SEO Terms & Buzzwords

SEO Dictionary - A Lexicon of commonly used terminology

Following are some commonly used terms as they pertain to internet marketing and SEO (search engine optimization).

It's not totally complete, but we add to it as we think of terms that are missing. Feel free to suggest new terms for this section.

Algorithm
The formula a search engine uses to compute the relevance of the pages isted for the keywords used in a query. Different search engines use different algorithms in an attempt to display the most relevant results. They are designed in an effort to list the most pertinent websites first, while eliminating spam or other efforts to reduce manipulation of the results.

<a href=“www..targetem.com”>An Internet Marketing Firm in Virginia</a>

And will produce a human viewable link like that looks like this:

An Internet Marketing Firm in Virginia

Anchor text helps the search engines know what the site is about.

ATW
Abbreviation for All The Web.

Back Link
A link on page that points to the target page. Also referred to as an IBL, or Inbound Link.

i.e. A link from the yahoo directory (another page) to www.targetem.com (target page) is considered a backlink.

Black Hat
The optimization of a website or page in violation of a search engine's Term of Service. A black hat optimizer may try and use shortcuts such as doorway pages, hidden text, etc. or use IP delivery Cloaking to show a secondary, highly optimized version of a page to the search engines. Can quickly and temporarily move a site to the top of the SERPs, will ultimately result in the banning of the site when discovered. Hard for search engines to detect, discovery is usually the result of a competitive SEO spam report to the search engines.

Blacklisted
A site being banned and removed from a search engine index. The single worst event that can happen in SEO. Usually occurs when using black hat SEO tactics. Often the removal is permanent.

Blog Spam
A black hat technique whereby the spammer causes links to a target page to appear over and over in one or more Blogs (weblogs). Sometime done by a script or Bot.

Bot
Abbreviation for Robot. A software program that spiders or scours the web, following links. Bots perform many functions that include indexing web pages, finding email addresses, and searching for news feeds.

Cloaking
Uses lists of known IP addresses of search engine robots, to show a different page to humans than what the search engines see. Used to hide pages filled with ugly keywords from humans, but still show them to search engines. See IP Delivery

Conversion
The rate or percentage of visitors to a website who perform an action desired by the webmaster.

i.e. If the action desired by the webmaster is for visitors to purchase a widget, then a conversion occurs each time a visitor purchases a widget. Alternatively a conversion may mean filling a form or sending an email, etc. Webmasters measure conversion to gage the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and site design.

Contextual Advertising
Advertisements are placed on websites that contain content similar to that of the advertiser. Also called CTA.

CPC
Abbreviation for Cost Per Click. Measurement describing the cost to obtain a visitor. Most commonly used in Overture or AdWords type campaigns but can be associated with banner ads or affiliate programs etc.

Crawler
See Spider

CTA
Abbreviation for Content Targeted Advertising. Advertisements are placed on websites that contain content similar to that of the advertiser. Also referred to as contextual advertising. Overture ContentMatch and Google AdWords are examples of CTA.

CTR
Abbreviation for Click TThrough Rate. Ratio usually used to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Calculated by dividing clicks from impressions.

i.e. An advertisement was clicked on 5 times out of the 100 times it was shown. 5 / 100 = .05 The advertising campaign therefore had a CTR of 5%.

Doorway Page
Page that leads to another page and is designed solely to rank well in search engines. The page has no user benefit and will either automatically take visitors to the main website or require visitors to make at least one click before accessing the primary site. Also referred to as a Mirror Page, Shadow Page, Gateway Page or Advertising Page. Considered spam by search engines, use of these types of pages, when discovered, can cause an entire website to be blacklisted.

FFA
Abbreviation for Free For All. Type of site that contains a plethora of unrelated links. Anyone can post links and everyone does. Adding sites to these pages may even lower their search rankings.

Gateway Page
Page that leads to another page and is designed solely to rank well in search engines. The page has no user benefit and will either automatically take visitors to the main website or require visitors to make at least one click before accessing the primary site. Also referred to as a Doorway Page.

Guest Book Spam
Similar to FFA, spammers use Bots to add links to their sites in website guest books.

Googlebot (aka GBot)
The name of Google’s main robot, it visits web pages and downloads information for further processing and analysis.

 Google Dance
Refers to a Google practice of batched monthly updates to its servers. Search results for each of Google's data centers “danced” during this time. For a while, this was no longer a relevant term as Google began using “rolling updates” meaning updates began to occur much more frequently and with less major changes. Google dancing seemingly re-emerged in Feb. and March of 2005. Dancing is the result of a combination of load balancing, which means a user does not always connect to the same Google server, and, Google servers that do not always have the same data as each other. When the Google servers data sets are not in sync with each others, dancing occurs. The visible result is that for the same search, the results are different a few minutes or hours later. There are over 88 known separate Google servers at the time of this writing.

Harvester
A software program that sifts through the web using a bot to gather specific information, usually email addresses. The word carries a negative connotation. Eg. Atomic Harvester, is an email harvester that sifts through the web gathering email addresses to be used by spammers.

Hidden Text
Keywords that are viewable only to the search engine spiders. does not refer to HTML or META "tags" which are hidden from the user as part of normal programming.

Hidden text can include adding keywords with fonts that use the same color as the background so that they are invisible to any person who visits the website. Hidden text can also be found where Divs are used to place text outside of the viewable area of a page, meaning it is off of the viewers screen but visible to the spiders. Sometimes hidden text is the result of using CSS to make the text so small as to be unreadable. This is just a sampling of the various ways of doing this. It is a bad practice that can cause penalty or banning.

IBL
Abbreviation for Inbound Link. A link on another page that points to a target page. Also referred to as a Back Link.

Eg. A link from the Yahoo directory (or any other page) to Targetem.com (our page) would be one of our IBLs.

Ink
Abbreviation for Inktomi. Behind the scenes software that powers Yahoo and other search engines. Now owned by Yahoo.

Internal Links
Links that refer to other pages within the same website. A site with a strong navigation structure will have many internal links that point to their most important pages.

IP Delivery
Technique used to identify by knowing their source IP address. Used to show search Bots one page and visitors another. This is done to try and influence search results.

Keywords
Words typed into a search engine when trying to find a subject, service, or product. Usually refers to a phrase of words.

Keyword Stuffing
Adding keywords to a page with the sole intention of increasing its search ranking. Usually results in the opposite happening as search engines are mostly wise to this technique.

Link Farm
A group of websites that link to one another with the goal of increasing PR for the whole group. A definite penalty item that can cause all associated sites to be banned.

Link Spam
A black hat technique whereby links are obtained in large quantities from various sources, can include link farms, “back link networks” or using bots to drop links in forums, guest books, blogs etc. See also: Blog Spam

Meta Tag
Information placed in the header information, at the top of the web page code that is hidden from the visitor, but is allowed by the search engines' terms of service. With some search engines, these tags can give web masters a degree of control in how a site's listing will appear in the SERPs.

Mirror
A virtually identical or duplicate website accessible under a different domain name. Mirrors are often created is an attempt to target different keywords without having to build an entirely new website. This is against the Terms of Service of most search engines and could result in the original and the mirror sites being penalized when discovered.

Paid Link
A link from another site to www.your-site.com that is displayed for a fee paid to the linking site. See Also Site Wide Links See also: Volunteer Link

Paid Listing
Any listing in the search engine or directory that is listed as a result of payment.

PFI
Abbreviation for Pay For Inclusion. Many search engines offer a PFI service that guarantee a website will be included in an index. This does not assure the page or website will rank well in the search results, rather only that it is frequently spidered and updated within the search index.

Portal
Class of websites that provide information or lead to information for a wide variety of topics.

PPC
Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. A pay for performance advertising model where advertisers only pay if a person clicks on their advertisement.

Reciprocal Link
These are links where two sites link to each other. Ok to do, if the sites truly complement each other or are related to each other’s topic. Otherwise, can be considered spam by the search engines.

Robots.txt
A file intended to be read by search robots, so that they can determine, among other things, pages the webmaster does not want appearing in the search index. A robots text can look like this:

User-agent: *

Dissalow: /cgi-bin

In this example. The robots text is saying that (*) all user agents (all robots) please stay out of the /cgi-bin directory

SEM
Abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing. SEM refers to all forms of marketing related to search engines, including but not limited to, SEO, PPC, etc.

SEO
Abbreviation for Search Engines Optimization. The process of designing websites or pages to rank well in the natural or “editorial” results for specific keywords.

SERPs
Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Pages. The pages of search results for a query excluding all paid listings.

Site Wide Links
Links, usually paid for, that are on every page of a website. Some larger dynamic websites having tens of 1,000s of pages offer these links. Not a good practice, and if not a penalty today it will be.

Slurp
The name of Inktomi's search engine spider. Used by Yahoo Search.

Source Code
The HTML code that translates into the web page that is seen in the browser. Click on “view” from the title bar and then “source” in most browsers to see the source code of an HTML page.

Snippet
The description text that is returned with a search result. It is usually about 170 characters of text that describes the website. Sometimes pulled from the <meta> description tag, it can also be extracted from various parts of the on-page text. The red part (below) is an example copied from Google:

· SEO Internet Marketing For Online Business Targetem

SEO Virginia Internet Marketing Firm Targetem provides search engine marketing, internet marketing for online business, search engine optimization services SEO Virginia Internet Marketing Firm ... www.targetem.com Cached page

Source Code
The HTML code that translates into the web page that is seen in the browser. Click on “view” from the title bar and then “source” in most browsers to see the source code of an HTML page.

Spam
Since this is an SEO lexicon spam is not junk email. Rather it is a group of techniques used to achieve higher rankings in violation of the search engines' Terms of Service. Here are the search engines' definitions of Spam:

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN
• Inktomi
• Alta Vista
• AllTheWeb (FAST)
• Ask Jeeves (Teoma)

Spamdexing
An attempt to spam a search engine's index. It is a blatant violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines.

Spider / Spyder
A software program that scours the web. Spiders perform many functions that include indexing web pages, finding email addresses, etc. Also called a robot or Bot.

Spider Trap
A repeating loop where spiders request pages and servers request data necessary to render the pages. It can also be an intentional ploy to identify and prohibit spiders that ignore the robots.txt file.

Splash Page Welcome pages designed heavily in graphics. Their primary purpose of which are to Wow” the visitor. These pages generally do not rank well in search engines.

Sticky
A website that a visitors stays on for a long time. Sometimes websites will rank well but are not sticky, so a visitor leaves the website quickly. A well ranked website that is not sticky has little use.

Stop Words
Common words that are ignored by the search engines when indexing pages and performing search queries. Eg. and, the, in, of

Submission Service
Any 3 rd party that submits your site to search engines and directories. These services are usually a waste of money since most search engines do not require submissions. Often, submission services submit to thousands of search engines that hardly anyone even uses.

Query
The text submitted to a search engine before displaying a list of relevant sites.

i.e. If a searcher types “dog food” and clicks submit, the query “dog food”, will display a list of sites based upon the engine's algorithm.

Volunteer Link
An inbound link that was unsolicited. The best kind of link to get. These links are usually the result of your website having useful content.

Copyright 2006 Targetem.com