Adwords: Google Pay Per Click contextual advertisement program, very common way of basic website advertisement.
Adwords Site (MFA) Made For Google Adsense Advertisements - websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for GA advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing.
Affiliate: An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or commissions.
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.
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.
Astroturfing (the opposite of full disclosure): Attempting to advance a commercial or political agenda while pretending to be an impartial grassroots participant in a social group. Participating in a user forum with the secret purpose of branding, customer recruitment, or public relations.
Authority (trust, link juice, Google juice): The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites.
B2B: Business to Business.
B2C: Business to Consumer
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.
Blog: A website which presents content in a more or less chronological series. Content may or may not be time sensitive.
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.
Bounce rate: The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.
Bread crumbs: Web site navigation in a horizontal bar above the main content which helps the user to understand where they are on the site and how to get back to the root areas.
Canonical issues (duplicate content): 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.
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 chose.
Conversion (goal): Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.
Conversion rate: Percentage of users who convert - see conversion.
CPC Cost Per Click - the rate that is paid per click for a Pay Per Click Advertiser
CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions) A statistical metric used to quantify the average value / cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M - from the Roman numeral for one thousand.
crawler (bot, spider) A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.
Doorway (gateway): 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.
E commerce site: A website devoted to retail sales.
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 that users and search engines are served different content.
Googlebot: Google’s spider program
GYM Google - Yahoo - Microsoft, the big three of search
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.
Impression (page view): The event where a user views a webpage one time.
In bound link (inlink, incoming 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 cannibalization: The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.
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 stuffing (keyword spam): Inappropriately high keyword density.
Landing page: the page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP
Latent semantic indexing (LSI): This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail Searches”. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail”.
Link bait: A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media.
Link 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 themselves. Quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.
Link farm: a group of sites which all link to each other.- Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
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.
Metric: A standard of measurement used by analytics programs.
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.
Monetize: To extract income from a site. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetize a website.
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. A form of link condom.
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. A form of link condom.
Pagerank (PR) a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors.
PPA (Pay Per Action ): Very similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversions.
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.
Robots.txt : a file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behavior 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.
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 favorably 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 users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.
Social media: Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.
Social media marketing (SMM): Website or brand promotion through social media
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. Poorly executed splash pages may be bad for SEO and often a pain in the ass for users. - Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
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.
Trust rank: a method of differentiating between valuable pages and spam by quantifying link relationships from trusted human evaluated seed pages.
URL Uniform Resource Locator - AKA Web Address
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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