Glossary

Third-person rewrite of The Fundamentals of BrandSERPs for Business by Jason Barnard

Definitions of key terms used throughout this guide

Alt Tag: The alternative text for an embedded graphic. Screen readers use this for visually impaired users. Google uses it to understand the image. It is added in the HTML code.

Black Hat Tactics: Techniques designed to manipulate Google’s algorithms for artificial results. These are against Google’s guidelines and damage credibility. Avoid them at all costs.

Commercial Search: A search with clear purchase intent, such as “buy shoes.”

Crawlable: A condition where Google can access all important pages on a site via a logical path from the homepage.

Digital Ecosystem: The total online presence of a brand—website, social platforms, third-party mentions, reviews, and more.

E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—Google’s standard for evaluating brand credibility.

Informational Search: A search to learn more about a topic or brand. Users might search for a brand name to understand its offerings and credibility.

Knowledge Panel: A verified information panel that appears on the right on desktop or top on mobile when a user searches an entity.

Leapfrogging: Improving positive results that rank below negative results to push the negative content down the SERP.

Meta Title: The HTML title of a webpage, usually shown as the blue link in Google’s search results.

Meta Description: A short HTML summary of a webpage. Google may use it as the description below the title in search results.

Navigational Search: A search where the user is trying to navigate directly to a brand’s website.

Negative SEO: A deliberate attempt by a competitor to damage a brand’s search visibility or reputation.

“People Also Ask” (PAA) Panel: A Google feature listing related questions and answers, offering users information they didn’t explicitly search for.

Private Blog Networks (PBN): A network of sites created solely to link to and falsely boost the credibility of a target site. A common Black Hat strategy.

Rich Element: A multimedia or interactive feature in the SERP—e.g., Knowledge Panels, Video Boxes, Twitter Boxes.

Rich Sitelink: Enhanced sitelinks that include both a clickable link and a snippet of text.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): The practice of making content more appealing to search engines so they recommend it to users.

Semantic Triple: A grammatical construct of subject–verb–object used by algorithms to understand relationships in content.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page—the list of results shown after a query is entered into a search engine.

Siloing (Categorisation): Organising content by topic in a hierarchical structure to help Google understand relevance.

Sitelink: The links under a brand’s homepage result in a SERP that help users navigate to subpages directly.