301 A permanent server redirect - a
change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file on apache servers.
It islso useful for dealing with canonical issues
adwords Google Pay Per
Click contextual advertisement program, very common way of basic website
advertisement.
adwords site (MFA) Made For Google
Adsense Advertisements - websites that are designed from the ground up as a
venue for GA advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV
programming is usually Made For 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 (algo) 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.
astroturfing (the opposite of full
disclosure) attempting to advance a commercial or political agenda while
pretending to be an impartial grassroots participant in a social group.
Participating in a user forum with the secret purpose of branding, customer
recruitment, or public relations.
authority (trust, link juice, Google
juice) The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search
query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other
trusted sites.
authority site A website which has many
incoming links from other related expert/hub sites. Because of this
simultaneous citation from trusted hubs an authority site usually has high
trust, pagerank, and search results placement. Wikipedia, is an example of an
authority site.
B2C Business to Consumer
back link (inlink, incoming link) Any
link into a page or site from any other page or site.
black hat 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 (duplicate
content) 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.
click fraud Improper clicks on a PPC
advertisement usually by the publisher or his minions for the purpose of
undeserved profit. Click fraud is a huge issue for add agencies like Google,
because it lowers advertiser confidence that they will get fair value for their
add spend.
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.
code swapping (bait and switch) Changing
the content after high rankings are achieved.
comment spam Posting blog comments for
the purpose of generating an inlink to another site. The reason many blogs use
link condoms.
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 (goal) 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.
directory page A page of links to related
WebPages.
doorway (gateway) A web page that is
designed specifically to attract traffic from a search engine. A doorway page
which redirects users (but not spiders) to another site or page is implementing
cloaking. - Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
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.
feed Content which is
delivered to the user via special websites or programs such as news
aggregators.
FFA (Free For All) A page or site with
many outgoing links to unrelated websites, containing little if any unique
content. Link farms are only intended for spiders, and have little if any value
to human users, and thus are ignored or penalized by the search engines.
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.
gadget see gizmo
gizmo (gadget, widget) small applications
used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP
address display. Gizmos can make good link bait.
Google bomb The combined effort of
multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually for humorous
effect. The “miserable failure” - George Bush, and “greatest living American” -
Steven Colbert Google bombs are famous examples.
Google bowling Maliciously trying to
lower a sites rank by sending it links from the “bad neighborhood” - Kind of
like yelling “Good luck with that infection!” to your buddy as you get off the
school bus - there is some controversy as to if this works or is just an SEO
urban myth.
Google dance The change in SERPs caused
by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and
consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time
during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.
Google juice (trust, authority, pagerank)
trust / authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other
pages.
Googlebot Google’s spider program
GYM Google - Yahoo - Microsoft, the big
three of search
hit Once the standard by
which web traffic was often judged, but now a largely meaningless term replaced
by pageviews AKA impressions. A hit happens each time that a server sends an
object - documents, graphics, include files, etc. Thus one pageview could
generate many hits.
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.
in bound link (inlink, incoming link)
Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
index Noun - a database of WebPages and
their content used by the search engines.
index Verb - to add a web page to a
search engine index.
indexed Pages The pages on a site which
have been indexed.
inlink (incoming link, inbound link)
Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
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.
keyword spam (keyword stuffing)
Inappropriately high keyword density.
keyword stuffing (keyword spam)
Inappropriately high keyword density.
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 building actively cultivating
incoming links to a site.
link condom Any of several methods used
to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental
results of indorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage
link spam in user generated content.
linkerati internet
users who are the most productive targets of linkbait. The Linkerati includes -
social taggers, forum posters, resource maintainers, bloggers and other content
creators, etc - who are most likely to create incoming links or link generating
traffic (in the case of social networkers). Suggested by lorisa.
link exchange a reciprocal linking scheme
often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually
allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves. Quality
directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.
link farm a group of sites which all link
to each other.- Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
link juice (trust, authority, pagerank)
link love An outgoing link, which passes
trust, unencumbered by any kind of link condom.
link partner (link exchange, reciprocal
linking) Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see
these as high value links, because of the reciprocal nature.
link popularity a measure of the value of
a site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it
link spam (Comment Spam) Unwanted links
such as those posted in user generated content like blog comments.
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/
LSI(Latent Semantic Indexing) 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”.
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”
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.
mirror site An identical site at a
different address.
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. A form
of link condom.
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. A form of link condom.
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.
outlink (Out going link)
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. - Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
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.
proprietary method (bullshit, snake oil)
sales term often used by SEO service providers to imply that they can do
something unique to achieve “Top Ten Rankings”.
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.
regional long tail (RLT) coined by Chris Paston of onlinedevelopment.co.uk
- a multi word keyword term which contains a city or region name. Especially
useful for the service industry.
RLT see Regional Long Tail
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. - Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
SE (Search Engine)
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.
search engine spam Pages created to cause
search engines to deliver inappropriate or less relevant results. Search Engine
Optimizers are sometimes unfairly perceived as search engine Spammers. Of
course in some cases they actually are.
SEM 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.
SEO 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.
SMWC (Slapping Myself With Celery)
indicates an extreme reaction similar to a “spit take” but more vegan-trendy.
Often combined with other exclamatory acronyms. - WTF/SMWC, or perhaps
ROTFL/SMWC.
SMM (Social Media Marketing) Website or
brand promotion through social media
SMP (Social Media Poisoning) A term
coined by Rand Fishkin - any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques
designed to implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example, blog comment
spamming in the name / brand of a competitor
sock puppet an online identity used to
either hide a persons real identity or to establish multiple user profiles.
social bookmark A form of Social Media
where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.
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.
social media marketing (SMM) Website or
brand promotion through social media
social media poisoning (SMP) A term
coined by Rand Fishkin - any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques
designed to implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example blog comment
spamming in the name / brand of a competitor
spam ad page (SpamAd page) A Made For
Adsense/Advertisement page which uses scraped or machine generated text for
content, and has no real value to users other than the slight value of the
adds. Spammers sometimes create sites with hundreds of these pages.
spamdexing Spamdexing or search engine
spamming is the practice of deceptively modifying web pages to increase the
chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or
to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner.
- Wikipedia
spammer A person who uses spam to pursue
a goal.
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.
- Definition revised based upon advice from Michael
Martinez
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.
stickiness Mitigation of bounce rate.
Website changes that entice users to stay on the site longer, and view more
pages improve the sites “stickiness”.
submission
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. - Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
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.
- Definition added based upon advice from Michael
Martinez
trust rank a method of differentiating
between valuable pages and spam by quantifying link relationships from trusted
human evaluated seed pages.
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.
walled garden a group of
pages which link to each other, but are not linked to by any other pages. A
walled garden can still be indexed if it is included in a sitemap, but it will
probably have very low pagerank.
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.
widget 1) (gadget, gizmo) small
applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit
counter or IP address display. These programs can make good link bait. 2) a
term borrowed from economics which means “any product or commodity.”
