SEO Glossary

A

• A/B Testing: Creating two nearly identical documents (webpages/newsletters/ads, etc) for the purpose of testing which copy produced a better result. The best producing document is then kept as the “control” and a new nearly identical document is created to test against.
• Above the fold: This is a term used to describe content that is near the top of a webpage and is visible without having to scroll down the page to view it.
• Agent: Crawlers/Spiders are also referred to as “agents”. This is when Google or another search engine visits your web page and “crawls” the contents to determine what your site is about, if it has been updated recently, or if it down.
• 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.

• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an initiative to improve the mobile web and enhance the distribution ecosystem. If content is fast, flexible and beautiful, including compelling and effective ads, we can preserve the open web publishing model as well as the revenue streams so important to the sustainability of quality publishing. AMP HTML is a new way to make web pages that are optimized to load instantly on users’ mobile devices. It is designed to support smart caching, predictable performance, and modern, beautiful mobile content.  

• Anchor Text: Anchor text is the text portion of a link that you click on when an address isn’t displayed. An example of this would be (Bay Area SEO). Google uses anchor text to help 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
• Bait & Switch techniques
• 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.

• Body (Body Copy): The body of your text – text that is visible to users and doesn’t include code, navigational content, or images.
• 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 if you hit the back-button instead of having to re-load the entire contents again.
• 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://website-url.com
• Http://www. website-url .com
• http://www. website-url .com/index.html
• http:// website-seo.com/index.html

• 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.
• Class C IP: (No not Classy IP’s! ) There are four parts to an IP address. These part (first three digits) consist of “Class A”. The second part (second three digits) count as Class “B”, the third part consisting of Class C.
• Cloaking: When a website or webpage shows different content to visitors than it does to search engines. Cloaking is similar to the “bait and switch” tactic where code is placed to show spiders optimized content, fooling the search engine into thinking the webpage is optimized for something it is not and placing it higher in search results. When a visitor clicks on this page, they often see completely different and possibly unrelated content. This is a black hat tactic that will result in getting banned from the search engines.
• 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. I t 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. An example would be DMoz.
• 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 intent is to have links which will lead the visitor to another main website.
• 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

• Findability: How easy it is to find your site in the search engine results
• 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.
• Fresh: Often used when referring to content. Fresh, unique content is the best for search engine optimization. With fresh content, Google will revisit the page and update it more frequently.
• 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

• Gateway Page: Also known as a “doorway page” or a “bridge page”. Gateway pages are generally very low quality pages containing little content. They exist in order to drive users to another website and are often easy to indentify.
• 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 references 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

Google Supplemental Index: Google’s supplemental index is a database that contains websites relegated to “supplemental” results. These are pages Google has deemed unworthy to be displayed in regular search results because they feel they are untrustworthy. If your page is in the supplemental index, this means that the site will not show up in search results unless there are no other results to display for the term you searched for.

Reasons your site may be sent to the Supplemental Index include:

• Black Hat Techniques
• Duplicated Content
• Lack of trust
• A site with a very large number of pages
• Page freshness
• Excessively long URL’s.
• You used to be able to distinguish supplemental results from regular results because Google placed a tag next to any result being pulled from its supplemental index. As of 2007, this tag has been removed making it very difficult to determine where a site may be pulled from.

H

• Hard 404′s: The standard 404 error page that is displayed when a server returns the response code 404.
• 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.
• Hijacking: Hijacking refers to a practice that makes search engines believe a website actually exists at another URL. It is similar to search engine spam and cloaking. This is used to increase rankings in search engine results for a particular term. This is also an illegal black hat tactic
• 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
• Hubs: A hub is a list of centralized websites that link to many related topics on authority websites.
• 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.
• Inlinks: Also refers to backlinks, generally used by Yahoo!
• Internal Links: This is a link that points to another page on the same site. If I were to link to my homepage in this example, this would be considered an internal link. This also refers to any links within a pages navigation.
• Internal Redirect: Also known as a silent redirect, this is a redirect that a search engine can’t see.
• ISAPI_Rewrite: A module written in C and C++ programming language that is used within an IIS server. This works like the Mod_rewrite rule.

J

• Javascript: A programming language. These scripts run on a users computer rather than the webserver’s.

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 amount of times a keyword is displayed within the text on the page. If your keyword appears multiple times, it will have a higher keyword density than a keyword which doesn’t display at all.
• Keyword Popularity: Occurrences of how many times a particular keyword or keyword phrase has been searched during a specified period of time.
• Keyword Prominence: The location of a keyword on your webpage. The higher up a keyword is, the more prominent it is considered to be by search engines. Keyword placement and prominence is a necessary part of any search engine optimization strategy.
• Keyword Research: Researching keywords to determine the competition, the monthly searches and finding new keywords and phrases that people use to find sites similar to yours. These are then compiled into a list for your own use.
• 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. Keyword stuffing would be determined by search engines by having a very high Keyword Density.

L

• Landing Page: Usually a singular webpage that is used to direct users to a page focused on specific information about a product or service you offer, with a call to action and information on how to purchase or sign up. These are also used in Adwords campaigns.
• Link Bait: Link baiting is the one form of link building and it aims to increase the quantity of high-quality, relevant links to a website through any content or feature, within the website, designed specifically to gain attention of 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 can also include directory submissions and press releases. Sites also offer “paid links” promising to do the link building for you. This 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.
• Link Spam: Links between pages specifically set up to take advantage of link calculating algorithms to artificially inflate your link popularity.
• Linkwheel: A group or “hub” of websites that link to one another in a circular fashion.
• LSI: Meaning Latent Semantic Indexing – which is the hypothesized indexing method/database used by Google. Some argue that latent semantic indexing would not be pragmatic, though some form of latent analysis and indexing is definitely used whether it is LSI or another method.

M

• Malaware: A malicious program containing a virus that is often downloaded to your machine without your knowledge.
• Meta Data: The HTML area toward the “head” of a site that displays various Meta Tags
• Meta Description: The message tag displayed at the top of your website, within the HTML code. This is placed in the Meta Data section and provides a brief description of your website. This description should be between 12 and 20 words. This is what will be displayed under your Website Title in search results.
• Meta Keywords: HTML tag displayed in the source code at the top of your website. This is placed in the Meta Data section and provides a list of keywords relevant to your site. This has been abused by search engine spammers using black hat techniques, that this no longer provides a major benefit to your site, and is advisable to not waste time on them.
• 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.
• Mod_Rewrite: A module used in Apache that can be used to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. It supports an unlimited number of rules and attached rule conditions.

N

• Negative SEO: The practice of attempting to demote a webpage or site from the search engine results. Mostly used by competitors, and is an unethical practice.

O

• Off Page Optimization: This covers techniques used indirectly, such as gaining incoming links to your website. These help your SEO but do not deal with your page directly.
• On Page Optimization: This covers techniques used directly on your landing page or website to optimize its visibility in search results. These techniques are directly controlled by you, such as keyword density, HTML, and meta tags.
• Organic Results: This is when people view and get to your page directly from search engine results and not from paid traffic or advertisements.
• 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 takes a lot 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.
• Page Rank Sculpting: A hyphothetical strategy that involves placing a “nofollow” attribute on specific links and pages in order to direct the flow of page-rank to another page in an attempt to increase that pages importance.
• 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 user needing 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 in 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.
• Semantic Analysis: What search engines use to determine semantically relevant phrases within a pages content.
• SMO: Social Media Optimization: Strategy and methods for social media marketing.
• Soft 404: An error page which returns a header status code of “200 ok” rather than 404. This is not recommended.
• Spam: Manipulation of various techniques that violate search engine terms.
• Spamdexing: Same as spamming.
• Spamglish: Keyword rich nonsense that appears as pure gibberish to any human trying to read it. Often includes meaningless sentences and keyword repetition in order to inflate your ranking for a specific term.
• 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.
• Stop characters: Certain words and characters such as the ampersand (&) equal sign (=) and question mark (?). When these are used in URL’s these make websites believe that the URL is dynamic. It is not recommended to use these as search engines do not usually index dynamic websites.
• Stop Word: A search engine won’t bother indexing certain common words, such as “the”, “a”, “an”, “of”, and “with”. These words are basically ignored. Including stop words in title tags or URLs waters down their density and should be avoided.

T

Taxonomy: Classification of controlled vocabulary used to organize topical subjects – generally hierarchical in nature.

Theme: The main focus of your website or webpage.

Title Attribute: Supplementary information about a specific element.

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.

Trackback: A notification that someone has linked to a document on your site. This helps authors keep track of who is linking to their articles.

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.

User Agent: The name of the browser/spider that is currently visiting a page. For example, “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

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.

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