Search Engine Optimization News, Website Promotion Tips

Every self-respecting SEO professional should know the industry terms and definitions he deals with every day

Since the full list would be quite extensive, here you’ll find a general representation of the most common terms.

advertising network: A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple Web sites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site.

anchor text - The words in the clickable part of a link. For SEO purposes, anchor text is important because search engines assume that the words used in a link will succinctly describe the page it’s pointing to. Therefore, it is believed that search engine give anchor text words extra weighting when determining relevancy.

algorithm (algo): The technology that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads.

anchor text: The clickable text part of a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

Backward Links (aka Back Links or Backlinks) - The links that point to any given web page.

Body Copy - The content one reads on any given web page.

canonical page - is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

Cloaking - Showing one thing to a search engine and another to the average person. Generally considered to be search engine spamming.

CMS - Content Management System

content network: A group of Web sites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. For example: Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network.

contextual advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a Web page based on the page’s content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.

Copywriting - Writing marketing or advertising copy.

CPA - Cost Per Action or Cost Per Acquisition.

CPC - Cost Per Click

CPM - Cost Per Thousand

CSS - Cascading Style Sheet

cost per action (CPA): A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the ad. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

cost per click (CPC): Also called Pay per Click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

Doorway Page - A web page created solely to rank high in the search engines and then direct actual human visitors to another web page. These have always been considered to be search engine spam by the search engines.

eCommerce - “Electronic Commerce.” Selling products and services through a website, most often via the use of an online shopping cart.

External Link - A web page link that points to a website other than the one it comes from. Any given web page can have external links pointing to them, and/or can point their own external links at other sites.

geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won’t be shown based on the searcher’s location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

Googlebot: Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Google bots begin with “Googlebot”; for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

Google Dance -1. Years ago, Google used to do a major algorithm update every few months. When it happened, the search engine results for any search query would “dance” around and positions would constantly change. It was dubbed the “Google Dance” by forum members at Webmaster World.

Hidden Text -Words on a web page which the average person browsing the page would not see, but which a search engine would.

Hidden text has been used for search engine spamming since the dawn of search engines. It’s much less effective than it used to be, but can still be found on many websites even today.

Image Links -Links to page’s URL that are clicked to via a graphic image, as opposed to text.

Some people believe that image links are given less weight by search engines than text links, but there’s never been any proof of that.

The disadvantage to an image link is the lack of anchor text to place descriptive keyword phrases into. However, this lack can be made up for by using a descriptive image alt attribute.

Impressions - The number of times an web page ad is displayed.

Inbound links - Any link pointing to a given page’s URL.

Internal Links - Links from within one website which point to other pages within the same website. Typical links in a website’s navigation, would be considered internal links.

inbound link: An inbound link is an hyperlink to a particular Web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that Web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a Web page.

invisible web: A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that isn’t indexed by search engines. Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth.

keyword: A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results. Many Web sites offer advertising targeted by keywords, so an ad will only show when a specific keyword is entered.

link bait: Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a Web page and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links from other sites. Or, as Matt Cutts of Google says, “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

link building: The process of getting quality Web sites to link to your Web site, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

Link Juice - The link popularity that passes from any given link to the page it’s linking to.

Link Popularity -A large part of all major search engine’s ranking formula. The search engines believe the more frequently a web page is linked to, the more popular it is, and the more weight they will give it in their relevancy rankings.

Google’s PageRank algorithm is a form of link popularity.

Matt Cutts : Google software engineer (knows everything about Google and even shares his knowledge with community….rather selectively I must say )

meta tags: Information placed in the HTML header of a Web page, providing information that is not visible to browsers, but can be used in varying degrees by search engines to index a page. Common meta tags used in search engine marketing are title, description, and keyword tags.

Navigation - The clickable links displaying throughout a website.

Nofollow Attribute - A link attribute that was originally created to try and combat comment spam link dropping. The attribute is applied to links using rel=”nofollow” in the code, and it is a signal to the search engines that the link has not necessarily been reviewed.

At this time, Google appears to be the only search engine who doesn’t actually follow links using the nofollow attribute.

Organic Listing - Any listing that shows up in the organic (or natural — unpaid) results of a search engine. As opposed to the sponsored paid search listings.

PageRank - Google’s internal measurement denoting the number and importance of links pointing to any given URL.

Rankings - The positions pages appear in the search engine results pages for any given search query.

pay per click (PPC): See Cost per Click (CPC).

quality score: A score assigned by search engines that is calculated by measuring an ad’s clickthrough rate, analyzing the relevance of the landing page, and considering other factors used to determine the quality of a site and reward those of higher quality with top placement and lower bid requirements. Some factors that make up a quality score are historical keyword performance, the quality of an ad’s landing page, and other undisclosed attributes. All of the major search engines now use some form of quality score in their search ad algorithm.

return on investment (ROI): The amount of money an advertiser earns from their ads compared to the amount of money the advertiser spends on their ads.

search advertising: Also called Paid Search. An advertiser bids for the chance to have their ad display when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are displayed above or to the right of the algorithmic (organic) search results. Most search ads are sold by the PPC model, where the advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or text link.

search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search.

search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they’ve entered their query into the search box. This page lists several Web pages related to the searcher’s query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.

Site Audit - Reviewing a website to see how it needs to be fixed to be the best it can be for the search engines and its users.

social media: A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.

spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the Web, visiting Web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine’s index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.”

splash page - A introductory page of a website, usually all graphical and sometimes all Flash, which generally doesn’t provide any information, but requests visitors click through to the next page to view the information they’re looking for.

title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific Web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

universal search: Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page. Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories.

usability - The ease that a person browsing a page can find what they’re looking for or complete any given task (such as making a purchase) on the website.

Web 2.0: A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

The list of prevalent Status Codes

200

OK - The request has succeeded. The information returned with the response is dependent on the method used in the request.

301

Moved Permanently - The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs.

302

Found - The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests.

304

Not Modified - If the client has performed a conditional GET request and access is allowed, but the document has not been modified, the server SHOULD respond with this status code.

307

Temporary Redirect - The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests.

400

Bad Request - The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The client SHOULD NOT repeat the request without modifications.

401

Unauthorized - The request requires user authentication. The response MUST include a WWW-Authenticate header field containing a challenge applicable to the requested resource.

403

Forbidden - The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.

404

Not Found - The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

410

Gone - The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent.

500

Internal Server Error - The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.

501

Not Implemented - The server does not support the functionality required to fulfill the request. This is the appropriate response when the server does not recognize the request method and is not capable of supporting it for any resource.