SEO Terminology

    If you need a little help brushing up on your SEO vocabulary, then here are some useful terms that may want to review on. When you want to learn more SEO stuff, you can always check out more sites that offer a longer glossary of SEO terminology.

AdWords – A service provided by Google where in webmasters are given additional modes for advertising. Payments are made to Google when visitors click on the ads posted.

Affiliates – Other companies or websites that are involved or connected with your site. This also refers to a form of marketing in which the selling of products becomes more effective through affiliate marketers.

ALT text – A description of a picture of graphic, and serves a practical purpose for people with visual disabilities so that sites can be viewed on special browsers. You can also see the ALT text on a web page if that specific picture or graphic did not load.

Analytics – A program that is an essential tool for webmasters, as it helps in determining trends and statistics pertaining to the use of a website. Google Analytics is one popular example of such program.

Blog – A shortened term for web log. Blogs are online diaries or journals that are regularly updated, and can also be helpful tools for SEO.

Bot – Also referred to as the crawler or spider. It is a program that works for the search engine, and its task it to go through all websites and pages to index them.

Cloaking – This is the act in which content is more intended for bots or spiders than for internet users. One way that this is done is through gateway or doorway pages. Cloaking is a non-recommended SEO practice and can lead to penalization or banning form search engine results.

Content – Text found within the website for the purpose of consumption by the web visitor. Content creation should be considered carefully, and when coupled with the right keywords, become a great mix for sites that want to implement SEO.

Crawler – Also referred to as the bot or spider. (See Bot)

Cross Linking – It is the practice which websites do to increase the popularity of their link or their sites. Partner websites share links of their affiliates so their visitors can in turn check them out.

Directory – A site wherein websites can be submitted for inclusion, so that they can be more easily found when an internet users makes a search query.

Directory page – Described as a page with links that are directed to web pages related to each other.

Doorway pages – SEO practices that are generally not acceptable and can lead to a site becoming penalized. If you make a search query, and you click on a site that tells you to be redirected to another website, then that is a doorway page.

Duplicate content – Elements found in one page of a website that is repeated on other pages of the site. Bots or spiders can see these contents as redundant and may not index them as they should. There are ways by which this can be avoided, such as using Robots.txt files.

E-commerce site – This is the term used to defined a website that serves as an online store. The main purpose of such sites is to make sales and generate income. Examples of sites that operate in e-commerce mode is Amazon.com, Shopping.com, and many others.

External link – This is any link on your site which directs to another web page not belonging to that same site.

FFA – This means Free for All. This is a website that has many outbound links, usually about unrelated websites. The mail purpose of FFA is to have spiders or bots crawl over them to reach the pages listed in the links. This can also be referred to as link farms, which is an unwanted practice for SEO.

Googlebot – The name given to the spider program used by Google. There are different bots used by the popular search engine, one example is Freshbot, which constantly updates the index when new sites are added or when pages are updated.

Hit – This happens when a file is downloaded from a server whenever a visitor opens a web. Website popularity and also the amount of traffic can be quantified based on the number of hits. When one page is being loaded, you can expect several dozen hits to occur.

HTML – Stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. This is described as the universal language upon which all websites are built. HTML is the standard code in which web browsers are able to convert strings of code into graphics, pictures, text, and the like so that they can be viewed by the internet user.

Indexing – This is the task performed by spiders, bots, or crawlers of web search engines. When a website is indexed, it is included in that search engines list of website. Every time a search query is made on Yahoo, MSN, or Google, the search engine checks out the index to get all the sites relevant to the query and list them down.

Intro page – Also called splash pages. These are the first pages in a website which are graphic-heavy and may take time to load. For SEO purposes, websites are not recommended to put up intro pages form Flash or any other multimedia software.

Keyword - Whenever a web surfer types in a search query, the words become keywords or key phrases. Keywords and key phrases are very helpful for search engines when they are to list results of relevant sites for the user.

Keyword Density – This serves as a point of measurement that web search engines use to determine if excessive keywords are used on a page. Search engines have a recommended maximum keyword density, usually about 5% of the content or less. Any more than that, a website can be banned from search engine indexes or considered as spam.

Keyword Research – The extensive efforts to determine which keywords are most suitable for use in a site for SEO. This can be through the use of several tools, some of which are available through Yahoo and Google.

Keyword Spam – This is also known as keyword stuffing. This is considered as an unconventional practice, and can get a site banned from search engine indexes and even penalized. Keyword spam or keyword stuffing is excessive use of keywords, above the recommended keyword density.

Link building – A strategy in which more related or partner sites are encouraged to include a certain link, so more visitors will come in and more traffic can be generated.

Meta Tag – These are used within the HTML code of websites, which makes it much easier for spiders or bots to crawl the content. Meta tags can also be placed in keywords within the text or paragraphs found within a web page, so that indexing is more efficiently done.

Mirror site – This term describes a site that has exactly the same content as an existing one, only that it is found at a different URL or web address.

Open directory – It is a huge directory wherein sites and links are submitted, and it is maintained and reviewed by humans. This can be found at the address http://www.dmoz.org. Having your site included in this open directory makes it more likely for it to be included in major search engine results as well.

Outbound links – These are links found on your site but are directed to pages of another site.
PPC – This acronym stands for Pay Per Click. This is an advertising method in which websites and other companies pay Google to put up links for their site. Every time a visitor or web user on Google clicks those ads, the advertiser pays Google.

Ranking – This is the position of a website on search engine lists. The aim of SEO is to make a website rank as high as possible in the major search engines and directories.

Robots tag – Also referred to as the robots exclusion protocol, this is a way for webmasters and web designers to dictate to search engine bots and spiders what to index and what not to. This is most applicable for sites with duplicate content. The Robots.txt file helps prevent redundancy when the bots index the page, hence avoiding spam and exclusion from the index.

Search engine spam – This is a general term that refers to websites that have been poorly optimized for search engines. Oftentimes, search engine spam contains no relevant results, and is just created solely for getting high ranks on results pages.

SEM – It is the acronym for Search Engine Marketing. The goal of SEM is to be able to sell products and services more effectively through the use of sales strategies and by using search engines as a powerful tool. Included within the realm of SEM is affiliate marketing, PPC, and other strategies and techniques from SEO.

Submission – This is the process of letting the bots and spiders of search engines know that you want your site to be crawled and indexed. In Google, submission is not exactly that necessary, as experts say Google finds your site on its own.

Title tag – This is an important factor to include within your HTML code or meta tags because spiders and bots look for keywords in these whenever they index. The keywords you will be using on the title tag will appear on the title bar, or the part of your web browser window that says, “Microsoft Internet Explorer.”

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