301
A permanent server redirect. A change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file on apache servers. Also useful for dealing with canonical issues.
Adwords
Google Pay Per Click contextual advertisement program, very common way of basic website advertisement.
Affiliate
An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or commissions.
Algorithm
A program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given search query.
Alt Text
A description of a graphic, which usually isn’t displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is undeliverable, or a browser is used that doesn’t display graphics. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated picture. Special web browsers for visually challenged people rely on the alt text to make the content of graphics accessible to the users.
Analytics
A program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program.
Anchor Text
The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.
Back Link
Any link into a page or site from any other page or site (inlink, incoming link).
Black Hat SEO
Search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Blog
A website which presents content in a more or less chronological series. Content may or may not be time sensitive. Most blogs us a Content Management System such as WordPress rather than individually crafted WebPages. Because of this, the Blogger can chose to concentrate on content creation instead of arcane code.
Bot (Robot, Spider, Crawler)
A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.
Bread Crumbs
Web site navigation in a horizontal bar above the main content which helps the user to understand where they are on the site and how to get back to the root areas.
Canonical Issues
Canon = legitimate or official version – It is often nearly impossible to avoid duplicate content, especially with CMSs like WordPress, but also due to the fact that www.site.com, site.com, and www.site.com/index.htm are supposedly seen as dupes by the SEs – although it’s a bit hard to believe they aren’t more sophisticated than that. However these issues can be dealt with effectively in several ways including – using the noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the canon.
Cloak
The practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and caries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.
CMS Content Management System
Programs such as WordPress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so chose.
Content (Text, Copy)
The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.
Contextual Advertisement
Advertising which is related to the content.
Conversion
Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.
Conversion Rate
Percentage of users who convert – see conversion.
CPC (Cost Per Click)
The rate that is paid per click for a Pay Per Click Advertiser.
CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions)
A statistical metric used to quantify the average value / cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M – from the Roman numeral for one thousand.
Crawler (Bot, Spider)
A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.
Duplicate Content
Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any Trust from the search engines compared to the content that the SE considers being the original.
E-Commerce
A website devoted to retail sales.
Feed
Content which is delivered to the user via special websites or programs such as news aggregators.
Frames
A web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within it’s own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to correctly navigate them. Additionally, most users dislike frames because it is almost like having two tiny monitors neither of which shows a full page of information at one time.
Gateway Page (Doorway Page)
A web page that is designed to attract traffic from a search engine and then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page is not exactly the same as cloaking but the effect is the same in that users and search engines are served different content.
Googlebot
Google’s spider program.
GYM
Google – Yahoo – Microsoft, the big three of search.
Hub (Expert Page)
A trusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)
Directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.
Impression (Page View)
The event where a user views a webpage one time.
In Bound Link (Inlink, Incoming Kink)
Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
Indexed Pages
The pages on a site which have been indexed inside the search engines.
Inlink (Incoming link, Inbound Link)
Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
Keyword
Key phrase The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.
Keyword Cannibalization
The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.
Keyword Density
The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.
Keyword Research
The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.
Landing Page
The page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail Searches”. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail”. The significance is that it might be almost impossible to rank well for “mortgage”, but fairly easy to rank for “second mortgage to finance monster truck team”. Go figure.
Link
An element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page or another part of the current page.
Link Bait
A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media.
Link Text (Anchor Text)
The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.
Long Tail
Longer more specific search queries that are often less targeted than shorter broad queries. For example a search for “widgets” might be very broad while “red widgets with reverse threads” would be a long tail search. A large percentage of all searches are long tail searches.
Mashup
A web page which consists primarily of single purpose software and other small programs (gizmos and gadgets) or possibly links to such programs. Mashups are quick and easy content to produce and are often popular with users, and can make good link bait. Tool collection pages are sometimes mashups.
META Tags
Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.
Metric
A standard of measurement used by analytics programs.
MFA
Made For Advertisements – websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV programming is usually MFA.
Monetize
To extract income from a site. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetize a website.
Nofollow
A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link.
Noindex
A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link.
Non Reciprocal Link
If site A links to site B, but site B does not link back to site A, then the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of collusion between sites.
Organic Link
Organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.
Pagerank (PR)
A value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors. Often confused with Toolbar Pagerank.
Placement Ads
An ad placement is a specific group of ad units on which an advertiser can choose to place their ads using placement targeting. Ad placements can be as broad as an entire website or as specific as a single ad unit. Placements are made visible to advertisers in two ways:
One: Placements automatically created by our system. Each publisher website in the AdSense network is automatically made available to advertisers as a placement where they can target their ads. When advertisers target this type of placement, their ads may appear anywhere on the website.
Two: Placements defined by publishers. You have the ability to define your own ad placements using your custom channels. You choose how to group together specific ad units on your site that you want advertisers to be able to target. Common ways of grouping ad units into custom channels are by topic, ad format, or location on a page. When advertisers target publisher-defined ad placements, their ads may only appear in the specific ad units the publisher has selected.
Pay For Inclusion (PFI)
The practice of charging a fee to include a website in a search engine or directory. While quite common, usually what is technically paid for is more rapid consideration to avoid Googles prohibition on paid links.
Portal
A web service which offers a wide array of features to entice users to make the portal their “home page” on the web. IGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN are portals.
PPA (Pay Per Action)
Very similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversions.
PPC (Pay Per Click)
A contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.
Reciprocal Link (link exchange, link partner)
Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal and potentially incestuous nature.
Redirect
Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.
Robots.txt
A file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behavior of search engine spiders.
ROI (Return On Investment)
One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment, and thus cost / benefit of different schemes.
Sandbox
There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or exact behavior of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs.
Scrape
Copying content from a site, often facilitated by automated bots.
Search Engine (SE)
A program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.
S.E.M. (Search Engine Marketing)
Short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.
S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization)
Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favorably ranked by the search engine.
SERP
Search Engine Results Page.
Site Map
A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.
S.M.O. (Social Media Optimization)
Website or brand promotion through social media.
Sock Puppet
An online identity used to either hide a persons real identity or to establish multiple user profiles.
Social Media
Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.
Spider (bot, crawler)
A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.
Spider Trap
An endless loop of automatically generated links which can “trap” a spider program. Sometimes intentionally used to prevent automated scraping or e-mail address harvesting.
Splash Page
Often animated, graphics pages without significant textual content. Splash pages are intended to look flashy to humans, but without attention to SEO may look like dead ends to search engine spiders, which can only navigate through text links. Poorly executed splash pages may be bad for SEO and often a pain in the ass for users.
Splog
Spam Blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or made up of scraped content.
Static Page
A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.
Supplemental Index (supplemental results)
Pages with very low pagerank, which are still relevant to a search query, often appear in the SERPs with a label of Supplemental Result. Googles representative’s say that this is not indicative of a penalty, only low pagerank.
Text Link
A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.
Time On Page
The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of quality and relevance.
Toolbar Pagerank (PR)
A value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies page importance and is not the same as pagerank. Toolbar Pagerank is only updated a few times a year, and is not a reliable indicator of current status. Often confused with Pagerank.
Trust Rank
A method of differentiating between valuable pages and spam by quantifying link relationships from trusted human evaluated seed pages.
URL
Uniform Resource Locator – AKA Web Address.
User Generated Content (UGC)
Social Media, wikis, Folksonomies, and some blogs rely heavily on User Generated Content. One could say that Google is exploiting the entire web as UGC for an advertising venue.
Web 2.0
Is characterized by websites, which encourage user interaction.
White Hat SEO
Techniques which conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to unscrupulously “game” or manipulate SERPs.