SEO Glossary Ad Words — Ad Words is Google’s flagship advertising product, and main source of revenue. Ad Words offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The Ad Words program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes. Acquisition - The point in Internet marketing when a visitor becomes a qualified lead/customer. Generally an acquisition is when a visitor • buys a product. • subscribes to a newsletter. • provides contact details and indicates an interest in the product. Algorithm - A complex mathematical equation used by the search engines for determining the importance and rank of a website. ALT Tags — The alternative text that the browser displays when the surfer does not want to or cannot see the pictures present in a web page. Using alt tags containing keywords can improve the search engine ranking of the page for those keywords. Anchor Text - The visible text for a hyperlink. For example: This is the anchor text Altavista.com - Search engine owned by Overture. AOL - America Online portal. ASK - Ask Jeeves search engine Back links — A back link is any link to a website from another. An important part of a search engines algorithm is link popularity, i.e. the number of back links that a website receives. Blog — “web-log”. A journal or diary that is usually hosted by a third party and can be updated regularly. Broken Link(s) - A link within a website which could not be followed. Is also known as a “dead link”. CPC - Abbreviation for Cost Per Click. It is the base unit of cost for a PPC campaign. CTA - Abbreviation for Content Targeted Advertising, It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites. CTR - Abbreviation for Click Through Rate. Click Through — When a user clicks on a link and visits a new page. The term “click through rate” is used to describe the amount of times paid listings are clicked through as a percentage of the total number of impressions (displays). Cloaking - This is a technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider/robot is different from that presented to the users browser. This is a “black hat” technique and is not advisable for any website. Content - The text, images and any other information located on a web page. Crawler - The search engines robots that crawl the web, making copies of the web pages it comes across and storing them in a database called an “index”. Cross Linking — The process of back linking several sites with the purpose of increasing link popularity. Delisting - This describes when a website is dropped from a search engines index usually through penalisation but occasionally due to the search engines mistake. DESCRIPTION Tag — A Meta information tag. It is used to describe the contents of a web page and is included in the head tags of a web page. Directory - A categorised list of websites that is maintained by human editors instead of crawlers. Yahoo.com is the most widely recognised directory on the web, but there are literally thousands of others. Doorway Page — A webpage that has been designed purely for search engines and often leads to another, separate website. This is a “black hat” SEO technique and although may achieve a high rankings quite quickly, it will ultimately lead to your site being penalised or banned completely. Also known as a “Gateway page”. Duplicate Content — The issue of having duplicated content on two or more pages of the same or different web pages. Dynamic Content (dynamic pages) - Web pages that are often generated from databases. The URLs of dynamic pages often use the extensions: asp, .cfm, .cgm, or .cgi. FFA - Free For All link pages. Freshbot - A Google spider which updates the engine with recently updated pages Google — The worlds most popular search engine. Google also supplies results to AOL, the BBC, iWon and Netscape Googlebot — Google’s main robot. Known as a “spider” it crawls the web and records information about websites as visits them. Google Bomb — The process of manipulating the results of Google by placing a link to a single webpage on several domains. The most famous incident of Google bombing was when around 32 webmasters put the text “miserable failure” on their websites and placed a link under this text to George Bush’s autobiography. Causing this webpage to rank #1 in Google for the search term “miserable failure.” Google Dance — The period when Google is in the process of updating its search engines rankings. During this time SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) can fluctuate and websites often see a surprising rise or fall in rankings before returning back to normal. Google Toolbar - software provided by Google which inserts the Google search bar and other features into a users Internet Explorer browser. Google Sandbox - A filter affect that Google places on new domains to stop the website from high rankings for the main keywords. Header Tags - HTML tags that help outline what a web page is about. Keywords inside the header tags on a webpage help to increase a websites ranking for those specific keywords. Examples: <h1> H1 tag.</hl> <h2> H2 tag.<1h2> Hidden Text and Hidden Links — A “black hat” technique of hiding text or links by making them the same colour as the web page background. This is often done to stuff keywords onto the page for the purpose of search engines rather than users. Once this is discovered by the search engines your site will be penalised. Hit — A “hit” is the occurrence of a file being downloaded from a server due to a visitor viewing a webpage. This includes style sheets, graphics files and photo files. Indexing - After a search engine crawls the web, it forms a database or index using an algorithm to rank the URLs it has found. IBL- Inbound Link KEYWORDS Tag — A Meta information tag. Single or multi-word phrases are placed into this tag to describe what the content of a webpage is about. Keyword Density — The amount of times a keyword is mentioned in the content of a webpage, expressed as the percentage of total number of words on a page. Landing Page - The page that a web user reaches after clicking on a search engine listing. Link Farms — A website that exists purely to increase the rankings of member’s websites thorough increased link popularity. It is not recommended to participate in link farms as search engines will often penalise a site or ban it completely for participating. Link Popularity — The term used to describe the importance of a webpage, by measuring the number of inbound links to the site. Meta Tag — An HTML tag that must appear in the <head> portion of the page. Meta tags supply information to search engines about a page but do not affect its appearance. Mirror Sites — Identical websites at different domains. MSN Live Search —Microsoft’s new search engine. Located at www.live.com Open Directory — The largest human edited directory located at www.dmoz.org. Outbound Links - Links on a page that lead to another web page. This term refers to links that lead to either the same or different websites. Page Rank — Formula developed by Google to determine a web pages “inbound link ranking” Often referred to as “PR’ value. Page View — A single view of a webpage. Used for measuring traffic to a website, but remember a page view is not necessarily caused by a human. Ranking — The positioning of a webpage for a certain search term in a search engine. ROBOTS Tag — A Meta information tag which is used to to tell a search engine robot how to behave. Search Query — The keyword/keywords that are typed into a search engine to find relevant websites. Search Term - The keyword/keywords that are typed into a search engine to find relevant websites. SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. The act of altering a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. In the past, has also been used as a term for any type of search engine marketing activity, though now the term search engine marketing is more commonly used as an umbrella term. Search Engine Optimisation — See SEO SERPs - See Search Engine Results Pages Search Engine Submission — The process of informing the search engines of a website in the hope of the search engine spiders the website and indexes the site in its database. TITLE Tag - Meta information tag inserted at the top of a web page, and displayed in the browser bar. It is very important to integrate keyword into the title tag of each page. Yahoo -A very popular Web portal and web-based email provider. Other major web-based email providers are Microsoft’s Hotmail and Google’s Gmail services. URI - Uniform Resource Identifier. It is address of resources available on internet. URL -Uniform Resource Locator. It is unique address of resources available on internet.
