SEO & SEM — Glossary of Terms
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Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example:
This is anchor text. This isn't anchor text.
Backlink
A link from another website to your website. Also called inbound links or IBLs.
Bot
Abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
Canonical URL
Canonicalization, as used by Google, is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. When Google "canonicalizes" a URL, it tries to pick the URL that seems like the best representative from a set of URLs that refer to the same page, eg:
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- example.com/home.asp
Make sure all your links to a page use the same URL. Also, use 301 Redirects to redirect URLs to the URL you want to be "canonical."
Cloaking
Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Conversion
Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose.
CPC
Abbreviation for Cost Per Click. It is the base unit of cost for a PPC campaign.
CTA
Abbreviation for Content Targeted Ad(vertising). It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.
CTR
Abbreviation for Click Through Rate. It is a ratio of clicks per impressions in a PPC campaign.
dmoz
See See ODP - Open Directory Project
Doorway Page
Also called a gateway page. A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could result in banning.
FFA
Abbreviation for Free For All. FFA sites post large lists of unrelated links to anyone and everyone. FFA sites and the links they provide are basically useless. Humans do not use them and search engines minimize their importance in ranking formulas.
Gateway Page
Also called a doorway page. A gateway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Gateway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using gateway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Google Dance
In the past, Google updated its index once a month, and this became known as the "Google Dance." Today, Google updates its index on a regular, ongoing, constant basis to which it refers for its searches.
Google PageRank
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
Inbound Link (IBL)
Any link on another website that points to a page on your website. Also called a backlink.
IYP
Acronym for Internet Yellow Pages.
Keyword/Keyphrase
Keywords are words, which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are multi-word phrases used in search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and keyphrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.
Keyword Family
In optimizing pages for high-value search terms, a "keyword family" is a group of keywords that are related to each other and can all be associated with one page which is optimized for that family of terms.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the 'benefit' of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (i.e. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.
Link Farm
A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (eg Google PageRank). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning. Google defines a Link Farm as any one page having more than 99 outbound links.
Link Popularity
A raw count of how "popular" a page is based on the number of backlinks/inbound links it has. It does not factor in link context or link quality, which are also important elements in how search engines make use of links to impact rankings.
Mirror
In SEO parlance, a mirror is a near identical duplicate website (or page). Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to target different keywords/keyphrases. Using mirrors is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Meta Robots
This tag, in the <head> of a Web page, instructs the search engine spiders about how to index the page. By default, search engines assume the values "index,follow,archive" for all pages, but it's good practice to include them anyway, just in case. Use "noodp,noydir" to tell the search engines not to use descriptions from the DMOZ and Yahoo! directories in their search results. Search engines will generally use your meta description tag — below the bolded title-tag content — if they see these values in your robots meta tag.
nofollow
The tag rel="nofollow" is automatically inserted into every href link in many blogs, forum posts, and wikis. The tag instructs the search engine to not follow the link. This results in no backlink credit for the URL in the link.
ODP - Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. ODP data powers the core directory services for many of the Web's largest search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, and Alexa. More at Wikipedia.
off-page SEO
"Off-page SEO" refers to efforts to improve a website's search engine rankings by increasing the number and quality of backlinks to the site. This includes getting the site listed in Web directories (eg Open Directory Project - DMOZ), Yahoo Directory), getting more backlinks from what are called "authoritative" websites (sites that have been around a long time, and have what is generally considered reputable content & eg .edu and .gov are considered authoritative), as well as improving the anchor text for the backlinks already existing by adding high-value keywords to the anchor text. Compare with "on-page SEO."
on-page SEO
"On-page SEO" refers to efforts to optimize your own website, its coding, use of structural markup, directory and file nomenclature, and content. Compare with "off-page SEO".
organic search results
These are the search results that appear in the main, left column of SERPs, as distinguished from the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) results that appear, in Google, under "Sponsored Links", which are based on ad relevance and bid amount. Organic results are based solely on on-page and off-page SEO.
PageRank
See Google PageRank, above.
PFI
Abbreviation for Pay For Inclusion. Many search engines offer a PFI program to assure frequent spidering / indexing of a site (or page). PFI does not guarantee that a site will be ranked highly (or at all) for a given search term. It just offers webmasters the opportunity to quickly incorporate changes to a site into a search engine's index. This can be useful for experimenting with tweaking a site and judging the resultant effects on the rankings.
Portal
Designation for websites that are either authoritative hubs for a given subject or popular content driven sites (like Yahoo) that people use as their homepage. Most portals offer significant content and offer advertising opportunities for relevant sites.
PPC
Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads. For Google, this is Adwords and the links appear under "Sponsored Links" in the right column and (sometimes) at the top, before the organic results.
PR
Abbreviation for PageRank - Google's proprietary measure of link popularity for web pages. Google offers a PR viewer on their Toolbar.
robots.txt
"robots.txt" is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may or may not visit.
SEM
Abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing. SEM encompasses SEO and search engine paid advertising options (banners, PPC, etc.)
Semantic Markup
See Structural Markup.
SEO
Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO covers the process of addressing the focus of individual pages in a website to ensure that the subject matter of each page is clearly focused and clearly communicated via the directory and file name, the title tag and meta tags, the header tags, the content, and the anchor text of any links on the page. The goal is to communicate clearly to the search engines the subject matter of each page and to utilize the HTML markup to communicate the relative importance of a page's content.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks (Web URLs) to a public website such as Digg or Delicious (formely Del.icio.us) so you can access these bookmarks from any Web-connected computer. Your favorite bookmarks are also available for others to view and follow, as well, hence the social aspect. To create your own social bookmarks, you must register with a social bookmarking website. Once registered, you can store bookmarks, tag your bookmarks, and/or share your bookmarks with others.
SERP
Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page. This refers to the organic search results page for a given search.
Spam
In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Techniques "perceived" by the bots as spam are grounds for penalties such as excluding a website from the search engine's index.
Spamdexing
Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine's index. Spamdexing is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and can be grounds for penalties.
Spider
Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
Spider Trap
A spider trap refers to either a continuous loop where spiders are requesting pages and the server is requesting data to render the page or an intentional scheme designed to identify (and "ban") spiders that do not respect robots.txt.
Splash Page
Splash pages are introduction pages to a web site that are heavy on graphics (or flash video) with no textual content. They are designed to either impress a visitor or complement some corporate branding.
Stemming
The process for reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their stem, base or root form. Sometimes called conflation, stemming is useful in search engines for query expansion or indexing and other natural language processing problems.
Stop Word
Stop words are words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries. Common words such as "the" or "and" or "it."
Structural Markup
Structural Markup, aka Semantic Markup, is markup that is used to set out the logical structure of a page. The <strong> tag identifies that text as strongly emphasized, header tags are utilized (H1, H2 ... H7) to indicate priority of text headers, etc. Structural markup makes the structure of the document clearer both to browsers (which can then display it more usefully to their users, particularly when external style sheets are disabled), and to search engines where the relative importance of content can be indicated by the markup. The use of structural markup is strongly recommended.
Title Tag
This tag — <title> — which is located in the <head> of the HTML page indicates the subject matter of a Web page and should be concise and descriptive. On a SERP, the content of the title tag is the bolded anchor text, the first line of each result. This tag is given a fair amount of weight by the search engines because of its purpose and the fact that its content is viewable in the browser, in the top upper left of the browser in the Windows operating system and centered at the top of the browser in Mac systems.
Title Stacking
Adding extra <title> tags for more keywords. A big no-no.