Glossary of  SEO Terms

Website SEO´s explanation of various terms used throughout the SEO industry

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business remunerates  one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Algorithm

This is a mathematical formula used by each search engine to decide  where a web page will rank in the search results.

Anchor Text

The visible text in a hyperlink where you click to go to another page or website, this is  also known as a “Link Text”.

ALT tag

Text that appears when you scroll over an image, a graphic or to see when images are turned “off” on your browser. This can also be used by the visually impaired as screen readers can read this text.

Back Links

The number of web pages found in a specific search engine or across the Internet that contain a link to a specific page. This can also be referred to as “inbound links” or “incoming links”.

Bot

An abbreviation for “Robot” or “Spider”. This is a software program that scans the web, collecting data for  indexing web pages by search engines or harvesting e-mail addresses.

Cache

The capture of a web page as the search engine last recorded it. Viewing the cached version of a page will tell you what the search engine saw that led to a page’s current ranking.

Cloaking

This is the act of presenting different information to a search engine spider that a human visitor might see.

Crawler

Another name for a search engine spider.

Cross Linking

Multiple sites linked together to increase link popularity. This is also referred to as “interlinking”.

CSS

“Cascading Style Sheets”. These are used to manipulate and easily manage the   design and formatting of a website

Directory

Websites that list other websites, organized into various categories. Human editors can then assess each website and if approved, can place them into the specific category of the directory.

Description

This term typically has two uses in search engine positioning:-

1. It can refer to the description meta tag which is a line of code in the header of your page and which is used to describe what that page is about.

2. It can refer to a description of your site which you would submit to a preferred webmaster who you were interested in exchanging links with and they would put that description below your link on their resources page or directory.

Doorway Pages

A page on your site, not there to provide information, but rather only to rank for a specific keyword phrase in the hope that the visitor will go to one of your more useful pages. Sometimes used in conjunction with redirects and/or cloaking. You can find more information on this with the Black-Hat SEO Tactics.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail to

communicate commercial or fundraising messages to an audience.

Gateway Pages

Another term for “Doorway Pages”.

Google Bot or Googlebot

Google’s search engine “Spider”

Head

A code that exists on your web page but is essentially invisible to the visitor. This code includes the “Title”,” Keyword Meta” tag, description “Meta” tag and the “Robots” tag it can also contain scripting and other additional information.

Hidden Text

Text which is invisible to the human eye as it is set to the same color as the background.

Header

There are traditionally 6 header tags ranging from H1 to H6. These tags are typically used to separate a web page into logical parts which then act as titles for various page sections. It is believed that the header content is assigned a higher weight than standard content as it generally appears more prominently on the page.

Inbound Links

Another term for “back links”.

Keywords

Keywords or keyword phrases which are used to identify the topic of your website.

Keyword Density

The percentage of a given keyword or phrase. ie:- 1 keyword in 100 words of page text, equals a 1% keyword density.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to adding unnecessary keywords to a web page so that search engines will consider the page to be more relevant.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is a marketing term which refers to marketing activity targeted at generating sales opportunities for use by a company’s sales force.

Link Building

This is the practice of obtaining links from external websites to your own, to    improve  direct referrals (people clicking on the link) and search engine ranking                                                                                                                                            `

Link Popularity

Another term for “Back Links”.

Local Search

By getting listed in “Local Search Results” and” Local Business Directories” you will open the doors to high quality leads from your local market.

Meta Tags

HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) this is used in the source code to provide content and site information to search engine “Spiders”.

Mirror

This is a nearly identical duplicate website (or page). You can find more information on this under “Duplicate Sites” on our Black/White/Grey-Hat information page.

Offsite Optimization

The method of increasing a website’s ranking by influencing its relationship with other websites, primarily links found on different websites to the target website.

Optimization

Fine tuning a website or web page with the ultimate goal that it will achieve higher rankings.

Outbound Link

Linking your website to another website

Page Rank

Google’s tool for measuring the importance of web pages.

Paid Inclusion Paid inclusion is a” Search Engine Marketing Product” where the search engine company charges fees related to the inclusion of websites in their search index.

PPC

“Pay Per Click” is an advertising model used in search engines, advertising networks and content websites, such as “Blogs”, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad when visiting the advertisers’ websites.

PR

This is another term for “PageRank”

Reciprocal Links

This means two sites exchanging links, they do this by placing a link to each other on each site. You can find additional information on this practice on our White-Hat SEO information page.

Redirects

A spam tactic is used to send a visitor to a different page other than the one found in the search results. You can find more information on this under “Duplicate Sites” on our Black/White/Grey-Hat information page.

Robot

A name given to a “Spider”, “Bot” or “Crawler” program that travels the web collecting data from websites.

Search Engine

A search Engine is a piece of Software that uses a keyword or phrase to to find

Subjects relating to that keyword that may be relevant.

Submission

This is the registering of your website to the search engines.

SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “Natural”, “Organic” or “Algorithmic” search results for targeted keywords.

SERP

An acronym for “Search Engine Results Page”.

SERP’s Report

“Search Engine Rankings Report”. This is a report that measures a web page or websites search engine rankings for a range of keyword phrases across the major search engines.

Slurp

Yahoo!’s crawler.

Social Media Marketing

This can take many different forms, ie;- Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video.

Spider

A program that visits and collects specific information from a web page, including the URL (Unique Resource Locator) and indexing the keywords and text of each page it finds.

Splash Page

Another term for “Doorway Page”.

Title Tag

This is the content that exists in the “Meta” data of your page. This content often appears as the clickable title in the search engine results and will appear in your browser’s navigation bar.

URL

“Uniform Resource Locator”. This is the address where your website can be found. e.g. www.website-seo.us. Also known as a “Domain”.

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