Glossary

Looking to find out more about SEO? You can always take the time to look through this glossary.

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SEO Glossary (0-9)

200 (Status Code)

The file request was successful. For example, a page or image was found and loaded properly in a browser.

301 (Status Code)

File 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 (Status Code)

File 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 (Status Code)

File 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:

• report navigational problems within your site
• view your most popular and / or most relevant navigational options

Search engines request a robots.txt file to see what portions of your site they are permitted to crawl. Many browsers also 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.

SEO Glossary (A)

Above The Fold

This is a term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or internet marketing it refers to the area of content viewable on the screen 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. Google launched a algorithm to penalize sites with excessive top heavy ad placement above the fold.

Absolute Link

A link which shows the full URL path 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. For example: /services as opposed to https://peterwoottonseo.com/services (the absolute version). Due to canonicalisation and hijacking related issues, it is typically preferable to use absolute link values over relative link paths.

Activity Bias

Any attempted form of ad targeting might be targeted toward people who are more likely to engage in a particular activity, especially with ad retargeting. Correlation does not mean causation.

(Google) AdWords

An contextual advertisement program; AdWords is 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 click-through rate as well as max bid.

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 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. The action may range from anything from filling a form to buying a product.

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

Alexa is Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic. Alexa tends to be biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free resource.

Algorithm

This is the computational processes and procedures used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest (and ultimately rank) for a given search query.

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.

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.

Alt Text (Alt Attribute)

description of a graphic, which usually isn't displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is un-deliverable, 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.

Amazon.com

The largest internet retailing website. Amazon.com is rich in consumer generated media. Amazon also owns a number of other popular websites, including IMDB and Alexa.

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.

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.

Android

Android is Google's operating system which powers cell phones & some other consumer electronics devices like TVs.

AOL

Popular web portal which merged with Time Warner & then was spun back out.

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.

Astroturfing

is the opposite of full disclosure. Astroturfing is 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, PageRank) 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.org, is an example of an authority site.

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.

SEO Glossary (B)

B2B

Business to Business.

B2C

Business to Consumer

Bait and Switch

Marketing technique where you make something look overtly pure or as though it has another purpose to get people to believe in it or vote for it (by linking at it or sharing it with friends), then switch the intent or purpose of the website after you gain authority.

Back Link (inlink, incoming link, inbound link)

Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.

Banner Blindness

During the first web boom many businesses were based on eyeballs more than actually building real value. Many ads were typically quite irrelevant and web users learned to ignore the most common ad types.

Battelle (John)

Popular search and media blogger who co-founded The Industry Standard and Wired, and authored a popular book on search called The Search.

Behavioral Targeting

Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or implied intent. For example, if I recently searched for mortgages then am later reading a book review the page may still show me mortgage ads.

Bias

A prejudice based on experiences or a particular worldview. Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of the largest search engines may bias their organic search results toward informational (ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is heavily cited. Search personalisation biases our search results based on our own media consumption and searching habits.

Bing

Microsoft owned search engine, which also powers the organic search results on Yahoo! Search.

Bing Ads

Microsoft's paid search program, which rivals Google AdWords and powers paid search results on Yahoo! Search.

Black Hat SEO

Search engine optimisation tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Block Level Analysis

A method used to break a page down into multiple points on the web graph by breaking its pages down into smaller blocks.

Blog

A periodically updated journal, typically (yet not always) formatted in reverse chronological order. Many blogs not only archive and categorise information, but also provide a feed and allow simple user interaction like leaving comments on the posts.

Blog Comment Spam

Are blog comments created (typically en-mass) either manually or automatically via a software program; which add low value or no value to other sites.

Blogger

Blogger is a free blogging platform owned by Google.

Blogroll

Link list on a blog, usually linking to other blogs owned by the same company or friends of that blogger. Once a effective way of acquiring backlinks; Blogrolls are been recently devalued in terms of the value they pass on.

Bold (Strong)

A way to make words appear in a bolder font. Words that appear in a bolder font are more likely to be read by humans that are scanning a page. A search engine may also place slightly greater weighting on these words than regular text, but if you write natural page copy and a word or phrase appears on a page many times it probably does not make sense or look natural if you bold ever occurrence.

Bookmarks

Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy.

Boolean Search

Many search engines allow you to perform searches that contain mathematical formulas such as AND, OR, or NOT. By default most search engines include AND with your query, requiring results to be relevant for all the words in your query.

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 within a predetermined period of time.

Brand

Refers to the emotional response associated with a company and/or product.

Branded Keywords

Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand or entity. Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle, and are some of the highest value and highest converting keywords. These searches may be used as relevancy signals in algorithms like Panda.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between pages.

Brin (Sergey)

One of the Co-founders of Google.

Broken Link

A hyperlink which is not functioning. A link which does not lead to the desired location. Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site's links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Browser (Web)

Client used to view the world wide web/internet. The most popular browsers are Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera.

Bush (Vannevar)

WWII scientist who wrote a seminal research paper on the concepts of hypertext and a memory extension device titled As We May Think.

Business.com

A well trusted directory of business websites and information. Business.com is also a large pay per click arbitrage player.

Buying Cycle

Before making large purchases consumers typically research what brands and products fit their needs and wants. Keyword based search marketing allows you to reach consumers at any point in the buying cycle. In many markets branded keywords tend to have high search volumes and high conversion rates.

SEO Glossary (C)

Cache

Copy of a web page stored by a search engine. When you search the web you are not actively searching the whole web, but are searching files in the search engine index.

Calacanis (Jason)

Founder of Weblogs, Inc. Also pushed AOL to turn Netscape into a Digg clone & then launched longtail SEO play Mahalo.

Canonical URL

Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use PageRank or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.

Catch All Listing

A listing used by pay per click search engines to monetise upon long tail search terms that are not yet targeted by marketers. This technique may be valuable if you have very competitive key words, but is not ideal since most major search engines have editorial guidelines that prevent bulk untargeted advertising, and most of the places that allow catch all listings have low traffic quality. Catch all listings may be an attractive idea on theme specific search engines and directories though, as they are already pre-qualified clicks.

CGI

Common Gateway Interface - interface software between a web server and other machines or software running on that server. Many cgi programs are used to add interactivity to a web site.

Chrome (Google)

Primarily known as Google's web browser, there is also an OS by the same name.

Client

A computer, program, or process which makes information requests to another computer, process, or program.

Cloaking

Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine.

Cluetrain Manifesto, The

A good book about how the web is a marketplace, and how it is different from traditional offline business.

Clustering

In search results the listings from any individual site are typically limited to a certain number and grouped together to make the search results appear neat and organized and to ensure diversity amongst the top ranked results. Clustering can also refer to a technique which allows search engines to group hubs and authorities on a specific topic together to further enhance their value by showing their relationships.

CMS

Content Management System. Functionality used to help make it easy to update and add information to a website.

Co-citation

In topical authority based search algorithms links which appear near one another on a page may be deemed to be related to one another. In algorithms like latent semantic indexing words which appear near one another often are frequently deemed to be related.

Comments

Many blogs and other content management systems allow readers to leave user feedback.

Comments Tag

Web developers frequently place comments in the source code of their work to help make it easy for people to understand the code.

Compacted Information

Information which is generally and widely associated with a product. For example, most published books have an ISBN.

Conceptual Links

Links which search engines attempt to understand beyond just the words in them. Some rather advanced search engines are attempting to find out the concept links versus just matching the words of the text to that specific word set. Some search algorithms may even look at co-citation and words near the link instead of just focusing on anchor text.

Concept Search

A search which attempts to conceptually match results with the query, not necessarily with those words, rather their concept.

Contextual Advertising

Advertising programs which generate relevant advertisements based on the content of a webpage.

Conversion

Many forms of online advertising are easy to track. A conversion is reached when a desired goal is completed.

Copyright

The legal rights to publish and reproduce a particular piece of work.

Cookie

Small data file written to a user's local machine to track them. Cookies are used to help websites customize your user experience and help affiliate program managers track conversions.

CPA (Cost Per Action)

Cost per action. The effectiveness of many other forms of online advertising have their effectiveness measured on a cost per action basis. Many affiliate marketing programs and contextual ads are structured on a cost per action basis. An action may be anything from an ad click, to filling out a lead form, to buying a product.

CPC (Cost Per Click)

Cost per click. Many search ads and contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is charged a certain price per click.

CPM

Cost per thousand ad impressions.

Crawl Depth

How deeply a website is crawled and indexed.

Crawl Frequency

How frequently a website is crawled.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets is a method for adding styles to web documents.

CTR (Click Through Rate)

Clickthrough rate - the percentage of people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to measure how relevant a traffic source or keyword is. Search ads typically have a higher clickthrough rate than traditional banner ads due to being highly relevant to implied searcher demand & a history of questionable ad labeling disclosure by search engines.

Cutts (Matt)

Google's head of search quality.

Cybersquatting

Cybersquatting is the act of registering domains related to other trademarks or brands in an attempt to cash in on the value created by said trademark or brand.

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.

Code Swapping

Changing the content after high rankings are achieved.

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.

SEO Glossary (D)

Dayparting

The act of turning ad campaigns on or off, amending ad bid prices, or budget constraints based on bidding more when your target audience is available and less when they are less likely to be available.

Dead Link

A link which is no longer functional.

Deep Link

A link which points to an internal page within a website.

Dedicated Server

Server which is limited to serving one website or a small collection of websites owned by a single person.

Deep Link Ratio

The ratio of links pointing to internal pages to overall links pointing at a website. A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a organic and natural link profile.

De-Listing

Temporarily or permanently becoming de-indexed from a directory or search engine.

Del.icio.us

Is a popular social bookmarking (social tagging) website.

Demographics

Statistical data or characteristics which define segments of a population.

Nick (Gawker)

Publisher of Gawker, a popular ring of topical weblogs, which are typically focused on controversy.

Description

Directories and search engines provide a short description near each listing which aims to add context to the title.

Digg

A Social news site where users vote on which stories get the most exposure and become the most popular.

Directory

A categorised catalog of websites, typically manually organised by topical editorial experts.

Disavow

The link disavow tool is a way for a webmaster to state they do not vouch for a collection of inbound links to their website.

DMOZ

The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL, and is mostly run by volunteer editors.

DNS (Domain Name System)

Domain Name Server or Domain Name System. A naming scheme mechanism used to help resolve a domain name / host name to a specific TCP/IP Address.

Domain

Scheme used for logical or location organisation of the web. Alot of people also use the word domain to refer to a specific website.

Doorway Pages

Pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other advertisements.

Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is a popular web development and editing software which utilises a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) interface.

Duplicate Content

Content which is duplicate or near duplicate in nature.

Dwell Time

Dwell time is the amount of time a searcher spends at a destination website before returning to the search results.

Dynamic Content

Content which changes over time or uses a dynamic language such as PHP to help render the page.

Dynamic Languages

Are programming languages such as PHP or ASP which build web pages on the fly upon request.

SEO Glossary (E)

Earnings Per Click (EPC)

Many contextual advertising publishers estimate their potential earnings based on how much they make from each click.

E-Commerce site

A website specifically devoted to online retail sales.

Editorial Link

Search engines count links as votes of quality. They primarily want to count editorial links that were earned over links that were bought or bartered.

Emphasis

An HTML tag used to emphasize text.

Engagement Metrics

The measurement of how engaging users find a particular piece of content within a site, or a particular site in general.

Entities

People, places or things which search engines aim to know & present background information about.

Entry Page

The webpage at which a user enters your site.

Ethical SEO

Search engines like to paint SEO services which manipulate their relevancy algorithms as being unethical. Any particular technique is generally not typically associated with ethics (with the exception of hacking), but is either effective or ineffective.

Everflux

Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux.

Expert Document

Quality page which links to many non-affiliated topical resources.

External Link

Link which references another domain.

SEO Glossary (F)

Fair Use

The stated exceptions of allowed usage of work under copyright without requiring permission of the original copyright holder. Fair use is covered in section 107 of the Copyright code.

Favicon (Favourites Icon)

A Favicon is a small icon which appears next to URLs in a web browser. They usually come in the format of .ico files

Feed

Many content management, systems such as blogs, allow readers to subscribe to content update notifications via RSS or XML feeds. Feeds can also refer to pay per click syndicated feeds, or merchant product feeds. Merchant product feeds have become less effective as a means of content generation due issues in regards content duplication.

Feed Reader

A software or website used to subscribe to feed update notifications.

FFA

Free for all pages are pages which allow anyone to add a link to them. Generally these links pull little weight in search relevancy algorithms because many automated programs fill these pages with links pointing at low quality websites.

Filter

Certain activities or signatures which make a page or site appear unnatural might make search engines inclined to filter / remove them out of the search results.

Firefox (Mozilla)

A popular extensible and open source web browser developed by Mozilla.

Flash

Adobe Flash is a piece of Vector graphics-based animation software which is way to make sites interactive in nature.

Frames (iFrames)

A technique created by Netscape used to display multiple smaller pages on a single display. This web design technique allows for consistent site navigation, but makes it hard to deep link to relevant content.

Fresh Content

Fresh Content is new content (dynamic in nature) that gives people a reason to keep paying attention to your website, or content which was recently published.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol is a protocol for transferring data between computers. It is typically a way to place documents on your web server so it is accessible on the WWW.

Fuzzy Search

A search which will find matching terms when terms are misspelled (or fuzzy).

SEO Glossary (G)

GAP (Google Advertising Professional)

Google Advertising Professional is a program which qualifies marketers as being proficient AdWords marketers.

Gladwell (Malcolm)

Popular author who wrote the book titled The Tipping Point.

Godin (Seth)

Popular blogger, author, viral marketer and business consultant.

Google

The world's leading search engine in terms of reach. Google pioneered search by analysing linkage data via PageRank. Google was created by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

GoogleBot

Google's search engine spider.

Google Base

Free database of semantically structured information created by Google.

Google Bombing

Making a prank rank well for a specific search query by pointing hundreds or thousands of links at it with the keywords in the anchor text.

Google Bowling

Knocking a competitor out of the search results by pointing hundreds or thousands of low trust low quality links at their website. See also Negative SEO.

Google Checkout

Payment service provided by Google which helps Google better understand merchant conversion rates and the value of different keywords and markets.

Google Dance

In the past Google updated their index roughly once a month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a constantly updating index, websites are no longer subject to what was traditionally called a Google Dance.

Google Keyword Tool

Keyword research tool provided by Google which estimates the competition for a keyword, recommends related keywords, and will tell you what keywords Google thinks are relevant to your site or a page on your site. This has now been replaced by Google Keyword Planner

Google OneBox

Portion of the search results page above the organic search results which Google sometimes uses to display vertical search results from Google News, Google Base, and other Google owned vertical search services.

Google Sitemaps

Program which webmasters can use to help Google index their contents.

Google Sitelinks

On some search results where Google thinks one result is far more relevant than other results (like navigational or brand related searches) they may list numerous deep links to that site at the top of the search results.

Google Supplemental Index

Index where pages with lower trust scores are stored. Pages may be placed in Google's Supplemental Index if they consist largely of duplicate content, if the URLs are excessively complex in nature, or the site which hosts them lacks significant trust.

Google Traffic Estimator

Tool which estimates bid prices and how many Google searchers will click on an ad for a particular keyword.

Google Trends

Tool which allows you to see how Google search volumes for a particular keyword change over time.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

An arbitrary & ever-shifting collection of specifications which can be used to justify penalising any website.

Google Webmaster Tools

Tools offered by Google which show recent search traffic trends, let webmasters set a target geographic market, enable them to request select pages be re-crawled, show manual penalty notifications and allow webmasters to both disavow links and request a manual review from Google's editorial team.

Google Website Optimiser

Free multi variable testing platform used to help AdWords advertisers improve their conversion rates.

Guestbook Spam

A type of low quality automated link which involves post on website Guestbooks.

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 juice (trust, authority, pagerank)

trust / authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.

SEO Glossary (H)

Headings

The heading element briefly describes the subject of the section it introduces.

Headline

The title of an article or story.

Hidden Text

SEO technique used to show search engine spiders text that human visitors do not see.

Hilltop

Algorithm which ranks results largely based on unaffiliated expert citations.

HIT

Once the standard by which web traffic was often judged, but now a largely meaningless term replaced by pageviews (impressions). A hit happens each time that a server sends an object - documents, graphics, include files, etc. Thus one pageview could generate many hits.

HITS

Link based algorithm which ranks relevancy scores based on citations from topical authorities.

Hijacking

Making a search engine believe that another website exists at your URL. Typically done using techniques such as a 302 redirect or meta refresh.

Home Page

The main page on your website, which is largely responsible for helping develop your brand and setting up the navigational schemes that will be used to help users and search engines navigate your website.

.htaccess

Apache directory-level configuration file which can be used to password protect or redirect files. The htacess file can also be used to implement a range of server side modifications which optimise site loading times.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the primary language in which pages on the World Wide Web are created.

Hubs

Topical hubs are sites which link to well trusted within their topical community. A topical authority is a page which is referenced from many topical hub sites. A topical hub is a page which references many authorities.

Hummingbird

A Google search algorithm update which better enabled conversational search.

SEO Glossary (I)

IDF

Inverse Document Frequency is a term used to help determine the position of a term in a vector space model.

Inbound Link

Link pointing to one website from another website.

Index

Collection of data used as bank to search through to find a match to a user fed query. The larger search engines have billions of documents in their catalogs.

Internal Link

Link from one page on a site to another page on the same site.

Information Architecture

Designing, categorising, organising, and structuring content in a useful and meaningful way.

Information Retrieval

The field of science based on sorting or searching through large data sets to find relevant information.

Inktomi

Search engine which pioneered the paid inclusion business model. Inktomi was bought by Yahoo! at the end of 2002.

Internet

Vast worldwide network of computers connected via TCP/IP.

Internet Explorer (IE)

Microsoft's web browser.

Invisible Web

Portions of the web which are not easily accessible to crawlers due to search technology limitations, copyright issues, or information architecture issues.

IP Address (Internet Protocol Address)

Internet Protocol Address. Every computer connected to the internet has an IP address. Some websites and servers have unique IP addresses, but most web hosts host multiple websites on a single host.

ISP

Internet Service Providers sell end users access to the web. Some of these companies also sell usage data to web analytics companies.

SEO Glossary (J)

JavaScript

A client-side scripting language that can be embedded into HTML documents to add dynamic features.

SEO Glossary (K)

Keyword

A word or phrase which implies a certain mindset or demand that targeted prospects are likely to search for.

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

An old measure of search engine relevancy based on how prominent keywords appeared within the content of a page. Keyword density is no longer a valid measure of relevancy over a broad open search index though.

Keyword Funnel

The relationship between various related keywords that searchers search for. Some searches are particularly well aligned with others due to spelling errors, poor search relevancy, and automated or manual query refinement.

Keyword Not Provided

When Google shifted to using secured search they continued to pass referrers, but they stripped the keyword information from most organic Google referrals, making it much harder for SEOs to close the loop and figure out which keywords drove conversions via organic search. While Google stripped the organic keyword information overnight, they kept passing the equivalent keyword data to AdWords advertisers for years.

Keyword Research

The process of discovering relevant keywords and keyword phrases to focus your SEO and PPC marketing campaigns on.

Keyword Research Tools

Tools which help you discover potential keywords based on past search volumes, search trends, bid prices, and page content from related websites.

Keyword Spam

Inappropriately high keyword density.

Keyword Stuffing

Writing copy that uses excessive amounts of the core keyword.

Kleinberg (Jon)

Scientist largely responsible for much of the research that went into hubs and authorities based search relevancy algorithms.

Knowledge Graph

Search result enhancements where Google scrapes third party information & displays it in an extended format in the search results.

SEO Glossary (L)

Landing Page

The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.

Landing Page Quality Scores

A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of their AdWords program.

Link

A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document. Google considers links from high authority sites comprised of relevant content as a vote of trust.

Link Baiting

The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media and bloggers.

Link Building

The process of building high quality linkage data that search engines will evaluate to trust your website is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy.

Link Bursts

A rapid increase in the number of links pointing at a website.

Link Churn

The rate at which a site loses links.

Link Equity

A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity and the authority of the sites providing those links.

Link Farm

Website or group of websites which exercises little to no editorial control when linking to other sites. FFA pages, for example, are link farms.

Log Files

Server files which show you what your leading sources of traffic are and what people are search for to find your website.

Link Hoarding

A method of trying to keep all your link popularity by not linking out to other sites, or linking out using JavaScript or through sneaky redirects.

Link Popularity

Refers to the number of backlinks pointing to a website.

Link Reputation

The combination of your link equity and anchor text.

Link Rot

A measure of how many and what percent of a website's links are dead/broken.

Link Velocity

The rate at which a page or website accumulates new inbound links.

Long Tail

Phrase describing how for any category of product being sold there is much more aggregate demand for the non-hits than there is for the hits.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

Latent Semantic Indexing is a way for search systems to mathematically understanding and representing language based on the similarity of pages and keyword co-occurance. A relevant result may not even have the search term in it. It may be returned based solely on the fact that it contains many similar words to those appearing in relevant pages which contain the search words.

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).

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 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.

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 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.

SEO Glossary (M)

Manual Penalty

Website penalties which are applied to sites after a Google engineer determines they have violated the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Recoveries from manual penalties may time out years later, or a person can request a review in Google Webmaster Tools after fixing what they believe to be the problem.

Manual Review

All major search engines combine a manual review process with their automated relevancy algorithms to help catch search spam and train their relevancy algorithms. Abnormal usage data or link growth patterns may also flag sites for manual review.

Mechanical Turk

Amazon.com program which allows you to hire humans to perform easy tasks that computers are bad at.

Meme

A unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." Many people use the word meme to refer to self spreading or viral ideas.

Meta Description

The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of the page.

Meta Keywords

The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to highlight keywords and keyword phrases which the page is targeting.

Meta Refresh

A meta tag used to make a browser refresh to another URL location.

Meta Search

A search engine which pulls top ranked results from multiple other search engines and rearranges them into a new result set.

Meta Tags

People generally refer to meta descriptions, page title & meta keywords as meta tags.

Microsoft

Creator of the popular Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser, owner of the search engine Bing.

Mindshare

A measure of the amount of people who think of you or your product when thinking of products in your category.

Mirror Site

A website which mirrors (or duplicates) the contents of another website.

MSN Search

Search engine built by Microsoft. MSN was the default search provider in Internet Explorer. MSN Search has now been rebranded as Bing.

Multi Dimensional Scaling

The process of taking shapshots of documents in a database to discover topical clusters through the use of latent semantic indexing. Multi dimensional scaling is more efficient than singular vector decomposition since only a rough approximation of relevance is necessary when combined with other ranking criteria.

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.

Monetise

To extract income from a site. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetise a website.

SEO Glossary (N)

Natural Language Processing

Algorithms which attempt to understand the true intent of a search query rather than just matching results to keywords.

Navigation

Scheme to help website users understand where they are, where they have been, and how that relates to the rest of your website.

Negative SEO

Attempting to adversely influence the rank of a third-party site.

Netscape

Originally a company that created a popular web browser by the same name, Netscape is now a social news site similar to Digg.com.

Niche

A topic or subject which a website is focused on.

Nofollow

Attribute used to prevent a link from passing link authority. Commonly used on sites with user generated content, like in blog comments.

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.

SEO Glossary (O)

Ontology

In philosophy it is the study of being. As it relates to search, it is the attempt to create an exhaustive and rigorous conceptual schema about a domain. An ontology is typically a hierarchical data structure containing all the relevant entities and their relationships and rules within that domain.

Open Source

Software which is distributed with its source code such that developers can modify it as they see fit.

Opera

A fast standards based web browser.

Organic Search Results

Most major search engines have results that consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. The unpaid / algorithmic listings are called the organic search results. Organic search results are organized by relevancy, which is largely determined based on linkage data, page content, usage data, and historical domain and trust related data.

Outbound Link

A link from one website pointing at another external website.

Overture

The company which pioneered search marketing by selling targeted searches on a pay per click basis. Originally named GoTo, they were eventually bought out by Yahoo! and branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Overture Keyword Selector Tool

Popular keyword research tool, based largely on Yahoo! search statistics. Heavily skewed toward commercially oriented searches, also combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single version.

Organic link

Organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.

SEO Glossary (P)

Page (Larry)

One of the co-founders of Google.

PageRank

A logarithmic scale based on link equity which estimates the importance of web documents.

Paid Inclusion

A method of allowing websites which pass editorial quality guidelines to buy relevant exposure.

Panda Algorithm

A Google algorithm which attempts to sort websites based on perceived quality. Signals referenced in the Panda patent include the link profile of the site & entity (or brand) related search queries.

Pay for Performance

Payment structure where affiliated sales workers are paid commission for getting consumers to perform certain actions.

Penalty

Search engines prevent some websites suspected of spamming from ranking highly in the results by banning or penalizing them. These penalties may be automated algorithmically or manually applied.

Penguin Algorithm

Google algorithm which penalizes sites with unnatural link profiles.

Personalisation

Altering the search results based on a person's location, search history, content they recently viewed, or other factors relevant to them on a personal level.

PHP

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side scripting language used to render web pages or add interactivity to them.

Pigeon Update

An algorithmic update to local search results on Google which tied in more signals which have been associated with regular web search.

Piracy Update

Search algorithm update Google performed which lowered the rankings of sites which had an excessive number of DMCA takedown requests. Google has exempted both Blogspot and YouTube from this "relevancy" signal.

Poison Word

Words which were traditionally associated with low quality content that caused search engines to want to demote the rankings of a page.

PDF

Portable Document Format is a universal file format developed by Adobe Systems that allows files to be stored and viewed in the original printer friendly context.

POGO Rate

The percent of users who click on a site listed in the search results only to quickly click back to the search results and click on another listing.

Portal

Web site offering common consumer services such as news, email, other content, and search.

PPC

Pay Per Click is a pricing model which most search ads and many contextual ad programs are sold through. PPC ads only charge advertisers if a potential customer clicks on an ad.

Precision

The ability of a search engine to list results that satisfy the query, usually measured in percentage. (if 20 of the 50 results match the query the precision is 40%)

Profit Elasticity

A measure of the profit potential of different economic conditions based on adjusting price, supply, or other variables to create a different profit potential where the supply and demand curves cross.

Proximity

A measure of how close words are to one another.

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.

PPA (Pay Per Action )

Similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversions.

Proprietary Method (snake oil)

Sales term often used by SEO service providers to imply that they can do something unique to achieve “Top Ten Rankings”.

SEO Glossary (Q)

QDF

Query deserves freshness (QDF) is an algorithmic signal based on factors like a burst in search volume and a burst in news publication on a topic which helps inform Google that a particular search query should rank in recent / fresh results.

Quality Content

Content which is linkworthy in nature.

Quality Link

Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links.

Query

The actual "search string" a searcher enters into a search engine.

Query Refinement

Some searchers may refine their search query if they deemed the results as being irrelevant. Some search engines may aim to promote certain verticals or suggest other search queries if they deem other search queries or vertical databases as being relevant to the goals of the searcher.

SEO Glossary (R)

Recall

The portion of relevant documents that were retrieved when compared to all relevant documents.

Reciprocal Links

Nepotistic link exchanges where websites try to build false authority by trading links, using three way link trades, or other low quality link schemes. Nowadays, the acquisition of reciprocal links are considered an ineffective approach towards SEO.

Redirect

A method of alerting browsers and search engines that a page location moved. 301 redirects are for permanent change of location and 302 redirects are used for a temporary change of location.

Registrar

A company which allows you to register domain names.

Reinclusion

If a site has been penalized for spamming they may fix the infraction and ask for reinclusion. Depending on the severity of the infraction and the brand strength of the site they may or may not be added to the search index.

Referrer

The (external) source from which a website visitor came from.

Relative Link

A link which shows the relation of the current URL to the 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 canonicalisation and hijacking related issues it is preferable from an SEO perspective to use absolute links over relative links.

Relevancy

A measure of how useful searchers find search results.

Repeat Visits

Visitors to a website which have visited it in the recent past.

Reputation Management

This is the process of and activities involved in ensuring that your brand related keywords display results which reinforce your brand.

Resubmission

Much like search engine submission, resubmission is generally a useless program which is offered by businesses bilking naive consumers out of their money for a worthless service.

Retargeting

Advertising programs targeted at people who have previously visited a given website or channel, viewed a particular product, or added a particular product to their shopping cart.

Reverse Index

An index of keywords which stores records of matching documents that contain those keywords.

Robots.txt

A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search engines which files not to crawl. Some search engines will still list your URLs as URL only listings even if you block them using a robots.txt file.

ROI (Return On Investment)

Return on Investment is a measure of how much return you receive from each pound invested.

RSS (Rich Site Summary)

Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication is a method of syndicating information to a feed reader or other software which allows people to subscribe to a channel they are interested in.

Regional Long Tail (RLT)

A multi word keyword term which contains a city or region name. This is especially useful for the service industry.

SEO Glossary (S)

Safari

A popular web browser from Apple.

Salton (Gerard)

A scientist who pioneered in the information retrieval field.

Scumware

Intrusive software and programs which usually target ads, violate privacy, and are often installed without the computer owner knowing what the software does.

Search History

Many search engines store user search history information. This data can be used for better ad targeting or to make old information more findable.

Search Engine

A tool or device used to find relevant information. Search engines consist of a spider, index, relevancy algorithms and search results. The main search engine used on the WWW is Google.

SEM

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

Search engine optimisation is the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries.

SEO Copywriting

Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries.

SERP(s)

Search Engine Results Page is the page on which the search engines show the results for a search query.

Search Marketing

The act of marketing a website in the search engines. Typically this involves SEO, pay per click ads, and/or paid inclusion.

Server

A Computer used to host files and serve them to the WWW.

Sandbox

An obsolete occurence were Google would put all new websites into a sandbox prior to allowing them to acquire rankings under appropriate search terms.

Scraping

The act of copying content from a site, often facilitated with the use of automated bots.

Site Map

A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website; They are intended to help improve 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.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Website or brand promotion through social media

Social Media Poisoning

A term originally 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.

Spam Ad 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 (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.

Spammer

A person who uses spam to pursue a goal.

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.

Spider (bot, crawler)

A specialised bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.

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

A mitigation of bounce rate. Website changes that entice users to stay on the site longer, and view more pages improve the sites “stickiness”.

Supplemental Index

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.

Singular Value Decomposition

The process of breaking down a large database to find the document vector (relevance) for various items by comparing them to other items and documents.

Siphoning

Unethical Techniques used to steal another web sites traffic, including the use of spyware or cybersquatting.

Splash Page

Feature rich or elegantly designed beautiful web page which typically offers poor usability and does not offer search engines much content to index.

Spyware

Software programs which spy on web users, often used to collect consumer research and to behaviorally targeted ads.

SSI

Server Side Includes are a way to call portions of a page in from another page. SSI makes it easier to update websites.

Stemming

Using the stem of a word to help satisfy search relevancy requirements. EX: searching for swimming can return results which contain swim. This usually enhances the quality of search results due to the extreme diversity of word used in, and their application in the English language.

Stop Words

Common words (ie: a, to, and, is ...) which add little relevancy to a search query are known as Stop Words. They are removed from the search query prior to relevant search results are returned.

SEO Glossary (T)

Taxonomy

Is a classification system of controlled vocabulary used to organise topical subjects; usually hierarchical in nature.

Term Frequency

This acts as a measure of how frequently a particular keyword appears amongst a collection of documents.

Term Vector Database

A weighted index of documents which aims to understand the topic of documents based on how similar they are to other documents, and then match the most relevant documents to a search query based on vector length and angle.

Thesaurus

Thesauruses in an SEO context corresponded to Synonym directory that search engines use to help increase relevancy.

Title

The title is one of the most important aspects to doing SEO on a web page. The title element is used to describe the contents of a document.

Toolbar

Many major search companies aim to gain marketshare by distributing search toolbars. Some of these toolbars have useful features such as pop-up blockers, spell checkers, and form autofill. These toolbars also help search engines track usage data.

Top Heavy

Google algorithm which penalizes websites which have a high ad density above the fold & sites which make it hard to find the content a user searched for before landing on the page.

Topic-Sensitive PageRank

Method of computing PageRank which instead of producing a single global score creates topic related PageRank scores.

Trackback

Automated notification that another website mentioned your site which is baked into most popular blogging software programs.

TrustRank

Search relevancy algorithm which places additional weighting on links from trusted seed websites that are controlled by major corporations, educational institutions, or governmental institutions.

Typepad

Time On Page

This corresponds to the amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. Google uses time on page as an indication of quality and relevance.

Toolbar Pagerank

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.

Text Link

A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.

SEO Glossary (U)

Unethical SEO

Some search engine marketers lacking in creativity try to market their services as being ethical, whereas services rendered by other providers are somehow unethical. With the exception of hacking or spamming, SEO services are generally neither ethical or unethical. They are either effective or ineffective.

Update

Search engines frequently update their algorithms and data sets to help keep their search results fresh and make their relevancy algorithms hard to update. Most major search engines are continuously updating both their relevancy algorithms and search index. Major updates from Google include: Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Hummingbird & Google Caffine.

URL

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the unique address of any web document.

URL Rewrite

A technique used to help make URLs more unique and descriptive to help facilitate better sitewide indexing by major search engines.

Usability

Usability corresponds to how easy it is for customers to perform desired actions on a site.

Usage Data

Factors like a large stream of traffic, a high percent of visitors as repeat visitors, long dwell time, multiple page views per visitor, a high clickthrough rate, or a high level of brand related search queries may be seen by some search engines as a sign of quality. Some search engines may leverage these signals to improve the rankings of high quality documents and high quality websites via algorithms like Panda.

Usenet

A search service which is focused on a particular field, a particular type of information, or a particular information format.

User Gnerated 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.

SEO Glossary (V)

Vertical Search

A search service which is focused on a particular field, a particular type of information, or a particular information format.

Viral Marketing

Self propagating marketing techniques. Common modes of transmission are email, blogging, and word of mouth marketing channels.

Virtual Domain

Website hosted on a virtual server.

Virtual Server

A server which allows multiple top level domains to be hosted from a single computer.

SEO Glossary (W)

Wales (Jimmy)

One of the co-founders of Wikipedia.

Whois

Each domain has an record of ownership. This data is stored within the Whois record for the corresponding domain.

White Hat SEO

Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next.

Wiki

A software platform which allows information to be published using collaborative editing.

Wikipedia

A popular free online collaborative encyclopedia built using wiki software. It is supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

Wordnet

A lexical database of English words which is used by search engines as a way of understanding word relationships.

Wordpress

WordPress is the world's most popular open source web platform. It's great for SEO and features a easy to use, robust Content Management System.

Wordtracker

WordTracker is a feature rich (paid) keyword research tool which collects data from a number of popular meta search engines.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is loosely defined as websites which encourage user interaction.

SEO Glossary (X)

Xenu Link Sleuth

Popular free software which is used for checking a site for broken internal or external links and creating a sitemap.

XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language)

Extensible HyperText Markup Language is a class of specifications designed to move HTML to conform to XML formatting.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language)

Extensible Markup Language is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML, used to make it easy to syndicate or format information using technologies such as RSS.

SEO Glossary (Y)

Yahoo! Answers

Free question asking and answering service which allows Yahoo! to leverage social structures to create a bottoms up network of free content.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo!'s paid search platform, (previously known as Overture.)

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Research tool which webmasters can use to see what pages Yahoo! has indexed from a website, and what pages link at those pages.

SEO Glossary (Z)

Zeal

Zeal was a Non-commercial directory which was bought by Looksmart for $20 million, then abruptly shut down with little to no warning.