Glossary |
Search
Accessibility: The practice of making websites usable by disabled people - especially blind people.
Because search engines are essentially blind (ie they can´t see pictures or use Flash) accessible websites tend to have better search engine rankings than inaccessible websites.
AdSense: Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website´s content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site — or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts — you´ll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages.
It´s also a way for website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.
AdWords: Google´s CPC (Cost Per Click) based text advertising. AdWords takes clickthrough rate into consideration in addition to advertiser’s bid to determine the ads relative position within the paid search results. Google applies such a weighting factor in order to feature those paid search results that are more popular and thus presumably more relevant and useful. Google has also started taking into account the quality of the landing page and applying a quality score to the landing pages. You can apply for AdWords Select at www.adwords.google.com
Agent name This is the name of the Crawler / spider that is currently visiting a page. Spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalogue websites on the internet. When a spider indexes a particular website, this is known as ‘being spidered’.
Algorithm: Operational programming rules that determine how a search engine indexes content and displays the results to its users.
Anchor text(Hyper Link): This is the actual text part of a link (usually underlined). Used by search engines as an important ranking factor. Google pays particular attention to the text used in a hyperlink and associates the keywords contained in the anchor text to the page being linked to.
API: Abbreviation for Application Program Interface. An API is a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications; it determines how a service is invoked through the application.
ASP: An acronym for Active Server Pages, a Microsoft-invented, proprietary programming language for building dynamic web sites. Also an acronym for Application Service Provider, a hosted service available via the Internet.
Automated Submitting: Using automated software such as WebPosition Gold or an Application Service Provider (ASP) such as Microsoft b-central´s Submit-It service to submit your web pages to the search engines. This tactic is frowned upon by the search engines. Indeed, some search engines such as AltaVista have completely automated submissions by requiring the user to re-key in a one-time use submission code that is displayed on the submission page as a graphic.
Back Links: Inbound links pointing to a web page. Also known as backlinks or inlinks.
Bid Management Tool Software or an ASP service used to manage bids on pay-per-click search engines such as Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google AdWords.
Bidding: Placing a bid price that you are willing to pay as an advertiser on a pay-per-click search engine. The highest bid for a given keyword achieves the top spot in the PPC search results. In Overture, the top three bids are "featured" on Overture´s partners sites, including AOL, Altavista, Infospace, and others. The minimum bid amount on Overture is 5 cents per clickthrough.
Blacklist Lists that either search engines or vigilante users compile of search engine spammers, which may be used to ban those spammers from search engines or to boycott them.
Blog: Also known as a “weblog”. An online diary with entries made on a regular if not daily basis. Some blogs are maintained by an anonymous author who uses a nickname or handle instead of his or her real name.
Bot Short for web robot. See “spider” for more details.
Bulk submission services: An ASP that submits many URLs to the search engines on your behalf. For example: SubmitWolf. Search engines don´t like these.
Cache: Copies of web pages stored locally on an Internet user´s hard drive or within a search engine´s database. A cache is the reason why web pages load so quickly when a user hits the Back button in their web browser, since the page is not being redownloaded off of the Internet. Google is unusual among search engines in that it allows Internet users to view the cached version of web pages in its index. Simply click on the word “Cache” next to the search result of interest and you will be taken to a copy of the page as Googlebot discovered and indexed it.This feature of Google makes it easy to spot cloaking...
Cgi-bin: A “virtual” directory contained in URLs indicates a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script is in use. A sure tip-off to the spider that your page is dynamic.
CTR (Clickthrough Rate): The rate at which people click on a link such as a search engine listing or a banner ad. Studies show that clickthrough rates are six times higher for search engine listings than banner ads.
Cloaking: Serving different content to search engine spiders than to human visitors. Cloaking is basically a “bait and switch” tactic, where the web server feeds visiting spiders content that is keyword-rich, thus fooling the search engine into placing that page higher in the search results. Yet when the visitor clicks on the link they are given different content, which may be totally unrelated. Search engines frown upon this practice and some will penalize or ban sites that they catch doing it.
Cold fusion: A web scripting language with limited capabilities, mostly centered around database access. ColdFusion program files are saved on the web server with a .CFM file extension.
Conversion The act of converting a web site visitor into a customer or at least taking that visitor a step closer to customer acquisition (such as convincing them to sign up for your e-mail newsletter).
Conversion Rate(CR): Ratio of sales / actions to clicks.
Cost per Action (CPA): The cost incurred or price paid for a specific action, such as signing up for an email newsletter, entering a contest, registering on the site, completing a survey, downloading trial software, printing a coupon, etc.
Cost per Click(CPC): The cost incurred or price paid for a clickthrough to your landing page.
Cost per Thousand(CPM): The cost incurred or price paid for a thousand impressions.
Crawler(Bot): See “spider”.
CSS Cascading Style Sheet: Used to control the design of website.
Database Driven: As in “database-driven web site” Means that the website is connected to a database and web page content is based in part on information extracted from those databases.
Database Generated As in “database-generated web page” Means that a web page is created dynamically ‘on-the-fly’ from a database, in contrast with a static HTML page.
Deep Submitting: Submitting URLs of pages deep in your site to the search engines. For example, if a webmaster of 200-page website submits each of those 200 pages. This tactic is frowned upon by some search engines because it unnecessarily clogs up their submission database when the search engine spider could find those pages on its own by exploring links starting at the home page.
Directory: Human editors group websites into categories and provide site descriptions or edit 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. Contrast this with a search engine, which is unedited and concerned primarily with the HTML of a site's constituent pages.
Doorway Page: A doorway page is a web page full of keyword-rich copy that doesn´t deliver any useful information on it other than a link into the site, and whose sole purpose is to be fed to the search engines.
Dynamic Generated: ‘on-the-fly’ from a database.
Findability: How easily found your site is using search engines.
Flash: A technology developed by MacroMedia Corp. that allows a web designer to embed interactive multimedia into web pages. Often used for Flash intros, games, and animating navigation. If you visit a web page and see letters and numbers flying around with a fun.
Frames: When separate web pages are combined into one, each potentially with its own scrollbar. You know you´re on a framed website when part of the page scrolls while the rest of the page stays in place. Frames frustrate people because much of the time when the person tries to bookmark a specific page, it doesn´t actually work but instead bookmarks the “frameset” page which is typically the home page. Search engines don´t like frames. A framed web site is at a severe disadvantage compared to non-framed sites in terms of search engine marketing. Most search engines support frames, but only, as Google says in its FAQ section, “to the extent that [we] can.’ Searchers clicking through to a framed page from search results sometimes end up on an orphaned page.
Frameset: A web page that is made up of frames. A useful analogy: if the individual frames that make up the frameset are the ‘children’ then the frameset is the “parent.’
Google AdSense: Paid ads webmasters may place on their websites.
Google Bombing: When a group of sites such as blogs join forces to link to an unflattering page about a company such that this page rises to the top of the search results in Google. Google bombing takes advantage of the power of hyperlink text and of PageRank. For example, if a group of sites with high PageRank all link to a page about XYZ Company´s inappropriate behavior with hyperlink text of “XYZ Company sucks” then the linked page can shoot to the top of Google's search results for the term “XYZ Company.”.
Google XML Sitemap: A service/method offered by Google to expedite and ensure indexing of sites with lots of pages.
GoogleBot: A Googlebot is a search bot used by Google. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.
If a webmaster wishes to restrict the information on their site available to a Googlebot, or other well-behaved spider, they can do so by with the appropriate directives in a robots.txt file.
Googleware: The assortment of tools produced by google that can be used to search, report, play, research Includes (but is not limited to):
- Blogsearch
- Google Analytics
- Adwords
- Adsense
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- Google Video
- Google Scholar
- Google News
- Google search
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- Froogle
- Google Maps
- Google Images
- Google Earth
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Hallway page: A page that serves as an index to a group of pages that you would like the search engine spiders to find. Once a search engine spider indexes the hallway page, it should also follow all the links on that hallway page and in turn index those pages as well.
Hidden keywords: Keywords that are placed in the HTML source in such a way that these words are not viewable by human visitors looking at the rendered web page.
Hits: A download of a file from a web server. Hits do not correlate with web page visits. Every graphic on a web page counts as a hit. Thus, a single access of a web page with 20 unique graphics on it register as 21 hits - 20 for the graphics and 1 for the HTML page. Web metrics guru Jim Sterne says hits “stand for How Idiots Track Success.’ People who talk in terms of hits are usually either ignorant or are trying to snow their boss into thinking the website is doing better than it really is.
HTML source: The raw, unrendered programming code. It can be accessed in Internet Explorer by going to the “View’ menu then selecting “Source’.
Hyperlinks: See “links’
Inbound links: Links that point to your site from sites other than your own. Inbound links are an important asset that will improve your site´s PageRank.
Index: A search engine´s database in which it stores textual content from every web page that its spider visits.
Inlinks A synonym for back links. Popularized by Yahoo!
Invisible web: A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that is not indexed by the search engines. Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth.
Java Applets: Small programs written in the Java programming language that can be embedded into web pages. Applet programs run on the Internet user´s computer rather than the web server´s computer. Search engines can not run Java applets. Consequently, if navigation or content is embedded in a Java applet, it will be invisible to the search engines and will not get indexed. Java source code gets compiled into executable code called “bytecode’.
Java Scripts: Programs written in the JavaScript programming language. It is used to give dynamic features to a web page.
Key phrase: A search phrase made up of keywords.
Keyword: A word that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn´t appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it´s highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine).
Keyword Density The number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a web page. The more times that a given word appears on your page (within reason), the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search.
Keyword Popularity: The number of occurrences of searches done by Internet users of a given keyword during a period of time. Both WordTracker.com and Overture´s Keyword Selector (http://inventory.overture.com) Tool can be used to check keyword popularity numbers.
Keyword Research: Determining the words and phrases that people use to find something, Then compiling them into a list for use on web pages, etc.
Keyword Stuffing: Placing excessive amounts of keywords into the page copy and the 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. This includes hiding keywords on the page by making the text the same color as the background, hiding keywords in comment tags, overfilling alt tags with long strings of keywords, etc. Keyword stuffing is just another shady way of gaming the search engines and, as such, its use should be strongly discouraged.
Keyword-rich: When a given page or bit of text is full of good keywords rather than a bunch of meaningless words (e.g. “welcome”, ”click here‘) or irrelevant words (e.g. “solution”).
Landing Page(LP): The web page that a visitor clicks through to from the search results. It is also known as destination URL page.
Link Bait: Useful or entertaining web content which compels users to link to it.
Link building: Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your “link popularity” and / or “PageRank.”
Considerations for link building can include directory submissions and press release syndication.
Link Popularity: When other web sites link to your site, your site will rank better in certain search engines. The more web pages that link to you, the better your link popularity.
Log File: All accesses to a web site can be logged by the web server. Data that is usually logged includes date and time, filename accessed, user´s IP address, referring web page, user´s browser software and version, and cookie data.
Manual Submitting: Submitting by hand to an individual search engine, rather than using an automated submission tool or service. Manual submitting is the more polite way to submit, and as such is less likely to land you in trouble with the search engines. But the best approach is not to submit at all and let the search engine spiders find your site through links from other sites to your site.
Meta Description: A meta tag is hidden tag in the HTML that describes the page content. It should be relatively short; around 15 to 25 words is suggested. The meta description provides an opportunity to influence how your Web page is described in the search results, but it will not improve your search rankings. Make sure your meta description reflects the page content or you may be accused of spamming.
Meta keywords: A meta tag hidden in the HTML that lists keywords relevant to the page´s content. Because search engine spammers have abused this tag so much, this tag provides little to no benefit to your search rankings. Of the major search engines, only Yahoo! still pays any attention to the meta keywords tag.
Meta Search: Search results derived from several sources and consolidated into a single.
Meta Tags: Meta-information (information about information) that is associated with a web page and placed in the HTML but not displayed on the page for the user to see. There are a range of meta tags, only a few of which are relevant to search engine spiders. Two of the most well-known meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords; unfortunately these are ignored by most major search engines, including Google.
Mirror: See “replica”.
Mouseover: Where hovering the mouse over a text or graphic link without clicking displays something new on the page. For example, a horizontal navigation bar may display further sub-section choices underneath the section hovered over>
MSN: Can refer to Microsoft Network and their search engine.
Navigation bar: A web site´s navigation icons, usually arranged in a row down the left hand side or along the top that plays a crucial role in getting site visitors to view more than just the home page.
Negative SEO: The act of demoting a page or site from the SERPS. Most often used against a competitor that is above your site in the SERPS but can be used purely for fun.
Noframes tag: Alternative non-framed HTML on a frameset page for very old, non-frames capable web browsers and search engine spiders. Placing good keyword-rich text in noframes tags is a good idea if your site is framed, but a much better idea is to ditch frames altogether and rebuild the site properly. A framed web site is not search engine friendly as long as it uses noframes tags.
On theme: Refers to content specific to a particular topic.
Outbound links: Links that direct “off-site” to another website.
Page title: See “title tag”. Pagejacking: Stealing high-ranking web page content from another site and placing it on your site in the hope of increasing your own site´s search engine rankings. Pagejacking is yet another shady way of gaming the search engines and, as such, its use should be strongly discouraged. Page rank: Google uses a weighted form of link popularity called PageRank. Not all links are created equal. Google differentiates a link from an important site (such as CNN.com) as being better than a link from Jim-Bob´s personal home page. The Google Toolbar has a PageRank meter built into it, to see which web pages are considered important by Google and which aren´t. PageRank scoring ranges from 0 to 10, 10 being the best. PageRank scores get exponentially harder to achieve the closer to 10 they are. For example, increasing your own homepage´s PageRank from a 2 to 3 is easy with not a lot of additional links, jumping from a 7 to an 8 is very difficult to achieve. The higher the PageRank of the page that´s linking to you, the more your site´s PageRank will benefit. The better your PageRank, the better you´ll do in Google, all else being equal.
Pageviews: see “Impression”.
Paid inclusion: Paying a search engine to have your web pages included in that search engine´s index.
Paid placement: Paying a search engine to have your listing show up prominently. These listings are usually denoted as “sponsored listings.” Pay-for-performance A pricing model based on delivering sales or something else that can be directly attributed to the bottom line. Contrast this with traditional banner advertising which is based on impressions, a chunk of which come from people you have no desire or ability to do business with.
Pay per click(PPC): A pay-for-performance pricing model where advertising (such as banners or paid search engine listings) is priced based on number of clickthroughs rather than impressions or other criteria. Overture is an example of a search engine which charges advertisers on a pay-per-click basis.
PHP: An “open source” programming language for building dynamic web sites. PHP can be used to write server-side programs that access databases. PHP is the most popular web programming language - more popular than Microsoft´s ASP (Active Server Pages), JSP (Java Server Pages), and Macromedia´s Cold Fusion. PHP is especially well-suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP is secure, easy to learn, efficient, fast to code and fast to deploy. PHP is being used by over nine million web sites (over 24% of the sites on the Internet), due largely to benefits such as quicker response time, improved security, and transparency to the end user.
Pull down list: On a web form, where the user chooses from a list of items. For example, if you are asked to identify which country you are from, this will typically be done using a pull-down list. A pull-down list is usually displayed with the first item within a box and a down arrow immediately to the right. Clicking on the down arrow will display the full list to choose from. Search engine spiders can´t fill out forms or pull down on lists, so content that is only accessible through pull-down lists will not be indexed and will be part of the “Invisible Web.”
Reciprocal linking: The practice of trading links between websites.
Redirect: Where the Internet user is automatically taken to another web page address without him / her clicking on anything. Redirects are generally not good for search engine rankings, as they dilute PageRank. There is also the risk that the search engine spider will not follow your redirect.
Referrer: A web page, containing a link to your web page that delivered your visitor to your web page.
Relevance: The likelihood that a given web page will be of interest or useful to a search engine user for a keyword search.
Render: Format and stylize HTML source code into the final format for the visitor´s screen.
Replica: A copy of a dynamic web site or a group of web pages from a dynamic site, saved as static HTML files. Resubmitting: Submitting your web page address(es) to search engines after you´ve already submitted those addresses previously or after the search engine has already included your site in its index. Search engines don´t like it when you resubmit as it simply clutters their queue with duplicate requests.
Results: Can refer to SERPs.
Rewrite: As in “URL rewriting”
Robot: See “spider”.
Robot.txt: Text file placed in a websites root directory and linked in the html code.
Allows for SEO´s to control the actions of search engine spiders on the site or even deny them access. Search engine: A web site that offers its visitors the ability to search the content of numerous web pages on the Internet. Search engines periodically explore all the pages of a website and add the text on those pages into a large database that users can then search. With a search engine, publishing web pages that incorporate relevant key phrases, prominently positioned in particular ways, is critical. Contrast this with directories, which don´t siphon content out of the HTML of a site´s constituent pages, but instead are comprised solely of site names and descriptions written or edited by human reviewers.
Search engine Marekting(SEM): Strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines.
Search Engine Optimsation(SEO): Strategies and tactics undertaken to influence the rankings of web pages in the search engines.
Search engine results page(SERP): A page of search results delivered by a search engine.
Search term: A keyword, or phrase used to conduct a search engine query.
Select list: See “pull-down list”.
SEM: Acronym for Search Engine Marketing.
SEO: Acronym for “search engine optimization” and / or “search engine optimizer”.
SERP An acronym for Search Engine Results Page.
SERP: Plural for SERP (search engine results pages).
Sniffer script: A small program or script that detects which web browser software an Internet user is using and then serves up the particular browser-specific cascading style sheet to match. Sniffer scripts are also used to detect whether a user has the Macromedia Flash plug-in installed, and if so, a Flash version of the page is displayed.
Spamglish Keyword-rich gibberish used as search engine fodder instead of thoughtfully written, interesting content. Spamglish often includes meaningless sentences and keyword repetition.
Spamming: As in “spamming the search engines”. Spamming is most commonly associated with the act of sending unsolicited commercial email, but in the context of search engine optimization, spamming refers to using disreputable tactics to achieve high search engine rankings. Such spamming tactics include bulk submitting spamglish-containing doorway pages.
Spider: Also known as a bot, robot, or crawler. Spiders are programs used by a search engine to explore the World Wide Web in an automated manner and download the HTML content (not including graphics) from web sites, strip out whatever it considers superfluous and redundant out of the HTML, and store the rest in a database (i.e. its index).
Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).
A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, recursively browsing the Web according to a set of policies.
A spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalog websites on the internet. When a spider indexes a particular website, this is known as ‘being spidered’.
Spider Trap: An infinite loop that a spider may get caught in if it explores a dynamic site where the URLs of pages keep changing. For example, a home page may have a different URL and the search engine may not be able to ascertain that it is the home page that it has already indexed but under another URL. If search engines were to completely index dynamic web sites, they would inevitably have large amounts of redundant content and download millions of pages. Splash Page: A home page that is, for the most part, devoid of content. Often times created in Flash. Splash pages usually say something to the effect of “Enter Here” or “Choose our Flash-enabled site or the HTML version”. Splash pages are an annoyance to Internet users as they introduce an extra hoop that the user has to jump through before they get to any meaningful content. Splash pages are also damaging to search engine rankings. Consider that your home page is typically considered by search engines as the most important page of your site. If your home page is a content-less splash page, then it´s a wasted opportunity.
Standards compliant: Sites that use valid XHTML and CSS, separate the content layer from the presentation layer. Because standards compliant sites are accessible and usable to both humans and spiders alike, they tend to rank better in search engines than non-compliant sites.
Static: As in “static web page.’ Means that the web page was not created dynamically from a database, but instead previously created and saved as a HTML file.
Stemming: Search engines such as Google use a process called stemming to deliver results based on a word´s root spelling. An example would be similar search results returned for clothes as for the word clothing Stop word: Certain words, such as “the’, “a’, “an’, “of’, and “with’, are so common and meaningless that a search engine won´t bother including them in their index, or database, of web page content. So in effect, the stop words on your web pages are ignored as if those words weren´t on your pages in the first place. Including a lot of stop words in your title tag waters down the title tag´s keyword density.
Supplemental pages: Pages which are indexed in Google but do not exist at this time. But during searching for a particular thing they are shown in the search result pages. These pages provides additional information about the particular search.
Theme: The main keyword focus of a web page.
Title Tag: The text displayed in the blue bar at the very top of the browser window, above “Back’, “Forward’, “Refresh’, “Print’, etc. Although inconspicuous to the user, the title tag is the most important bit of text on a web page as far as the search engines are concerned. Search engines not only assign the words in the title tag more weight, they also typically display the title tag in the search results, making the title tag an important potential call-to-action as well. Thus, the wording of each page´s title tag should be thought through carefully. Also see “keyword prominence’.
Traffic: The amount of users that surf to a site.
Unique Visitors: A count of individual users who have accessed your web site. It should be noted that the “user session’ metric does not yield an accurate unique visitor count, as multiple user sessions can be generated by one unique visitor.
URL: Used interchangeably with web address. Acronym stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URLs can specify the location of a web page, an email address, or a file on an FTP server, among other things.
User agent: The name of the browser/spider that is currently visiting a page.
User session: An instance of an Internet user accessing your web site for a length of time, then leaving. During a user session any number of pages may be accessed. A user session is considered finished once an arbitrarily chosen period of inactivity - typically 30 minutes - is exceeded.
Visibility: How well-placed your web site is in the search engines for relevant keyword searches. Also see “Invisible Web”.
Web browser: Software installed on the Internet user´s computer that allows him or her to view web pages. Popular web browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera. |
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