IDF stands for "Inverse Document Frequency" and is a metric from search engine optimization and information retrieval. It measures how rarely a term appears across a collection of documents. The rarer a term, the higher its IDF – indicating greater relevance to a specific document. IDF balances WDF (Within Document Frequency) and together they form the basis of WDF*IDF analysis. This method helps optimize content by considering both the frequency and uniqueness of a term.