SEO Glossary

Here are some words or acronyms used in SEO and Web Marketing

Algorithm
A set of rules that a search engine uses to rank the listings contained within its index, in response to a particular query. No search engine reveals exactly how its own algorithm works, to protect itself from competitors and those spamming the search engine.

Adsense
Google AdSense, commonly just AdSense, is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis.

Adwords
AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution.

Ajax
(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or Ajax, is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications.

Alt Tags
The small text box visible when a mouse is hovered over an image in a web browser, describing what the image contains. Useful in search engine optimisation.

ASP
Active Server Pages, Microsoft's technology that enables HTML pages to be dynamic and interactive and to draw information from a database. ASP is usually associated with Microsoft Windows Web servers and Microsoft Access Databases. ASP pages can be recognised as they have the suffix .asp

AWStats
AWStats is an open source Web analytics reporting tool, suitable for analyzing data from Internet services such as web, streaming media, mail and FTP servers.

Backlink
All the links pointing at a particular web page. Inbound linksare an important part of web site marketing as they can deliver targeted visitors directly from another web site, and can help to improve the ranking position of your site on engines that use link popularity as a part of their algorithm. (also known as inbound link.)

Black Hat SEO
Black Hat search engine optimisation is usually defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner.

Blog
A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links.

Cloaking
Technique allowing to provide a different page to the search engines which index a site from that visible by a Net surfer. Regarded as spamdexing, it is prohibited by the search engines.

CPM
Cost per thousand impressions.

Click-through rate (CTR)
The average number of click-throughs per hundred ad impressions, expressed as a percentage.

Deep linking
Linking to a web page other than a site's home page.

DMOZ
Name of the directory of the ODP project (Open Directory Project), managed by thousands of voluntaries, freely used by many other sites, including Google

DNS
The Domain Name System is the method by which the Internet resolves a domain name (e.g. andaluciaws.com) to the IP address (e.g. 212.67.207.152) of the server where the website is hosted. Changing the DNS record is the method of changing the hosting of a domain from one server to another.

Doorway domain
a domain used specifically to rank well in search engines for particular keywords, serving as an entry point through which visitors pass to the main domain.

Doorway page
Similar to a cloaking, where the page that exists only to drive traffic to another page. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the most search engine guidelines and could be grounds for banning.

Favicon
A small icon that is used by some browsers to identify a bookmarked Web site.

Flash
Programme used (predominantly) to make animated or "movie" images within websites. Flash is developed by a company called Macromedia. Flash provides a slick professional corporate image but some users dislike having to wait to view information.

FTP
File Transfer Protocol. The common method of uploading web pages to the internet. FTP details are the host, user name, password needed to alter or add a web page on the internet.

Frames
An HTML technique allowing web site designers to display two or more pages in the same browser window. Many search engines do not index framed web pages properly - they only index the text present in the NOFRAMES tag. Unless a web page which uses frames contains relevant content in the NOFRAMES tag, it is unlikely to get a high ranking in those search engines.

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 optimised 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 most search engine guidelines and could be grounds for banning.

Google Dance
Corresponds to the period of the month at which Google updates the values of PageRank of the pages indexed in its database. This one generally starts at the end of the month and lasts one week. During this time, the ranking of a Web page in the results of a search goes up or down (you understand why it is called a dance). It is the same for its visible PageRank in Google Toolbar. According to the geographical area of the Net surfer, one of the thousands of servers of Google will give the results to the search, which will differ according to whether this server is updated or not.

Googlebot
Name of the indexing robot of Google, which scans the Web from link to link looking for new pages. You may know if googlebot came to visit your site by looking at the log files of your server.

Hacker
Hacker has several common meanings. It is most commonly used by the mass media to refer to a person who engages in illegal computer trespassing

Hidden Links
A spam technique in which hypertext links are written to be seen by spiders hut not by human visitors. Spammers place lots of links from high-ranking pages to other pages they are trying to boost.

Hit
A request for a file by a web browser to a web server. Since files include images and graphics it is a meaningless statistic from a marketing or point of view although hits are often quoted in website's promotional material to enhance the number of visitors or page impressions.

Hosting
Space provided on a web server where information contained in a website is made available to those searching the world wide web. Andalucia Web Solutions offers a number of hosting plans. For more information please see Hosting Plans contact sales by phone on 952 897 865 or fill in our contact form.

Html
Hypertext Markup Language. A programming language used in the construction of websites. It is really a mark up language rather than a full programming language. Static web pages are written in HTML.

Http
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a communications protocol used to transfer or convey information on intranets and the World Wide Web.

Inbound Links
An inbound link is a hyperlink that point to your website.

Internet (the)
The vast worldwide collection of computer networks that all use a common protocol called TCP & IP (Transport Control Protocol & Internet Protocol) to communicate. It evolved from the ARPANET of the late 60's and early 70's.

Java Script
JavaScript is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development.

Keyword
a word used in a performing a search.

Keyword density
keywords as a percentage of indexable text words.

Keyword research
the search for keywords related to your Web site, and the analysis of which ones yield the highest return on investment (ROI).

Keywords tag
META tag used to help define the primary keywords of a Web page.

Landing page
In online marketing a landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.

"Link:" command
Tool giving the number of pages linking to another. Attention, only a part is actually given, the less popular pages are not counted in these results, even though they are counted in the PageRank's computation. This type of search cannot be combined with other search.

Link popularity
An analysis by search engines to determine the authority or ranking of Web pages by examining the network of connections between Web pages. Search engines use link analysis when ranking search results by relevance—pages that have many inbound links from high-authority pages are ranked higher than other pages in the search results.

Link text
the text contained in (and sometimes near) a hyperlink.

Log file
file that records the activity on a Web server.

Linux
A free version of the Unix operating system. Linux is "Open Source" software and is freely available over the Internet. It is primarily composed of tools developed over a 15-year period by Richard Stallman and Project GNU. However, the final spectacular push was provided by Linus Torvalds who wrote a kernel (completed in 1994), organized a bunch of programmers Internet-wide, and managed releases. It is known for its reliability and is popular choice for web servers. It is growing in popularity in office environment usage in spite of higher level of required technical support. IBM has adopted Linux as a standard.

Live Search
Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search and MSN Search) is the name of Microsoft's web search engine, designed to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo!. Live Search is accessible through Microsoft's Live.com and MSN.com web portal.

Lycos
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the web, launched in 1994. It ceased crawling the web for its own listings in April 1999 and instead provides access to human-powered results from LookSmart for popular queries and crawler-based results from Yahoo for others.

Manual submission
adding a URL to the search engines individually by hand.

Meta tag generator
tool that will output META tags based on input page information.

Meta tags
tags to describe various aspects about a Web page.

Microsoft
The world's largest vendor of personal computer software. Microsoft was founded in 1978 by Bill Gates and several others writing software for the emerging PC market. Success came with the contract to write the MS-DOS operating system for IBM who did not see them as a threat. Their present operating system Windows is now the worlds most popular operating system. The office suite of programmes (Word, Excel, Access, Power Point) form the backbone of its software product range.

Mirror
A mirror is the term used for a near identical duplicate website. Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to improve the ranking of a web site or target different keywords/keyphrases using the same material. Using mirrors is a violation of the search engines guidelines and result in banning.

MSN
Short for Microsoft Network, Microsoft's online service. Like competing services such as America Online, MSN offers e-mail, topic-related forums, and full access to the World Wide Web.

Natural Search
Also known as organic search, the search engine technology that finds the most relevant matches for a searcher’s query from all of the pages indexed from the Web. Natural search contrasts with paid search, in which webmasters can pay for the highest rankings position.

Open Directory
The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. Formerly known as NewHoo, it was launched in June 1998. It was acquired by AOL Time Warner-owned Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement.

Overture
Overture is the oldest major paid placement search engine. It distributes its listings to a wide-range of search engines, including that of its owner, Yahoo.

Open Source
Any software whose code is available for users to look at and modify freely. Linux is the best-known example; others include Apache, the dominant software for servers that dish out corporate web pages.

Orphan
A page is known as orphan if no other establishes a link towards it. If his URL were not connait, one can never fall above, so that in general it is not indexed by the search engines.

Page Impression
Each time a page is viewed within a website. The number of page impressions a website receives in a week (for example) is the number of times pages have successfully been viewed.

PageRank (PR)
Index of popularity of a Web page, calculated according to a very sophisticated algorithm, worked out by Google. It takes its name from one of the founders of Google, Larry Page.

PHP
PHP (a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open-source, server-side HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. It is typically used on Solaris and Linux platforms.

POP3
Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), an application-layer protocol, to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection.

Pop-up ad
An ad that displays in a new browser window.

PPC
Pay per click or Pay per call

ROI
Return on investment

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords.

Search Engine Sandbox
A search engines treatment of new sites or sites having a quick change in link popularity. Ranking algorithms have added a time delay to changes in the rankings. The sandbox effect aims to filter out transient changes to a web sites popularity, and only factor in permanent popularity factors. The sames is true for the number web pages indexed on a web site.

Search engine submission
the act of supplying a URL to a search engine in an attempt to make a search engine aware of a site or page.

SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - A protocol used to send e-mail on the Internet. SMTP is a set of rules regarding the interaction between a program sending e-mail and a program receiving e-mail.

Skyscraper ad
An online ad significantly taller than the 120x240 vertical banner.

SERP
Search Engine Results Pages

Spamdexing
In reference to the Spam, together of the techniques aiming at cheating in order to improve referencing of a site in the search engines. Examples: multiple tenders, repetitions of key words, pages satellite, duplication of pages, cloaking, etc.

Title tag
HTML tag used to define the text in the top line of a Web browser, also used by many search engines as the title of search listings.

Unique Visitor
A visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site in a given time period.

URL
location of a resource on the Internet.

Viral marketing
Marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message. World Wide Web The large global collection of Internet servers which support hypertext documents coded in HTML, and transferred via HTTP.

Web 2.0
A trend in web design and development - a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services (such as social-networking sites, wikis and blogs) which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users.

Web Site
A collection of "pages" or files linked together and available on the World Wide Web. Web sites are provided by companies, organizations and individuals.

Yahoo
Acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"; a www directory which categorizes web pages, it is one of the Internet's leading search tools. The business created by David Filo and Jerry Yang of the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University is now a major web portal, content provider and web based email account provider.

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