X-Factor Marketing SEO Glossary
A B C D E F G H I K L M N P R S T U W X
301 Redirect: a permanent server redirect that reflects a change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file on apache.
302 Redirect: indicates that the document requested is found however temporarily resides under a different URL. Since a permanent redirect has not been used, the client should continue to use the original requested URL for future requests.
404 Error Page: a custom page created for the website that is presented when a user arrives at a page that no longer exists or has moved. It is beneficial to create a custom 404-error page for your users to help them navigate back to the site, to your homepage or sitemap.
Adwords: Google's advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google's ads are keyword targeted and sold on a cost per click basis in an auction, which factors in ad click-through rate as well as max bid.
Algorithm: an advanced formula with a set of rules used by search engines to evaluate a website in determining its relevancy to a particular search. The search engines then rank the websites within their indexes accordingly.
Alt Tag: an attribute included within an element link, most often an image link, to describe what the graphic is about; used to aid the visually impaired and search engine robots that cannot see images.
Analytics: a program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage.
Anchor Text: the text that contains a link embedded to another page of a website. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page.
Article Syndication: a website promotion and Internet marketing strategy that involves posting articles on one or more article syndication sites on the Internet. Others may then republish your articles on their website or blog, resulting in spreading the word about the subject matter of your article.
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Back Link: all incoming links to a webpage from an external website; also referred to as inbound links.
Blog: an online, chronological publication of a person’s comments/opinions on a given subject matter that are displayed as entries on a web page. Readers have the option to add their own entries to respond to the bloggers’ comments.
Bounce Rate: the percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages other than the site they arrived on.
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Click Fraud: repeatedly clicking on pay-per-click ads for the purpose of defrauding advertisers.
CMS: acronym for Content Management System; it includes solutions/tools for publishing, format management, revision control, indexing, search and retrieval. When selecting a CMS for your website, be sure to factor in SEO so that your CMS will be able to handle items such as populating unique title tags, meta data, page copy, text links, SEO friendly URL structure and redirects.
Content (text, copy): the written part of the web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding, and boilerplates are not usually considered to be content.
Conversion: the act of converting a website visitor into a customer or at least taking that visitor a step closer to customer acquisition. Add clicks, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.
Conversion Rate: the rate at which visitors are converted to customers or are moved a step closer to customer acquisition.
CPC: acronym for Cost Per Click; the rate that is paid for each click-through to a webpage.
CPM: acronym for Cost Per Thousand Impressions; a statistical metric used to quantify the average value/cost of Pay Per Click advertisements.
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Directory: a group of websites that are broken down into categories and provide site descriptions that are submitted to them. With a directory, picking the right category and composing a description rich in key phrases will ensure maximum visibility.
Domain: the online address of your website. It will direct the visitor to your website when typed into any browser.
Duplicate Content: content that is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. This may result in a penalty by search engines.
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E-Commerce Site: website devoted to buying and selling items online.
Feed: software or a hosted application that collects feeds from various sources and displays it in a single consolidated view, either in a window on your desktop or in a Web browser.
Googlebot: a search bot that is used by Google; it collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.
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Heading Tags: an HTML element that provides structure and tells search engines which parts of your page are most important.
Hits: once the standard by which web traffic was often judged, but now a largely meaningless term replaced by page views (impressions). A hit happens each time that a server sends an object - documents, graphics, includes files, etc. Therefore one page view could generate many hits.
HTML: an acronym for Hypertext Markup Language; it is the fundamental coding language used to create webpages.
HTML Sitemap: a webpage that lists all of the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site. It is similar to a table of contents.
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Impression: the number of times the paid advertisement is shown to users by search engines.
Inbound Link: the links that point to your site from sites other than your own. Inbound links are an important asset that will improve your site's page rank.
Index (noun): a database of webpages and their content used by the search engines
Index (verb): to add a webpage to a search engine index.
Inlinks: a synonym for back links. Popularized by Yahoo!
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Keyword: a word or phrase a web owner optimizes his/her website for in an effort to be highly listed in the search engines for the query on the keyword. Keywords must be relevant to the rest of the content on the web page and not be used in excess.
Keyword Density: a ratio of the amount of times a keyword is used in relation to the total word count of the webpage. It is calculated by dividing the times the keyword is mentioned by the total number of words on the page.
Keyword Research: researching the most relative and popular keywords for a given site, and an analysis of which ones yield the highest ROI.
Keyword Stuffing: placing excessive amounts of keywords into the page copy and HTML in such a way that it detracts from the readability and usability of a given page for the purpose of boosting the page's rankings in the search engines. Websites can be banned from search engines if they engage in this practice.
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Landing Page: the webpage that a browser enters a website through once they click on an online advertisement or natural search listing.
Link Bait: online content that attracts other website owners to link to it because of its unique value.
Link Exchange: when one website agrees to link to another website in return for a link back to their site to increase link popularity.
Link Farm: a group of highly interlinked websites with the purposes of inflating link popularity. Links that participate in link farms are penalized by search engines.
Link Popularity: the measurement of how popular a page is based on the number of back-links it has pointing to it.
Links: text or graphics that, when clicked on, take the Internet user to another web page location. Links are expressed as URLs.
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Online Public Relations: public relations activities (press releases, articles, blogs, etc.) that are released to Internet media sites and are geared towards influencing audiences that exist solely on the Internet.
META Description: a hidden HTML tag that summarizes the content of your webpage. Search engines scan this tag in order to find out what the web page is about and will display the description in the SERP (search engine results page).
META Tags: data placed in the code of a webpage that helps search engines decipher what the webpage is about.
Mirror Site: an identical site with a different URL or address.
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No Follow: a command found either in the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots not to follow either any links on 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 reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of collusion between sites or link exchange.
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Page Rank: a value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other factors.
PPC: an acronym for pay per click; a contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their ad. Adwords is an example of Pay Per Click advertising.
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Reciprocal Link: an exchange of links between two websites.
Redirect: any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page (i.e. when a site is moved).
Regional Long Tail Keyword: a multi word keyword term that contains a city or region name.
Robots.txt: a simple text file of instruction code that alerts the search engine robots what to do with the information found on a website.
ROI: acronym for Return on Investment; one use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment, and thus cost/benefit of different keywords.
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Sandbox: a probationary period for new websites that are added to Google’s index. Sites cannot get a high search engine ranking while in the “Sandbox.”
Search Engine: a program which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches to a users keyword phrases and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Each search engine has a specific algorithm used when determining the ranking, or placement, of a website in their results.
SEM: an acronym for Search Engine Marketing; it is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting, and positioning a website within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your website. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid or sponsored ads, and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to a website.
SEO: an acronym for Search Engine Optimization; the process of increasing the number of visitors to a website by achieving high rank in the search results of search engine. The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater chance that users will visit the site and become customers.
SERP: acronym for Search Engine Results Page; the pages of generated results returned after querying a search engine with keywords or a phrase.
Social Bookmarking: the method web visitors use to organize, store and share various website links with others on social bookmarking sites including www.digg.com, www.furl.net and www.blink.com.
Social Media: various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Examples of social media are blogs, forums, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.
Social Media Marketing (SMM): branches and marketing communication of a website through various social media outlets.
Spiders (bot, robot, or crawler): programs used by a search engine to explore the World Wide Web in an automated manner. Spiders download the HTML content from websites and store it in a database.
Static Page: a webpage 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.
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Text Link: a plain HTML link that does not involve graphics or special codes such as flash or java script.
Title Tags: HTML element that displays the title of a web page in your web browser and in the search results.
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URL: acronym for Uniform Resource Locator; specifies the location of a web page, an email address, or a file on an FTP server, among other things; the “address” of a website.
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Web 2.0: the new generation of web based services and communities characterized by participation, collaboration and sharing of information among users online.
White Hat SEO: ethical SEO techniques, which conform to best practice guidelines and do not attempt to unscrupulously “game” or manipulate SERP’s.
XML: an acronym for Extensible Markup Language; it is a scripting language that allows the programmer to define the properties of the document.
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