SEO Glossary

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.