SEO & GEO
Search and generative-engine optimisation terminology, from crawl budget to EEAT.
Backlink
A backlink is a link from a page on one website to a page on a different website, used by search engines as one signal of the linked page's credibility and relevance.
Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the preferred version of a page, specified via a <link rel="canonical"> tag, that tells search engines which URL to treat as authoritative when duplicate content exists.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a defined set of metrics measuring real-world page loading speed, interactivity responsiveness and visual layout stability, used as one signal in search engine page-quality assessments.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the combination of crawl rate limit (how fast a search engine can fetch pages without overloading the server) and crawl demand (how many pages the engine wants to fetch based on perceived value) for a given site.
EEAT
EEAT is a quality assessment framework — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — used to guide how content, and the sites and authors producing it, are evaluated for credibility.
Featured Snippet
A featured snippet is a search result feature that extracts and displays a concise answer, list or table from a ranking page directly on the results page, above the standard list of links.
Generative Engine Optimisation
GEO is the set of editorial and technical practices that increase the likelihood a page is retrieved, quoted or cited by generative AI systems when they answer a user's question.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is the deliberate use of hyperlinks connecting pages within the same website, used to guide navigation, distribute authority and clarify the site's topical structure.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is the specific, standardised vocabulary of types and properties defined at schema.org, used to implement structured data in a form that major search engines have agreed to interpret consistently.
Search Intent
Search intent is the goal a searcher is trying to achieve with a given query, typically categorised as informational, navigational, commercial or transactional.
SERP
A SERP is the full page returned by a search engine in response to a query, comprising organic results plus any additional features such as ads, snippets, local packs or AI-generated summaries.
Structured Data
Structured data is content organised according to a predefined, standardised format so that machines — not just humans — can reliably identify what each piece of information means.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO covers the infrastructure-level factors — crawlability, indexability, site speed, structure and rendering — that determine whether search engines can access and understand a website at all.
Topical Authority
Topical authority is the accumulated signal, built through breadth and depth of coverage on a subject, that indicates a site is a reliable and comprehensive source on that topic.