SEO Glossary

Algorithm (algo):	A program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given search query.

Alt Text:	A description of a graphic, which usually isn’t displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is undeliverable, or a browser is used that doesn’t display graphics. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated picture. Special web browsers for visually challenged people rely on the alt text to make the content of graphics accessible to the users.

Analytics:	A program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program.

Anchor Text:	The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

Authority Site:	A website which has many incoming links from other related expert/hub sites. Because of this simultaneous citation from trusted hubs an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank, and search results placement. Wikipedia is an example of an authority site.

Back Link (inlink, incoming link):	Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.

Black Hat:	Search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Bot (robot, spider, crawler):	A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.

Canonical Issues:	(duplicate content) canon = legitimate or official version - It is often nearly impossible to avoid duplicate content, especially with CMSs like Wordpress, but also due to the fact that www.site.com, site.com, and www.site.com/index.htm are supposedly seen as dupes by the SEs - although it’s a bit hard to believe they aren’t more sophisticated than that. However these issues can be dealt with effectively in several ways including - using the noindex Meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the canon.

Cloak:	The practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and caries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.

CMS:	Content Management System - Programs such as Wordpress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so.

Crawler (bot, spider):	A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.

Directory:	A site devoted to directory pages. The Yahoo directory is an example.

Doorway (gateway page):	A web page that is designed specifically to attract traffic from a search engine. A doorway page which redirects users (but not spiders) to another site or page is implementing cloaking.

Duplicate Content:	Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any Trust from the search engines compared to the content that the SE considers being the original.

Feed:	Content which is delivered to the user via special websites or programs such as news aggregators.

FFA (Free For All):	A page or site with many outgoing links to unrelated websites, containing little if any unique content. Link farms are only intended for spiders, and have little if any value to human users, and thus are ignored or penalized by the search engines.

Gateway Page (doorway page):	A web page that is designed to attract traffic from a search engine and then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page is not exactly the same as cloaking but the effect is the same in those users and search engines are served different content.

Google Bomb:	The combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually for humorous effect. The “miserable failure” - George Bush, and “greatest living American” - Steven Colbert Google bombs are famous examples.

Google Bowling:	Maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from the “bad neighborhood” - Kind of like yelling “Good luck with that infection!” to your buddy as you get off the school bus - there is some controversy as to if this works or is just an SEO urban myth.

Google Dance:	The change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.

Google Juice:	(trust, authority, pagerank) trust / authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.

Googlebot:	Google’s spider program.

GYM:	Google - Yahoo - Microsoft, the big three of search.

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

In Bound Link (inlink, incoming link):	Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and page rank.

Indexed Pages:	The pages on a site which have been indexed.

Inlink (incoming link, inbound link):	Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.

Keyword - Key Phrase:	The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.

Keyword Density:	The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.

Keyword Research:	The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.

Landing Page:	The page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP.

BLink Building:	Actively cultivating incoming links to a site.

Link Exchange:	A reciprocal linking scheme often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value.

Link Partner (link exchange, reciprocal linking):	Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal nature.

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

Link Text (Anchor text):	The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

Long Tail:	Longer more specific search queries that are often less targeted than shorter broad queries. For example a search for “widgets” might be very broad while “red widgets with reverse threads” would be a long tail search. A large percentage of all searches are long tail searches.

META Tags:	Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.

MFA (made for advertisements):	Websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV programming is usually MFA.

Mirror Site:	An identical site at a different address.

Natural Search Results:	The search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.

NoFollow:	A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link.

NoIndex:	A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link.

Non Reciprocal Link:	If site A links to site B, but site B does not link back to site A, then the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of collusion between sites.

Organic Link:	Organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.

Outlink:	Out going link.

PageRank (PR):	A value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors.

PPC (pay per click):	A contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

Reciprocal Link (link exchange, link partner):	Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal and potentially incestuous nature.

Redirect:	Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.

Robots.txt:	A file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behaviour of search engine spiders.

ROI (return on investment):	One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment, and thus cost / benefit of different schemes.

Sandbox:	There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or exact behaviour of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs.

Search Engine (SE):	A program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a user’s keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.

SEM:	Short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.

SEO:	Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favourably ranked by the search engine.

SERP:	Search Engine Results Page.

Site Map:	A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.

SMM (social media marketing):	Website or brand promotion through social media.

Social Bookmark:	A form of Social Media where user’s bookmarks are aggregated for public access.

Social Media:	Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social book marking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.

Social Media Marketing (SMM):	Website or brand promotion through social media.

Site Map:	A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.

Spider (bot, crawler):	A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.

Splash Page:	Often animated, graphics pages without significant textual content. Splash pages are intended to look flashy to humans, but without attention to SEO may look like dead ends to search engine spiders, which can only navigate through text links.

Static Page:	A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.

Web 2.0:	Is characterized by websites, which encourage user interaction.

White Hat:	SEO techniques, which conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to unscrupulously “game” or manipulate SERPs.

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