The Larkspur glossary
Short, plain answers to the words that come up in our posts. Pick a letter to jump to it.
A
- AI Overview
- An AI Overview is the answer Google's AI writes at the top of some results pages, with links to the pages it drew on.
- Anchor text
- Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link.
- Answer capsule
- An answer capsule is a short paragraph, about forty to sixty words, placed right under a heading that asks a question.
B
- Backlink
- A backlink is a link to your site from a page on another site. Search engines treat links from relevant, trusted sites as a sign that a page is worth showing.
C
- Canonical URL
- A canonical URL is the one address you want search engines to treat as the main version of a page when the same content can be reached at several addresses,…
- Content decay
- Content decay is the slow loss of search clicks a post suffers as its facts age, newer pages overtake it, or the question behind it changes.
- Content series
- A content series is a set of posts written to be read in order, such as a short course in three parts.
- Crawl budget
- Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine is willing and able to fetch from a site in a given time.
- Cumulative Layout Shift
- Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS, is one of the three Core Web Vitals.
E
- E-E-A-T
- E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
F
- Featured snippet
- A featured snippet is a short extract from one page that Google shows above or among the regular results, to answer a question directly.
H
- Hreflang
- Hreflang is an attribute that tells search engines which language, and optionally which region, a page is written for, and where its translations live.
I
- Information gain
- Information gain is what a page adds that the pages already ranking do not: a new number, a worked example, a first-hand test or a clearer method.
- Interaction to Next Paint
- Interaction to Next Paint, or INP, is one of the three Core Web Vitals.
K
- Keyword difficulty
- Keyword difficulty is a score that SEO tools give a search phrase to estimate how hard it is to reach the first page for it, usually from the links pointing at…
L
- Largest Contentful Paint
- Largest Contentful Paint, often shortened to LCP, is the time from the moment a reader asks for a page until the biggest image or block of text on the screen…
- Long-tail keyword
- A long-tail keyword is a specific search phrase that few people type each month, usually three words or more, such as "content calendar template for two…
N
- Noindex
- Noindex is a rule, set in a robots meta tag or an HTTP header, that asks search engines to leave a page out of their results.
O
- Orphan page
- An orphan page is a page that no other page on the same site links to.
P
- Pillar page
- A pillar page is the main guide on a broad subject, linked to and from a set of shorter posts that each cover one part of it in depth.
- Pillar post
- A pillar post is the one long post that covers a whole subject and links to every shorter post on its parts.
Q
- Query fan-out
- Query fan-out is the way AI search tools split one question into several related searches, run them all, and combine what they find into one answer.
R
- Robots.txt
- Robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch.
S
- Search intent
- Search intent is the goal behind a search: to learn something, to find a particular site, to compare options or to buy.
- Search volume
- Search volume is an estimate of how many times a phrase is searched in a month, usually averaged over a year.
- Structured data
- Structured data is code in a page, usually JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, that describes what the page is in a form machines can read: an article and…
T
- Title tag
- The title tag is the title element in a page's head.
- Topical authority
- Topical authority is how much a search engine trusts a site on one subject.
X
- XML sitemap
- An XML sitemap is a file that lists the addresses on a site you want search engines to find, often with the date each one last changed.