SEO Internet Marketing Glossary

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION GLOSSARY OF TERMSShown below is a useful glossary of common terms used in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Internet Marketing industry.
301 Redirect :: A permanent server redirect of a web page address often found in the htaccess file on apache servers, or within server side scripts.  Also useful for dealing with duplicate content issues.

Adwords :: Google's pay per click contextual advertisement program, a common way of basic website monetization and advertisement.

Affiliate :: An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold and delivered by another website or business in exchange for a commissions or other benefits.

Algorithm (algo) :: A system used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest, and in what order, for a given search term or query.

Alt text :: A text description of a graphic, usually not shown to the end user, unless the image is not available, or a browser is used that does not support images.  Alt text is important because search engines cannot read images and rely on this text to obtain an accurate description for the graphic object. 

Analytics :: A program that assists webmasters in gathering and analyzing data about website usage and trends. Google analytics is a feature rich, free analytics program.

Anchor text :: The visible, clickable text of a web page link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring website, and the link to the content on the target page. Ideally all three will have some keywords in common.

Authority (trust, link juice) :: The amount of trust that a website is given for a particular search term or query. Authority is derived largely from related incoming links from other trusted authority sites.

Authority site :: A website that has many incoming links from other related hub sites. Because of this simultaneous citation from trusted expert sites and hubs, an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank, and search results placement. 

Backlink (back link, incoming link) :: Any incoming link to a page or website from any other page or site.

Black hat :: Non-ethical search engine optimization techniques that are counter to establish best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Link spam and keyword stuffing are good examples.

Blog (weblog) :: A website that often presents content in a chronological way. Content may, or may not, be time sensitive. Most blogs use a Content Management System rather than individually crafted pages. Because of this, the Blogger can concentrate on content creation 
instead of coding.

Bot (robot, spider, crawler) :: A program or application that performs a task autonomously. Search engines use bots to find, read and add web pages to their indexes. 

Bounce rate :: The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.

Bread crumbs (breadcrumbs) :: A type of web site navigation, usually in a horizontal bar above the main content, that helps the user to understand where they are in relation to other pages on the site.

Canonical issues (duplicate content) :: It is often nearly impossible to avoid duplicate content, especially with the use of CMSs, but also due to the fact that www.xyz.com, xyz.com, and www.xyz.com/index.htm are often seen as duplicates by the SEs. These issues can be dealt with in several ways including; the use of the noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the master.

Click fraud :: Clicks on a PPC ad, usually by the publisher or his friends, for the purpose of undeserved profit. 

Cloak :: Delivering different content to a search engine spider than a human user. This black hat technique is frowned upon by the search engines, and where detected could result in a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned fro SERPs.

CMS :: Content Management System - Programs such as Wordpress, which separate most of the Webmaster tasks like coding from content creation so that a publisher can create content without acquiring any specialist coding skills.

Code swapping (bait and switch) :: Changing the page content after a  high search engine ranking is achieved.

Comment spam :: Posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an link to another site. The reason many blogs now use nofollow links.

Content (text, copy) :: The part of a web page that is intended to have value for the end user. Ads, navigation, headers, footers and branding  are not usually considered as content.

Contextual advertisement :: Advertising that is related to the topic of the page content in which it is shown.

Conversion (goal) :: Achievement of a specific goal on a website. Ad clicks, sign-ups, and sales are examples of conversions.

Conversion rate :: Percentage of users that convert - See conversion.

CPC :: Cost Per Click - the rate that is paid per click on a Pay Per Click Advertisement.

CPM :: Cost Per Thousand impressions - A metric used to quantify the average value and cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. 'M' taken from the Roman numeral for one thousand.

Crawler (bot, spider) :: A program that navigates through the web, or a website, using links to gather data on the content it encounters.

Directory :: A site devoted to directory listing pages. The Yahoo directory and DMOZ (open directory project) are examples.

Directory page :: A page containing links to related or categorized  web pages and websites.

Doorway (gateway) :: A web page that is designed specifically to attract high levels of traffic from a search engines.  

Duplicate content :: Content that is similar, or identical to, the content found on another website or web page. A site serving duplicate content may well receive little, if any, trust from search engines compared to the content that the SE considers to be the original.

E-commerce site :: A website devoted to online retail sales.

Feed :: Content that is delivered to the user via special websites or programs such as news readers.

FFA (Free For All) :: A website with many outgoing links to unrelated sites, that contain little, if any, unique content. Only intended for spiders, and have little value to human users, and so are often ignored or penalized.

Frames :: An outdated web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within it’s own space or 'frame'. Frames are not so good for SEO purposes because spiders often fail to correctly navigate and index sites with this structure. 

Gateway page (doorway page) :: A web page that is designed to attract traffic from search engines and then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page is not identical to cloaking, but the effect is the same in that end users and search engines are served different 
content.

Gizmo (gadget, widget) :: A small application used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter. Gizmos can make good link bait.

Google bomb :: The combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the search results, usually for humorous effect. The “miserable failure” - George Bush, is a famous example.

Google bowling (negative SEO) :: Maliciously trying to lower a web site rank of a competitor by sending it links from a “bad neighborhood”. There is some controversy over negative SEO and if this actually works.

Google dance :: 1) The change in SERPs position caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. A cause of great angst for many webmasters who slip in the SERPs. 2) The period during a Google update when different data centers hold different data.

Google juice (trust, authority, pagerank) :: Trust / authority from Google, that flows through outgoing links and passed on to other web pages.

Googlebot :: Google’s web page spider program for crawling websites and indexing web pages.

GYM :: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the top three major search engines.

Hub (expert page) :: A trusted page with high quality topical content that links to other quality related pages.

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) :: Embedded directives or “markup” which are used to add special web formatting and functionality to plain text for use as pages on the internet. 

Impression (page view) :: The event where an individual user views a webpage a single time.

Inbound link (inlink, incoming link) :: Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank and important in terms of search engine optimization.

Index (Noun) :: A database of web pages and their associated content used by a search engine.

Index (Verb) :: To add a web page or resource to a search engine index.

Indexed pages :: The pages on a website that have been indexed.

Keyword (key phrase) :: The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine to find relevant results.

Keyword cannibalization :: The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This makes it difficult for end users and the search engines to determine what page is most relevant for a particular keyword.

Keyword density :: Represents the percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized for keyword stuffing.

Keyword research :: The hard work of determining what keywords are appropriate, and most effective for targeting a particular website.

Keyword spam (keyword stuffing) :: Inappropriately high keyword density.

Landing page :: The page that a search engine user lands on when they click on a link within a SERP.

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) :: This just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a page or document. SEOs refer to these groups of terms as “Long Tail Keywords”.  Most searches consist of at least three or more words strung together 
as a phrase. See also “Long tail”.  

Link :: An element on a web page that may be clicked on to cause the browser to navigate to another page, or another part of the current web page.

Link bait :: A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often via social media.

Link building :: The task of actively cultivating new incoming links to a web site or page in order to improve rankings.

Link condom :: Any of several methods used to avoid passing link juice to another website or web page, to avoid detrimental results of endorsing a bad website by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content and comments.

Link exchange :: A reciprocal linking scheme often used by directories. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of little or no quality, and add no value themselves. Quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.

Link farm :: A group of websites that all link to each other.

Link juice (trust, authority, pagerank) :: A google assigned value passed to an outgoing link.

Link love :: An outgoing link, which is allowed to pass trust and page rank, without any type of link condom.

Link partner (link exchange, reciprocal linking) :: Two separate sites which link to each other in a mutual fashion. Search engines usually wont see these links as high value, because of their reciprocal nature.

Link popularity :: A measurement of the value of a site based upon the number and quality of websites that link to it.

Link spam (comment spam) :: Unwanted links such as those posted in user generated content like blog comments and forum posts.

Link text (anchor text) :: The user visible text of a hyperlink. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and the content on the landing page. Ideally all three should 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 “blue widgets with round ends” would be a long tail search. A large percentage of searches are long tail.

Mashup :: A page that consists primarily of single purpose software and other small programs (gizmos and gadgets), or possibly links to such programs. Mashups are quick and easy to produce and are often popular with users, making them ideal link bait. 

META tags :: Entries within the HEAD section of an HTML page that provide information about the page contents. META information may be in the SERPs but is not usually 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 the topic of a page. 

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 placing advertisements.

Mirror site :: An identical site with identical content located at a different web address.

Monetize :: To extract income from a web site using advertising, affiliate programs, direct sales etc. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetize a website.

Natural search results (organic) :: The standard search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.

Nofollow :: The 'nofollow' command is 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. A form of link condom.

Noindex :: The 'noindex' command is found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, that instructs robots to not index a web page or the specific link. A form of link condom.

Non reciprocal link :: If website A links to website B, but B does not link back to A, then it is considered a non reciprocal link. 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 the two sites.

Organic link :: Organic links are those that are natural and published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.

Outlink :: An out going link to another external website.

Pagerank (PR) :: A value assigned by the Google algorithm that represents link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) ranking factors. 

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 paid for is faster consideration and inclusion, to avoid Googles ban on paid links.

Portal :: A website or service that offers a wide range of features and benefits to entice users to make the portal their “home page”. Yahoo, and MSN are examples of web portals.

PPA (Pay Per Action) :: Similar to Pay Per Click (PPC) except publishers only get paid when a click through results in certain actions or result in conversions.

PPC (Pay Per Click) :: A advertising scheme where advertisers pay ad agencies when a unique end user clicks on their ad. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

Proprietary method (bullshit, snake oil) :: A sales term often used by SEO service providers to imply that they can do something unique to achieve “Top 10 Rankings” in SERPS (only the CEO of Google could make such a claim). 

Reciprocal link (link exchange, link partner) :: Two websites that mutually link to one another. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links, due to the reciprocal nature.

Redirect :: Any one of several methods used to change the web address of a web page, such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway page.

Regional long tail (RLT) :: A multiple word keyword phrase that contains a city or region name. Especially useful for SEO in the service industry.

Robots.txt: :: A file named 'robots.txt' located in the root directory of a website, used to restrict and control the behavior of search engine spiders and robots.

ROI (Return On Investment) :: One use of web analytics software is to analyze and quantify your return on investment, and so the cost and benefit of different marketing efforts.

Sandbox :: There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for any search terms until a set period of time has passed. 

Scrape :: The act of copying content (scraping) from another website, often facilitated by automated bots.  

SE :: Search Engine

Search engine (SE) :: An application that searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches for a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant results.

Search engine spam :: Web pages designed to cause search engines to deliver less relevant results. SEOs are sometimes unfairly labeled as search engine Spammers. Of course, in some cases they actually are.

SEM :: Search engine marketing - Often used to describe acts associated with the researching, submitting and ranking of a Website within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of the site. SEM includes things tasks like search engine optimization, paid listings and other search related functions that will increase traffic to your Web site.

SEO :: Search engine optimization - The process of increasing the traffic (visitors) to a website by achieving high ranking in the search results pages. The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is search engine friendly and improves the chances that the site will be favorably ranked.

SERP :: Search Engine Results Page. The results shown to a user after entering a keyword phrase or search term.

Site map :: A page (or group of pages) that link to all accessible pages on a website, clarifying the data structure for the site users. An XML sitemap is also often located in the root directory of a site to help search engines find and index all pages on a site.

SMM (Social Media Marketing) :: Website, business or brand promotion through social media sites such as twitter and facebook.

Social bookmark :: A form of Social Media where a user can bookmark sites and these are made available for public access.

Social media :: Online sources 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.

Social media marketing (SMM) :: Website, business or brand promotion conducted via social media websites.

Spammer :: A person or body that uses spam techniques to pursue a goal.

Spider (bot, crawler) :: A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.

Splash page :: Graphical pages without any significant text content. Splash pages are intended to look good to real people but without attention to SEO may look like dead ends to search engine spiders that only read text and links.

Static page :: A web page with no dynamic content or variables like session IDs within the URL. Static pages are good for SEO purposes as they are very friendly to search engine spiders.

Stickiness :: Mitigation of bounce rate. Website changes that entice users to stay on the site for longer, and view more pages, improve the sites “stickiness”.

Submission :: The act of submitting or suggesting a website or web page(s) for inclusion in a search engine indexes or directories.

Supplemental index (supplemental results) :: Pages with very low pagerank, but are still relevant to a search query, often appear in the SERPs with a label of Supplemental Result. 

Text link :: A plain HTML link that does not involve graphics or special code such as Javascript.

Time on page :: The amount of time that a user spends on a single web page before moving away. Can be an indication of quality and relevance.

Toolbar pagerank (PR) :: A value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, that quantifies a pages importance and is not the same as pagerank. Toolbar Pagerank is only updated a several times a year, and is not a reliable indicator of overall trust or authority. 

Trust rank :: A method of differentiating between pages with value and spam pages by quantifying link relationships from trusted human vetted seed pages.

URL :: Uniform Resource Locator - The full address of a web page or resource (as seen in the address bar of a web browser).

User generated content (UGC) :: Social Media, wikis, forums and some blogs rely heavily on User Generated Content. 

Web 2.0 :: Characterized by websites that encourage user interaction.

White hat :: SEO techniques that conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to game or manipulate SE result pages.

Widget :: 1) (gadget, gizmo) small programs used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter. 2) a term borrowed from economics which means “any product or commodity”.



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