SEO Glossary of Terms

301 Redirect: it means that the URL has moved to a different address permanently.

302 Redirect: also known as a temporary redirect, it means a URL has moved to a different location but will come back soon.

403 Server Code: this shows up when you’re not allowed to access the website.

404 Server Code: this shows up when the URL cannot be found.

A/B Testing: it’s when you come up with two versions of a page and shows a random visitor one version of a page and analyzing their behavior on the net based on what they saw. Version A is called “control” or the regular web page while version B is the “challenger” or the alternative web design. This is to see if the current page needs to be changed with version B.

Affiliate Marketing: is the process of partnering with other websites wherein the merchant pays the affiliate website a referral fee based on the visitors they produce for the merchant.

Algorithm: the mathematical standard used by search engines to determine ranking depending on the queries.

Algorithm Results: the results that come out of the query. There are two kinds- organic results, which come out based on rank while Paid Listing is paid advertised results.

ALT tag or ALT text: abbreviated from the word alternative text, these are the description of the picture when you hover over them while the image is loading or when it cannot be loaded.

Analytics: the analysis of all technological, programming and data used by a website to determine its performance and success.

Anchor text: this is the clickable text that’s also known as link text. This is what links one article to another article in a different website.

Auction Model Bidding: some keywords have to be bought to be able to be used by website owners. During an auction when a keyword has no other buyers the advertisers pay for what they bidden on it. When there are other buyers, the winning advertiser pays a cent more than the last bid. Like if advertiser A bids $.10, advertiser B will have to pay$.11 for it.

B2B: refers to Business to Business transactions where the services offered are focused to other business.

B2C: refers to Business to Customer transactions where the services offered are focused to customers.

Backlinks: also called inbound links or backward links are links from other sites that lead to your website. These links are vital for the rise of your site’s ranking.

Banned: also known as Delisted, these sites are penalized and removed or ignored in the search engine on account of Black Hat SEO.

Black Hat SEO: these are shady techniques done by some SEO to improve the ranking of their websites. These include Spam, Cloaking or going around the rules of search engines. When caught doing Black Hat SEO, these sites are banned.

Blacklist: these are sites that are considered harmful or dangerous. Sites like these are usually illegal sites put up to send spyware or dangerous software to the visitor.

Blogs: an abbreviated version of web logs, it is an ongoing online journal usually open to public. It’s usually the expression of the owner’s thoughts and feelings.

Broken Link: it’s an inactive Landing Page or a link that leads to a destination that no longer exists or working. This is frowned upon by search engines so it’s important to always keep all Landing Pages active.

Brand: this is a name, a logo, symbols, fonts and colors that’s representative of what the product or service is.

Branding: it’s the process of differentiating your products and services f5rom your competition.

Bucket: it’s a group of concepts, keywords, behaviors and defined characters of the users that is connected to your company’s product or service. It’s a virtual bucket that saves keywords and concepts to use for future use.

CTR: acronym for Click-Through Rate, this is how many hits your ad receives divvied by how long it has been displayed. Example, an ad has had 3 clicks out of 10 impressions, the CTR is 3%.

Canonicalization: essentially coming up with a website that is optimized.

Cloaking: an example of Black Hat SEO, it’s coming up with a different website for search engines and another one for human users. This is done to improve traffic and to trick searchers into going to the website. Usually a popular keyword is used to entice visitors.

Conversion: it’s basically a sale, an inquiry or a sign up for an account by a user after visiting the site.

Conversion Rate: percent of how many visitors to the site were converted.

Crawler: also known as Spider or Robot or Bot, it’s the search engine program that goes through the web gathering data, links, copying new and updated sites and URLs. This is the program that comes up with the search listing.

DHTML: or Dynamic Hypertext Markup language is a newer technical language for HTML which explains how a text and images appears on a web page.

DKI: also known as Dynamic Keyword Insertion is the inclusion of exact keyword by a user to make the listing relevant.

Description Tag: a description for the META Tag, it’s a short summary of what is within the web page. When we do search engine results, it’s the description that comes out along with the Title Tag.

Directory: as opposed to search engine results gathered by a Crawler, directories are come up by people. They’re categorized into different sections where fresh lists of registered sites appear depending on the query. It’s vital for inbound links and SEO performance.

Domain: it is the name or address of the website.

Dynamic Content: fluctuating web content, content that is regularly updated.

E-commerce: doing business on the internet as commerce is to real life like selling, providing services and buying.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol is transferring files from one host to another using network like the internet.

Flash: a popular technology that includes animation and interactivity on the website. Often used to create animation, advertisements and other components via video as well as more modern internet applications.

Geo-targeting: specifying your website’s state, county, city and neighborhood for the Search Engine Market. Specific addresses are also included. This is used for your website’s presence on Local Search engines.

Gray Hat SEO: hovers between Black Hat and White Hat SEO as some of these activities are illegal in some search engines and legal in others.

Hit: a flimsy way to measure traffic on a website. If a user ends on a page with four images, one hit equals one hit for each image.

HTTP: short for HyperText Transfer Protocol, it is the command that fetches the URL and opens up the searched website.

HTML: a language of codes and tags used in coming up with a webpage. It’s the direction on how a webpage was created.

Hyperlink: or simply known as link, this is an image or text on a website that opens to another webpage or different browser.

Index: the database of a search engine which has all the data a crawler has gathered. When a query was submitted to a search engine, the results are taken from the index.

Inbound Links: also known as backlinks or backward links, these are links in other websites that leads the user to your site when they click on them.

Internet Marketing: basically it’s advertising, communicating and selling of goods and services on the Internet. Its system is the same as that of SEO with its targeted keywords, sites that are crawler friendly and search engine submission.

Internet Marketing Consultant: another term for SEO consultants or professionals who create traffic and improve a client’s website ranking.

Javascript: a programming language used in script to give it interactive features.

Keyword/Key Phrase: a word or phrase that may be used by a searcher when querying for a certain subject. Example someone looking for a thesaurus, the searcher will type this particular word. Or someone looking for a synonym for keyword, the searcher will type “synonym keyword thesaurus”. This is an example of Long Tail.

Keyword Density: this is determined by the percentage value of the number of times a keyword or phrase is used in the content of a page compared to the word count. The more the keyword is used, the elevated its density is.

Keyword Tag: keywords that are used in the META description. It contains about 8-10 keywords or phrases separated by commas.

Landing Page: also known as Destination Page, where a searcher lands when clicking an ad. In SEO lingo it’s also called “where the deal is closed” as this is where the conversion rate is proven a success.

Lead Generation: the process of creating consumer interest in your site. This is when a visitor would fill out the contact form for information. Once a contact form is submitted this is called Lead.

Link Popularity: the number of links that direct to a URL. Internal Link Popularity is the number of links a page inside the website gets. External Link Popularity is the number of links coming from an outside website.

Link Bait: it means that something in your site has caught the interest of other people which they then link to their site or share to other people.

Listing: the ranked order result of a user search.

Log File: considered the “black box” of a website that records all the activities that happened.

Long Tail: a key phrase that has 3 to 5 words, making the keyword very specific. It gathers lesser traffic but has a more successful conversion rate.

Meta Description Tag: a short HTML paragraph that summarizes the content of a web page provided for the search engine index. They aren’t necessarily included in the content.

Metrics: the measurement used to determine overall traffic such as search engine traffic, conversion, top traffic-driving keywords, top conversion-driving keywords, keyword rankings and others.

Microblogging: smaller in quantity than a regular blog where users also exchange in small sentences, videos and images.

Natural Listing: also known as organic listing, it is a listing of web pages solely based on the relevance of the keyword.

Natural Search Engine Optimization: as opposed to paid advertising and also known as organic search, these are listings based on their relevance to the searched keyword.

Optimization Services: the methods used by an SEO company in increasing traffic and ranking of a client website, as well as its Click-Through Rate and Conversion Rate.

Outbound Links: links within a website that direct towards other website pages as well as internal pages.

Page Rank: developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it is a link analysis algorithm that positions websites from 1 to 10 in that order depending on their relevance. It’s different from Rank.

Paid Inclusion: also known as guaranteed inclusion, it’s a paid process to be included in a search engine or directory. It doesn’t affect the ranking but just a guarantee the website will be part of the index.

Position Reporting: an everyday supervision of changes in a website’s search engine rank that were optimized based on precise keywords. It’s what used to come up with a Search Engine Ranking Report.

Query: typed in words by a user when searching through a search engine. It’s also the exact keywords inputs in the search box.

Rank: also known as position, it is the position a website is placed when certain keywords are typed in the search box depending on the Algorithmic Results. The first page lists the top ten websites most relevant with the keyword while the second page releases the eleventh to twentieth and so on. As much as possible websites want to be in the top ten ranks as users rarely go past second page.

Reciprocal Link Exchange: a deal between two websites putting links that open up to each other’s home pages.

Registration: submitting your URL to a search engine or directory to be listed in the index. Some registrations are free but others require payment.

ROI: meaning Return on Investment is the amount you make compared to the amount you spent for the product.

RSS: acronym for Rich Site Summary and part of web feed formats, the process of informing users of regular changes in a web content in sites they have subscribed to. Websites syndicate their content to the RSS Feed.

Relevance: it is how close your title, description and keyword to the searcher’s query.

Robot.txt: a text file inside the root directory to inform a Crawler or Robot which site pages and sub-folders should not be incorporated into the index. It’s also like a password protection.

SEM: acronym for Search Engine Marketing, it is a type of marketing through the internet by promoting their visibility on the search engine. The methods employed by SEM are SEO, paid placement, contextual advertising, digital asset optimization, and paid inclusion.

SEO: acronym for Search Engine Optimization, it’s the method of providing content and code for a website to promote visibility and increasing the rank and Page Rank.

SERP: acronym for Search Engine Results Page, it is the page display of the results of a searcher’s query. It’s short for results page.

Search Engine: a database of all websites submitted to the engine. It’s the search engine that ranks the results based on their algorithm. Examples of search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Secondary Links: indirect links like a newspaper story or press release.

Site Optimization: it is the methods used by SEO.

Social Media: a form of electronic communication such as social networking or microblogging where users create communities on the internet by sharing ideas, information, personal messages and content.

Spam: any method that breaks the guidelines set by search engines or trying to improve ranking of a site with content that has nothing to do with the query. It is a type of Black Hat SEO.

Submission: also known as registration, it is the process of submitting URL to the search engine or directory for indexing. It is part of the methods of SEO.

Targeting: narrowing down of keywords to focus on a specific location also known as geo-targeting, days of the week or time of the day, known as dayparting, or gender and age known as demographic targeting. Techniques used in targeting are based on behavior, web activity and predictive behavior for potential customers.

Title Tag: an HTML tag, this is beneficial to your site for searchers who know nothing about it. It is a sentence, usually including keywords, describing the contents of a webpage. Search engines to lead to your site usually use it.

Traffic: the amount of visitors going to a website. It can be seen by analyzing the web logs.

Traffic Analysis: understanding the traffic going to a site, what the visitors are looking for and what are the particulars that lead them to the site.

Unique Visitor: a measuring term for web traffic where it identifies the IP address of the visitor. If one visitor using the same IP address goes to the site a hundred times, it’s only counted as one unique visit.

Usability: it defines how user friendly a website is. A site that gives out the desired information a visitor is looking for or was able to perform the action they needed is considered to be of good usability.

User Generated Content: this is when it’s the visitors or users who create the content for the site. Examples of these are comments, threads, reviewers and such.

Viral: content is considered viral when it had the ability to spread across the internet by itself through the means of being shared by other people.

White Hat SEO: a natural search engine optimization where the target is on human audience rather than search engines. It is uses organic means of ranking and relevancy through techniques like keywords, linking and great content.

Wiki: a computer program that let people write content on a particular topic.

XML: acronym for Extensible Markup Language, it lets web designers customize tags, allows them to define, transmit, validate and interpret data.