SEO glossary in English and Arabic: 60 terms defined in two lines each

How to use this glossary

The terms are grouped into seven families by type of work, not alphabetically, so you can read a whole family when you read a report about it. The Arabic equivalent is given where a distinct Arabic term is in use, because most reports in the region mix the two languages in a single sentence.

The basics

SEO (السيو، تحسين محركات البحث). Search engine optimisation: making a site appear in organic results when someone searches for what it offers, with no payment per click.

SEM (التسويق عبر محركات البحث). In practice, paid advertising in search results. The difference is in SEO versus Google Ads.

SERP (صفحة النتائج). The page the engine shows after a search: organic results, ads, maps, video, and the AI Overview.

Keyword (الكلمة المفتاحية). What the searcher types into the box. In Arabic one intent has several forms: standard, dialect and Latin letters.

Search intent (نية البحث). What the searcher wants behind the words: to learn, compare, buy, or reach a specific site. A page answers the intent, not the keyword.

Long-tail keyword (الكلمة الطويلة). A specific multi-word phrase with small volume and clear intent: “cheap furniture movers in Riyadh” versus “furniture moving”.

Search volume (حجم البحث). The average number of monthly searches for a keyword in a given country. Tools round it into bands, and small numbers are common in the Gulf.

Keyword difficulty (صعوبة الكلمة). A tool’s estimate of how hard page one is for a keyword, based on the links of the ranking pages. A rough indicator, not a verdict.

Impressions (الانطباعات). How many times your page appeared in results, clicked or not. From Search Console.

Clicks and CTR (النقرات ونسبة النقر). How many people clicked your result, and their share of impressions. A good title and description raise it from the same position.

Ranking, position (الترتيب، المركز). Where your page sits among results for a given query. It varies by country, device and person, so there is no single “ranking”.

Organic traffic (الزيارات الطبيعية). Visitors who arrived from unpaid results.

Technical

Crawling (الزحف). The engine’s software visiting your pages, reading them and following their links. Googlebot is Google’s crawler.

Indexing (الفهرسة). The engine storing a page in its database after reading it. An unindexed page never appears.

robots.txt. A text file at the site root telling crawlers what they may visit. A wrong rule in it hides the site.

Sitemap (خريطة الموقع). An XML file listing the site’s pages for the engine. Submitted in Search Console.

noindex tag. A tag in a page asking the engine not to index it. Useful for thank-you and filter pages, catastrophic when left on the whole site.

Canonical (الرابط الأساسي). A tag telling the engine which is the original version of a page that has similar copies, such as a category page with different filters.

301 redirect (التحويل الدائم). Telling the engine and the browser that a page has moved permanently to a new URL, carrying its trust. Essential whenever any URL changes.

404 error. Page not found. Normal for a deliberately deleted page, a problem for a page that brought traffic.

hreflang. A tag linking the Arabic and English versions of the same page so the engine shows the right one to each searcher. It must be reciprocal. The guide is in the hreflang article.

x-default. Within hreflang: the version shown to anyone whose language matches none of the versions.

Core Web Vitals (مؤشرات الويب الأساسية). Three numbers for the speed experience: LCP time until the largest element appears, INP response time to a tap, CLS how much elements jump. In the speed article.

Structured data, schema (البيانات المنظمة، السكيما). Markup describing the page’s content type to the engine in a standard format, qualifying it for rich results. In the schema article.

Rich results (النتائج المنسقة). A result with extra elements: stars, prices, breadcrumbs, images.

Server-side rendering (العرض من الخادم). Sending the page with its full text in the HTML. Its opposite is drawing the text with JavaScript in the browser, which some crawlers do not see.

HTTPS. The encrypted connection with a security certificate. A basic requirement; its absence is a browser warning and a negative signal.

On-page

Title tag (عنوان الصفحة). The blue line in results and the browser tab. The most important on-page element.

Meta description (الوصف التعريفي). The two lines beneath the title in results. Affects clicks, not ranking.

H1 and headings (العنوان الرئيسي والترويسات). The page’s internal headings in hierarchical order. One H1; the rest are the searcher’s questions.

Alt text (النص البديل). A text description of an image for the engine and screen readers.

URL slug (الرابط اللطيف). The last part of the URL that names the page. Short, readable, stable.

Internal link and anchor text (الرابط الداخلي ونص الرابط). A link between two pages on your site, and the clickable words in it. In the internal linking article.

Duplicate content (المحتوى المكرر). The same text on more than one page or site. The engine picks one and ignores the rest.

Thin content (المحتوى الضحل). A page that says nothing worth indexing. Silently excluded.

E-E-A-T. Google’s quality framework: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. Not a single signal but a description of what the signals measure.

Featured snippet (المقتطف المميز). A passage from a page Google shows in a box at the top of results as a direct answer.

Off-page

Backlink (الباك لينك). A link from another site to yours. A trust signal weighted by its source. In the backlinks article.

Link building (بناء الروابط). The work of earning links from real sources. Not buying them.

nofollow and sponsored. Attributes on a link telling the engine not to treat it as a vote: the first general, the second for paid links.

Domain authority (سلطة النطاق). A number from a third-party tool estimating a site’s strength from its links. Not a Google number.

Manual action (الإجراء اليدوي). A penalty documented by a human reviewer at Google for a violation, shown in Search Console.

Disavow (أداة الرفض). A file telling Google to ignore specific links to you. Rarely needed.

Local

Google Business Profile (ملف النشاط التجاري على جوجل). The free listing you appear with on Maps and in “near me” results. In the profile article.

Local pack, map pack (صندوق الخرائط). The map with three businesses that appears at the top of results for a local search.

NAP (الاسم والعنوان والهاتف). Name, address and phone, which must match exactly across the profile, the site and every directory.

Service-area business (النشاط الذي يخدم منطقة). A business without premises that visits customers, and hides its address on the profile.

AI

GEO. Optimising your presence in the answers of generative answer engines. In the GEO article.

AI Overviews. The AI-generated paragraph at the top of Google results. AI Mode is the full conversational tab. In their article.

Answer engine (محرك الإجابة). ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini when they answer from sources they cite.

LLM (النموذج اللغوي). The language model behind answer engines.

AI crawlers (زواحف الذكاء الاصطناعي). GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and others. In the llms.txt article.

llms.txt. A proposed file summarising a site for models, used by no major engine to date.

Measurement and the market

Search Console. Google’s free tool for your site’s visibility data. Webmaster Tools was its old name. In its guide.

Keyword Planner (مخطط الكلمات الرئيسية). Google’s tool for search volumes per country.

Core update (التحديث الأساسي). A broad re-evaluation by Google of all sites, several times a year. In the traffic drop article.

Cannibalisation (التنافس الذاتي). Two pages on your site competing for the same query, so both lag.

Arabizi (العربيزي). Arabic written in Latin letters and numerals: “3ibaya”. A real search form in the Gulf.

MSA and dialect (الفصحى والعامية). The two forms of a word in Arabic search, often with different volumes.

Audit (التدقيق). A comprehensive examination of a site ending in an ordered plan. What it includes is in the audit article.

From the glossary to the decision

Knowing the term makes you a better buyer, and lets you read reports without an intermediary. What the glossary cannot give is judgement: which of these terms is your problem, and in what order. The Digital Presence Audit measures all of the above on your site and returns it in language management understands and a developer can act on, with no term left unexplained.