Search Engine Optimization Glossary
- AdWords
- Google’s advertising service for displaying Ads of your website as paid inclusion (top of seach or on the right side).
- More details can be found at http://adwords.google.com
- Alt tag
- A tag that provides alternative text for visually impaired users (instead of pictures).
- Search engines may pick this text instead of graphical images.
- Anchor text
- Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink.
- Search engines may pick this up for ranking.
- Example: SEO Expert
- Backlink
- Any direct link from another web page to your website.
- Backlinks can sometimes be known as Incoming Links.
- Blog spam (or comment spam)
- Automatic posting random comments, promoting commercial services, to blogs, guestbooks, or other publicly-accessible online discussion boards.
- Cloaking
- Serving a specific page to search engines and a different page to human visitors.
- Crawl
- When a search engine visits your website and extracts your content for search results.
- External links
- A link that forwards to a website outside the home domain name (third party).
- Filename
- A file name, including directory path. http://seotrainingwizard.com/p166931-contact-us.cfm
- Internal links
- A link that forwards to a website inside the home domain name.
- Javascript
- A script language created by Netscape, that can be embedded into the HTML of a web page to add functionality.
- Link farm
- A set of web pages that have been built for the sole purpose of increasing the number of incoming links to a web site.
- This is done in order to increase link popularity and search engine rankings.
- GOOGLE AND OTHER SEARCH ENGINES HATE THIS PRACTICE AND YOU SHOULD AVOID.
- Meta-tag
- A special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page.
- Generally used for search engines to describe your website.
- PageRank (PR)
- Google’s method to determine a page’s relevance and importance through the quality of sites linking to it.
- Generally updated only a few times per year.
- Referrer / Referring page
- When a user visits your website by clicking a link from another website, the other website is called a referrer.
- Example: Going from abc.com to your website; abc.com is the referrer.
- SEO
- An abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization.
- To optimize and promote your website in a technique that makes search engines rank your website higher in search results.
- Spam
- Excessive manipulation to influence search engine rankings, often for pages which contain little or no relevant content.
- Can result in penalization of a website by search engines.