Search Engine Optimization

The short text that stands in for an image for people who can't see it, read aloud by screen readers and shown when images fail, which works best when it describes what the image is for rather than what it looks like.

The automatically-derived list of pages linking to the current one.

any headline phrased as a question can safely be answered "no".

A website of dated posts shown newest first, named in 1997 and made easy by tools like Blogger and WordPress, which turned personal publishing into a mass habit before social networks absorbed much of it.

The one preferred address for a page that's reachable at many, declared so search engines and other tools treat the copies as a single page, a hint introduced by the major search engines together in 2009.

Google's small set of user-centered performance metrics: loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

Linking straight to a specific page or item rather than a site's front door, once fought over in court and now a feature that apps and web apps must work to support.

A metadata block at the top of a text document, separated from the body by delimiters.

A content system exposing structured data through an API, with presentation left entirely to consumers.

The three-digit number at the start of every HTTP response that tells the client, caches, crawlers and monitoring what happened, grouped into five classes by the first digit.

Serving a cached static page while regenerating it in the background after a chosen interval.

How information is organized, labeled, and navigated so people can find what they need.

Information modeled as entities and the typed relationships between them.

A plain-text formatting syntax designed to be readable as written, now the default for technical writing.

The meta tags a page uses to describe its own preview card when a link is shared, how chat apps and social networks fetch them, and why a preview shows only what the page claims about itself.

The rules for when a browser tells a site which page a visitor came from, a header misspelled in the 1990s that leaked private addresses for decades until browsers began trimming it by default.

A syndication format letting readers subscribe to a site without an intermediary.

Using elements for their meaning, so the document conveys structure without extra description.

Producing a page's HTML on the server so the first response is already content.

A web app that loads one HTML page and then rewrites it with JavaScript as the user navigates, trading a slower, heavier first load for app-like transitions afterwards.

A list of a website's pages, either drawn for people as a map of its structure or published as an XML file that tells search engines what exists and when it last changed.

The short, readable, hyphenated part of a URL that names a page, borrowed from newsroom jargon, simple to generate and surprisingly hard to keep stable once other people link to it.

Rendering every page to a file at build time, so serving is just handing over bytes.

Machine-readable markup describing what a page is about, in a shared vocabulary.

The address format that names every resource on the web, its parts from scheme to fragment, and why parsing one correctly is harder and more security-relevant than it looks.

A program that discovers the web by fetching pages and following their links, the machinery behind search engines and training datasets, and the voluntary etiquette that governs it.

A system that crawls the web, indexes what it finds, and ranks pages in answer to typed queries, the main way people have found things online since the late 1990s and one of the largest advertising businesses ever built.

A note-taking method built on small single-idea notes linked to one another.