SEO Glossary
Affiliate
Affiliates are basically associates or partners that get paid for carrying out any event or program focussed to bring more traffic to the site. Affiliates are paid by the advertisers. There is an associate program called Affiliate Marketing and that helps in lead generation. In simple words, Affiliates sell for another person and in turn gets paid for the job based on the lead generated.
Alternate Text
Alternate Text is more commonly referred as Alt Tags. Alt Tags are basically associated with the graphics of web page and the text gets displayed when any user hovers the mouse on the particular image object. The main aim of the Alt Tags is to convey what the graphics is all about and mostly contains relevant keywords such that spiders can make a good search. However in the field of Search Engine Optimization, the usage of Alt Tags has been discounted to a great extent.
Back link
Back links are nothing but inbound links or IBL. These are links that point to your main site from the sites that are not yours or from external sites. It originates from one particular website but refers to another webpage or website. The form of back links varies ranging from flash file to text link and is important for the ranking of the site and has been useful in improving Page Rank of the site.
Click Through Rate
CTR or Click through Rate is the ratio of the number of users that clicked on the advertisement per the number of times the advertisement is shown often known as impressions. In an online advertising campaign, it is a useful tool to measure the success of the campaign. It has been observed that the clickthroughrates are six times higher in case of SEO listings than the banner ads.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique mostly used by spammers to feed keyword rich content to the search engine spiders that results in higher ranking of the page by the search engines. But the content that the human visitor will see will be irrelevant to the search he has given. It is basically different pages that are shown and different content that is served between a search engine spider and human visitor. Cloaking is one of the grounds by which if caught, search engines can penalize and even ban the sites.
Cost Per Action
Cost per Action or CPA is the price or the fee paid to the site owner upon using the services offered by it. It is the fee paid for say downloading software or say for completing a survey or even for entering a contest.
Directory
Directory is a storehouse of many websites and links. The sites get submitted by the individuals with a specific, keyword-rich description about the content. It is the owner of the directory that groups the different websites based on categories and often edited descriptions ensuring maximum visibility. Directories are in contrast to search engines wherein it remains unedited.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool to find out the composition or statistics of detailed visits to the site by a visitor. It gives information on not only the number of visits but track site activities such as visits per day, pages per visit, average time spent on the site and even bounce rates. It is a great tool to assess Ad sense traffic and has a great user-friendly interface.
Hits
Hits are nothing but the number of downloads from a web server. It has absolutely no correlation with web page visit. Every item on a webpage is counted as a hit. For example a single access to a webpage that contains 10 images, is considered to have 11 hits; 10 for the images and 1 for the download of HTML page.
Index
It is the search engine’s database that contains textual information of every visit of a web page by search engine spiders.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the measure of the ratio of the number of occurrences of a given keyword appears and the total number of words. It is how many times a given word appears on the webpage. The SEO experts are of the opinion that the keyword density on a particular webpage should range from 3-10 percent.
Keyword Prominence
On a given webpage, the placement or the location of the keyword is known as keyword prominence. The word gets higher prominence, if it lies higher up in the page.
Keyword Stuffing
It is a common practice to add superfluous keywords in a webpage. The keywords are stuffed more for the benefit of search engine and not for the human visitors. In the effort to make the web page keyword rich, it often loses readability and usability. Keyword stuffing is another shady way to fool the search engine and usage of it is strongly voted against.
Link Building
To increase the popularity and visibility of your own site, one can request links from webmasters of some other sites Link building often includes directory submission too.
Hallway Page
When you want the search engines to find you a group of pages then a page is created which serves the purpose of indexing this group of pages. Once the spider is able to search the hallway page, it should keep a track of all the links and index the other pages also.
Header Tags
Header Tags are the headlines of a page or the sub headings which are ranked in importance according to the indexing process by search engines.
Index
Index is a list of keywords in a database which helps to identify a particular record. Indexing is an effective method of finding and sorting the specific records in a fast manner
Long Tail
Long tail is a term used to refer to the marketing strategy on the sale of a range of unique products and services. The term was given because of its graph like structure which analyses the popular products. One end of the graph has a steep rise which depicts the increasing sale of some products and at the other end there is a long tail which surmises the demand for not so popular products.
MSN AdCenter
The MSN AdCenter is a search engine where you can put up your ads for the publicity of your website along with the URL of your site. You need to choose special keywords related to the products in your site which will help people to visit your site. For example if you are selling healthy nutritious diet then the keywords that you need to use are healthy diet or healthy nutrition. You need to open an account with MSN and make a deposit and you have to determine an amount that you will pay MSN every time a visitor clicks on your URL that you have set on your ad. Each time there is a click a certain amount is debited from your account.
PHP
PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a scripting language which has HTML embedded in it and is used on the server side to create dynamic websites.
The HTML page is enabled with the PHP code which is surrounded by PHP tags. When a visitor clicks on a page the server reads the PHP code and then transmits the result to the browser of the user. The code itself is not transmitted so you do not have the tension of your PHP code being stolen unlike Javascript.
PHP has excellent connectivity with MySQL, Sybase, Oracle, Informix and several other databases. The main functions of PHP are connection with remote servers, checking email through IMAP or POP3, encoding of URLs and setting cookies.
Redirect
Redirect is a method of making your web pages available to the user through many URLs on the internet. For example you have a company by the name of Apha Beta Company which can be abbreviated as ABC. So if somebody keys in www.abc.com or www.alphabeta.com then they can be directed on to your home page. This is useful especially when there is long and complex URLs Also if you want to maintain your present visitor’s list while transferring your website onto other domain names you can use the Redirect method.
Search engine
When you key in words to search for relevant websites a program starts searching for documents for the keywords that you have entered and returns a list of the documents. A search engine uses the help of a spider to comb the internet for relevant documents and the indexer program reads the documents and creates an index.
Stop Word
Stop words are a list of common words which the search engines have been programmed to ignore to save space and expedite effective searching. Different search engines have different lists of stop words but some are pretty common. That means if your website has excessive stop words then the spider will not index your website. It decreases the ranking of your website.
SERP
This is an abbreviation of Search Engine Results Page. This is especially effective for internet marketing. The most widely used keywords by users should be incorporated in your website which will place your site on the first page of the search results and ensure more traffic.
Traffic
Traffic is the number of visitors who visit your website each day. The greater the number of visitors the better it is for your business.
Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is marketing of your website in a swift manner and make it increase rapidly. This method was implemented originally by Hotmail as a method of popularizing it among the masses. It is a technique that has been developed to target large widespread audiences. If you wish to have more visitors on your site then in your email just include some links with your name, contact and the websites that you have hosted. People are bound to click on the links when they receive your email.
Yahoo Search Marketing
The Yahoo Search Marketing was originally Overture’s Search Marketing System and is the first pay per click program. The reason why Yahoo Search Marketing has an edge over the other PPC programs is because it is located right at the top of the page and there is scope for creative content. Yahoo Search Marketing also has the Precision Match Program to complement its PPC service. Thus when you use the Yahoo Search Marketing your website is listed in MSN, AltaVista, CNN and Infospace which will give you better chances to reach out to more users.
Mod_Rewrite
Mod_Rewrite is a plugin on Apache server that helps in rewriting the requested URL. It also supports several rules and is friendly for both search engine and user URLs striving to increase indexing chances. This module seemed to be more helpful for major database-driven sites.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags are Meta information that is not displayed in the web page but it is placed in HTML. Some important Meta tags are Meta keywords, Meta descriptions and Meta title.
Page Rank
It is a method to rank the WebPages on the Google search result. It is scaled between 0 and 10. It is a major form of link popularity.
Search Engine Marketing
Marketing campaigns or tactics undertaken to generate greater and quality leads by the search engines is referred as Search Engine Marketing.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the technique involved in upgrading the page rank of a particular web page or website. It involves three steps such as technical optimization, content optimization and above all link building.
Spider
Spiders are programs designed by search engine to explore periodically and automatically the website to download information to be stored in its index. It is also referred as bot, crawler or robot.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the words that are used to give a description of the link. These words have a hyperlink which means that you can click on these words to view the content of the site. It gives information to the search engines regarding your site and it can boost your rank.
Contextual ad
These are advertisements related to the content on the web page that the user is viewing. For example if the user is viewing a travel guide then ads related to travel like hotels and air fares are displayed on the same page.
CPM
CPM is known as cost per thousand and this is an efficient method of advertising. In this you do not pay per click. Here you buy a set of impressions and each impression is a single occurrence when an ad appears on a website.
Doorway page
A doorway page is a special page that has been created for users only to access the main website from the search engines.
Googlebot
Googlebot is used by Google to search and gather documents on the internet to make an index for the Google search engine.
Google Adwords
Google adwords is a system of advertising on Google. The service provided helps you to create ads, select the correct keywords to correlate with the ads and you pay only when visitors click on your ad.
Google Dance
Whenever Google updates its index the term Google dance is used. Google used to update once a month and during this process backward links for pages were visible and there was fluctuation in the search results.
