Short, practical definitions of the terms you'll meet when working on a website or e-shop. No academic jargon – just what each term means and why it matters for your business.
The set of website and content improvements that make pages rank higher in search results (Google, Bing). It covers site technology, content matching real queries and authority building. The result is traffic you don't pay for per click.
Search Engine Results Page. It contains paid links, the map pack, organic results and increasingly an AI overview. Your SERP position decides how many people reach your site.
Phrases people type into a search engine. The core of SEO strategy: every important phrase should have exactly one page on your site answering it. Search volume is measured with tools like Ahrefs.
Longer, more specific search phrases (“custom e-shop development price”) with lower volume but higher buying intent. They tend to be less competitive, so even a smaller site can win them.
The part of SEO that deals with machines rather than copy: loading speed, indexing, redirects, structured data, mobile rendering. When the technology is broken, even great content won't rank.
On-page is everything on your website (content, titles, structure, speed). Off-page is everything outside it – mainly backlinks and mentions that build your site's authority.
Links from other websites to yours. Search engines treat them as recommendations: the more trustworthy the sites linking to you, the more authority your site gains. Quality beats quantity.
The process by which a search engine stores a page in its database (index). A non-indexed page cannot appear in results no matter how good it is. Check indexing status in Google Search Console.
Three metrics Google uses to measure user experience: LCP (content display speed, target under 2.5 s), INP (interaction response, under 200 ms) and CLS (visual stability, under 0.1). Measured free via PageSpeed Insights.
The ratio of impressions in search results to actual clicks. Low CTR at a good position means your title and description don't attract – rewriting the snippet is the cheapest SEO fix there is.
Machine-readable markup that tells search engines what your content means (FAQ, service, business, review). It enables richer result displays and easier citation by AI search engines.
Optimization for AI search – ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity. It builds on classic SEO and adds emphasis on extractable facts, concrete prices, FAQs and brand building across the sources AI draws from.
A text file in the site root that gives AI crawlers a concise summary of what the site offers and for whom. A robots.txt counterpart for the language-model era – a cheap way to hand AI accurate information about your business.
A system for managing website content without touching code – e.g. WordPress, Sanity or the Shoptet admin. The choice of CMS affects site speed, security and maintenance costs.
A conversion is the action you want from a visitor: an inquiry, an order, a call. Conversion rate says what percentage of visitors take it. Traffic without conversions is just a number in a chart.
Markup that tells search engines which language versions of a page exist (e.g. Czech and English). Without it, a multilingual site may appear in results in the wrong language.
Missing a term, or want these concepts applied to your website? Start with the free SEO mini-audit or see the full SEO services.