SEO Glossary of Terms
Here is a list of common terms used in SEO.#
301 Redirect: A server redirect that is permanent; this means that instead of the original webpage displaying for a specified URL, another of your choice in a separate location will load.
A
Adwords: This contextual advertisement, Google Pay-Per-Click, is a basic and popular way to set up advertisements on sites with similar content.
Affiliate Marketing: A marketing program in which an advertiser pays an affiliate for driving traffic to their site. The affiliate gets paid a fee or commission based on a predetermined ‘event,' such as an order or lead.
Algorithm (algo): Search engines use algorithms in order to decide what pages to list for a search.
Alt Tag: An HTML description added to online images (usually within the IMG tag) to provide alternate text when images cannot be displayed online. Alt tags also ensure that search engines are able to recognise the content contained in each image.
Alt Text: A written description of a picture or graphic. The alt text is not generally displayed unless the graphic cannot be displayed. Search engines use alt text to ascertain a description of the picture in question.
Analytics: Analytics programs gather and analyse data about how users interact with websites. Google Analytics is an example of a free analytics program.
Anchor Tag: An HTML tag that allows you to create a link to another document or web page or to a bookmark within the current web page.
Anchor Text: Anchor text are the words that contain a link users can click on. Search engines think of anchor text as important because they measure how relevant the words in the anchor text are to the words and keywords of the page, or landing page that the link points to.
Authority (Google juice, link juice, trust): Authority/trust is just what it sounds like-- it's similar to how relevant or respected a certain webpage is with respect to the keywords the user searches for in Google. Search engines use things like incoming links and page rank to determine a website's authority.
B
B2B (Business-to-Business): A marketing strategy which involves the transaction of goods or services between businesses.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer): A transaction of goods or services directly from a business to the consumer.
Back Link (incoming link, inbound link, inlink): A link originating on one page or website and pointing to another website or web page.
Black Hat SEO: Frowned-upon tactics for SEO that are against the rules of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Black Hat SEO techniques are aimed to get higher rankings and more traffic, but simultaneously run the risk of being removed from high rankings by search engines, or being dropped from results altogether (blacklisted).
Blacklisted: A penalty for websites that do not adhere to a search engine's code of best practice. The offending site is removed from the search engine list for a period of time and will not appear in search results.
Blog: This shortening of the term ‘web log' refers to a website which presents content by date, like a diary. The content is generally written by one user and supplies up-to-date information, author viewpoints or commentary about a particular subject or theme.
Blogosphere: The large and influential network of blogs that make up the internet's blogging community.
Bot (crawler, spider, robot): An autonomous program used by search engines to search the web for various purposes, such as finding and adding web sites to their search indexes.
Bounce Rate: This is the percentage rate of people who view a website's homepage and then leave it without visiting any other pages.
C
CMS (Content Management System): An online system that allows users with little or no knowledge of coding to make changes to a website. This includes programs like Wordpress.
Comment Spam: The practice of writing excessive or irrelevant blog comments in order to seed a link to another page.
Content (copy, text): Informative, quality and keyword rich text on a website which is of direct interest for the viewer. This doesn't usually include advertising or website navigation tools.
Contextual Advertisement: Advertising that has a product related to content on the website. Google AdWords is a program that uses contextual advertisement.
Conversion (goal): Web traffic that fulfils a pre-established, quantifiable goal. Examples of conversions are: purchasing of a specific product or filling out a registration form, ad clicks and sign ups.
Conversion Rate: A measurement of the percentage of viewers who visit a site and perform a quantifiable action. See conversion.
CPA: (Cost Per Acquisition): The fee paid to an affiliate marketer for driving a particular action or event on your site.
CPC (Cost Per Click): The amount of money paid for each click to a program like AdWords by the company that sponsors the advertisement.
CPM (Cost per thousand impressions): M represents the Roman numeral that means 1,000. Therefore, CPM is Cost per Thousand clicks in a PPC campaign.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): A language used to describe how a given page or web site will look. This includes font styles, graphical layouts and colour.
CTR (Click Through Rate, Impression): A standard method of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. This statistic is calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of times the ad was shown.
D
Directory: A list of websites organised by category, or a site made up of directory pages.
Dofollow Link: A hyperlink within a webpage that search engines follow.
Domain Name: An identification label used for addressing purposes on the internet. Top-level-domains (TLDs) function as website addresses (i.e. http://example.net). The most common TLDs are .com, .net, .org and there are some TLDs reserved for governmental use.
Duplicate Content: Large blocks of content within or across multiple domains that are very similar.
E
E-commerce site: A webpage or website tailor made in order to sell goods or services.
F
FFA: Stands for Free For All or Free For All Links. They basically describe webpages set up to host an indiscriminate number of unrelated links to web pages. A form of 'Link Farm' of which search engines frown upon. FFA links should be avoided as they offer no value and sites linking to a FFA site can be penalised by the search engines.
Feed: Content delivered to a web user using programs or websites like news collectors.
Forums: Online bulletin boards used for holding discussions and posting user generated content. For example, a forum for SEO specialists could discus new ideas, get feedback on the best links to buy, and review SEO campaigns.
G
Google PageRankTM: A numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web.
Googlebot: The spider program used by Google.
GYM: The largest and most popular search engines-- Google, Yahoo & Microsoft.
H
Hit: A hit occurs each time a server sends any object - documents, graphics, include files, etc. Thus, one view of a page could result in many hits.
Hosting: A service that runs servers connected to the internet, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content online. The most common kind of hosting is web hosting which provides space on servers and connectivity to the internet for websites and databases.
Hub (expert page): A page that has high authority and contains quality content and links to pages that relate in terms of content.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language): Instructions in an online written language that are used to make webpages look and function in the way the programmer wants them to, instead of being simply plain text.
I
Impression (page view): One veiw of a webpage by one user.
Inbound link (incoming link, inlink): A link to a website from another website.
K
Keyword (key phrase): A phrase or single word that a user types into search engines. Keywords are used by search engines to determine the topic of a given web page. For example, to find our website, you might type in "SEO Halpern."
Keyword Density: This measures the amount of times a keyword is used on a particular webpage. SEO experts work to make sure that keyword density is within optimized parameters and not too low or high.
Keyword Research: SEO experts perform keyword research to find out which words are the best keywords to include for a webpage, industry or subject.
L
Landing Page: This is the page a user clicks through to when they choose a web page from among the search engine results.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. Search engines index and categorize these groups of words in a document. SEO experts refer to common searches that use these groups of words as "Long Tail Searches". One example of a long tail search is "SEO work at Halpern Cowan."
Link: These are include on webpages as leads that can be clicked on to go to another site which is usually related in content but does not have to be.
Link Building: Proactively marketing a website so that other relevant websites chose to link out to the site in question.
Link Condom: There are several diffent kinds of link condom, which basically all discourage the passing of love (power) to another webpage.
Link Exchange: Websites that decide to exchange links in order to increase their page rank or visibility.
Link Farm: A cluster of pages which link to one other. Something not to use!
Link Juice: The total power of all the links that point to a website.
Link Love: This is an outbount link from one page to another with no link condom, which passes authority.
Link Popularity: Search engines measure the link popularity of a webpage by analysing the amount of links from a site and the quality of the webpages it links to.
Link Spam (comment spam): Unwanted links coming from non-reputable, irrelevant sources.
Long tail keywords: Keyword phrases containing between 3-5 keywords which are very specific to whatever product or service your website is offering. When a person uses a highly specific search phrase, it's probable that they already know what they want and are now looking for the most suitable provider of the desired item or service. In virtually every case, traffic coming from such searches is far more likely to convert to sales than traffic from generic searches that tend to be geared more toward the type of research that consumers usually do prior to making a buying decision.
M
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 Data / Meta Tags: Web page specific, descriptive information that helps a search engine identify the purpose and topic of a given web page. Common meta data include a web page's description and keyword listing.
Metric: Most analytics programs use this as their standard measurement.
MFA (Made for Advertisements): Webpages that are designed soley in order to host advertisements.
Microblogging: A multi-media form of blogging that allows users to post pictures, video or short pieces of text onto a website. Examples of relevant sites include Twitter, Plurk and Friendfeed.
Mirror Site: This is the instance where two identical sites are hosted on different web addresses. The two identical webpages are called mirror sites.
Monetize: To make money from a websites. One example of a monetizing programme is Google Adsense.
N
Natural Search Results (organic search results): Search engine results which come up based on the Google Best Practices, and not from SEO work.
Nofollow: This is an HTML command that tells robots and spiders not to count links seeded on that webpage towards page rank of the website the link points towards.
Noindex: This is an HTML command that tells robots and spiders not to index the website when its forms lists for its search results.
Non Reciprocal Link: This occurs when one website links to another and the second website does not post a link in return. Search engine bots tend to value non reciprocal links more than reciprocal links.
O
Offering: A product, piece of information or service that is presented to a website visitor (e.g. SEO services).
Online Community: A group of people who are members of a website or have shared interests or lifestyles. (e.g. makeupalley.com is a website for women who want to review makeup and beauty products).
Organic Link: These links are published on a webpage because the webmaster feels they will benefit or interest the viewers.
Organic Search (organic search results): The results that come up naturally based on their indexing within a search engine. The higher a site appears on natural listings, the more traffic it can expect to attract.
Outlink (outgoing link, outbound link): A link on a website which points to another website.
P
Pagerank (PR): A value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm. 0 is low, and 10 is high. A high pagerank quantifies link popularity and trust and is based on the number of links to and from a page, and the relevance of items on that page. Pages with good rankings will appear higher in organic or natural search results generated by Google.
Paid Link Building: Websites who are willing to link back to your site for a fee in order to boost your rankings/weight in the search engines.
PPA (Pay Per Action): Like Pay Per Click, contextual ads are placed on webpages with relevant content and keywords, and advertisers pay only when web users perform a certain action predetermined by the advertiser.
PPC (Pay Per Click): Advertisers use Pay Per Click ads in contextual advertisements. This means that their ads will appear on wesites with similar content, and they only pay for the advertisement when a user clicks on the ad and lands on their landing page.
R
Registrar: An organisation or service that offers reservation and management of Internet Domain Names.
ROI (Return on Investment): The quantity of profit gained for unit of money spent. For example, an ROI of 25 GBP means that for every 1 GBP spent, the company makes a profit of 25 GBP.
RSS Feed: A list of frequently updated data such as news articles, blog entries, financial reports or podcasts that web viewers can subscribe to.
RSS Reader: Any reader which can be used to access an RSS feed that the user has subscribed to. Most recent posts are listed first, and unread posts are usually set apart.
S
SEM (search engine marketing): Marketing a company, product or service digitally so that it can achieve the greatest possible exposure and conversions from search engines. This includes paid listings and SEO, as well as other functions that aim to increase traffic and exposure to a given website.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): This is the act of using knowledge of search engine algorithms and workings to promote a given website to a high ranking and a higher position in search engine results.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page): This is the page of results that a search engine provides when users type in a keyword or phrase.
Search Ranking: The position at which a website appears within the list of results returned for a particular search.
Site Map: A site map is a general outline of the information on a website and where it is placed.
SMM (Social Media Marketing): Using social media to market a website, business, product, service or brand.
Social Bookmark (social bookmarking): A method for web users to store and share lists of websites they feel are interesting or topical. Examples include: Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com and Technorati.com.
Social Media (Web 2.0): Social media is the term that refers to an array of websites and web technologies that facilitate sharing opinions and information on the internet. Forums, wikis, social bookmarking, blogs, rating sites and user reviews are some examples of social media.
Static Page/Website: A website or web page whose content is fixed.
Stickiness: This is a measure of how long users stay on websites once clicking through to the landing page. The greater the stickiness, the better for the website or business.
Supplemental Index (supplemental results): The supplemental index includes web pages that relate to the SERP, but that have a very low PR and so haven't come up in the first pages. Pages on the supplemental index often look for SEO services.
T
Tag: A descriptive word applied to a page or piece of content that allows it to be found easily by users of search engines.
Text Link: An HTML link that is made up entirely of text, and does not contain java script, graphics, or any special code.
Title Tag: A meta data element that determines the actual "title" of a given webpage. The title is what shows up in the top bar of your browser. It is also the hyperlink that shows in search engine results listings.
TLD (Top Level Domain): The three main domain extensions: .com, .net, and .org.
U
URL (Uniform Resource Locator): A web address.
User Generated Content (UGC): Text, images or video created by individuals in a personal capacity. Some examples of this platform include YouTube and Wikipedia.
W
Web 2.0: Websites that facilitate user interaction, such as Facebook and Wikipedia.
Webmaster Tools: Useful things that help you manage a website. Some examples include URL rewriting and site link analysers.
White Hat SEO: The use of accepted SEO practices in order to get higher rankings and more traffic.
Widget (gizmo, gadget): Web users employ widgets to enhance their online experience by customising their digital environment and making it truly personal. Some examples are hit counters and subject clouds.
Many of these are also explained in further detail in the book our CEO Louis and Creative Director Roy co-wrote: Personal Reputation Management: Making the Internet Work for You.
