(Glossary)

The words, without the fog.

Our industry hides a lot behind vocabulary, some of it deliberately. These are plain definitions of the terms you will meet when buying or running a website, including the New Zealand specifics that overseas glossaries get wrong. 41 terms and counting.

Search & AI

SEO

SEO is the practice of making a website more likely to appear in unpaid search results for relevant queries.

AEO

AEO is the practice of making content likely to be retrieved and cited inside an AI-generated answer.

AI crawler

An AI crawler is an automated program that reads websites on behalf of an AI system, for search indexing, live user fetches, or model training.

Schema markup

Schema markup is code added to a page that describes the meaning of its content using the shared vocabulary published at schema.org.

Entity

An entity is a distinct thing a search or AI system recognises and holds information about, such as a specific company, person, product, or place.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is Google's framework of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust, used in its guidelines for assessing content quality.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the work of ensuring search engines can crawl, render, understand, and index a website correctly.

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which a search engine's bot discovers and downloads web pages; indexing is storing and organising what it found.

robots.txt

robots.txt is a file at a website's root that tells cooperating crawlers which parts of the site they may request.

Canonical tag

A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the preferred version of a page when the same content is reachable at several addresses.

301 redirect

A 301 redirect is a permanent instruction that a URL has moved, passing visitors and accumulated ranking signals to the new address.

XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file listing a website's important URLs to help search engines discover them.

Local SEO

Local SEO is optimisation for searches where the results depend on the searcher's location or a named place.

Backlink

A backlink is a link from another website to yours, historically one of the strongest signals of a site's standing.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed root-level file offering a curated, machine-readable map of a website's content for large language models.

Performance

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google's three metrics for real-world page experience: loading, responsiveness, and visual stability.

Largest Contentful Paint

Largest Contentful Paint measures the time until the largest visible element on a page finishes rendering.

Cumulative Layout Shift

Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much a page's content moves unexpectedly while it loads.

CDN

A CDN is a distributed network of servers that delivers a website's files from a location physically near each visitor.

Development

Headless CMS

A headless CMS stores and manages content but does not control how it is displayed, delivering it to any front end through an API.

Static site generation

Static site generation builds a website's pages into ready-made HTML files at build time rather than assembling them for each visitor.

Framework

A framework is a structured foundation of pre-written code that handles common application concerns so developers build features rather than plumbing.

API

An API is a defined interface that lets one piece of software request data or actions from another.

DNS

DNS is the system that translates a human-readable domain name into the numeric address of the server holding the website.

SSL certificate

An SSL certificate enables encrypted HTTPS connections, protecting data in transit between a visitor's browser and the website.

Web hosting

Web hosting is the service of storing a website's files on a server connected to the internet so visitors can reach them.

Design

WCAG

WCAG is the international standard defining how to make web content accessible to people with disabilities.

Web accessibility

Web accessibility is the practice of designing and building websites that people with disabilities can perceive, operate, and understand.

UX

UX is the overall experience a person has using a product, covering how easily and successfully they achieve what they came to do.

UI

UI is the visual and interactive surface of a product: the layout, typography, colour, and controls a person actually sees and touches.

Design system

A design system is a documented set of reusable components, patterns, and rules that keeps a product visually and behaviourally consistent.

Wireframe

A wireframe is a deliberately plain layout diagram used to agree structure and priority before visual design begins.

Commerce

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the proportion of visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or submitting an enquiry.

Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment is when a shopper adds items to an online basket but leaves without completing the purchase.

Payment gateway

A payment gateway is the service that securely transmits payment details from a website to the systems that authorise and settle the transaction.

PCI DSS

PCI DSS is the security standard governing how organisations that handle payment card data must protect it.

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