather than from unpaid results.
Pages / Session
The average number of pages a visitor views in one session.
PageRank
Google’s original algorithm for scoring a page’s importance by the links pointing at it.
Q3 terms
Qualified lead
A lead that meets the criteria sales agreed to — the metric performance media should optimise to.
Quality Score
The platform's estimate of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to each other.
Qualified install
An install that leads to real use — typically opening the app more than once.
R11 terms
Retargeting
Showing ads to people who already visited, usually the cheapest and most over-credited spend in an account.
Robots.txt
A file at the root of a domain telling crawlers which paths they may request.
ROAS
Revenue attributed to advertising divided by what the advertising cost.
Retention (app)
The share of installs that keep using the app after a defined period, e.g. day 7.
Ratings and reviews
The star average and written feedback shown on the store page.
Rich Snippets
Search results enhanced with extra detail — ratings, prices, availability — drawn from structured data.
Redirect Chain
A URL that redirects to another URL that redirects again before reaching the final destination.
Redirect Loop
Two or more URLs that redirect to each other endlessly, so no page is ever served.
Rank Tracker
A tool that checks and records where a site ranks for chosen keywords over time.
Referring Domains
The number of distinct websites linking to a site, regardless of how many links each one contributes.
Ranking Factor
Any signal a search engine uses when deciding the order of its results.
S27 terms
SEO
Earning organic visibility through technical health, content architecture and authority — traffic you do not pay for per click.
SERP
Everything a query returns — organic results, ads, and whatever features sit above them.
Search intent
What the person actually wants when they type the query — to learn, to compare, or to buy.
Schema markup
Structured data that describes your content so engines and assistants can interpret it accurately.
Share of citation
How often your brand is quoted in generated answers compared with competitors.
Sitemap
A machine-readable list of the URLs you want crawled, with their last modified dates.
Server-side tracking
Sending conversion events from your own server instead of relying on the browser.
Store listing
The product page inside the App Store or Google Play: title, subtitle, icon, screenshots, video and description.
Screenshot narrative
The order and captions of store screenshots, read as a sequence rather than a gallery.
Store experiment
A split test run inside the store itself, on real store traffic.
Store conversion rate
The share of store page visitors who install.
Sitemap Directive
The robots.txt line that points crawlers at the site’s XML sitemap.
Sitelinks
The additional links shown beneath a result, pointing at sections of the same site.
Search Query
The exact words a person types or speaks into a search engine.
Search Operators
Special commands that narrow a search — site:, inurl:, intitle: and the rest.
Soft 404
A page that says nothing was found but answers with a 200 status code.
Server Side Rendering
Building the HTML on the server so the browser receives a complete page.
Site Speed Optimization
The work of reducing how long a page takes to become visible and usable.
SSL Certificate
The certificate that lets a site serve traffic over an encrypted HTTPS connection.
Subdomain
A separate host under the same domain, such as blog.example.com.
Subfolder
A directory within a domain’s path, such as example.com/blog.
Short Tail Keywords
One- or two-word queries with high volume and broad, ambiguous intent.
Search Console
Google’s free tool reporting how a site performs in search and how Google sees it.
SEO Visibility
A vendor index estimating how visible a domain is across a tracked set of keywords.
Session
A group of interactions one visitor has with a site within a given time window.
Sponsored Tag
The rel value marking a link as an advertisement, sponsorship or other paid placement.
Spam Link
An artificial or manipulative link created to influence rankings rather than to help a reader.
T9 terms
Technical SEO
The engineering half of organic: crawling, rendering, speed, status codes and migration safety.
Thought leadership
Publishing a position your competitors avoid, under a named author who can defend it.
Title Tag
The HTML element that names a page, shown as the headline of a search result and in the browser tab.
Time to First Byte
The delay between requesting a page and receiving the first byte of the response.
Third Party Resources
Scripts, fonts, widgets and pixels loaded from domains you do not control.
Transactional Intent
A query made with the aim of completing a purchase or sign-up now.
Thin Content
A page that adds little for the visitor beyond what is already available elsewhere.
TF-IDF
A statistical weight for how distinctive a term is in one document compared with a wider collection.
Trust Flow
A Majestic metric estimating how trustworthy a site’s link profile is, based on proximity to known-good sources.
U7 terms
UTM parameters
Tags appended to a link so analytics can tell where a visit came from.
User Agent
The identifier a client sends with every request, and the robots.txt line that names which bot a rule applies to.
URL
The unique address of a page or file on the web.
URL Shortening
Replacing a long address with a short one that redirects to it.
User Comments
Reader-contributed text published under a page’s main content.
UGC Tag
The rel value for links inside content contributed by users — comments, forum posts, profiles.
User Experience
How easily and pleasantly a person can do what they came to a site to do.
V2 terms
Video Sitemap
Sitemap entries describing the video on a page: its title, thumbnail, duration and file location.
VPN
An encrypted tunnel that routes a device’s traffic through a network in another location.
W4 terms
WebP
An image format that produces noticeably smaller files than JPEG or PNG at comparable quality.
WebM
An open media format that keeps video and audio files considerably smaller than common alternatives.
Whois
The public record of a domain’s registration: registrar, dates and, where not redacted, the owner.
WordPress
The most widely used content management system, extended through themes and plugins.