Search Engine Optimization Definitions Glossary

As Search Engine Optimization – SEO terms are unknown to most people, we have included a glossary/dictionary to help demystify the industry’s Keyword Definitions.

adwords Google’s Pay Per Click program, which shows up at the top and right side of SERPs.

affiliate a joint venture partner of a website which advertises their products and earns a commission for a referred sale.

algorithm A search engine’s secret coding their spiders use to determine rankings in SERPs for a given keyword phrase.

analytics Google program that analyzes and summarizes data of a website based on gathered data from the site.

anchor text Keyword phrase used to hyperlink to another page or website.

B2B Business to Business.

B2C Business to Consumer

back link inbound link from another website.

black hat Search engine optimization techniques that are used in an attempt to fool the search engines for the purpose of higher rankings without valuable content.

blog A Content Management System or website such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal that has consistent journal-style entries.

bot (robot, spider, crawler) A search engine program that will anonymously search the internet to find websites to add web pages to their search index.

CMS Content Management System – Programs such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal which can allow pages to be easily added to a website such as a blog, forum, or online community.

content (text, copy) the words on a website that are relevant to a keyword search term.

crawler (see bot, spider)

duplicate content -content which is found to be similar either found on the same site or another site. Google usually accepts the oldest contents date and ignores the duplicate content on other sites.

e commerce site website involving B2C sales of products.

Google dance a major change to Google’s algorithm in an attempt to reduce spam, duplicate or irrelevant content, often causing many sites to lose their place ion the SERPs .

Googlebot Google’s spider program

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) programming language of most web sites.

index – to job of the search engine spiders to add web pages to their databases (index/cache).

keyword / phrase – any word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.

keyword density The frequency of how often a search term appears on a web page, which can assist or penalize a page in the SERPS.

keyword research This is the basis of SEO research to determine what surfers are looking for in order to draw traffic to a website..

landing page -pages with backlimgs coming from other websites for the purpose of converting traffic to buyers

link building creating links either through back-linking or link-exchanges.

link popularity an important element to Google’s algorithm which helps determine the value of a website. It is like a “vote” coming from another site.

META tags section in html code that is not viewable on the site, but important to SEO

organic SEO – natural (white-hat search engine optimization techniques for the purpose of adding value to a website. .

pagerank (PR) – a method used by Google to help determine the link popularity of a site which can be caused by internal page structuring, or backlinking. It is a closely guarded secret that ranks each page on a site (from 0-10).

PPC (Pay Per Click) paid advertising in the search engines that will rank sites above organic results in the SERPs bases on amount paid per click (such as found with Google Adwords).

robots.txt a website file that limits where a search engine spider may visit on a website.

ROI (Return On Investment) a measure of the monetary benefit to a website sales vs. the cost of driving the traffic to the site

SEM search engine marketing – usually refers to the SEO and PPC techniques used to help a website rank higher in the SERPs

SEO search engine optimization – the techniques and strategies used to help a website rank higher in the search engines for given keyword terms. Proper landing page sales copy will also convert traffic to buyers.

SERP Search Engine Results Page

site map – a website file or page that maps out all the internal pages of a website. An html sitemap is used to help visitors navigate a site, whereas an xml sitemap is used to help the search engines locate all the internal pages on a site.

SMM (Social Media Marketing) Websites of large communities of people for the purpose of socializing, or coming together for a common purpose.

spider – see bot/crawler

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.

URL Uniform Resource Locator – entered into web browser software to find a website on the internet.

web 2.0 refers to the newest techniques in web design but usually is a reference to Social Media Marketing..

white hat – organic SEO techniques that are approved by Google for the purposes of ranking naturally in the search engines (as opposed to black-hat techniques used to fool or manipulate search engine results).