SEO Terms Glossary
- Algorithm
- A definite set of rules specified for a search engine to measure the relevancy of the web pages and sort their listings which will be displayed in response to a search query. It is basically a mathematical formula employed by a search engine to agree on where a web page will rank in the search results for a particular key phrase. Each search engine follows its own algorithm to allot rankings. Also, the algorithm keeps changing frequently from time to time to eradicate the possibility of guesswork and speculations by intelligent webmasters.
- ‘Alt’ attribute
- It displays alternative text description for an image when a user hovers mouse over it.
- Anchor text
- This visible text in hyperlink allows user to move to other pages by clicking on it.
- AdWords
- Cost-Per-Click based advertising introduced by Google.
- Blog Farm
- Collection or group of blogs purposely used for link building and populated by RSS-feed scripts.
- Back Link
- A link or number of links on web pages that point to the main or subject page
- Bad neighborhood
- Bad neighbourhood defines a websites that links to a website or network of website that are or have had employed unethical practices such as Link scheming, hosting spyware, malware, offensive material, including other illegitimate activities such as phishing. Don't link to these websites in order to gain a link to improve your search engine rankings, you are doing more harm than good to your website.
- Bid management
- Process to placing a bid price that a user wants to pay on a PPC search engine.
- Bot
- Software that’s generally used by the search engines for web spidering and webpage indexing.
- Cache
- Last recorded view of a webpage stored in the search engine’s database
- Cloaking
- Cloaking is a smart yet risky technique used to present different content to the search engines than a human visitor would see. It is a Black hat SEO technique employed to present dissimilar content for search engine and human visitors. A totally deceptive search engine optimization technique, it actually cheats search engines in order to rank well for desired keywords.
- Black Hat SEO Tactics
- This is best described as the use of “unfair” or unethical SEO techniques to drive results in search engine result pages among other things. However, mostly the traffic or artificial clicks gained from the use of black hat methods are extremely temporary. A number of tactics such as hidden text, interlinking, redirecting, doorway pages, keyword spamming and etc, are meant to only trick a search engine into the game of gaining rankings. However, the websites using black-hat SEO tactics are most likely to jump down from these places as fast as they rise.
- Crawler
- A web crawler (Search Engine Spider) is an automated and orderly managed program that browses the internet and creates a copy of all the websites it frequently visits. Search engines make use of these to index the downloaded pages and accelerate the entire search process. A crawler has ability to index million pages per day but due to use of different algorithms they produce different search results.
- Cross-linking
- Term used when several sites are linked together in order to enhance the link popularity. Sometimes it’s also called interlinking.
- CSS
- Commonly known as Cascading Style Sheets. The most common application is used to format web pages written in HTML or XHTML.
- Conversion rate
- This is the rate at which a visitor converts in the potential customer
- Directory
- A website that acts as a repository of other website listings where the websites are listed in various categories. These directories are either free or paid.
- Doorway pages
- Doorway pages are web pages written in simple HTML pages by customizing a few particular keywords or phrases, to gain attraction from specific search engines and their spiders. The core objective of the doorway pages is to trick the search engines into rendering the site top rankings, only for a limited period of time. Doorway Pages are specifically intended for search engine spiders whereas for human visitors, it is more or less a redirect page that leads to the “real" website. Doorway pages are often termed as "entrance" or "bridge" pages.
- Description
- The term refers Meta tag description in the head section of the page to describe primary purpose of the website. In other words, the term ‘description’ also refers to the full elaboration of your website segment during the directory submission.
- Delisting
- This is the scenario when webpage(s) of a website are removed from search engine indexes or banned from for any such reason.
- Graphical Search inventory
- Advertisement units like banners, animations and browser toolbars that can easily be synchronized with the keywords, are known as the Graphical Search Inventory. This non-text based advertising medium depends on the manner in which content is displayed.
- Google Bot
- This Google’s search engine spider visits the links across the internet to feed pages to search engines index. As many quality links your website have, priority of frequent spider visit at your website increases.
- Head
- This is a section in your website where you can find the code that includes title for the webpage, keyword Meta tag, description Meta tag and robots tag. The section is invisible from general users.
- Hidden Text
- These are the text, made hidden by setting the font color of the text same as the background color of the page. It renders the text invisible unless user highlights it.
- Indexing
- The term indexing or search engine indexing refers to the collecting, parsing and storing data on the World Wide Web for accurate and easy retrieval.
- Keyword
- These are the words that describe the theme of the website or particular webpage. Keywords and keyword phrases are used in SEO Process to optimize the web pages for high search engine rankings.
- Keyword Density
- Term depicts the availability of a given keyword in 100 words of text. It equals a keyword density of 1% .
- Keyword Stuffing
- Keyword stuffing is a Black hat SEO technique used to add unnecessarily a good number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase to a web page to showcase higher level of relevancy to the search engines and gain top most positions in the search result for those particular keywords. Although, such purposeful integration of several specific phrases in the content of the web page may result in tempo temporary rank benefits but in the long run, it may lead to a series of problems.
- Link Farm
- A link farm is a website page or collection of websites having an extensively large list of hyperlinks to different websites with no specific relationship in terms of groupings, categories, or any connection to the site domain name. Although most link farms are a creation of automated programs and services, a few can also be built by hands. It is a kind of spamming the index of a search engine, which is often termed as spamdexing or spamexing.
- Link Building
- Acquiring valuable links from external websites for web documents through request, referral or lease/purchase.
- Link Popularity
- It refers to the number of hyperlinks that point to a particular web page. This is a vital factor that determines the PageRank of the page.
- Longtail SEO
- Long tail SEO is an intelligent technique of bringing together lower-volume and higher-converting keywords for a major impact. The technique is specifically devised to gain relevant traffic from long search queries that are more focused and less frequently searched by searchers than other primary search terms.
- Meta Tags
- Meta tags are small packets of data about the web pages rendered for the web crawlers. These tags are written in HTML and specify the source code to offer content and site information to search engine spiders. The Meta elements are normally used to state page description, keywords, author of the document, previous customized and other metadata. These tags help you manage the way some search engines may index your site, with the use of keywords and descriptions you offer. So, spiders rely heavily on the information provided by the site owner in the Meta Tags.
- Mirror
- As it name signifies, mirror sites are a nearly identical or duplicate website of the original one. In common terms, it is basically a little modified or tweaked replica of the original website. However, although the technique is highly purposeful when it comes to accessibility, it is marked under black Hat SEO Tactics and is not supported by the search engines. It is quite easy to create mirror, especially with the use of software that do the automated mirroring of entire sites.
- Macro SEO
- A group level search engine optimization technique to promote a number of websites together for one or more keywords.
- Micro Website
- Micro websites are compact and informative websites used by organizations apart from their major websites. It usually contains around 5 to 6 primary pages including home page, product or services page, service portfolio and a contact page with an enquiry or feedback form. These websites are the great help when it comes to analyze the initial online presence of your business or services and its possible outcome. In initial phase of your business promotion, micro websites can be the best associate that helps you to market your product in the global market place and later assists you to convey the wide product scenario among the buyers.
- Offsite Optimization
- A process to optimize and increase a website’s search engine rankings primarily with link exchange.
- Optimization
- A very popular process to tune up the website(s) to make it more visible in search engines for achieving high search engine rankings.
- Outbound Link
- These are the links on your website that point to other websites
- PageRank
- PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, given by Google King of search engine in the form of numerical weighting ranging from 1 to 10. The PageRank is assigned on the basis of each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, so as to measure its qualified importance contained in the set. Generally, it is described as a Google’s tool, used to weigh up every webpage on the grounds of the number and quality of backlinks.
- Pay per Click
- A process used by prominent search engines where advertisers pay for their published ads on the websites when a user clicks on the add link.
- Reciprocal Links
- Term refers a process of link exchange between two sites to improve website’s search ranking on a search engine results page (SERP).
- Redirects
- A tactic to send a visitor to other webpage than the one that’s particularly explored by the keyword search in the search engine. The process is risky as search engine spider doesn’t follow the redirects sometimes.
- Robots.txt
- A set of instructions for spiders to allow or deny them indexing of website page(s).
- Sandbox Effect
- According to industry experts, sandbox is an algorithmic effect, where Google condenses the page rank of new domains on temporary basis by placing them into what is termed as "sandbox". The step is believed to be taken to stand against the tricky techniques of search engine optimizers attempting to influence Google's page ranking through the massive creation of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they possess. Google's sandbox is a filter that came into existence back in March of 2004.
- Search Engine Optimization
- Very well-arranged technique to place appropriate title tags and Meta tags, and that the keywords in a page in order to obtain higher search engine rankings.
- Search Engine Ranking Report
- The report evaluates web page rankings by analyzing a range of keyword(s) in the major search engines.
- Search Engine Result Page
- It displays an indicative list of search results that are relevant to the keyword(s) or search phrases, user enter.
- Search Engine Submission
- A process to submit a website to search engines in order to allow them to list your website in their indices and search results
- Slurp
- Crawler from yahoo. It crawls the World Wide Web and submits the content into the Yahoo search engine
- Spider
- A spider is an automated program that randomly visits the websites and reads entire content for making their entries in the Google search engine indices. In other terms, a spider is a robot used by search engines to list websites on the internet.
- Spamming
- In search engine terms, spamming is a tactic to repeat keywords or key phrases in the website to achieve higher ranking in the search engines.
- Reporting Search Engine Spam
- The process used to legitimately eliminate perverse or unfair competition from the search is termed as a search engine spam reporting. The presence of such website or content on the search engine, devalue its significance in terms of being an effective resource. If a competitor is making frequent use of various black hat SEO techniques or spam tactics to gain top positions on the search engines, it is in your best interest and indeed, the best interest of users also, who are getting directed to websites through search engine results, to report the site.
- Secondary Search Engines
- Secondary search engines target at smaller, more specific audiences. They are basically the topical and regional search engines that can provide a user tremendously narrow and focused search results when looking for specific information. However, the volume of traffic they generate is much lesser than the primary search engines do.
- Title Tag
- Found in the ‘Head’ section of a Web page, this HTML tag is used to define the text that acts as the title of the search listings
- Traffic
- A collective amount of visitors that visit a website for their own purposes.
- URL
- Broadly known as ‘Uniform Resource Locator’ and is the address of a particular website on the internet. It starts with https://.
- SEO Friendly URL
- Without proper SEO Services, a website stands numerous chances of not getting indexed by search spiders, which in turn, puts a question mark on its ranking in the SERPs and of course, the conversion rate. The situation can be easily resolved by implementing some sort of "cosmetic" operations on a site, and an integral part of these operations is URL Rewriting. Although, it is considered a bit time-intensive, it is very quite effective in the long run by others, is URL rewriting.
- White Hat SEO Tactics
- Any SEO tactic that is in sync with integrity of the website and in complete compliance with Search Engines Guidelines is seen as a white hate search engine optimization tactic. These are the techniques that a webmaster should employ to boost up the ranking of the website, without making any compromises with the reliability and genuineness of the website.
