SEO Glossary

Below is an SEO Glossary that will help you understand most of the basic terms involved with search engine optimization.

Traffic to your website Webinar.

3-way link exchange – a link exchange agreement when there are no two sites pointing to each other

Algorithm – the mathematical formula in a search engine used to rank sites

Anchor Text – the text that is clickable–also known as a hyperlink

backlinks (BLs) – incoming links to a website

Black Hat SEO – unethical techniques used to gain high search engine rankings that do not fall within the terms of service of search engines. Some examples are hiding written text (black letters on black background), link farming, and cloaking.

Cache – a storage area within a search engine’s database for copies of web pages

Cgi-Bin – a storage folder that contains Common Gateway Interface – Binary scripts. There is normally one cgi-bin per website.

Cloaking – a black hat system of delivering custom content to an engine spider, but hiding the code or content from visitors

Dofollow – standard incoming links that do not have the nofollow attribute

Doorway Page – a webpage designed to draw in Internet traffic and then redirect this traffic to another website–also known as bridge, entry, gateway, jump, and zebra pages [a probable search engine penalty]

Firefox – a web browser developed by Mozilla that is free to download and provides an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows Internet Explorer

Frames – website design using multiple, independent sections to create a single webpage. Each frame is built as a separate HTML file, but with one “master” file to identify each selection. [Unfriendly to engine crawlers.]

Google Analytics – a free service offered by Google that generates detailed stats about website visitors. A benefit of using this service is to check the page views your site gets and to determine pay-per-click and other paid ad’s quality. Other benefits include tracking, keyword popularity specific to a search engine, all other referring websites, and visitors’ physical location.

HTML – Hypertext Markup Language – designed for the creation of web pages with clickable text and other information to be displayed in a web browser

IBL – in bound (incoming) link

image alt tag – the alternative text that the browser displays when the website visitor does not want to or cannot see an image on a website. Placed in the image tag like this:

Inside Pages/Internal Pages – the non-home pages of a website

IP Address – a unique identifier that has four numbers separated by dots, like this: 57.247.271.73. All computers across the Internet are assigned one. They are used like street addresses.

Link Farm – a group of links on a variety of pages solely for the purpose of increasing link popularity for search engines. Link farms are normally created by programs rather than by human beings. [A search engine penalty.]

META Tags – write-up placed within the HTMLtags of a webpage, providing information that is not visible to browsers

Nofollow – an HTML attribute used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s engine ranking. Used to cut down on irrelevant content to improve the quality of search engine results.

One-Way Link – a link that has been obtained without a link exchange. A non-reciprocal link.

Organic SEO – techniques used for unpaid high ranking results on search engines

PR – Google Page Rank: a numerical value that represents the popularity of a website. Found on the Google Toolbar.

SE – search engine

SEM – search engine marketing

SEO – search engine optimization

SEOs – search engine optimizers

SERP – search engine results page – the page that users see after clicking Search at an engine

URL – Uniform Resource Locator – a world wide web address

web 2.0 – the second generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in ways previously unavailable. For example: social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

Web Hosting Service – a company that provides web server space to individuals and organizations–used to store all of a website’s files. That server hosts the website.

White Hat SEO – techniques for high rank that fall within the terms of service of search engines

XML – Extensible Markup Language

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