Residual Victory Blog

This Search Engine Optimization Glossary is just a glimpse of some of the vocabulary one will come across in search engine optimization research.

By no means is this comprehensive glossary.  If you can’t find the definition you are looking for, try www.seomoz.org where a more indepth glossary is available.
Absolute Link: A link that shows the full URL of the page being linked.

allintitle:  Restricts results of a search to containing the words in a title of the webpage..

allinurl: Restricts results of a search to words located in a URL.

ALT Attribute: Descriptive text that appears if an image fails to load in an HTML element.

Anchor Text: The text part of a link.

AdSense: A Google advertising program.

Affiliate Network: Affiliated websites that partake in a system of commission on sales of products or services. One who participates is an Affiliate.

Algorithm: A mathematical programming system used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results, when referring to search engine algorithms.

Atom Feed: Atom is an XML-based document format similar to RSS.

Autoresponders:  A program that sends replies to email messages. Often used to send confirmations and boilerplate information.

Back Link: Also referred to as Inbound Link. A link on a web site other than your own that links to your web site.

Bait and Switch: Bringing a visitor or link in under a false premise then switching the intent. 

Black Hat: SEO techniques that don’t follow best practices.

Bot:  A program which performs a task autonomously. Search engines use spiderbots, spammers often use bots to plagiarize.
 
Bounce Rate:  The percentage of people who come to your website and leave instantly.

Cache: The snapshot of a webpage when it is crawled by the search engine’s spider.

Cloaking: Hiding page content or putting up artifical content to keep content from people or robots.

Click Thru Rate: The amount of clicks a visitor makes from search engine results to find the results they sought. Used to track keywords.

Conversion Rate: A rate that defines how many visitors are converted into money or how many viewed a page.

CPC:  Cost Per Click

CPM: Cost Per Thousand impressions. Quantifies the average value/cost of Pay-per-Click advertisements. (M stands for the Roman numeral one thousand).

Crawl: An robot follows links to visit web sites on behalf of search engines or directories then processes and indexes the code and content to store in the search engine’s database.

Cross Linking: Linking within one website.

DC:  Data Center

Data Centers: Different IP addresses.
 
Deep Linking: Linking to content buried “deep” in a website.

Duplicate Content: Content on two or more webpages that is the same or almost the same.  A negative attribute for SEO.

EPV:  Earnings Per Visitor.

EPC:  Earnings Per Click.

Flog:  Fake Blog.

Hijacking: Stealing pages from another site and making it appear that the pages are coming from the hijacker’s site.

Host: Either entire domains or sub-domains.

Hub: A trusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.

Image Link: A hyperlink that uses a clickable image, as opposed to a clickable text hyperlink.

Inbound Link: Also known as backlink. A link on a web site other than your own that points to your web site.

Index: A search engine’s database of websites that search engines use for queries.

Indexing:  The process of adding Web content to a search engine’s Index (database).

Indexer:   A program that search engines use to update their databases

Internal Links:  Links within your site that point to other pages in your website

Keyword density: The number of times a keyword or keyword phrase is used in a document compared to the total words in the document. You can take the total number of words in the document and multiply it by the percent required to find out how many keywords you need.  Or you can take the number of keywords or keyword phrases you have and divide by the total number of words.

Keyword Stuffing: Spamming, or stuffing, a document by repeating a word or phrase.

Keyword Phrase: A phrase a searcher uses when searching using a search engine.

Keyword: A word used when querying a search engine.

Landing Page:   The page a website visitor lands on after clicking a link, usually in a advertisement and usually contains a sales pitch.

Link Popularity: The measurement of quantity or quality of websites that link to your website.

Linking Strategy: The process of researching, analyzing and developing a strategy to include links on your website and others that will result in maximum visibility and are optimized for search engine results.

Linkage: The number of links pointing to a website. Search engines often consider linkage in their algorithms.

Link Baiting: Content created to attract links from other websites.

Link Building:   Working to generate incoming links to a site.

Link Partner:   Two sites that link to each other.  Also known as link exchange or reciprocal linking.  Not valued in search engine algorithims.

Link Popularity:  The value of a site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it.

Link Farm: Webpages with several links to each other for the sheer purpose of raising search results.  Looked upon negatively and considered spam. Typically, links may not even be relevant to the website and are often computer generated.

Long Tail:  A specific query as opposed to a broad category query.
Meta Search Engine: A search engine that grabs results from other search engines and directories. Examples: Dogpile, Metacrawler
Meta Tag:  Tags typically found in the header of the HTML document. Some examples of Meta Tags are “description,” “keyword” and “robot.”

NOFOLLOW: An attribute in a hyperlink that tells spiders the link is not  ‘trusted’ and to exclude from Page Rank.  When used in a robots meta tag, it tells search engines to ignore links on a page.

NOINDEX: An attribute in a hyperlink that tells spiders to not put contents in the public index. Used in the robots meta tag.

Non-Reciprocal Link: A one way link. Given more value by search engines.

Organic Results: Search engine results based on relevance and popularity and are not paid for.

Outbound Link: A link from one website that leads to another website.

Ranking:  The place a website shows up in search engine results. Being on the first page is a strong ranking. Not to be confused with Page Rank and Toolbar Rank.

Page Rank: Page Rank ranks every page on the internet based on the number, quality and popularity of inbound links pointing to the page.  Inbound links are considered “votes” towards a page. Page Rank is used by Google as one of the factors in search results.  Not to be confused with Toolbar Rank or Ranking in Search Results.

PR:  Page Rank

Parser:    A  program used by search engines to break down HTML pages into sections for indexing and send it to other indexers.

Pay-per-Click: Also referred to as PPC.  An advertising program where advertisers pay a pre-determined amount for each click made by their ad link. 
AdWords is a popular Pay-per-Click advertising program.

Ping: Used by Bloggers to post blogs on multiple stites. It also means “to bring attention to.”  And example of a ping program is available at ww.pingomatic.com.  Wordpress has a built in “Ping” Function. Technically, Ping is a program that sends a message to another computer and waits for acknowledgment, often used to check if another computer on a network is reachable.

PPC: Pay Per Click. An advertising program where you agree to pay a certain amount every time your link is clicked on.

Quality Links:  Links that are not Spam and are related to website content.

Recipricol Link: Links from two different websites that are linked to each other. A link exchange.

Robot.txt: A file named robots.txt in the root level of a web site used in programming to direct spiders to ignore directories.
ROI: Return On Investment. Often refers to sales per lead. Analytics software can analyze the cost/benefit value of different scenarios.

RSS Feed: Really Simple Syndication. Puts frequently updated information into XML format and makes it readable through an RSS Feeder. User can click on the RSS Feed link and automatically be updated of the Feed he has subscribed to.

Script: A written command interpreter of an operating system

SE:  Search Engine

SEM: Search Engine Marketing.  Drawing visitors through search engines and other means.

SEMPO:  Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (an international group).

SEO: Search Engine Optimization. Making a website favorable to search engines.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page. The page that shows the results of the search.

Site Links:  A link or links under the main link.  They are only shown for the top listing in  popular query results.

Sitemap: A page on your website that links to all other pages. Also one of Google’s Webmaster tools that enable a webmaster to inform Google of changes in content.

Social Bookmarking: A way for users to keep their bookmarks online. Bookmarks are typically given public access to provide a mode for gathering information other than search engines. A form of social media.

Spider: Programs that search the internet to process and index code and content of a web page to be stored in the search engine’s database. Googlebot, MSNbot and Yahoo Slurp are popular spiders. Some spiders are used for leaks in server configurations and disallowed web content.

Spiderbot: See Spider.

Tag: A word determined by a person to identify specific content.

Text Link: An HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code.

Title HTML Tag: The title of a page. Necessary to have a valid document, and must be placed in the head element.

Trackback: Enables blogs to link back to comments on a blog.  A cross-reference system between blogs. Both blogs being used must use blogging software that supports Trackback protocoal

Toolbar Pagerank: A webpages importance determined by Google’s algorithm and assigned a value between 0 and 10.  Not the same as Page Rank. Toolbar Rank is only updated a few times a year.

Viral Marketing: A marketing program where members promote the service for you.

White Hat: SEO techniques that play by the rules to acquire search engine results.

CRT:  Crawl to Ranking Time

Supplemental Index: Pages in Google’s index that are not part of the main index. Spidered less often.

XML: Markup language which incorporates features of HTML but is designed to overcome some of HTML’s limitations.