Glossary

Algorithm

An algorithm is a mathematical formula or an operational programming rule to establish the position of a web page in the search results.

‘Alt’ attribute

It displays alternative text description for an image when a user hovers mouse over it.

Anchor text

This visible text in hyperlink allows user to move to other pages by clicking on it.

Ad Words

Cost-Per-Click based advertising introduced by Google.

Blog Farm

Collection or group of blogs purposely used for link building and populated by RSS-feed scripts.

Back Link

A link or number of links on web pages that point to the main or subject page

Bad neighborhood

A bad neighborhood over the internet is a website that uses prohibited or controversial tactics to rank its position in the search engines.

Bid management

Process to placing a bid price that a user wants to pay on a PPC search engine.

Bot

Software that’s generally used by the search engines for web spidering and webpage indexing.

Cache

Last recorded view of a webpage stored in the search engine’s database

Cloaking

A Black hat SEO technique where the content provided to the search engine spider is different from the information displayed to the user’s browser.

Black Hat SEO Tactics

This is best described as the use of “unfair” or unethical SEO techniques to drive results in search engine result pages among other things. However, mostly the traffic or artificial clicks gained from the use of black hat methods are extremely temporary.

Crawler

A software program that browse the websites in very orderly and automated fashion. Crawler also executes link analysis and HTML code validation functions.

Cross-linking

Term used when several sites are linked together in order to enhance the link popularity. Sometimes it’s also called interlinking.

CSS

Commonly known as Cascading Style Sheets. The most common application is used to format web pages written in HTML or XHTML.

Conversion rate

This is the rate at which a visitor converts in the potential customer

Directory

A website that acts as a repository of other website listings where the websites are listed in various categories. These directories are either free or paid.

Doorway pages

These are specially built pages meant to draw visitors to your website. These standalone pages work as a bridge between user and your website. Once the spider comes on the doorway page, it directly directs to the real website.

Description

The term refers Meta tag description in the head section of the page to describe primary purpose of the website. In other words, the term ‘description’ also refers to the full elaboration of your website segment during the directory submission.

Delisting

This is the scenario when web page(s) of a website are removed from search engine indexes or banned from for any such reason.

Graphical Search inventory

Advertisement units like banners, animations and browser toolbars that can easily be synchronized with the keywords, are known as the Graphical Search Inventory. This non-text based advertising medium depends on the manner in which content is displayed.

Google Bot

This Google’s search engine spider visits the links across the internet to feed pages to search engines index. As many quality links your website have, priority of frequent spider visit at your website increases.

Head

This is a section in your website where you can find the code that includes title for the webpage, keyword Meta tag, description Meta tag and robots tag. The section is invisible from general users.

Hidden Text

These are the text, made hidden by setting the font color of the text same as the background color of the page. It renders the text invisible unless user highlights it.

Indexing

The term indexing or search engine indexing refers to the collecting, parsing and storing data on the World Wide Web for accurate and easy retrieval.

Keyword

These are the words that describe the theme of the website or particular webpage. Keywords and keyword phrases are used in SEO process to optimize the web pages for high search engine rankings.

Keyword Density

Term depicts the availability of a given keyword in 100 words of text. It equals a keyword density of 1% .

Keyword Stuffing

The term refers as a controversial practice of adding extra keywords in the web page in order to make the page more visible to search engines.

Link Farm

Group of interlinked websites, set up intentionally to increase the link popularity to those sites. Engaging in link farming is prohibited by the search engine.

Link Building

Acquiring valuable links from external websites for web documents through request, referral or lease/purchase.

Link Popularity

It refers to the number of hyperlinks that point to a particular web page. This is a vital factor that determines the Page Rank of the page.

Longtail SEO

Long tail SEO is an attempt to bring together lower-volume and higher-converting keywords so as to build a major impact. The concept is especially devised to obtain relevant traffic from long search queries. These queries are focused and less frequently used by searchers in comparison to other primary search terms.

Meta Tags

These are special HTML tags that store the information about a webpage. Meta tags are not displayed in the web browser. It provides the information about the theme of the page, keywords of the page and description of the page.

Mirror

A mirror sites is the exact or identical copy of another website. Mirror sites are used to deliver multiple source of the same information.

Macro SEO

A group level search engine optimization technique to promote a number of websites together for one or more keywords.

Micro Website

A group level search engine optimization technique to promote a number of websites together for one or more keywords.

Offsite Optimization

A process to optimize and increase a website’s search engine rankings primarily with link exchange.

Optimization

A very popular process to tune up the website(s) to make it more visible in search engines for achieving high search engine rankings.

Outbound Link

These are the links on your website that point to other websites

PageRank

This is Google’s tool to evaluate every web page based on the number and quality of backlinks.

Pay per Click

A process used by prominent search engines where advertisers pay for their published ads on the websites when a user clicks on the add link.

Reciprocal Links

Term refers a process of link exchange between two sites to improve website’s search ranking on a search engine results page (SERP).

Redirects

A tactic to send a visitor to other webpage than the one that’s particularly explored by the keyword search in the search engine. The process is risky as search engine spider doesn’t follow the redirects sometimes.

Robots.txt

A set of instructions for spiders to allow or deny them indexing of website page(s).

Sandbox Effect

When Google systematically ignores new websites to be indexed for its competitive keywords and key phrases, the term is called Sandbox effect.

Search Engine Optimization

Very well-arranged technique to place appropriate title tags and Meta tags, and that the keywords in a page in order to obtain higher search engine rankings.

Search Engine Ranking Report

The report evaluates web page rankings by analyzing a range of keyword(s) in the major search engines.

Search Engine Result Page

It displays an indicative list of search results that are relevant to the keyword(s) or search phrases, user enter.

Search Engine Submission

A process to submit a website to search engines in order to allow them to list your website in their indices and search results .

Slurp

Crawler from yahoo. It crawls the World Wide Web and submits the content into the Yahoo search engine

Spider

A spider is an automated program that randomly visits the websites and reads entire content for making their entries in the Google search engine indices. In other terms, a spider is a robot used by search engines to list websites on the internet.

Spamming

In search engine terms, spamming is a tactic to repeat keywords or key phrases in the website to achieve higher ranking in the search engines.

Reporting search engine spam

This is the procedure to legitimately elude perverse or unfair competition from the search base. Searchers may report a website spam, if they find it irrelevant according to the related theme.

Secondary search engines

Secondary search engines are the topical and regional engines that target at smaller, more specific audiences. These search engines provide narrow and focused search results while searching for specific information.

Title Tag

Found in the ‘Head’ section of a Web page, this HTML tag is used to define the text that acts as the title of the search listings

Traffic

A collective amount of visitors that visit a website for their own purposes.

URL

Broadly known as ‘Uniform Resource Locator’ and is the address of a particular website on the internet. It starts with http://.

SEO Friendly URL

Creating SEO-friendly URLs is a time consuming technique, employed to open the website to a massive platform of relevant traffic.

White Hat SEO Tactics

Any SEO technique that complies with integrity and veracity of the website and follows the search engines guidelines is seen as a white hate search engine optimization tactic.

200

Status OK - The file request was successful. For example, a page or image was found and loaded properly in a browser. Some poorly developed content management systems return 200 status codes even when a file does not exist. The proper response for file not found is a 404.

301

Moved Permanently - The file has been moved permanently to a new location. This is the preferred method of redirecting for most pages or websites. If you are going to move an entire site to a new location you may want to test moving a file or folder first, and then if that ranks well you may want to proceed with moving the entire site. Depending on your site authority and crawl frequency it may take anywhere from a few days to a month or so for the 301 redirect to be picked up.

302

Found - The file has been found, but is temporarily located at another URI. Generally, as it relates to SEO, it is typically best to avoid using 302 redirects. Some search engines struggle with redirect handling. Due to poor processing of 302 redirects some search engines have allowed competing businesses to hijack the listings of competitors.

404

Not Found - The server was unable to locate the URL. Some content management systems send 404 status codes when documents do exist. Ensure files that exist do give a 200 status code and requests for files that do not exist give a 404 status code. You may also want to check with your host to see if you can set up a custom 404 error page which makes it easy for site visitors to • view your most popular and / or most relevant navigational options • report navigational problems within your site Search engines request a robots.txt file to see what portions of your site they are allowed to crawl. Many browsers request a favicon.ico file when loading your site. While neither of these files are necessary, creating them will help keep your log files clean so you can focus on whatever other errors your site might have.

Above the Fold

A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.

Absolute Link

A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links. Example absolute link Cool Stuff Example relative link Cool Stuff

AdCenter

Microsoft's cost per click ad network. While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft's limited marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity.

AdSense

Google's contextual advertising network. Publishers large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google.

AdWords

Google's advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google's ads are keyword targeted and sold on a cost per click basis in an auction which factors in ad clickthrough rate as well as max bid. Google is looking into expanding their ad network to include video ads, demographic targeting, affiliate ads, radio ads, and traditional print ads.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying independent agents on a cost per action (CPA) basis. Affiliates only get paid if visitors complete an action.

Age

Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents.

AJAX

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load.

Alexa

Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic.

AllTheWeb

Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features.

Alt Attribute

Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object.

AltaVista

Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare.

Analytics

Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site. Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not.

Anchor Text

The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor text. Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text. Example of anchor text: Search Engine Optimization Blog Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites.

API

Application Program Interface - a series of conventions or routines used to access software functions. Most major search products have an API program.

Arbitrage

Exploiting market inefficiencies by buying and reselling a commodity for a profit. As it relates to the search market, many thin content sites laced with an Overture feed or AdSense ads buy traffic from the major search engines and hope to send some percent of that traffic clicking out on a higher priced ad. Shopping search engines generally draw most of their traffic through arbitrage.

ASP

Active Server Pages - a dynamic Microsoft programming language.

Ask

Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they dumped Jeeves in early 2006. Their search engine is powered by the Teoma search technology, which is largely reliant upon Kleinberg's concept of hubs and authorities.

Authority

The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search engines. Five large factors associated with site and page authority are link equity, site age, traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content. Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority.

Automated Bid Management Software

Pay per click search engines are growing increasingly complex in their offerings. To help large advertisers cope with the increasing sophistication and complexity of these offerings some search engines and third party software developers have created software which makes it easier to control your ad spend. Some of the more advanced tools can integrate with your analytics programs and help you focus on conversion, ROI, and earnings elasticity instead of just looking at cost per click.