| Term | Definition |
| 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 ad’s relative position within the paid search results. Google applies such a weighting factor in order to feature those paid search results that 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 |
| Alt tags | Alt tags alternate text associated with a web page graphic that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the graphic. Alt tags should convey what the graphic is for or about and contain good relevant keywords. Alt tags also make web pages more accessible to the disabled. For example, a vision-impaired user may have a web browser that reads aloud the text and alt tags on a page. (For those familiar with HTML, "alt" isn't actually a tag by itself but an attribute to the "img" tag.). Note that the value of Alt tags for SEO have been discounted over time by the search engines to the point that now it is of minimal value. |
| Anchor text | Anchor text 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. |
| Backlink | Backlink (also referred to as an "incoming link" or "reciprocal link") refers to the number of web pages in Google (and other engines), that have a link to your site. For example, you can type "link:www.organicseo.org (http://tinyurl.com/7safk)" in Google to determine how many pages link to your site, which in turn will have a direct effect on your ranking in the SERPs. |
| Clickthrough | A clickthrough (or clickthru) refers to the act of a visitor actually clicking on an advertisement and following through to the advertiser's web site. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Cookie | Information placed on a visitor's computer by a web server. While the web site is being accessed, data in the visitor's cookie file can be stored or retrieved. Mostly cookies are used as unique identifiers (i.e. user IDs or session IDs) to isolate a visitor's movements from others' during that visit and subsequent visits. Other data that may get stored in a cookie include an order number, email address, referring advertiser, etc. |
| CPC | Cost Per Click. The cost incurred or price paid for a clickthrough to your landing page. |
| CSS | Cascading Style Sheet - used to control the design of website |
| CTR | Click Through Rate. Click Through Rate is a measure of the number of clicks received from the number of ad impressions delivered. |
| Google AdSense | Paid ads webmasters may place on their websites. |
| Google Analytics | Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offering detailed visitor statistics. The tool can be used to track all the usual site activities: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rates and average time on site etc. |
| 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. |
| Hidden Text | SEO Spam Tactic. Hidden Text is a SEO spam tactic to hide contextual html text from human visitors to a webpage, however making it available to search engines to spider the text. |
| Index | A search engine's database in which it stores textual content from every web page that its spider visits. |
| Internal Links | An Internal Link is a hypertext link that points to another page within the same website. Internal links can be used as a form of navigation for people, directing them to pages within the website. Links assist with creating good information architecture within the site. |
| 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 Matching | Keyword matching is the process of selecting and providing advertising or information that match the user's search query. There are four types of keyword matching including: Broad Match Exact Match Phrase Match Negative Keyword |
| 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. |
| 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 colour 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. |
| KPI | Key Performance Indicators. KPIs help organizations achieve organizational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. The key indicators are agreed upon by an organization and are indicators which can be measured that will reflect success factors. The KPIs selected must reflect the organization's goals, they must be key to its success, and they must be measurable. Key performance indicators usually are long-term considerations for an organization." |
| Landing Page | The landing page is a web page where people go to once they click on an online advertisement or natural search listing. Landing pages are designed to be highly relevant to the advertisement or search listing and encourage users to complete a "call to action". |
| Link Farm | A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (or PR). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning. |
| Meta description | A meta tag hidden in the HTML that describes the page's content. Should be relatively short; around 12 to 20 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 SERP. |
| Meta tag stuffing | Repeating keywords in the meta tags and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. |
| 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. |
| Outbound links | Links that direct "off-site" to another website |
| 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. |
| Robots.txt | Robots.txt (or Bot) is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit. |
| 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 term | A keyword, or phrase used to conduct a search engine query |
| SEO | Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and keyphrases, so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries. Search Engine Optimisation involves the 3 steps of SEO including technical optimisation, content optimisation and link building. |
| SERP | Search Engine Results Page. A page of search results delivered by a search engine. |
| Spamglish | Keyword-rich gibberish used as search engine fodder instead of thoughtfully written, interesting content. Spamglish often includes meaningless sentences and keyword repetition. |
| 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. |
| Stop character | Certain characters, such as ampersand (&), equals sign (=), and question mark (?), when in a web page's URL, tip off a search engine that the page in question is dynamic. Search engines are cautious of indexing dynamic pages for fear of spider traps, thus pages that contain stop characters in their URL run the risk of not getting indexed and becoming part of the "Invisible Web." Google won't crawl more than one dynamic level deep. So dynamic pages with stop characters in its URL should get indexed if a static page links to it. Eliminating stop characters from all URLs on your site will go a long way in ensuring that your entire site gets indexed by Google. |
| 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. |
| Taxonomy | Classification system of controlled vocabulary used to organize topical subjects, usually hierarchical in nature. |
| Unique visitors | Unique visitors are 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. |
| User Generated Content | User-generated-content (USG) is content created and published by the end-users online. USG is comprised of videos, podcasts and posts on discussion groups, blogs, wiki's and social media sites. USG allows for a wider content provider base and the chance for all users to share their opinions online. Criticism of USG includes credibility and quality issues. |
| Visibility | How well-placed your web site is in the search engines for relevant keyword searches. |
| Web2.0 | Web2.0 refers to the new generation of web based services and communities characterised by participation, collaboration and sharing of information among users online. |
| Weblog | A weblog, or blog is an online journal. Weblogs are something of a phenomenon and have become increasing mainstream. |
| Wiki | A Wiki is a web site software package that allows visitors to edit the content of the pages. This site uses MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org). Another notable wiki is Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), an online encyclopaedia edited by the internet community. There are many wiki packages available, including WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org). |
| XML | XML stands for Extensible Markup Language (filename.xml) - a scripting language that allows the programmer to define the properties of the document. |
