SEO & GEO glossary

71 definitions of the vocabulary you will hear in a pitch, an audit or a reporting meeting — from crawl budget to AI Overviews. Every entry answers the question first, then explains why it matters and what it changes in practice.

All Fundamentals Technical SEO Content Links & authority Local SEO Measurement AI search & GEO Buying SEO

C

Content pruning

Content pruning is the deliberate removal, merging or redirection of pages that attract no traffic and no links, to concentrate quality signals on what remains.

D

Doorway page

A doorway page exists mainly to rank for a location or keyword variant and funnels every visitor to the same generic destination. Google's guidelines name it as a violation.

H

H1 and heading structure

Headings organise a page into a hierarchy: one H1 stating what the page is about, then H2s and H3s for its sections. They aid both accessibility and machine comprehension.

I

Internal linking

Internal linking is the network of links between a site's own pages. It distributes authority, defines hierarchy and is the cheapest ranking lever most sites never pull.

K

Keyword cannibalisation

Cannibalisation happens when several pages on a site compete for the same query, splitting links, impressions and relevance signals so that none of them ranks as well as one page would.

M

Meta description

The meta description is a short summary in the HTML head. It is not a ranking factor, but it frequently becomes the snippet under the title and therefore influences clicks.

T

Title tag

The title tag is the page's headline in the HTML head. It is the strongest on-page relevance signal and the text most often used as the clickable link in results.

Topical authority

Topical authority is the depth and coherence of a site's coverage of a subject. Covering a topic comprehensively, and linking that coverage together, helps every page in the cluster.