A
Alt Attribute:
Used in images, this HTML tag
provides alternative text or description of the image.
Alt Tags:Used
in images, this HTML tag provides the image name or description that
you see if you hover your mouse over the image. This is often used to
make your page more accessible to individuals with disabilities such
as people who may have a vision impairment and use a device that
reads the contents of a webpage to them.
Anchor Text: Anchor
text is the text portion of a link that you click on when an address
isn’t displayed.Google uses anchor text to determine what keywords
your site may focus on, and using appropriate anchor text is an
important search engine optimization technique.
Authority:
A site that is deemed as an “authority” site will generally have
better search engine result placement and page-rank.Authority is
primarily determined by relevant content and incoming links.
Average Page Views: The amount of pages within a
site a user visits within one session (one session is equal to one
visit, meaning if the user leaves and returns later this counts as
two sessions)
Average Time on Site:The average amount of time a
user spends on your website.
B
Backlinks: Backlinks
are links from other sites that point to your site.
Bait & Switch:
This is a technique used by black hat SEO’s and involves displaying
one web page to search engines and a completely different page for
other user agents at the same URL.It generally creates an optimized
page targeting specific keywords and submits this page to a search
engine or directory, but replaces that page with the regular page as
soon as the optimized page has been indexed.
Banned: If
your website has been penalized and removed from the search engine
results, it is considered to be banned.
Black Hat SEO:
This is a term used in the type of SEO you want to avoid and is
against search engine guidelines.Using Black Hat techniques can get
your site banned from Google – and chances are you won’t be able
to get it back into search results.
Following are Black Hat tactics to avoid:
Hidden text or Hidden links –
Links or text which is the same color as the background of your
page.
Artificially increasing the number
of links to your site: Sites which hold are wide repository of links
are considered by Google as “link farms” and receiving a wide
number of incoming links from “link farms” will have a negative
effect on your site.
Duplicated content:Content copied
from other sites and used on yours.
Excessive pop ups
Spamming other websites or forums
to place your link on their site.
Keyword stuffing:Using a keyword
so many times that the context makes little to no sense.
- Cross linking: An excessive amount of cross linking with
sites to increase your websites popularity.
Blacklist: Black
lists are created by organizations to create a database of websites,
ip addresses or users who are known for black hat tactics, hacking
attempts or other shady practices.
Bot:
Another name for Agent, Crawler or Spider
C
Cache: Copies
of your web pages that are stored locally (on a visitors
computer).This helps web pages to load quicker as it will show the
“cached” version of the webpage
Canonical URL:
Choosing a URL structure that will be your primary structure, and
notifying search engines to ignore all others.Not having a proper
canonical URL setup results in duplicate content penalties, as search
engines will view all URL versions of a webpage as different
websites.Examples would be:
http://abc.com
http://www.abc.com
www.abc.com
abc.com
Cannibalization:
This is often referred to as either “Keyword Cannibalization” or
“SEO Cannibalization”.This occurs when certain pages of your
website compete against one another for certain keywords.
Cloaking:
Cloaking
is another illegal technique, which partially involves content
separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of
course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the
same page.
Conversion Rate:The
percentage of your website visitors which convert – or perform a
“goal” or intended action.This could be purchases, newsletter
sign-ups, free trial downloads, etc.
Cookie:
A small piece of code, or information that is stored on a users
computer.This is generally used for websites to remember who you are,
such as storing passwords, email addresses, etc.It can also be used
to track a visitors navigation through the site and how many times
they have visited.
Crawler:
Same as a spider, Bot or Agent
Custom error pages:
This generally refers to customizing your 404 page, or page that a
user sees when the content they were searching for could not be
found.
D
Directory: A website that is a directory of other
websites.These can often be grouped into specific categories, or the
directory itself could focus on a specific niche or category.
Domain Trust: Domain trust is calculated by
various factors such as who you link to (reputable sites, spammy
sites, etc) who links to you, your domain age and your domain
registration information.
Domain Authority: The number of root domains
which link to different pages on your website (rather than getting
all links pointing directly to your homepage).
Doorway pages: This is also known as a “bridge
page” or a “
gateway” page.This is basically a webpage
created with a lot of keyword rich content without much useful
information.The aim is to trick spiders that your site is a
highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick
from search engines.
Dynamic:Content or URL’s that are generated on
the fly from a database
E
Error page: A
web page that cannot be displayed due to an error, such as a 404 or
“file not found” error.
F
Flash:
Allows webmasters to display interactive media on webpages. This is
often seen in website intros, games and animated navigation.The use
of flash is generally not a recommended SEO practice, although search
engines have made recent developments to now read flash.
Frames: Frames combine two web pages into one,
allowing you to display content from one webpage within another.They
may each have their own scrollbar, or part of the page my scroll
while the rest of the page does not move. Search engines don’t like
frames, as the content within the frame is difficult to crawl, though
they do support them.You can also use a <noframes> tag in HTML
to help crawlers index the page normally.
Funnel: A
path which visitors follow before arriving at a “goal” page or
completing a specific action.In Google Analytics you can create
funnels which have up to 10 pages
G
Goal Abandonment Rate:The
percentage of users who exited your website or your funnel before
reaching your goal page.
Google Bombing: Google
Bombing, or a Google Bomb refers to when a lot of webmasters will get
together and agree to link to a specific website using an
unflattering term.This takes advantage of the importance of anchor
text within a link, and will generally cause a page to rise in search
results for an unflattering term. An example of this is when George
Bush’s White House bio was displayed when anyone Googled the term
“miserable failure”.This has since been changed, and it has
become harder to Google Bomb a website.
Google Bowling: Google
bowling is a black hat technique used to knock pages out of the
search engine results, or significantly lower them.People sabotage
websites this way by pointing hundreds of low quality links to a
competitor’s site.Newer sites are generally more susceptible to
this as older sites are better established with a range of high
quality links.
Google Dance: This
refers a time when Google’s indexes are being updated.During this
time, you may notice drastic differences in the rankings of your site
and/or keywords.
Googlebot:
A search bot used by Google.
Grey Hat SEO:SEO that users a combination of both
white hat and black hat tactics.
H
Heading Tag: This can also be referred to as {H1,
H2, etc}.This is an HTML reference that explains the section on a web
page.Titles are usually placed in heading tags.The text placed within
these tags are often considered slightly more important to the
content on the page than normal text would be.
Hidden Keywords:Keywords which are placed on a
webpage and are hidden to visitors, but viewable by spiders.
Hidden Text: The practice of hiding text on a
webpage so that spiders can see and read it, but users cannot.The
reason this is done is to create more content and keywords for a
page.This however is a black hat tactic and can harm your rankings.
HTML: This stands for “Hyper Text Markup
Language” and this is a programming language.
HTML Source: Raw programming code.You can view
this by right clicking on a page and choosing “view source”
HTTP:Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.This is the
protocol used when a web browser communicates with a web server to
request and retrieve data.
HTTPS: A secure Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
Hyperlinks: Links that you click on within a
webpage to be brought to another page or website.
I
Inbound Links: Links
that point to your website from other websites.
Index: A search engines database that stores
information about websites.
Internal Links: This is a link that points to
another page on the same site.
K
Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s):
Helps organizations achieve
goals through defining the measurement and progress of a campaign.
Key Phrase (Keyword Phrase):
A search made up of keywords
Keyword: A single word that a search engine user
would search for in hopes of bringing up relevant useful website
results for that term.Your website should target Keywords and Keyword
Phrases that searchers will use to find you.
Keyword Density: The
no. of times a keyword phrase(N) in a web page mutilply by no. of
keywords in that phrase(M) divided by total word count of a web page.
Keyword Density =
N*M/Total Word Count
Keyword Proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are
Keyword Prominence:Refers to the fact that the keywords placed in important parts of a webpage are given priority by the search engines
Keyword Stuffing: The
act of including an excessive amount of keywords in your page text
and HTML.If the keywords are listed so often that it affects the
readability of your site, this can have a negative effect on your
search results.And is affected by Google Penguin
L
Link Bait: Link
Bait is designed specifically to gain attention or encourage others
to link to the website.
Link Building: The
process of requesting links from other webmasters who own sites that
are relevant to yours.This includes directory submissions, blog
commenting, press releases.. etc.Sites also offer “paid links”
promising to do the link building for you, which is not an advisable
practice to participate in.
Link Farm: A
group of websites that are all interlinked with the purpose of
inflating their link popularity.This is a form of spam.
Link Popularity: How
many other websites have linked to your website.The more pages
linking to you, the better.
Linkwheel:
A group or “hub” of websites that link to one another in a
circular fashion.
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing.
Latent Semantic Indexing keywords can make your content look more
natural to search engines and users. Instead of using the exact
phrase repeatedly throughout your text, you can use synonyms and
other terms that are related to your content and have the same
meaning with your target key phrase.
M
Meta Data: The
HTML area toward the “head” of a site that displays various Meta
Tags
Meta Description: Meta
Descriptions how search engines list your site in engines. Generally
not an influence in ranking on most engines, it still gets shown as
text to support a listing in natural search and does influence click
through rate and relevance.
Meta Keywords: Meta
Keywords – List of keywords used to indicate what your web page is
about.Used in SEO but no longer being used by Google to categorise
web page content.
Meta Tags: HTML
tags of information associated with a website, such as title,
description, keywords and author.
Microblogging:Microblogging is providing group of
people with news/information using a very short amount of text/words
to describe it.Sites like Twitter are considered microblogging sites.
O
Off Page Optimization: The
area of search engine optimization that applies to building backlinks
(link building)
On Page Optimization: The
area of search engine optimization that applies to the content and
structure of the website
Outbound Links:
Links that are directed to another website from your website.
P
Page Rank (PR): Page rank is a score Google gives
a web page based on how trustworthy and relevant the website appears
to be.The main factor of page rank is your link popularity.Google
consider many factors into account when judging your links and gives
some links a higher score while other links may negatively affect
your score.
The scale ranges from 0-10 with 0 being the lowest and 10 being
the highest. Each rank is harder to achieve the higher you get
There is an ongoing debate over the importance of Page Rank to
SEO.
Portal: A separate site used to function as an
access point to another website.These can be authoritive hubs that
link to a website.
Q
Query: A keyword or phrase typed into a search
engine to return results.
Query String: A portion of a URL which often
appears after a question mark( ? )
QDF: “Query Deserves Freshness”, sometimes
also referred to as “Quality Deserves Freshness”.For example, if
a blog post is created about a specific trending topic, that post may
be added to the search index quicker as it directly relates to the
current trend.
R
Reciprocal Linking: Trading links between
websites.
Redirect: Redirecting one site to another.This
happens automatically without the need of user to click on
anything.There are two main types of redirects, the 301 which lets
the search engines know your site has been permanently moved to
another, and the 302 which tells search engines the website has been
“temporarily moved”.
Referrer: If a user finds your website by
clicking on a link provided on another website, the website they
arrived from would be considered the referrer.
Relevance: How relevant your website is to a
search term entered, and the likelihood of your website appearing in
results for that term.
Robot: Same as Googlebot, crawler or spider.
ROI:Return on investment.The benefit gained from
investing budget into advertising, SEO or Social Media.Total revenues
generated from the campaign minus total costs.
S
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The search
results provided after you type a query, keyword or phrase.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing. Involves strategies
to increase the number and quality of leads generated by search
engines.
SEO:Search engine optimization.The practice of
optimizing your website for better placement in search engine
results. Involves three steps including technical optimization,
on-page optimization and off-page optimization.
SMO: Social Media Optimization:Strategy and
methods for social media marketing.
Spider: Also
known as a bot, robot, crawler or agent. These are programs used by
search engines to explore the web and your website and retrieve
content about what that site is about.
T
Theme: The
main focus of your website or webpage.
Title Tag:The
text displayed at the very top of your browser window, above the
“back” “forward” and “refresh” buttons.If you are using
Google Chrome you may not see this information.
A very important line of text for search engine optimization.The
words in this text are given more weight, and this text is generally
what is displayed in search engine results.
U
Usability: How friendly a website is to visitors,
and the ease of use in which they can find their way around your
site, or perform an action or task.
USG (User Generated Content): Content created and
published (or added to) by the end user.This consists of videos and
podcasts as well as sites like forums, wiki’s, blogs and social
media sites.
V
Visibility: How well placed your website is in
search engine results.
W
Web 2.0: Refers
to the new generation of web-based services and communities that are
generally characterized by participation, collaboration and sharing
of information.
Web 2.0 applications include wiki’s, folksonomies, blogs, and
other social networking sites.
White Hat SEO: Ethical SEO that follows search
engine guidelines.
X
XML: Extensible
Markup Language – this is a scripting language that allows a
programmer to define the properties of a document.
XML Sitemap: A sitemap generated in Google’s
required XML format.A sitemap is a map to all pages on your sites.
