Your Guide To Commonly Used SEO Jargon.
If you would like to suggest SEO related jargon or terminology for inclusion in the encyclopedia, please leave a comment below. Suggestions are always greatly appreciated as they help us to keep the encyclopedia concise and up to date.

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

• 200 – Signifies the successful loading of a webpage.
• 301 – A redirection used for the permenant relocation of a webpage to a new url.
• 302 – A redirection used for the temporary relocation of a webpage to a new url.
• 404 – Page not found error.

A

Back to top

• Absolute Link – A link that defines the full location of a particular page.
• AdCenter – The pay per click marketing service providing paid listings on Bing.
• AdSense – Google’s affiliate advertising service whereby webmasters recieve a commision for adverts that are clicked on their website.
• Affiliate Marketing – A method of online marketing that involves recruiting others to sell your products or services online, and rewarding them with a commission payment for each sale made.
• AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) – web based technology which is used to create interactive web applications.
• Alexa – A web traffic reporting service – data is collated by means of alexa’s tool bar which transmits browsing behavior back to alexa for reporting purposes.
• Algorithm – Complexed mathamatical formulas used by search engines to determine the ranking positions and relevence of webpages in their index.
• Alt Attribute – Also called an image alt tag, this attribute can be used to tell search engines what a particular image is about, it is commonly used in on-page optimisation.
• Anchor text – The text that is used to link a webpage when linked via a hyperlink, the Alt image tag becomes the anchortext when an images is linked.

B

Back to top

• Backlinks – Links that point form other domain to your website, Backlinks are a major factor used by search engines when deciding your ranking position.
• Black Hat SEO – Website promotion using techniques that are in breech of search engine guidelines. blackhat techniques can yield fast results but inevitably result in penalties of even permenant banning form search engines.
• Blog – An interactive website that allows authors to post articles and readers to submit comments regarding the articles.
• Blogroll – A list of links containing all the links that the blog links to.
• Bounce Rate – A figure that denote the percentage of visitors that leave a page almost as soon as they have arrived withoutvisiting any other page on the same domain.
• Branded Keyword – Search terms relating to a specific brand such as “coca cola” or “addidas shorts”.
• Breadcrumb Navigation – shows the full path of navigation used to reach a page, this can be beneficial to search engines and readers, especially on larger sites.
• Broken Link – a link that does not point to a webpage, either because the page has been moved or deleted, or because the link was incorrectly created.

C

Back to top

• Cache – A copy of a website saved by search engines incase the site unavailable when requested.
• Cloaking – The practice of showing different content to search engines and readers, this is a blackhat technique and should not be used, penalties for cloaking include permenant bans.
• Clustering – When a search returns several pages from the same domain they may be displayed together by the search engine in order to improve user friendliness.
• CMS – Content management system. Scripts upon which websites may be built to facilitate a back end admin area which allows the websites content to be changed and updated easily.
• Contextual Ad – An advertisment for a website with a strong topical connection to websites theme.
• Cost Per Action (CPA) – The overall cost of an online marketing campaign per result.This figure is used to identify the overall efficieny of the campaign.
• Cost Per Click (CPC) – An auction based billing method whereby advertisers bid for advertising positions in search engines by stating the maximum cost per click they are willing to pay, traffic recieved via the campaign is then charged at a maximum of the agreed rate per click.
• Cost Per thousand (CPM) – A method of advertising where a set charge is billed for each thousand impressions of the advert.
• Crawl – The process carried out by search engine spiders, automated programs which search the internet looking for fresh content to index. A spider is said to “crawl” a webpage.
• Crawl Depth – Crawl depth determines how many internal links a spider will follow to reach new pages whilst crawling your domain.
• Crawl Frequency – How often a spider visits your domain to check for new content. Regularly updated domains tend to be crawled more often.
• Cloud Tag – A visual depiction detailing the keyword density of a website, higher density words are normally shown in a larger font with less frequent words being smaller.

D

Back to top

• Dead Links – Internal links that no longer function, either because a page has been moved or deleted. dead links reduce the usability of a website and should be removed as soon as possible.
• Digital Marketing – A form of marketing that utilizes any digital medium other than the internet.
• Deep link – Linking internal page of a website to internal pages of another domain.
• Dedicated IP – A permenant identification number issued to a node for communication purposes.
• Dedicated Server – A server used soley by one person or company. Benefits include the ability to manage apache and php settings, as well as exclusive use of the servers ram, cpu and other resources.
• Description – Snippets of text displayed in search engines and directories as a means of describing the url shown.
• DMOZ – The worlds largest web directory the Open Directory Project is maintained by a global group of volunteers.
• DNS – Domain Name System, a technique of naming computers and other internet resources.
• DoFollow – An attribute which permits search engines to count the attribute link as a “vote” for that site and therefore affect the linked sites SERP for keywords used in the anchortext.
• Doorway Pages – Web pages intended to rank for particular keywords with the intention of sending recieved traffic to another webpage, these pages should never use html redirects, doing so can bring penalties for the recipients site.
• Duplicate content – Content that is identical or highly similar to the content used on another webpage or website. Duplicate content is a serious issue and can have very negative effects on rankings.
• Dynamic Content – Web pages that contain content automatically update their own content via rss feeds or other methods, these pages are normally indicated by the presence of a question mark in the url.

E

Back to top

• Entry Page – The landing page where traffic from search engines enters your domain.
• Ethical SEO – SEO methodology that is performed according to the standard rules and regulations followed by the search engines.
• External Link – Links pointing to your domain or a page on your domain from another website. Number, quality, and relevence of links are major ranking factors.

F

Back to top

• Feed – Allows subscribers to recieve updated data or articles from a website or blog on an automated basis.
• Free for all – FFA websites are set up with the sole purpose of providing free links for the promotion of sites, however these links carry little weight and low relevence, and are therefore not worth the effort required to get them.
• Filter – Filters form part of search engine algorithyms and are used to identify things like duplicate content with a view to removing identical pages from the search results.
• Frames – A method of displaying more than on html page in the same browser window, generally best avoided, frames can cause severe usability problems.
• Fresh Content – Brand new and original content (not scraped or reworded).

G

Back to top

• Google Adwords – Google’s pay per click advertising service where users bid for positions in search results through an auction type method by stating the maximium cost per click they are willing to pay.
• Google Analytics – Google’s free traffic analytics services which allows webmasters to identify traffic sources and bounce rates.
• GoogleBot – The name given to Google’s automated spider.
• Google AdSense – Google’s affiliate advertising service whereby webmasters recieve a commision for adverts that are clicked on their website.
• Google Base – A Database maintained by Google that allows users to add virtually any kind of content including excel templates and images.
• Google Bombing – This involves creating large numbers of links to a particular page with a chosen anchortext in order to get it to rank for that searchphrase, this is normally malicious in nature for example in 1999 the microsoft home page was googlebombed to rank first for the phrase “more evil than satan himself”.
• Google Bowling – The process of sabotaging a competitors webrankings by creating low quality spam links pointing to their pages, this damages their pages trust and therefore removes the page from the top of search results.
• Google Traffic Estimator – A tool provided by Google that is used to determine the monthly search volume and cost per click (adwords) for a particular keyword.
• Google Sitemap – Sitemaps are a basically list of the urls that you want to be indexed, submitting a sitemap via Google webmaster tools increases crawl efficiency and reduces the chance that Googlebot will miss important pages when crawling your domain.
• Google Sitelinks – Sitelinks are sometimes displayed underneath a sites listing in search results, they are links to other internal pages on that domain generated automatically by google when it thinks the sitelinks are relevent to the users query.
• Google Supplemental Index – A secondary index where google stores pages with less trust and inbound links, duplicate content is also thought to result in a page being returned as a supplemental result, Pages in this index recieve far less exposure in the search results, meaning it is therefore very bad for SEO.
• Google Website Optimizer – A free application provided by google that allows webmasters to test different versions of a html page with a view to reducing landing page bounce rates and increasing conversion rates.

H

Back to top

• Headings – Used to provide a webpages readers with an overview of the content that follows.
• Hidden text – Blackhat technique whereby text is created in the same colour as the page background to render it invisible from human eyes whilst allowing spiders to include the content.
• Hijacking – An unethical sabotage technique that involves tricking search engines into believeing that a page from one domain has move to another domain, thereby damaging the original pages rankings through duplicate content.
• HTML – Abbreviation of Hyper Text Markup Language.
• .Htaccess – A directory-level web server configuration file used by some servers (including apache) which has many uses including url redirection and enabling file caching.

I

Back to top

• Inbound Links – inbound links are also referred to as backlinks, they point to your domain (or a page on it) from another website.
• Index – A search engines index is used to store data, this facilitates the fast and efficient return of results relevent to a users query.
• Internal Link – Links that point to another location within the same domain, internal links are beneficial to optimisation as they can improve the understanding of search engines regarding what the website is about.

J

Back to top

• JavaScript – An object orientated web based programming language, originally known as “mocha” then “livescript” before being renamed to javascript.

K

Back to top

• Keyword – A word or a phrase that is likely to be used as a search term by internet users on search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
• Keyword Density – Also referred to as keyword weight, this refers to the number of times a specific keyword is used throughout a pages body content, density or keyword weight is displayed as a percentage.
• Keyword Frequency – The number of repetitions of a keyword within a single pages content.
• Keyword Prominence – Search engines attribute more importance to keywords appearing in certain areas of a page, keywords used in the opening lines of the first and last paragraph of a page are said to be more prominent, and carry more influence with regards to on-page optimisation.
• Keyword Relevancy – The relevance of an individual pages content with regards to being included in search results for a particular keyword.
• Keyword Research – Analysis that reveals which keywords are relevent to a webpages content, and how much traffic and competetition each of the suggested keywords have. The goal being to select high traffic low competition keywords that are highly relevent to a pages content.
• Keyword Stuffing – An outdated and no longer effectual method of acheiving high rankings by using more repetitions of a particular keyword than your competitors, both in the meta tags and page content.
• Keyword Weight – See above entry for Keyword Density.

L

Back to top

• Link Authority – The value of a particular inbound link with regards to trust, PR and relevence.
• Landing Page – Entry Page where traffic lands when a link is clicked, this could be from organic search results, a marketing email, sponsered listings, or a link on a refering site.
• Landing Page Quality – Google provide a landing page quality analysis free to adwords users. Relevence to the advert being run, and originality are the two main factors used for determining the score.
• Link Baiting – An SEO technique that involves creating enticing content which people will link to through their own free will because they see the content as usefull or interesting. Linkbaiting is a very effective method that when properly conducted can bring huge numbers of high quality backlinks.
• Link Building – The process of creating or obtaining links that point to your domain or a page on it from other websites on the internet.
• Link Equity – The number of inbound links a particular page has.
• Link Farm – A group of domains that exchange links with each other for the sole purpose of increasing pr and search rankings, such groups are easily spotted as they are highly interlinked and such practice is in breech of most search engines terms of service.
• Link Popularity – A major factor for determing the search results position of a given page by search engines, calcualted by examining the number, quality, and relevence of inbound links.
• Long Tail – Highly specific low competition keywords which are longer phrases than standard Keywords. Long tail keywords generally carry lower traffic but have a higher convertion rate than standard keywords due to the fact they are so highly targetted.

M

Back to top

• Meta Description – A coding statement providing a short and concise description of a webpages content. Meta description is sometimes used by search engines underneath a pages listing.
• Meta Keyword – A coding statement used to inform search engines of the keywords relevent to a pages content, although this tag is no longer as poweful as it once was with regards to determining the keywords a page will be returned in search results for, they still have some use in improving a pages overall keyword relevence and should therefore be utilised.

N

Back to top

• Natural Link – A link to your domain or one of its pages built by a reader because they found the content valuable.
• New Visitors – An analytical metric which shows the quantity of new visitors to your website as opposed to returning visitors.
• Nofollow – a html attribute which instructs search engines not to count the attributed link when calculating the search rankings of the linked page.

O

Back to top

• Organic Search Results – Search engine results that are ranked according to page relevence, link popularity, and trust, as opposed to paid listings from services such as Google Adwords which are classified as sponsored or paid results.
• Outbound link – a link pointing to an external domain or webpage on another domain.
• Open Directory Project – The internet’s largest human edited web directory, also known as DMOZ or ODP.

P

Back to top

• Page Rank – Google’s link analysis algorythm, a method of measuring the Importance of a particular webpage by assigning a value between 0 and 10.
• Page Title – Or page meta tag, gives a web author control of how that page will be diplayed in the search results. Title tags are also important to onpage optimisation and although they should be primarily written for human readers, they should also contain important keywords.
• Paid Inclusion – A Listing in a directory or search engine for which a fee must be paid. Additionally some commercial directories also charge an evalutaion fee to consider your site for listing, the payment of an evaluation fee does not guarantee inclusion.
• PPC (Pay Per Click) – An internet advertising model where advertisers bid in an auction for advert positions in search results by stating the maximum cost per click they are willing to pay each time their advert is clicked.
• Pay for performance – A marketing campaign that is billed on a per sales conversion basis or when a predefined search ranking traffic volume, or other metric is acheived.
• Penalty – Punishments issued by search engines for violation of their terms of service and unethical SEO practices, penalties range in severity and Google is thought to use three main types of penalty: -30, -950, and index exclusion.

Q

Back to top

• Quality Content – Original, informative, and well written content, highly prized by search engines like Google.
• Quality Link – A Link pointing to your domain from a website that is relevent to your content, and is well established with high levels of trust.

R

Back to top

• Reciprocal Links – A link exchange whereby two pages on seperate domains link to each other. Links exchanged between two domains where the outbound link points to a different pages than the inbound link is on are not strictly speaking classed as reciprocal links.
• Redirect – Used to forward traffic and inform search engines when a page is moved from one on location to another, this can be on the same domain, or to a different domain. Redirects can be permanent (301) or temporary (302).
• Re-inclusion request – A request that can be submitted to search engines for reinclusion in their index after a penalty has resulted in your domain being dropped from their index.
• Referrer – When you click a link on a webpage and end up on another domain the page containing the link that you clicked in order to reach your destination is said to be the refferer.
• Relative Link – Relative links are used for referencing pages on the same domain that a user is currently browsing and do not state the full url, just the path to that file on the server, for example /contact.html would form the url portion of a relative link whereas http://www.highimpact-seo.co.uk/contact.html would form the url portion of an absolute link.
• Reputation Management – By monitoring the actions of an organisation, and the opinions those actions generate within the the general public or other organisations, a reputation management company can create feedback of their own intended to alleviate the impact of any bad press and improve the overall standing of their client.
• Return Visitors – A visitor that has previously visited your website.
• Robots.txt – A text file used to control search engine spiders that crawl your site by telling then which pages and folders they may spider and which they may not by ustilising the robots exclusion protocol.
• ROI – Return on Investment. the ratio of monies gained through a marketing campaign or other investment versus monies invested.
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – An XML based web feed system that allows regularly updated content content such as news or blog posts to be automatically syndicated to a list of subscribed recipients.

S

Back to top

• Search Engine – A computer program capable of retrieving files or documents that are relevent to the users search terms form a database, network, or the internet.
• SEM – Search Engine Marketing: A holistic encompassment of all online marketing methods including SEO and PPC to increase traffic and visability within search engines.
• SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making off page and on page alterations to a website with the intention of improving organic search result positions and the amount of relevent organic traffic recieved.
• SEO Copywrighting – Creating content for a page or website that contains optimal density, prominence, and proximity of important keywords whilst at the same time being interesting, natural, and informative to the human eye.
• SERP (Search Engine Results Page) – The list of web pages that is provided by a search engine in response to a users search query.
• Search Marketing – See SEM.
• Sitemap – There are two kinds of sitemap, the first is a directory level file intended to assist spiders and tell them the location of pages you want to be indexed, the file contains the url of each page on the domain that you want them to crawl, the second kind of sitemap is a webpage that contains a link to every page on your domain with the aim of providing human users with a means of finding information.
• Social Media Site – Sites that allow users to bookmark sites, exchange media, or links, Social media sites depend on user contributions to provide their content.
• Spam – Unsolicited commercial email communications or low quality irrelevent blog comments submitted with the sole purpose of obtaining a link.
• Spider – An automated program that searches the internet looking for fresh content to add to its search engines database.
• Stopword – Search engines ignore certain very common words like “the” “a” or “to” because they can save time by doing so and still return relevent results. Stop words are therefore sometimes ommited from meta tags to free up space for important keywords.
• Supplemental results – a reserve index of pages that are viewed as less important by Google, pages in this index Sites are only returned in search results when there are a low number of relevent results found in the primary index, therefore pages in the supplemental index rarely rank for and high traffic keywords. In addition, pages in the supplemental index are generally crawled less frequently. Duplicate content and low page rank are thought to be amongst factors considered by google when a page is added to the supplemental index.

T

Back to top

• Tagging – The process of adding a keyword or keyphrase to a piece of information such as an article for descriptive and metadata purposes. Tags are normally found at the foot of an article and link to further information relevent to the article. Tags can also be used to index articles on a blog so that users can search for information by topic by browsing a list of tags.
• Trackback – A protocol which provides webmasters with a notification every time another trackback enabled website or blog links to one of their articles or pages.

U

Back to top

• Unethical SEO – Immoral SEO techniques such as hidden text which are normally in breech of a search engines terms of service. These practices can result in penalties or permenant exclusion from a search engines index.
• Unique Visits – A count of the number of unique visits that a website recieves over a set peroid of time (ie one month) each individual visitor is counted once, regardless of the number of return visits they make within the measured period.
• URL Rewrite – A method of altering a url which can be used to insert keywords and make the url more descriptive and SEO friendly, or additionally to make dynamic urls appear as a static url.

V

Back to top

• Viral Marketing – A method of marketing that works by self propogation, this is acheived by enticing people to pass on your offer which results in your marketing message growing and spreading in the same manner as a virus.

W

Back to top

• White Hat SEO – SEO techniques which are in compliance with the terms of service as set out by search engines.
• W3C – An International group of organisations and individuals that work together to create web language standards with the aim of improving the usability and cross platform compatability of the internet as a whole.

X

Back to top

• XHTML – A language containing aspects of HTML and XML, Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language allows added functionality and cross browser stability.
• XML – Extensible Markup Language. Created and maintained by the world wide web consortium (W3C) XML is a simple and flexible structured document format.

Y

Back to top

• No Entries

Z

Back to top

• No Entries

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 4:47 pm and is filed under SEO Encyclopedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.