≡ Menu
Voice Over SEO Encyclopedia of Terms

Voice Over SEO Encyclopedia of Terms

by Voice Actor Websites
in SEO

This encyclopedia of terms is a comprehensive list of common terms used in the SEO world. Voice over professionals who are learning about the world of search engine optimization can use this as a reference.

Glossary:

0 – 9 

200 Status OK – The file request was successful. For example, a page or image was found and loaded properly in a browser.

Some poorly developed content management systems return 200 status codes even when a file does not exist. The proper response for file not found is a 404 .

See also:

301 Moved Permanently – The file has been moved permanently to a new location.

This is the preferred method of redirecting for most pages or websites. If you are going to move an entire site to a new location you may want to test moving a file or folder first, and then if that ranks well you may want to proceed with moving the entire site. Depending on your site authority and crawl frequency  it may take anywhere from a few days to a month or so for the 301 redirect to be picked up.

See also:

302 Found – The file has been found, but is temporarily located at another URI.

Generally, as it relates to SEO, it is typically best to avoid using 302 redirects. Some search engines struggle with redirect handling. Due to poor processing of 302 redirects some search engines have allowed competing businesses to hijack  the listings of competitors.

See also:

404 Not Found – The server was unable to locate the URL.

Some content management systems send 404 status codes when documents do exist. Ensure files that exist do give a 200  status code and requests for files that do not exist give a 404 status code. You may also want to check with your host to see if you can set up a custom 404 error page which makes it easy for site visitors to

  • view your most popular and / or most relevant navigational options
  • report navigational problems within your site

Search engines request a robots.txt  file to see what portions of your site they are allowed to crawl. Many browsers request a favicon.ico  file when loading your site. While neither of these files are necessary, creating them will help keep your log files  clean so you can focus on whatever other errors your site might have.

See also:

A 

Above the Fold A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better. Google launched a top heavy algorithm to penalize sites with excessive ad placement above the fold.

See also:

Absolute Link A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking  related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.

Example absolute link

<a href=”http://domain.com/folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a>

Example relative link 

<a href=”../folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a>

 

Activity Bias Any attempted form of ad targeting might be targeted toward people who are more likely to engage in a particular activity, especially with ad retargeting . Correlation does not mean causation.

See also:

Ad Retargeting (see retargeting )

adCenter The old name for Microsoft’s cost per click ad network, later rebranded as Bing Ads .

While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared to Google AdWords . Due to Microsoft’s limited marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity.

AdSense Google’s contextual advertising  network. Publishers large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google.

AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue stream which will help some publishers establish a baseline for the value of their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is the trade off for automating ad sales.

AdSense ad auction formats include

  • cost per click  – advertisers are only charged when ads are clicked on
  • CPM  – advertisers are charged a certain amount per ad impression. Advertisers can target sites based on keyword, category, or demographic information.

AdSense ad formats include

  • text
  • graphic
  • animated graphics
  • videos

In some cases I have seen ads which got a 2 or 3% click through rate (CTR ), while sites that are optimized for maximum CTR (through aggressive ad integration) can obtain as high as a 50 or 60% CTR depending on

  • how niche their site is
  • how commercially oriented their site is
  • the relevancy and depth of advertisers in their vertical

It is also worth pointing out that if you are too aggressive in monetizing your site before it has built up adequate authority your site may never gain enough authority to become highly profitable.

Depending on your vertical your most efficient monetization model may be any of the following

  • AdSense
  • affiliate marketing 
  • direct ad sales
  • selling your own products and services
  • a mixture of the above

See also:

AdWords Google’s advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google’s ads are keyword  targeted and sold on a cost per click  basis in an auction which factors in ad clickthrough rate  as well as max bid. Google is looking into expanding their ad network to include video ads, demographic targeting , affiliate ads , radio ads, and traditional print ads.

AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords. Rather than doing that here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources.

See also:

Ad Heavy Page Layout (see Top Heavy )

Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying independent agents on a cost per action (CPA ) basis. Affiliates only get paid if visitors complete an action.

Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for wasting money on instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage via other’s affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value.

Some power affiliates make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year because they are heavily focused on automation and/or tap large traffic streams. Typically niche affiliate sites make more per unit effort than overtly broad ones because they are easier to focus (and thus have a higher conversion rate).

Selling a conversion is typically harder than selling a click (like AdSense  does, for instance). Search engines are increasingly looking to remove the noise low quality thin affiliate sites ad to the search results through the use of

See also:

  • Commission Junction  – probably the largest affiliate network
  • Linkshare  – another large affiliate network
  • Performics  – another large affiliate network
  • Azoogle Ads  – ad offer network focused on high margin / high profit verticals
  • CPA Empire  – similar to AzoogleAds
  • Amazon Associates  – Amazon’s affiliate program
  • Clickbank  – an affiliate network for selling electronic products and information

Age Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents.

Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs ) will temporarily rank better than you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank  page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home pages.

Some search engines may also try to classify sites to understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites or reference sites that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages and try to classify them based on how frequently they change.

See also:

AJAX Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load.Alexa Amazon.com  owned search service which measures website traffic.

Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.

See also

AllTheWeb Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture , which was bought by Yahoo . Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features.

See also:

Alt Attribute Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object.

Example usage

<img src=”http://www.domain.com/images/whammy.gif” height=”140″ width=”120″ alt=”Press Your Luck Whammy.” />

See also

AltaVista Search engine bought out by Overture  prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo . AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare.

See also:

Amazon.com The largest internet retailing website. Amazon.com is rich in consumer generated media. Amazon also owns a number of other popular websites, including IMDB and Alexa .

See also:

Analytics Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site.

Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not.

See also:

Anchor Text The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image the image alt attribute  may act in the place of anchor text.

Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

Example of anchor text:

<a href=”http://www.domain.com/”>Search Engine Optimization Blog</a>

Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use a Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites.

Android Google’s operating system which powers cell phones & some other consumer electronics devices like TVs.

While Google pitches Android as being an “open” operating system, they are only open in markets they are losing & once they establish dominace they shift from open to closed by added many new restrictions  on “partners.”

AOL Popular web portal which merged with Time Warner & then was spun back out.API Application Program Interface – a series of conventions or routines used to access software functions. Most major search products have an API program.Arbitrage Exploiting market inefficiencies by buying and reselling a commodity for a profit. As it relates to the search market, many thin content sites laced with an Overture  feed or AdSense  ads buy traffic from the major search engines and hope to send some percent of that traffic clicking out on a higher priced ad. Shopping search engines generally draw most of their traffic through arbitrage.

See also:

ASP Active Server Pages – a dynamic Microsoft programming language.

See also:

Ask Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they dumped Jeeves in early 2006. Their search engine is powered by the Teoma  search technology, which is largely reliant upon Kleinberg ‘s concept of hubs  and authorities .

See also:

Authority The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search engines. Five large factors associated with site and page authority are link equity , site age , traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content .

Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia  and DMOZ  are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority.

Authorities Topical authorities are sites which are well trusted and well cited by experts within their topical community. A topical authority is a page which is referenced from many topical experts and hub sites . A topical hub is page which references many authorities.

Example potential topical authorities:

  • the largest brands in your field
  • the top blogger talking about your subject
  • the Wikipedia or DMOZ page about your topic

See also:

Automated Bid Management Software Pay per click search engines are growing increasingly complex in their offerings. To help large advertisers cope with the increasing sophistication and complexity of these offerings some search engines and third party software developers have created software which makes it easier to control your ad spend. Some of the more advanced tools can integrate with your analytics programs  and help you focus on conversion , ROI , and earnings elasticity  instead of just looking at cost per click.

See also:

If you want to program internal bid management software you can get a developer token to use the Google AdWords API .

A few popular bid management tools are

B 

Backlink (see Inbound Link )

Bait and Switch Marketing technique where you make something look overtly pure or as though it has another purpose to get people to believe in it or vote for it (by linking at it or sharing it with friends), then switch the intent or purpose of the website after you gain authority .

It is generally easier to get links to informational websites than commercial sites. Some new sites might gain authority much quicker if they tried looking noncommercial and gaining influence before trying to monetize their market position.

 During the first web boom many businesses were based on eyeballs more than actually building real value. Many ads were typically quite irrelevant and web users learned to ignore the most common ad types.

In many ways text ads are successful because they are more relevant and look more like content, but with the recent surge in the popularity of text ads some have speculated that in time people may eventually become text ad blind as well.

Nick Denton stated :

Imagine a web in which Google and Overture text ads are everywhere . Not only beside search results, but next to every article and weblog post. Ubiquity breeds contempt. Text ads, coupled with content targeting, are more effective than graphic ads for many advertisers; but they too, like banners, will suffer reader burnout.

Battelle, John Popular search and media blogger who co-founded The Industry Standard and Wired, and authored a popular book on search called The Search.

See also:

Behavioral Targeting Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or implied intent. For example, if I recently searched for mortgages then am later reading a book review the page may still show me mortgage ads.Bias A prejudice based on experiences or a particular worldview.

Any media channel, publishing format, organization, or person is biased by

  • how and why they were created and their own experiences
  • the current set of social standards in which they exist
  • other markets they operate in
  • the need for self preservation
  • how they interface with the world around them
  • their capital, knowledge, status, or technological advantages and limitations

Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of the largest search engines may bias their organic search results  toward informational (ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is heavily cited.

Search personalization  biases our search results based on our own media consumption and searching habits.

Large news organizations tend to aim for widely acceptable neutrality rather than objectivity. Some of the most popular individual web authors / publishers tend to be quite biased in nature. Rather than bias hurting one’s exposure

  • The known / learned bias of a specific author may make their news more appealing than news from an organization that aimed to seem arbitrarily neutral.
  • I believe biased channels most likely typically have a larger readership than unbiased channels.
  • Most people prefer to subscribe to media which matches their own biases worldview.
  • If more people read what you write and passionately agree with it then they are more likely to link at it.
  • Things which are biased in nature are typically easier to be cited than things which are unbiased.

See also:

Bid Management Software (see Automated Bid Management Software )

Bing Microsoft’s search engine, which also powers the organic search results on Yahoo! Search.Bing Ads Microsoft’s paid search program, which rivals Google AdWords and powers paid search results on Yahoo! Search.

See also:

Black Hat SEO Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next.

Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs  while calling others black hat SEOs.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

See also:

Block Level Analysis A method used to break a page down into multiple points on the web graph by breaking its pages down into smaller blocks.

Block level link analysis can be used to help determine if content is page specific or part of a navigational system. It also can help determine if a link is a natural editorial link , what other links that link should be associated with, and/or if it is an advertisement. Search engines generally do not want to count advertisements as votes.

See also

Blog A periodically updated journal, typically formatted in reverse chronological order. Many blogs not only archive and categorize information, but also provide a feed  and allow simple user interaction like leaving comments on the posts.

Most blogs tend to be personal in nature. Blogs are generally quite authoritative with heavy link equity because they give people a reason to frequently come back to their site, read their content, and link to whatever they think is interesting.

The most popular blogging platforms are WordPress , Blogger , Movable Type , and Typepad .

Blog Comment Spam Either manually or automatically (via a software program) adding low value or no value comments to other sites.

Automated blog spam:

Nice post! 
by 
Bob Smith

Manual blog spam:

I just wrote about this on my site. I don’t know you, but I thought I would add no value to your site other than linking through to mine. Check it out!!!!!
by
cluebag manual spammer (usually with keywords as my name)

As time passes both manual and automated blog comment spam systems are evolving to look more like legitimate comments. I have seen some automated blog comment spam systems that have multiple fake personas that converse with one another.

Blogger Blogger is a free blog  platform owned by Google .

It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Blogspot.com, or to FTP  content to your own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity  and age  related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

Blogger is probably the easiest blogging software tool to use, but it lacks many some features present in other blog platforms.

See also:

Blogroll Link list on a blog, usually linking to other blogs owned by the same company or friends of that blogger.Bold A way to make words appear in a bolder font. Words that appear in a bolder font are more likely to be read by humans that are scanning a page. A search engine may also place slightly greater weighting on these words than regular text, but if you write natural page copy and a word or phrase appears on a page many times it probably does not make sense or look natural if you bold ever occurrence.

Example use:

  • <b>words</b>
  • <strong>words</strong>

Either would appear as words.

Bookmarks Most browsers  come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy.

Social bookmarking sites are often called tagging sites. Del.icio.us  is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yahoo! MyWeb also allows you to tag results. Google allows you to share feeds and / or tag pages. They also have a program called Google Notebook which allows you to write mini guides of related links and information.

There are also a couple meta news sites that allow you to tag interesting pages. If enough people vote for your story then your story gets featured on the homepage. Slashdot  is a tech news site primarily driven by central editors. Digg  created a site covering the same type of news, but is a bottoms up news site which allows readers to vote for what they think is interesting. Netscape cloned the Digg business model and content model. Sites like Digg and Netscape are easy sources of links if you can create content that would appeal to those audiences.

Many forms of vertical search, like Google Video or YouTube , allow you to tag content.

See also:

  • Del.icio.us  – Yahoo! owned social bookmarking site
  • Yahoo! MyWeb  – similar to Del.icio.us, but more integrated into Yahoo!
  • Google Notebook  – allows you to note documents
  • Slashdot  – tech news site where stories are approved by central editors
  • Digg  – decentralized news site
  • Netscape  – Digg clone
  • Google Video  – Google’s video hosting, tagging, and search site
  • YouTube  – popular decentralized video site

Boolean Search Many search engines allow you to perform searches that contain mathematical formulas such as AND, OR, or NOT. By default most search engines include AND with your query, requiring results to be relevant for all the words in your query.

Examples:

  • A Google search for SEO Book  will return results for SEO AND Book.
  • A Google search for “SEO Book”  will return results for the phrase SEO Book.
  • A Google search for SEO Book -Jorge  will return results containing SEO AND Book but NOT Jorge.
  • A Google search for ~SEO -SEO  will find results with words related to SEO that do not contain SEO.

Some search engines also allow you to search for other unique patterns or filtering ideas. Examples:

  • A numerical range: 12…18  would search for numbers between 12 and 18.
  • Recently updated: seo {frsh=100}  would find recently updated documents. MSN search also lets you place more weight on local documents
  • Related documents: related:www.threadwatch.org  would find documents related to Threadwatch.
  • Filetype: AdWords filetype:PDF  would search for PDFs that mentioned AdWords.
  • IP Address: IP:64.111.97.133 

See also:

Brand The emotional response associated with a company and/or product.

A brand is built through controlling customer expectations and the social interactions between customers. Building a brand is what allows businesses to move away from commodity based pricing and move toward higher margin value based pricing. Search engines may look at signals like repeat website visits & visits to a site based on keywords associated with a known entity  and use them for relevancy signals in algorithms like Panda .

See also:

Branded Keywords Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand  or entity . Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle , and are some of the highest value and highest converting keywords. These searches may be used as relevancy signals in algorithms like Panda .

Some affiliate marketing programs prevent affiliates from bidding on the core brand related keywords, while others actively encourage it. Either way can work depending on the business model, but it is important to ensure there is synergy between internal marketing and affiliate marketing programs.

Breadcrumb Navigation Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between pages.

Example breadcrumb navigation:

Home  > SEO Tools  > SEO for Firefox

Whatever page the user is on is unlinked, but the pages above it within the site structure are linked to, and organized starting with the home page, right on down through the site structure.

Brin, Sergey Co-founder of Google .

See also:

Broken Link A hyperlink which is not functioning. A link which does not lead to the desired location.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are

  • a website going offline
  • linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
  • moving a page’s location
  • changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Xenu Link Sleuth  is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

Browser Client used to view the world wide web.

The most popular browsers are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer , Mozilla’s Firefox , Safari , and Opera .

Bush, Vannevar WWII scientist who wrote a seminal research paper on the concepts of hypertext and a memory extension device titled As We May Think .Business.com A well trusted directory  of business websites and information. Business.com is also a large pay per click  arbitrage  player.

See also:

Buying Cycle Before making large purchases consumers typically research what brands and products fit their needs and wants. Keyword  based search marketing allows you to reach consumers at any point in the buying cycle. In many markets branded keywords  tend to have high search volumes and high conversion rates.

The buying cycle may consist of the following stages

  • Problem Discovery: prospect discovers a need or want.
  • Search: after discovering a problem look for ways to solve the need or want. These searches may contain words which revolve around the core problem the prospect is trying to solve or words associated with their identity.
  • Evaluate: may do comparison searches to compare different models, and also search for negative information like product sucks, etc.
  • Decide: look for information which reinforces your view of product or service you decided upon
  • Purchase: may search for shipping related information or other price related searches. purchases may also occur offline
  • Reevaluate: some people leave feedback on their purchases . If a person is enthusiastic about your brand they may cut your marketing costs by providing free highly trusted word of mouth marketing.

See also:

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?  – book by Brian & Jeffrey Eisenberg about the buying cycle and Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing.

C 

Cache Copy of a web page stored by a search engine. When you search the web you are not actively searching the whole web, but are searching files in the search engine index .

Some search engines provide links to cached versions of pages in their search results, and allow you to strip some of the formatting from cached copies of pages.

Calacanis, Jason Founder of Weblogs, Inc. Also pushed AOL  to turn Netscape  into a Digg  clone & then launched longtail SEO play Mahalo.

See also:

Canonical URL Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use PageRank  or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.

Webmasters should use consistent linking structures throughout their sites to ensure that they funnel the maximum amount of PageRank at the URLs they want indexed. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL.

Examples of URLs which may contain the same information in spite of being at different web addresses:

  • http://www.domain.com/
  • http://www.domain.com/index.shtml
  • http://domain.com/
  • http://domain.com/index.shtml
  • http://www.domain.com/?tracking-code

Catalog (see Index )

Catch All Listing A listing used by pay per click search engines to monetize long tail  terms that are not yet targeted by marketers. This technique may be valuable if you have very competitive key words, but is not ideal since most major search engines have editorial guidelines that prevent bulk untargeted advertising, and most of the places that allow catch all listings have low traffic quality. Catch all listings may be an attractive idea on theme specific search engines and directories though, as they are already pre qualified clicks.CGI Common Gateway Interface – interface software between a web server and other machines or software running on that server. Many cgi programs are used to add interactivity to a web site.Chrome Primarily known as Google’s web broser, there is also an OS by the same name.

Google ensured Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was fined in Europe  & then bundled Chrome in Adobe Flash security updates  to install Chrome bundleware on hundreds of millions of computers.

Client A program, computer, or process which makes information requests to another computer, process, or program.Cloaking Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine.

Cloaking has many legitimate uses which are within search guidelines. For example, changing user experience based on location is common on many popular websites.

See also:

Cluetrain Manifesto, The Book about how the web is a marketplace, and how it is different from traditional offline business.

See also:

Clustering In search results the listings from any individual site are typically limited to a certain number and grouped together to make the search results appear neat and organized and to ensure diversity amongst the top ranked results. Clustering can also refer to a technique which allows search engines to group hubs  and authorities  on a specific topic together to further enhance their value by showing their relationships.

See also

  • Google Touchgraph  – interesting web application that shows the relationship between sites Google returns as being related to a site you enter.

CMS Content Management System. Tool used to help make it easy to update and add information to a website.

Blog software programs  are some of the most popular content management systems currently used on the web. Many content management systems have errors associated with them which make it hard for search engines to index content due to issues such as duplicate content .

Co-citation In topical authority  based search algorithms links which appear near one another on a page may be deemed to be related to one another. In algorithms like latent semantic indexing words which appear near one another often are frequently deemed to be related.Comments Many blogs and other content management systems allow readers to leave user feedback.

Leaving enlightening and thoughtful comments on someone else’s related website is one way to help get them to notice you.

See also:

  • blog comment spam  – the addition of low value or no value comments to other’s websites

Comments Tag Some web developers also place comments in the source code of their work to help make it easy for people to understand the code.

HTML comments in the source code of a document appear as <!– your comment here –>. They can be viewed if someone types views the source code of a document, but do not appear in the regular formatted HTML rendered version of a document.

In the past some SEOs would stuff keywords in comment tags to help increase the page keyword density , but search has evolved beyond that stage, and at this point using comments to stuff keywords into a page adds to your risk profile and presents little ranking upside potential.

Compacted Information Information which is generally and widely associated with a product. For example, most published books have an ISBN.

As the number of product databases online increases and duplicate content filters are forced to get more aggressive the keys to getting your information indexed are to have a site with enough authority to be considered the most important document on that topic, or to have enough non compacted information (for example, user reviews) on your product level pages to make them be seen as unique documents.

Conceptual Links Links which search engines attempt to understand beyond just the words in them. Some rather advanced search engines are attempting to find out the concept links versus just matching the words of the text to that specific word set. Some search algorithms may even look at co-citation  and words near the link instead of just focusing on anchor text .Concept Search A search which attempts to conceptually match results with the query, not necessarily with those words, rather their concept.

For example, if a search engine understands a phrase to be related to another word or phrase it may return results relevant to that other word or phrase even if the words you searched for are not directly associated with a result. In addition, some search engines will place various types of vertical search  results at the top of the search results based on implied query related intent or prior search patterns by you or other searchers.

Contextual Advertising Advertising programs which generate relevant advertisements based on the content of a webpage.

See also:

  • Google AdSense  is the most popular contextual advertising program.

Conversion Many forms of online advertising are easy to track. A conversion is reached when a desired goal is completed.

Most offline ads have generally been much harder to track than online ads. Some marketers use custom phone numbers or coupon codes to tie offline activity to online marketing.

Here are a few common example desired goals

  • a product sale
  • completing a lead form
  • a phone call
  • capturing an email
  • filling out a survey
  • getting a person to pay attention to you
  • getting feedback
  • having a site visitor share your website with a friend
  • having a site visitor link at your site

Bid management , affiliate  tracking, and analytics  programs make it easy to track conversion sources.

See also:

Copyright The legal rights to publish and reproduce a particular piece of work.

See also:

Cookie Small data file written to a user’s local machine to track them. Cookies are used to help websites customize your user experience and help affiliate program managers track conversions.CPA Cost per action. The effectiveness of many other forms of online advertising have their effectiveness measured on a cost per action basis. Many affiliate marketing  programs and contextual ads  are structured on a cost per action basis. An action may be anything from an ad click, to filling out a lead form, to buying a product.CPC Cost per click. Many search ads and contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is charged a certain price per click.

See also:

CPM Cost per thousand ad impressions.

Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a website is or has the potential of becoming.

Crawl Depth How deeply a website is crawled and indexed.

Since searches which are longer in nature tend to be more targeted in nature it is important to try to get most or all of a site indexed such that the deeper pages have the ability to rank for relevant long tail keywords. A large site needs adequate link equity  to get deeply indexed. Another thing which may prevent a site from being fully indexed is duplicate content  issues.

Crawl Frequency How frequently a website is crawled.

Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority. Sites with highly artificial link authority scores (ie: mostly low quality spammy links) or sites which are heavy in duplicate content or near duplicate content (such as affiliate feed sites) may be crawled less frequently than sites with unique content which are well integrated into the web.

See also:

CSS Cascading Style Sheets is a method for adding styles to web documents.

Note: Using external CSS files makes it easy to change the design of many pages by editing a single file. You can link to an external CSS file using code similar to the following in the head of your HTML documents

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.seobook.com/style.css” type=”text/css” />

See also

  • W3C: CSS  – official guidelines for CSS
  • CSS Zen Garden  – examples of various CSS layouts
  • Glish.com  – examples of various CSS layouts, links to other CSS resources

CTR Clickthrough rate – the percentage of people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to measure how relevant a traffic source or keyword is. Search ads typically have a higher clickthrough rate than traditional banner ads due to being highly relevant to implied searcher demand & a history of questionable ad labeling disclosure by search engines.

 

A search engine can determine if a particular search query is navigational (branded ) versus informational or transactional by analyzing the relative CTR of different listings on the search result page & the CTR of people who have repeatedly searched for a particular keyword term. A navigational search tends to have many clicks on the top organic listing, while the CTR curve is often far flatter on informational or transactional searches.

See also:

Cutts, Matt Google’s head of search quality.

See also:

Cybersquatting Registering domains related to other trademarks or brands in an attempt to cash in on the value created by said trademark or brand.

D 

Dayparting Turning ad campaigns on or off, changing ad bid price, or budget constraints based on bidding more when your target audience is available and less when they are less likely to be available.Dead Link A link which is no longer functional.

Most large high quality websites have at least a few dead links in them, but the ratio of good links to dead links can be seen as a sign of information quality.

Deep Link A link which points to an internal page within a website.

When links grow naturally typically most high quality websites have many links pointing at interior pages. When you request links from other websites it makes sense to request a link from their most targeted relevant page to your most targeted relevant page. Some webmasters even create content based on easy linking opportunities they think up.

Dedicated Server Server which is limited to serving one website or a small collection of websites owned by a single person.

Dedicated servers tend to be more reliable than shared (or virtual) servers. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers  typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

Deep Link Ratio The ratio of links pointing to internal pages to overall links pointing at a website.

A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a legitimate natural link profile.

De-Listing Temporarily or permanently becoming de-indexed from a directory or search engine.

De-indexing may be due to any of the following:

  • Pages on new websites (or sites with limited link authority relative to their size) may be temporarily de-indexed until the search engine does a deep spidering and re-cache of the web.
  • During some updates search engines readjust crawl priorities.
    • You need a significant number of high quality links to get a large website well indexed and keep it well indexed.
    • Duplicate content  filters, inbound and outbound link quality, or other information quality related issues may also relate to re-adjusted crawl priorities.
  • Pages which have changed location and are not properly redirected, or pages which are down when a search engine tries to crawl them may be temporarily de-indexed.
  • Search Spam:
    • If a website tripped an automatic spam filter it may return to the search index anywhere from a few days to a few months after the problem has been fixed.
    • If a website is editorially removed by a human you may need to contact the search engine directly to request reinclusion.

Del.icio.us Popular social bookmarking website.

See also:

Demographics Statistical data or characteristics which define segments of a population.

Some internet marketing platforms, such as AdCenter  and AdWords , allow you to target ads at websites or searchers who fit amongst a specific demographic. Some common demographic data points are gender, age, income, education, location, etc.

Denton, Nick Publisher of Gawker, a popular ring of topical weblogs, which are typically focused on controversy.

See also:

  • Nick Denton.org  – official blog, where Nick often talks about business and his various blogs.

Description Directories and search engines provide a short description near each listing which aims to add context to the title .

High quality directories typically prefer the description describes what the site is about rather than something that is overtly promotional in nature. Search engines typically

  • use a description from a trusted directory (such as DMOZ  or the Yahoo! Directory ) for homepages of sites listed in those directories
  • use the page meta description  (especially if it is relevant to the search query and has the words from the search query in it)
  • attempt to extract a description from the page content which is relevant for the particular search query and ranking page (this is called a snippet)
  • or some combination of the above

Digg Social news site where users vote on which stories get the most exposure and become the most popular.

See also:

Directory A categorized catalog of websites, typically manually organized by topical editorial experts.

Some directories cater to specific niche  topics, while others are more comprehensive in nature. Major search engines likely place significant weight on links from DMOZ  and the Yahoo! Directory . Smaller and less established general directories likely pull less weight. If a directory does not exercise editorial control over listings search engines will not be likely to trust their links at all.

Disavow The link disavow tool is a way for a webmaster to state they do not vouch for a collection of inbound links to their website.

Recovering from manual link penalties  will often require removing some of lower quality inbound links & disavowing other low quality links. For automated link penalties, like Penguin , using the disavow tool should be sufficient for penalty recovery, however Google still has to crawl the pages to apply disavow to the links. It still may make sense to remove some lower quality links to diminish any future risks of manual penalties. With the rise of negative SEO , publishers in spammy industries may be forced to proactively use the disavow tool.

Document Freshness (see fresh content )

DMOZ The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL, and is primarily ran by volunteer editors.

See also:

DNS Domain Name Server or Domain Name System. A naming scheme mechanism used to help resolve a domain name / host name to a specific TCP/IP Address .Domain Scheme used for logical or location organization of the web. Many people also use the word domain to refer to a specific website.Doorway Pages Pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other advertisements.

Some webmasters cloak  thousands of doorway pages on trusted domains, and rake in a boatload of cash until they are caught and de-listed . If the page would have a unique purpose outside of search then search engines are generally fine with it, but if the page only exists because search engines exist then search engines are more likely to frown on the behavior.

Dreamweaver Popular web development and editing software offering a what you see is what you get interface.

See also:

Duplicate Content Content which is duplicate or near duplicate in nature.

Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of similar content. For example, printer friendly pages may be search engine unfriendly duplicates. Also, many automated content generation techniques rely on recycling content, so some search engines are somewhat strict in filtering out content they deem to be similar or nearly duplicate in nature.

See also:

Dwell Time The amount of time a searcher spends on a destination website before clicking back to the search results.

Some search queries might require significant time for a user to complete their information goals while other queries might be things which are quickly answered by a landing page, thus dwell time in isolation may not be a great relevancy signal. However search engines can also look at other engagement metrics  like repeat visits , branded searches , relative CTR  & if users clicking on a particular listing have a high POGO rate  (by subsequently clicking on yet another different search result) to get an idea of a user’s satisfaction with a particular webiste & fold these metrics into an algorithm like Panda .

Dynamic Content Content which changes over time or uses a dynamic language such as PHP  to help render the page.

In the past search engines were less aggressive at indexing dynamic content than they currently are. While they have greatly improved their ability to index dynamic content it is still preferable to use URL rewriting  to help make dynamic content look static  in nature.

Dynamic Languages Programming languages such as PHP  or ASP  which build web pages on the fly upon request.

E 

Earnings Per Click Many contextual advertising  publishers estimate their potential earnings based on how much they make from each click.Editorial Link Search engines count links as votes of quality. They primarily want to count editorial links that were earned over links that were bought or bartered.

Many paid links, such as those from quality directories , still count as signs of votes as long as they are also associated with editorial quality standards. If they are from sites without editorial control, like link farms , they are not likely to help you rank well. Using an algorithm similar to TrustRank , some search engines may place more trust on well known sites with strong editorial guidelines.

Emphasis An HTML tag used to emphasize text.

Please note that it is more important that copy reads well to humans than any boost you may think you will get by tweaking it for bots. If every occurrence of a keyword on a page is in emphasis that will make the page hard to read, convert poorly, and may look weird to search engines and users alike.

<em>emphasis</em> would appear as emphasis

Engagement Metrics The measurement of how engaging users find a particular piece of content within a site, or a particular site in general.

Search engines may analyze end user behavior to help refine and improve their rankings. Sites which get a high CTR  and have a high proportion of repeat visits  from brand related searches  may get a ranking boost in algorithms like Panda.

Entities People, places or things which search engines aim to know & present background information about.

Brands are a popular form of entities, but many other forms of information like songs or movies are also known as entities. Information about entities may be shown in knowledge graph  results.

Entry Page The page which a user enters your site.

If you are buying pay per click ads it is important to send visitors to the most appropriate and targeted page associated with the keyword they searched for. If you are doing link building it is important to point links at your most appropriate page when possible such that

  • if anyone clicks the link they are sent to the most appropriate and relevant page
  • you help search engines understand what the pages on your site are associated with

Ethical SEO Search engines like to paint SEO services which manipulate their relevancy algorithms as being unethical. Any particular technique is generally not typically associated with ethics, but is either effective or ineffective.

Some search marketers lacking in creativity tend to describe services sold by others as being unethical while their own services are ethical. Any particular technique is generally not typically associated with ethics, but is either effective or ineffective.

The only ethics issues associated with SEO are generally business ethics related issues. Two of the bigger frauds are

  • Not disclosing risks: Some SEOs may use high risk techniques when they are not needed. Some may make that situation even worse by not disclosing potential risks to clients.
  • Taking money & doing nothing: Since selling SEO services has almost no start up costs many of the people selling services may not actually know how to competently provide them. Some shady people claim to be SEOs and bilk money out of unsuspecting small businesses.

As long as the client is aware of potential risks there is nothing unethical about being aggressive.

Everflux Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux.

In the past Google updated their index roughly once a month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a constantly updating index Google no longer does what was traditionally called a Google Dance .

Expert Document Quality page which links to many non-affiliated topical resources.

External Link Link which references another domain.

Some people believe in link hoarding , but linking out to other related resources is a good way to help search engines understand what your site is about. If you link out to lots of low quality sites or primarily rely on low quality reciprocal links some search engines may not rank your site very well. Search engines are more likely to trust high quality  editorial links  (both to and from your site).

F 

Fair Use The stated exceptions of allowed usage of work under copyright  without requiring permission of the original copyright holder. Fair use is covered in section 107 of the Copyright code.

See also:

Favicon Favorites Icon is a small icon which appears next to URLs in a web browser.

Upload an image named favicon.ico in the root of your site to have your site associated with a favicon.

See also:

  • HTML Kit  – generate a favicon from a picture
  • Favicon.co.uk  – create a favicon online painting one pixel at a time.

Favorites (see bookmarks )

Feed Many content management, systems such as blogs, allow readers to subscribe to content update notifications via RSS  or XML  feeds. Feeds can also refer to pay per click syndicated feeds, or merchant product feeds. Merchant product feeds have become less effective as a means of content generation due to improving duplicate content  filters.Feed Reader Software or website used to subscribe to feed update notifications.

See also:

FFA Free for all pages are pages which allow anyone to add a link to them. Generally these links do not pull much weight in search relevancy algorithms because many automated programs fill these pages with links pointing at low quality websites.Filter Certain activities or signatures which make a page or site appear unnatural might make search engines inclined to filter / remove them out of the search results.

For example, if a site publishes significant duplicate content  it may get a reduced crawl priority and get filtered out of the search results. Some search engines also have filters based on link quality, link growth rate, and anchor text . Some pages are also penalized  for spamming .

Firefox Popular extensible open source web browser.

See also:

Flash Vector graphics-based animation software which makes it easier to make websites look rich and interactive in nature.

Search engines tend to struggle indexing and ranking flash websites because flash typically contains so little relevant content. If you use flash ensure:

  • you embed flash files within HTML pages
  • you use a noembed element to describe what is in the flash
  • you publish your flash content in multiple separate files such that you can embed appropriate flash files in relevant pages

Forward Links (see Outbound Links)

Frames A technique created by Netscape  used to display multiple smaller pages on a single display. This web design technique allows for consistent site navigation, but makes it hard to deep link at relevant content.

Given the popularity of server side includes , content management systems , and dynamic languages there really is no legitimate reason to use frames to build a content site today.

Fresh Content Content which is dynamic in nature and gives people a reason to keep paying attention to your website, or content which was recently published.

Many SEOs talk up fresh content, but fresh content does not generally mean re-editing old content. It more often refers to creating new content. The primary advantages to fresh content are:

  • Maintain and grow mindshare: If you keep giving people a reason to pay attention to you more and more people will pay attention to you, and link to your site.
  • Faster idea spreading: If many people pay attention to your site, when you come out with good ideas they will spread quickly.
  • Growing archives: If you are a content producer then owning more content means you have more chances to rank. If you keep building additional fresh content eventually that gives you a large catalog of relevant content.
  • Frequent crawling: Frequently updated websites are more likely to be crawled frequently.
  • QDF: Google’s query deserves freshness  algorithm may boost the rankings of recently published documents for search queries where they believe users are looking for recent information.

The big risk of creating lots of “fresh” content for the sake of it is that many low cost content sources will have poor engagement metrics , which in turn will lead to a risk of the site being penalized by Panda . A good litmus test on this front is: if you didn’t own your website would you still regularly visit it & read the new content published to it.

Freshness (see fresh content )

FTP File Transfer Protocol is a protocol for transferring data between computers.

Many content management systems (such as blogging platforms) include FTP capabilities. Web development software such as Dreamweaver also comes with FTP capabilities. There are also a number of free or cheap FTP programs such as Cute FTP, Core FTP, and Leech FTP.

Fuzzy Search Search which will find matching terms when terms are misspelled (or fuzzy).

 

Fuzzy search technology is similar to stemming  technology, with the exception that fuzzy search corrects the misspellings at the users end and stemming searches for other versions of the same core word within the index.

G 

GAP Google Advertising Professional is a program which qualifies marketers as being proficient AdWords  marketers.

See also:

Gladwell, Malcolm Popular author who wrote the book titled The Tipping Point.

See also:

Godin, Seth Popular blogger, author, viral marketer and business consultant.

See also:

  • Seth’s blog  – Seth talks about marketing
  • Purple Cow  – Probably Seth’s most popular book. It is about how to be remarkable. Links are citations or remarks. This book is a highly recommended for any SEO.
  • All Marketers Are Liars  – Book about creating and marketing authentic brand related stories in a low trust world.
  • Squidoo  – community driven topical lens site created by Seth Godin

Google The world’s leading search engine in terms of reach. Google pioneered search by analyzing linkage data via PageRank . Google was created by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

See also

GoogleBot Google’s search engine spider .

Google has a shared crawl cache between their various spiders, including vertical search spiders and spiders associated with ad targeting.

See also:

Google AdSense (see AdSense )

Google AdWords (see AdWords )

Google Base Free database of semantically structured information created by Google.

Google Base may also help Google better understand what types of information are commercial in nature, and how they should structure different vertical search products.

Google Bombing Making a prank rank well for a specific search query by pointing hundreds or thousands of links at it with the keywords in the anchor text .

See also:

Google Bowling Knocking a competitor out of the search results by pointing hundreds or thousands of low trust low quality links at their website.

Typically it is easier to bowl new sites out of the results. Older established sites are much harder to knock out of the search results.

Google Dance In the past Google updated their index roughly once a month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a constantly updating index, Google no longer does what was traditionally called a Google Dance.

Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux .

The second meaning of Google Dance is a yearly party at Google’s corporate headquarters which Google holds for search engine marketers. This party coincides with the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference.

Google Keyword Tool 

Keyword research tool  provided by Google which estimates the competition for a keyword, recommends related keywords, and will tell you what keywords Google thinks are relevant to your site or a page on your site.

See also:

Google OneBox Portion of the search results page above the organic search results  which Google sometimes uses to display vertical search  results from Google News, Google Base , and other Google owned vertical search services.Google Sitemaps Program which webmasters can use to help Google index their contents.

Please note that the best way to submit your site to search engines and to keep it in their search indexes is to build high quality editorial links .

See also:

Google Sitelinks On some search results where Google thinks one result is far more relevant than other results (like navigational or brand  related searches) they may list numerous deep links to that site at the top of the search results.Google Supplemental Index Index where pages with lower trust scores are stored. Pages may be placed in Google’s Supplemental Index if they consist largely of duplicate content, if the URLs are excessively complex in nature, or the site which hosts them lacks significant trust.Google Traffic Estimator Tool which estimates bid prices and how many Google searchers will click on an ad for a particular keyword.

If you do not submit a bid price the tool will return an estimated bid price necessary to rank #1 for 85% of Google’s queries for a particular keyword.

See also:

Google Trends Tool which allows you to see how Google search volumes for a particular keyword change over time.

See also:

Google Webmaster Guidelines An arbitrary & ever-shifting collection of specifications which can be used to justify penalizing any website.

While some aspects of the guidelines might be rather clear, other aspects are blurry, and based on inferences which may be incorrect like: “Don’t deceive your users.” Many would (and indeed have) argued Google’s ad labeling within their own search results is deceptive, Google has ran ads for illegal steroids & other shady offers, etc. The ultimate goal of the Webmaster Guidelines is to minimize the ROI of SEO & discourage active investment into SEO.

For background on how arbitrary and uneven enforcement actions are compare this  to this , then read this .

See also:

Google Wallet Payment service provided by Google which helps Google better understand merchant conversion rates and the value of different keywords and markets.

See also:

Google Webmaster Tools Tools offered by Google which show recent search traffic trends, let webmasters set a target geographic market, enable them to request select pages be recrawled, show manual penalty notifications and allow webmasters to both disavow links and request a manual review from Google’s editorial team.

While some of the Google Webmaster Tools  may seem useful, it is worth noting Google uses webmaster registration data to profile & penalize other websites  owned by the same webmaster. It is worth preceeding with caution when registering with Google, especially if your website is tied to a business model Google both hates & has cloned in their search results – like hotel affiliates .

Google Website Optimizer Free multi variable testing platform used to help AdWords  advertisers improve their conversion rates.

See also:

Guestbook Spam A type of low quality automated link which search engines do not want to place much trust on.

H 

Headings The heading element briefly describes the subject of the section it introduces.

Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower numbered headings being most important. You should only use a single H1 element on each page, and may want to use multiple other heading elements to structure a document. An H1 element source would look like:

<h1>Your Topic</h1>

Heading elements may be styled using CSS . Many content management systems  place the same content in the main page heading and the page title , although in many cases it may be preferential to mix them up if possible.

See also:

Headline 

The title  of an article or story.

Hidden Text SEO technique used to show search engine spiders text that human visitors do not see.

While some sites may get away with it for a while, generally the risk to reward ratio is inadequate for most legitimate sites to consider using hidden text.

Hilltop Algorithm which ranks results largely based on unaffiliated expert citations.

HITS Link based algorithm which ranks relevancy scores based on citations from topical authorities.

See also:

Hijacking Making a search engine believe that another website exists at your URL. Typically done using techniques such as a 302 redirect  or meta refresh .Home Page The main page on your website, which is largely responsible for helping develop your brand and setting up the navigational schemes that will be used to help users and search engines navigate your website.

As far as SEO goes, a home page is typically going to be one of the easier pages to rank for some of your more competitive terms, largely because it is easy to build links at a home page. You should ensure your homepage stays focused and reinforces your brand though, and do not assume that most of your visitors will come to your site via the home page. If your site is well structured many pages on your site will likely be far more popular and rank better than your home page for relevant queries.

Host (see Server )

.htaccess Apache directory-level configuration file which can be used to password protect or redirect files.

As a note of caution, make sure you copy your current .htaccess file before editing it, and do not edit it on a site that you can’t afford to have go down unless you know what you are doing.

See also:

HTML HyperText Markup Language is the language in which pages on the World Wide Web are created.

Some newer web pages are also formatted in XHTML .

See also:

HTTP HyperText Transfer Protocol is the foremost used protocol to communicate between servers and web browsers. Hypertext transfer protocol is the means by which data is transferred from its residing location on a server  to an active browser.Hubs 

Topical hubs are sites which link to well trusted within their topical community. A topical authority is a page which is referenced from many topical hub sites. A topical hub is a page which references many authorities.

See also:

Hummingbird A Google search algorithm update which better enabled conversational search.

See also:

I 

IDF Inverse Document Frequency is a term used to help determine the position of a term in a vector space model .

IDF = log ( total documents in database / documents containing the term )

Inbound Link Link pointing to one website from another website.

Most search engines allow you to see a sample of links pointing to a document by searching using the link: function. For example, using link:www.seobook.com would show pages linking to the homepage of this site (both internal links  and inbound links). Due to canonical URL  issues www.site.com and site.com may show different linkage data. Google typically shows a much smaller sample of linkage data than competing engines do, but Google still knows of and counts many of the links that do not show up when you use their link: function.

Index Collection of data used as bank to search through to find a match to a user fed query. The larger search engines have billions of documents in their catalogs.

When search engines search they search via reverse indexes  by words and return results based on matching relevancy vectors. Stemming and semantic analysis allow search engines to return near matches. Index may also refer to the root of a folder on a web server.

Internal Link Link from one page on a site to another page on the same site.

It is preferential to use descriptive internal linking to make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is about. Use consistent navigational anchor text for each section of your site, emphasizing other pages within that section. Place links to relevant related pages within the content area of your site to help further show the relationship between pages and improve the usability  of your website.

Information Architecture Designing, categorizing, organizing, and structuring content in a useful and meaningful way.

Good information architecture considers both how humans and search spiders access a website. Information architecture suggestions:

  • focus each page on a specific topic
  • use descriptive page titles and meta descriptions  which describe the content of the page
  • use clean (few or no variables) descriptive file names and folder names
  • use headings  to help break up text and semantically structure a document
  • use breadcrumb navigation  to show page relationships
  • use descriptive link anchor text 
  • link to related information from within the content area of your web pages
  • improve conversion  rates by making it easy for people to take desired actions
  • avoid feeding search engines duplicate or near-duplicate content 

Information Retrieval The field of science based on sorting or searching through large data sets to find relevant information.Inktomi Search engine which pioneered the paid inclusion  business model. Inktomi was bought by Yahoo! at the end of 2002.

Internal Navigation (see Navigation )

Internet Vast worldwide network of computers connected via TCP/IP.Internet Explorer Microsoft’s web browser. After they beat out Netscape’s browser on the marketshare front they failed to innovate on any level for about 5 years, until Firefox  forced them to.

See also:

Inverted File (see Reverse Index )

Invisible Web Portions of the web which are not easily accessible to crawlers due to search technology limitations, copyright  issues, or information architecture  issues.IP Address Internet Protocol Address. Every computer connected to the internet has an IP address. Some websites and servers have unique IP addresses, but most web hosts host multiple websites on a single host.

Many SEOs refer to unique C class IP addresses. Every site is hosted on a numerical address like aa.bb.cc.dd. In some cases many sites are hosted on the same IP address. It is believed by many SEOs that if links come from different IP ranges with a different number somewhere in the aa.bb.cc part then the link may count more than links from the same local range and host.

IP delivery (see cloaking )

ISP Internet Service Providers sell end users access to the web. Some of these companies also sell usage data to web analytics companies.

Italics (see emphasis )

J 

JavaScript A client-side scripting language that can be embedded into HTML  documents to add dynamic features.

Search engines do not index most content in JavaScript. In AJAX , JavaScript has been combined with other technologies to make web pages even more interactive.

K 

Keyword A word or phrase which implies a certain mindset or demand that targeted prospects are likely to search for.

Long tail  and brand  related keywords are typically worth more than shorter and vague keywords because they typically occur later in the buying cycle  and are associated with a greater level of implied intent.

Keyword Density An old measure of search engine relevancy based on how prominent keywords appeared within the content of a page. Keyword density is no longer a valid measure of relevancy over a broad open search index though.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

See also:

Keyword Funnel The relationship between various related keywords that searchers search for. Some searches are particularly well aligned with others due to spelling errors, poor search relevancy, and automated or manual query refinement .

See also:

  • MSN Search Funnels  – shows keywords people search for before or after they search for another keyword

Keyword Not Provided When Google shifted to using secured search they continued to pass referrers, but they stripped the keyword information from most organic Google referrals, making it much harder for SEOs to close the loop and figure out which keywords drove conversions via organic search. While Google stripped the organic keyword information overnight, they kept passing the equivalent keyword data to AdWords advertisers for years.

See also:

Keyword Research The process of discovering relevant keywords and keyword phrases to focus your SEO  and PPC marketing campaigns on.

Example keyword discovery methods:

  • using keyword research tools 
  • looking at analytics  data or your server logs 
  • looking at page copy on competing sites
  • reading customer feedback
  • placing a search box on your site and seeing what people are looking for
  • talking to customers to ask how and why they found and chose your business

Keyword Research Tools Tools which help you discover potential keywords based on past search volumes, search trends, bid prices, and page content from related websites.

Short list of the most popular keyword research tools:

  • SEO Book Keyword Research Tool  – free keyword tool cross references all of my favorite keyword research tools. In addition to linking to traditional keyword research tools, it also links to tools such as Google Suggest, Buzz related tools, vertical databases, social bookmarking and tagging sites, and latent semantic indexing  related tools.
  • Bing Ad Intelligence  – Excel plugin offering keyword data from Microsoft. Requires an active Bing Ads advertiser account.
  • Google AdWords Keyword Planner  – powered from Google search data, but requires an active AdWords advertiser account.
  • Wordtracker  – paid, powered from Dogpile and MetaCrawler. Due to small sample size their keyword database may be easy to spam.
  • More keyword tools 
  • Overture Term Suggestion – free, powered from Yahoo! search data. Heavily biased toward over representing commercial queries, combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single data point. This tool was originally located at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ but was taken offline years ago.

Please note that most keyword research tools used alone are going to be highly inaccurate at giving exact quantitative search volumes. The tools are better for qualitative measurements. To test the exact volume for a keyword it may make sense to set up a test Google AdWords  campaign.

Keyword Stuffing Writing copy that uses excessive amounts of the core keyword.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

See also:

Keyword Suggestion Tools (see Keyword Research Tools )

Kleinberg, Jon Scientist largely responsible for much of the research that went into hubs  and authorities based search relevancy algorithms.

See also:

Knowledge Graph Search result enhancements where Google scrapes third party information & displays it in an extended format in the search results.

The goal of the knowledge graph is largely three-fold:

  • Answer user questions quickly without requiring them to leave the search results, particularly for easy to answer questions about known entities .
  • Displace the organic search result set by moving it further down the page, which in turn may cause a lift in the clickthrough rates on the ads shown above the knowledge graph.
  • Some knowledge graph listings (like hotel search, book search, song search, lyric search) also include links to other Google properties or other forms of ads within them, further boosting the monetization of the search result page.

L 

Landing Page The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.Landing Page Quality Scores A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of their AdWords  program.

When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market, but as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to try to keep their ads relevant.

Link A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document.

Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.

Link Baiting The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media and bloggers .

See also:

Link Building The process of building high quality linkage data that search engines will evaluate to trust your website is authoritative , relevant, and trustworthy.

A few general link building tips:

  • create viral marketing  ideas that want to spread and make people talk about you
  • mix your anchor text 
  • get deep links 
  • try to build at least a few quality links  before actively obtaining any low quality links
  • register your site in relevant high quality directories  such as DMOZ , the Yahoo! Directory , and Business.com 
  • when possible try to focus your efforts mainly on getting high quality editorial links 
  • create link bait 
  • try to get bloggers to mention you on their blogs 
  • It takes a while to catch up with the competition, but if you work at it long enough and hard enough eventually you can enjoy a self-reinforcing market position

See also:

Link Bursts A rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing at a website.

When links occur naturally they generally develop over time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral articles receive many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of quality as well, such as:

  • increased usage data
  • increase in brand related search queries
  • traffic from the link sources to the site being linked at
  • many of the new links coming from new pages on trusted domains

See also:

Link Churn The rate at which a site loses links.

See also:

Link Disavow (see Disavow )

Link Equity A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity  and the authority  of the sites providing those links.Link Farm Website or group of websites which exercises little to no editorial control  when linking to other sites. FFA  pages, for example, are link farms.Log Files Server files which show you what your leading sources of traffic are and what people are search for to find your website.

Log files do not typically show as much data as analytics  programs would, and if they do, it is generally not in a format that is as useful beyond seeing the top few stats.

Link Hoarding A method of trying to keep all your link popularity  by not linking out to other sites, or linking out using JavaScript  or through cheesy redirects.

Generally link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons:

  • many authority sites were at one point hub sites that freely linked out to other relevant resources
  • if you are unwilling to link out to other sites people are going to be less likely to link to your site
  • outbound links to relevant resources may improve your credibility and boost your overall relevancy scores

“Of course, folks never know when we’re going to adjust our scoring. It’s pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in mind.” – Quote from Google’s Matt Cutts 

See also:

Link Popularity The number of links pointing at a website.

For competitive search queries link quality  counts much more than link quantity. Google typically shows a smaller sample of known linkage data than the other engines do, even though Google still counts many of the links they do not show when you do a link: search.

Link Reputation The combination of your link equity  and anchor text .Link Rot A measure of how many and what percent of a website’s links are broken.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are:

  • a website going offline
  • linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
  • moving a page’s location
  • changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

See also:

  • Xenu Link Sleuth  is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

Link Velocity The rate at which a page or website accumulates new inbound links.

Pages or sites which receive a huge spike of new inbound links in a short duration may hit automated filters and/or be flagged for manual editorial review by search engineers.

Live.com Microsoft portal which was used as their search brand after MSN search and before rebranding as Bing.

See also:

Long Tail Phrase describing how for any category of product being sold there is much more aggregate demand for the non-hits than there is for the hits.

How does the long tail applies to keywords? Long Tail keywords are more precise and specific, thus have a higher value. As of writing this definition in the middle of October 2006 my leading keywords for this month are as follows:

#reqs search term
1504 seo book
512 seobook
501 seo
214 google auctions
116 link bait
95 aaron wall
94 gmail uk
89 search engine optimization
86 trustrank
78 adsense tracker
73 latent semantic indexing
71 seo books
69 john t reed
67 dear sir
67 book.com
64 link harvester
64 google adwords coupon
58 seobook.com
55 adwords coupon
15056 [not listed: 9,584 search terms]

Notice how the nearly 10,000 unlisted terms account for roughly 10 times as much traffic as I got from my core brand related term (and this site only has a couple thousand pages and has a rather strong brand).

See also:

Looksmart Company originally launched as a directory service which later morphed into a paid search provider and vertical content play.

See also:

LSI Latent Semantic Indexing is a way for search systems to mathematically understanding and representing language based on the similarity of pages and keyword co-occurance. A relevant result may not even have the search term in it. It may be returned based solely on the fact that it contains many similar words to those appearing in relevant pages which contain the search words.

See also:

  • Quintura Search  – free LSI type keyword research tool.
  • Patterns in Unstructured Data  – free paper describing how LSI works
  • SEO Book articles on LSI: #1  & #2  (Google may not be using LSI, but they are certainly using technologies with similar functions and purpose.)
  • Johnon Go Words  – article about how adding certain relevant words to a page can drastically improve its relevancy for other keywords

M 

Malda, Rob Founder of Slashdot.org , a popular editorially driven technology news forum.Manual Penalty Website penalties which are applied to sites after a Google engineer determines they have violated the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Recoveries from manual penalties may time out years later, or a person can request a review in Google Webmaster Tools after fixing what they believe to be the problem.

Sites which had a manual penalty would typically have a warning show in Google Webmaster Tools , whereas sites which have an automated penalty like Panda or Penguin would not.

See also:

Manual Review All major search engines combine a manual review process with their automated relevancy algorithms to help catch search spam and train their relevancy algorithms. Abnormal usage data or link growth patterns may also flag sites for manual review.

See also:

Mechanical Turk Amazon.com program which allows you to hire humans to perform easy tasks that computers are bad at.

See also:

Meme In The Selfish Gene  Richard Dawkins defines a meme as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” Many people use the word meme to refer to self spreading or viral ideas.

See also:

  • Techmeme  – meme tracker which shows technology ideas that are currently spreading on popular technology blogs 

Meta Description The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of the page.

A good meta description tag should:

  • be relevant and unique to the page;
  • reinforce the page title; and
  • focus on including offers and secondary keywords and phrases to help add context to the page title.

Relevant meta description tags may appear in search results  as part of the page description  below the page title.

The code for a meta description tag looks like this

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your meta description here. ” / >

See also:

Meta Keywords The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to highlight keywords  and keyword phrases which the page is targeting.

The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”keyword phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more “>

Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers typically never see the tag, so most search engines do not place much (if any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags.

See also:

Meta Refresh A meta tag used to make a browser refresh to another URL location.

A meta refresh looks like this

<meta http-equiv=“refresh” content=“10;url=http://www.site.com/folder/page.htm”>

Generally in most cases it is preferred to use a 301  or 302  redirect over a meta refresh.

Meta Search A search engine which pulls top ranked results from multiple other search engines and rearranges them into a new result set.

See also:

Meta Tags People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the page title in with these.

Microsoft Maker of the popular Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser, owner of the search engine Bing.    Mindshare A measure of the amount of people who think of you or your product when thinking of products in your category.

Sites with strong mindshare, top rankings, or a strong memorable brand  are far more likely to be linked at than sites which are less memorable and have less search exposure. The link quality of mindshare related links most likely exceeds the quality of the average link on the web. If you sell non-commodities, personal recommendations also typically carry far greater weight than search rankings alone.

See also:

Mirror Site Site which mirrors (or duplicates) the contents of another website.

Generally search engines prefer not to index duplicate content . The one exception to this is that if you are a hosting company it might make sense to offer free hosting or a free mirror site to a popular open source  software site to build significant link equity.

Movable Type For sale blogging software which allows you to host a blog  on your website.

Movable Type is typically much harder to install that WordPress  is.

See also:

MSN Search Search engine built by Microsoft. MSN is the default search provider in Internet Explorer .

See also:

Multi Dimensional Scaling The process of taking shapshots of documents in a database to discover topical clusters through the use of latent semantic indexing . Multi dimensional scaling is more efficient than singular vector decomposition  since only a rough approximation of relevance is necessary when combined with other ranking criteria.MySpace One of the most popular social networking sites, largely revolving around connecting musicians to fans and having an easy to use blogging platform.

See also:

N 

Natural Language Processing Algorithms which attempt to understand the true intent of a search query rather than just matching results to keywords.

Natural Link (see Editorial Link )

Natrual Search (see Organic Search Results )

Navigation Scheme to help website users understand where they are, where they have been, and how that relates to the rest of your website.

It is best to use regular HTML  navigation rather than coding your navigation in JavaScript, Flash, or some other type of navigation which search engines may not be able to easily index.

Navigation Search A search query which has the intent of visiting a specific website or business.Negative SEO Attempting to adversely influence the rank of a third-party site.

Over time Google shifts many link building strategies from being considered white hat to gray hat to black hat. A competitor (or a person engaging in reputation management) can point a bunch of low-quality links with aggressive anchor text at a page in order to try to get the page filtered from the search results. If these new links cause a manual penalty, then the webmaster who gets penalized may not only have to disavow  the new spam links, but they may have to try to remove or disavow links which were in place for 5 or 10 years already which later became “black hat” ex-post-facto. There are also strategies to engage in negative SEO without using links .

Netscape Originally a company that created a popular web browser by the same name, Netscape is now a social news site similar to Digg.com .

See also:

Niche A topic or subject which a website is focused on.

Search is a broad field, but as you drill down each niche consists of many smaller niches. An example of drilling down to a niche market

  • search
  • search marketing, privacy considerations, legal issues, history of, future of, different types of vertical search, etc.
  • search engine optimization, search engine advertising
  • link building, keyword research, reputation monitoring and management, viral marketing, SEO copywriting, Google AdWords, information architecture, etc.

Generally it is easier to compete in small, new, or underdeveloped niches than trying to dominate large verticals. As your brand  and authority  grow you can go after bigger markets.

Nofollow Attribute used to prevent a link from passing link authority. Commonly used on sites with user generated content, like in blog comments.

The code to use nofollow on a link appears like

<a href=”http://wwwseobook.com.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text </a>

Nofollow can also be used in a robots meta tag to prevent a search engine from counting any outbound links on a page. This code would look like this

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

Google ‘s Matt Cutts  also pushes webmasters to use nofollow on any paid links, but since Google is the world’s largest link broker, their advice on how other people should buy or sell links should be taken with a grain of salt. Please note that it is generally not advised to practice link hoarding  as that may look quite unnatural. Outbound links  may also boost your relevancy scores in some search engines.

Not Provided (see Keyword (Not Provided) )

O 

Ontology In philosophy it is the study of being. As it relates to search, it is the attempt to create an exhaustive and rigorous conceptual schema about a domain. An ontology is typically a hierarchical data structure containing all the relevant entities and their relationships and rules within that domain.

See also:

Open Directory Project, The (see DMOZ )

Open Source Software which is distributed with its source code such that developers can modify it as they see fit.

On the web open source is a great strategy for quickly building immense exposure and mindshare.

Opera A fast standards based web browser.

See also:

Organic Search Results Most major search engines have results that consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. The unpaid / algorithmic listings are called the organic search results. Organic search results are organized by relevancy, which is largely determined based on linkage data, page content, usage data, and historical domain and trust related data.

Most clicks on search results are on the organic search results. Some studies have shown that 60 to 80% + of clicks are on the organic search results.

Outbound Link A link from one website pointing at another external website.

Some webmasters believe in link hoarding , but linking out to useful relevant related documents is an easy way to help search engines understand what your website is about. If you reference other resources it also helps you build credibility and leverage the work of others without having to do everything yourself. Some webmasters track where their traffic comes from, so if you link to related websites they may be more likely to link back to your site.

See also:

Overture The company which pioneered search marketing by selling targeted searches on a pay per click basis. Originally named GoTo, they were eventually bought out by Yahoo! and branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing .

See also:

Overture Keyword Selector Tool Popular keyword research tool, based largely on Yahoo! search statistics. Heavily skewed toward commercially oriented searches, also combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single version.

See also:

P 

Page, Larry 

Co-founder of Google .

PageRank A logarithmic scale based on link equity which estimates the importance of web documents.

Since PageRank is widely bartered Google’s relevancy algorithms had to move away from relying on PageRank and place more emphasis on trusted links via algorithms such as TrustRank .

The PageRank formula is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

PR= PageRank 
d= dampening factor (~0.85)
c = number of links on the page
PR(T1)/C(T1) = PageRank of page 1 divided by the total number of links on page 1, (transferred PageRank)

In text: for any given page A the PageRank PR(A) is equal to the sum of the parsed partial PageRank given from each page pointing at it multiplied by the dampening factor plus one minus the dampening factor.

See also:

Page Title (see Title )

 A method of allowing websites which pass editorial quality guidelines to buy relevant exposure.

See also:

  • Directories such as the Yahoo! Directory  and Business.com  allow websites to be listed for a flat yearly cost.
  • Yahoo! Search allows webmasters to pay for inclusion  for a flat review fee and a category based cost per click.

Paid Link (see Text Link Ads )

Panda Algorithm A Google algorithm which attempts to sort websites into buckets based on perceived quality. Signals referenced in the Panda patent include the link profile of the site & entity (or brand) related search queries.

 

Sites which have broad, shallow content (like eHow) along with ad heavy layouts, few repeat visits, and high bounce rates from search visitors are likely to get penalized. Highly trusted & well known brands (like Amazon.com) are likely to receive a ranking boost. In addition to the article databases & other content farms, many smaller ecommerce sites were torched by Panda.

Sites which had a manual penalty would typically have a warning show in Google Webmaster Tools , whereas sites which have an automated penalty like Panda or Penguin would not.

See also:

Pay for Performance Payment structure where affiliated sales workers are paid commission for getting consumers to perform certain actions.

Publishers publishing contextual ads  are typically paid per ad click. Affiliate marketing programs pay affiliates for conversions – leads, downloads, or sales.

Penalty Search engines prevent some websites suspected of spamming  from ranking highly in the results by banning or penalizing them. These penalties may be automated algorithmically or manually applied.

If a site is penalized algorithmically the site may start ranking again after a certain period of time after the reason for being penalized is fixed. If a site is penalized manually the penalty may last an exceptionally long time or require contacting the search engine with a reinclusion  request to remedy.

Some sites are also filtered  for various reasons.

See also:

Penguin Algorithm Google algorithm which penalizes sites with unnatural link profiles.

 

When Google launched the Penguin algorithm they obfuscated the emphasis on links by also updating some on-page keyword stuffing classifiers at the same time. Initially they also failed to name the Penguin update & simply called it a spam update, only later naming it after plenty of blowback due to false positives. In many cases they run updates on top of one another or in close proximity to obfuscate which update caused an issue for a particular site. Sometimes Google would put out a wave of link warnings and manual penalties  around the time Penguin updated & other times Penguin and Panda  would run right on top of one another.

Sites which were hit by later versions of Penguin could typically recover on the next periodic Penguin update after disavowing low quality links inside Google Webmaster Tools, but sites which were hit by the first version of Penguin had a much harder time recovering. Sites which had a manual penalty would typically have a warning show in Google Webmaster Tools , whereas sites which have an automated penalty like Panda or Penguin would not.

See also:

Personalization Altering the search results based on a person’s location, search history, content they recently viewed, or other factors relevant to them on a personal level.PHP PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side scripting language used to render web pages or add interactivity to them.

See also:

Pigeon Update An algorithmic update to local search results on Google which tied in more signals which have been associated with regular web search.

See also:

Piracy Update Search algorithm update Google performed which lowered the rankings of sites which had an excessive number of DMCA takedown requests. Google has exempted both Blogspot and YouTube from this “relevancy” signal .Poison Word Words which were traditionally associated with low quality content that caused search engines to want to demote the rankings of a page.

See also:

PDF Portable Document Format is a universal file format developed by Adobe Systems that allows files to be stored and viewed in the original printer friendly context.POGO Rate The percent of users who click on a site listed in the search results only to quickly click back to the search results and click on another listing.

A high POGO rate can be seen as a poor engagement metric , which in turn can flag a site to be ranked lower using an algorithm like Panda .

Portal Web site offering common consumer services such as news, email, other content, and search.PPC Pay Per Click is a pricing model which most search ads and many contextual ad programs  are sold through. PPC ads only charge advertisers if a potential customer clicks on an ad.

See also:

Precision The ability of a search engine to list results that satisfy the query, usually measured in percentage. (if 20 of the 50 results match the query the precision is 40%)

Search spam  and the complexity of language challenge the precision of search engines.

Profit Elasticity A measure of the profit potential of different economic conditions based on adjusting price, supply, or other variables to create a different profit potential where the supply and demand curves cross.Proximity A measure of how close words are to one another.

A page which has words near one another may be deemed to be more likely to satisfy a search query containing both terms. If keyword phrases are repeated an excessive number of times, and the proximity is close on all the occurrences of both words it may also be a sign of unnatural (and thus potentially low quality) content.

Q 

QDF Query deserves freshness is an algorithmic signal based on things like a burst in search volume and a burst in news publication on a topic which tells Google that a particular search query should rank recent / fresh  results.

Newly published content may be seen as fresh content, but older content may also be seen as fresh if it has been recently updated, has a big spike in readership, and/or has a large spike in it’s link velocity  (the rate of growth of inbound links).

Quality Content Content which is linkworthy in nature.

See also:

Quality Link Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links.

There are a variety of ways to define what a quality link is, but the following are characteristics of a high quality link:

  • Trusted Source: If a link is from a page or website which seems like it is trustworthy then it is more likely to count more than a link from an obscure, rarely used, and rarely cited website. See TrustRank  for one example of a way to find highly trusted websites.
  • Hard to Get: The harder a link is to acquire the more likely a search engine will be to want to trust it and the more work a competitor will need to do to try to gain that link.
  • Aged: Some search engines may trust links from older resources or links that have existed for a length of time more than they trust brand new links or links from newer resources.
  • Co-citation: Pages that link at competing sites which also link to your site make it easy for search engines to understand what community your website belongs to. See Hilltop for an example of an algorithm which looks for co-citation from expert sources.
  • Related: Links from related pages or related websites may count more than links from unrelated sites.
  • In Content: Links which are in the content area of a page are typically going to be more likely to be editorial links  than links that are not included within the editorial portion of a page.

While appropriate anchor text  may also help you rank even better than a link which lacks appropriate anchor text, it is worth noting that for competitive queries Google is more likely to place weight on a high quality link where the anchor text does not match than trusting low quality links where the anchor text matches.

Query The actual “search string” a searcher enters into a search engine.Query Refinement Some searchers may refine their search query if they deemed the results as being irrelevant. Some search engines may aim to promote certain verticals or suggest other search queries if they deem other search queries or vertical databases as being relevant to the goals of the searcher.

Query refinement is both a manual and an automated process. If searchers do not find their search results as being relevant they may search again. Search engines may also automatically refine queries using the following techniques:

  • Google OneBox: promotes a vertical search database near the top of the search result. For example, if image search is relevant to your search query images may be placed near the top of the search results.
  • Spell Correction: offers a did you mean link with the correct spelling near the top of the results.
  • Inline Suggest: offers related search results in the search results. Some engines also suggest a variety of related search queries.

Some search toolbars  also aim to help searchers auto complete their search queries by offering a list of most popular queries which match the starting letters that a searcher enters into the search box.

R 

Rankbrain Google search relevancy algorithm signal which leverages user clickpath information to improve relevancy on less commonly searched for related search terms.Recall The portion of relevant documents that were retrieved when compared to all relevant documents.Reciprocal Links Nepotistic link exchanges where websites try to build false authority  by trading links, using three way link trades, or other low quality link schemes.

When sites link naturally there is going to be some amount of cross linking within a community, but if most or all of your links are reciprocal in nature it may be a sign of ranking manipulation. Also sites that trade links off topic or on links pages that are stashed away deep within their sites probably do not pass much link authority, and may add more risk than reward.

Quality reciprocal link exchanges in and of themselves are not a bad thing, but most reciprocal link offers are of low quality. If too many of your links are of low quality it may make it harder for your site to rank for relevant queries, and some search engines may look at inlink and outlink ratios as well as link quality when determining how natural a site’s link profile is.

See also:

Redirect A method of alerting browsers and search engines that a page location moved. 301 redirects are for permanent change of location and 302 redirects  are used for a temporary change of location.Registrar A company which allows you to register domain names.Reinclusion If a site has been penalized for spamming they may fix the infraction and ask for reinclusion. Depending on the severity of the infraction and the brand strength of the site they may or may not be added to the search index.

See also:

  • Google Reinclusion – sign up for Google Sitemaps , and request reinclusion from within Google Sitemaps

Referrer The source from which a website visitor came from.Relative Link A link which shows the relation of the current URL to the URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization  and hijacking  related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.

Example relative link

<a href=”../folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a>

Example absolute link 

<a href=”http://domain.com/folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a>

Relevancy A measure of how useful searchers find search results.

Many search engines may also bias organic search results  to informational resources since commercial ads also show in the search results.

See also:

Remarketing (see retargeting )

Repeat Visits Visitors to a website which have visited it in the recent past.

Search engines may look at signals like a strong stream of regular repeat visits to a site & many brand-related searches  as signals of strong user engagmenet , which lead them to rank the site higher in algorithms like Panda . Sites which get few repeat visits and few brand-related searches compared agains their overall search traffic footprint may be viewed as lower quality sites & have their rankings suppressed.

Reputation Management Ensuring your brand  related keywords display results which reinforce your brand. Many hate sites tend to rank highly for brand related queries.Resubmission Much like search engine submission , resubmission is generally a useless program which is offered by businesses bilking naive consumers out of their money for a worthless service.

Rewrite (see URL Rewrite )

Retargeting Advertising programs targeted at people who have previously visited a given website or channel, viewed a particular product, or added a particular product to their shopping cart.

Due to activity bias , many retargeted ads overstate their effective contribution to conversions.

Reverse Index An index of keywords which stores records of matching documents that contain those keywords.

See also:

 Robots.txt A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search engines which files not to crawl. Some search engines will still list your URLs as URL only listings even if you block them using a robots.txt file.

Do not put files on a public server if you do not want search engines to index them!

See also:

ROI Return on Investment is a measure of how much return you receive from each marketing dollar.

While ROI is a somewhat sophisticated measurement, some search marketers prefer to account for their marketing using more sophisticate profit elasticity  calculations.

RSS Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication is a method of syndicating information to a feed reader  or other software which allows people to subscribe to a channel they are interested in.

S 

Safari A popular Apple browser.Salton, Gerard Scientist who pioneered the information retrieval field.

See also:

Scumware Intrusive software and programs which usually target ads, violate privacy, and are often installed without the computer owner knowing what the software does.Search History Many search engines store user search history information. This data can be used for better ad targeting or to make old information more findable.

Search engines may also determine what a document is about and how much they trust a domain based on aggregate usage data . Many brand  related search queries is a strong signal of quality.

Search Engine A tool or device used to find relevant information. Search engines consist of a spider , index , relevancy  algorithms and search results .

Search pogo (see pogo rate )

SEM Search engine marketing.

Also known as:

SEO Search engine optimization is the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries.

SEO consists largely of keyword research , SEO copywriting , information architecture , link building , brand  building, building mindshare , reputation management , and viral marketing .

SEO Copywriting Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries.

There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly

  1. Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content for your site or already have an amazingly authoritative site.
  2. Write page titles that are exceptionally compelling to link at. If enough people link at them then your pages and site will rank for many relevant queries even if the keywords are not in the page titles.

See also:

SERP Search Engine Results Page is the page on which the search engines show the results for a search query.Search Marketing Marketing a website in search engines. Typically via SEO , buying pay per click  ads, and paid inclusion .Server Computer used to host files and serve them to the WWW.

Dedicated servers  usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers  typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

Server Logs Files hosted on servers which display website traffic trends and sources.

Server logs typically do not show as much data and are not as user friendly as analytics  software. Not all hosts provide server logs.

Singular Value Decomposition The process of breaking down a large database to find the document vector (relevance) for various items by comparing them to other items and documents.

Important steps:

  • Stemming: taking in account for various forms of a word on a page
  • Local Weighting: increasing the relevance of a given document based on the frequency a term appears in the document
  • Global Weighting: increasing the relevance of terms which appear in a small number of pages as they are more likely to be on topic than words that appear in most all documents.
  • Normalization: penalizing long copy and rewarding short copy to allow them fair distribution in results. a good way of looking at this is like standardizing things to a scale of 100.

Multi dimensional scaling  is more efficient than singular value decomposition because it requires exceptionally less computation. When combined with other ranking factors only a rough approximation of relevance is necessary.

Siphoning Techniques used to steal another web sites traffic, including the use of spyware  or cybersquatting .Site Map Page which can be used to help give search engines a secondary route to navigate through your site.

Tips:

  • On large websites the on page navigation should help search engines find all applicable web pages.
  • On large websites it does not make sense to list every page on the site map, just the most important pages.
  • Site maps can be used to help redistribute internal link authority toward important pages or sections, or sections of your site that are seasonally important.
  • Site maps can use slightly different or more descriptive anchor text than other portions of your site to help search engines understand what your pages are about.
  • Site maps should be created such that they are useful to humans, not just search engines.

Slashdot Central editorially driven community news site focusing on technology and nerd related topics created by Rob Malda .

See also:

Snippit (see Description )

Social Media Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are social bookmarking sites and social news sites.

See also:

  • Del.icio.us  – social bookmarking program
  • Digg  – social news site

Spam Unsolicited email messages.

Search engines also like to outsource their relevancy issues by calling low quality search results spam. They have vague ever changing guidelines which determine what marketing techniques are acceptable at any given time. Typically search engines try hard not to flag false positives as spam, so most algorithms are quite lenient, as long as you do not build lots of low quality links, host large quantities of duplicate content, or perform other actions that are considered widely outside of relevancy guidelines. If your site is banned from a search engine you may request reinclusion  after fixing the problem.

See also:

Spamming The act of creating and distributing spam.Spider Search engine crawlers which search or “spider” the web for pages to include in the index .

Many non-traditional search companies have different spiders which perform other applications. For example, TurnItInBot searches for plagiarism. Spiders should obey the robots.txt  protocol.

Splash Page Feature rich or elegantly designed beautiful web page which typically offers poor usability and does not offer search engines much content to index.

Make sure your home page  has relevant content on it if possible.

Splog Spam blog , typically consisting of stolen or automated low quality content.Spyware Software programs which spy on web users, often used to collect consumer research and to behaviorally targeted ads.

See also:

  • Ad Aware  – spyware removal software
  • Stop Badware  – site about fighting spyware and other adverse sleazy software programs

Squidoo Topical lens site created by Seth Godin .

See also:

SSI Server Side Includes are a way to call portions of a page in from another page. SSI makes it easier to update websites.

To use a server side include you have to follow one of the conditions:

  • end file names in a .shtml or .shtm extension
  • use PHP or some other language which makes it easy to include files via that programming language
  • change your .htaccess  file to make .html or .htm files be processed as though they were .shtml files.

The code to create a server side include looks like this:

<!–#include virtual=”/includes/filename.html” –>

Static Content Content which does not change frequently. May also refer to content that does not have any social elements to it and does not use dynamic programming languages .

Many static sites do well, but the reasons fresh content  works great for SEO  are:

  • If you keep building content every day you eventually build a huge archive of content
  • By frequently updating your content you keep building mindshare , brand  equity, and give people fresh content worth linking at

Stemming Using the stem of a word to help satisfy search relevancy requirements. EX: searching for swimming can return results which contain swim. This usually enhances the quality of search results due to the extreme diversity of word used in, and their application in the English language.Stop Words Common words (ex: a, to, and, is …) which add little relevancy to a search query, and are thus are removed from the search query prior to finding relevant search results.

It is both fine and natural to use stop words in your page content. The reason stop words are ignored when people search is that the words are so common that they offer little to no discrimination value.

Sullivan, Danny Founder and lead editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, who later started SearchEngineLand.com.

See also:

Submission The act of making information systems and related websites aware of your website. In most cases you no longer need to submit your website to large scale search engines, they follow links and index content. The best way to submit your site is to get others to link to it.

Some topical or vertical search  systems will require submission, but you should not need to submit your site to large scale search engine.

Supplemental Results Documents which generally are trusted less and rank lower than documents in the main search index.

Some search engines, such as Google, have multiple indicies. Documents which are not well trusted due to any of the following conditions:

  • limited link authority relative to the number of pages on the site
  • duplicate content or near duplication
  • exceptionally complex URLs

Documents in the supplemental results are crawled less frequently than documents in the main index. Since documents in the supplemental results are typically considered to be trusted less than documents in the regular results, those pages probably carry less weight when they vote for other pages by linking at them.

You can find document’s on this site that are in Google’s supplemental results by searching for site:seobook.com *** -view:randomstring 

T 

Tagging, tags (see Bookmarks )

Taxonomy Classification system of controlled vocabulary used to organize topical subjects, usually hierarchical in nature.Technorati Blog search engine which tracks popular stories and link relationships.

See also:

Teoma Topical community based search engine largely reliant upon Kleinberg ‘s concept of hubs  and authorities . Teoma powers Ask.com .Telnet Internet service allowing a remote computer to log into a local one for projects such as script initialization or manipulation.Term Frequency A measure of how frequently a keyword appears amongst a collection of documents.Term Vector Database A weighted index of documents which aims to understand the topic of documents based on how similar they are to other documents, and then match the most relevant documents to a search query based on vector length and angle.

See also:

Text Link Ads Advertisements which are formatted as text links.

Since the web was originally based on text and links people are typically more inclined to pay attention to text links than some other ad formats which are typically less relevant and more annoying. However, search engines primarily want to count editorial links  as votes, so links that are grouped together with other paid links (especially if those links are to off topic commercial sites) may be less likely to carry weight in search engines.

Thesaurus Synonym directory search engines use to help increase return relevancy.

Thesaurus tools can also be used as a keyword research tool  to help search marketers find related keywords to target.

Title The title element is used to describe the contents of a document.

The title is one of the most important aspects to doing SEO on a web page. Each page title should be:

  • Unique to that page: Not the same for every page of a site!
  • Descriptive: What important ideas does that page cover?
  • Not excessively long: Typically page titles should be kept to 8 to 10 words or less, with some of the most important words occurring near the beginning of the page title.

Page titles appear in search results as the links searchers click on. In addition many people link to documents using the official document title as the link anchor text . Thus, by using a descriptive page title you are likely to gain descriptive anchor text and are more likely to have your listing clicked on.

On some occasions it also makes sense to use a title which is not literally descriptive, but is easily associated with human emotions or a controversy such that your idea will spread further and many more people will point quality editorial links  at your document.

There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly

  1. Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content for your site or already have an amazingly authoritative site.
  2. Write page titles that are exceptionally compelling to link at. If enough people link at them then your pages and site will rank for many relevant queries even if the keywords are not in the page titles.

See also:

Toolbar Many major search companies aim to gain marketshare by distributing search toolbars. Some of these toolbars have useful features such as pop-up blockers, spell checkers, and form autofill. These toolbars also help search engines track usage data .Top Heavy Google algorithm which penalizes websites which have a high ad density above the fold & sites which make it hard to find the content a user searched for before landing on the page.

See also:

Topic-Sensitive PageRank Method of computing PageRank  which instead of producing a single global score creates topic related PageRank scores.

See also:

Trackback Automated notification that another website mentioned your site which is baked into most popular blogging software programs.

Due to the automated nature of trackbacks they are typically quite easy to spam. Many publishers turn trackbacks off due to a low signal to noise ratio.

The Tragedy of the Commons Story about how in order to protect the commons some people will have to give up some rights or care more for the commons. In marketing attention is the commons, and Google largely won distribution because they found ways to make marketing less annoying.

See also:

TrustRank Search relevancy algorithm which places additional weighting on links from trusted seed websites that are controlled by major corporations, educational institutions, or governmental institutions.

See also:

Typepad Hosted blogging platform  provided by SixApart, who also makes Movable Type .

It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Typepad.com, or to publish content which appears as though it is on its own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity  and age  related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

See also:

U 

Unethical SEO 

Some search engine marketers lacking in creativity try to market their services as being ethical, whereas services rendered by other providers are somehow unethical. SEO services are generally neither ethical or unethical. They are either effective or ineffective.

SEO is an inherently risky business, but any quality SEO service provider should make clients aware of potential risks and rewards of different recommended techniques.

Update Search engines frequently update their algorithms and data sets to help keep their search results fresh and make their relevancy algorithms hard to update. Most major search engines are continuously updating both their relevancy algorithms and search index.

URL Uniform Resource Locator is the unique address of any web document.URL Rewrite A technique used to help make URLs more unique and descriptive to help facilitate better sitewide indexing by major search engines.

See also:

  • ISAPI Rewrite  – software to rewrite URLs on sites hosted on a Microsoft Internet Information Server.

Usability How easy it is for customers to perform the desired actions.

The structure and formatting of text and hyperlink based calls to action can drastically increase your website usability, and thus conversion  rates.

See also:

Usage Data Things like a large stream of traffic, a high percent of visitors as repeat visitors , long dwell time , multiple page views per visitor, a high clickthrough rate , or a high level of brand related search queries  may be seen by some search engines as a sign of quality. Some search engines may leverage these signals to improve the rankings of high quality documents and high quality websites via algorithms like Panda .Usenet A search service which is focused on a particular field, a particular type of information, or a particular information format.

See also:

User Engagement (see usage data )

V 

Vector Space Model (see Term Vector Database )

Vertical Search A search service which is focused on a particular field, a particular type of information, or a particular information format.

For example, Business.com  would be a B2B vertical search engine, and YouTube  would be a video based vertical search engine.

Viral Marketing Self propagating marketing techniques. Common modes of transmission are email, blogging, and word of mouth marketing channels.

Many social news sites and social bookmarking sites also lead to secondary citations.

Virtual Domain Website hosted on a virtual server .Virtual Server A server which allows multiple top level domains to be hosted from a single computer.

Using a virtual server can save money for smaller applications, but dedicated hosting should be used for large commercial platforms.Most domains are hosted on virtual servers, but using a dedicated server on your most important domains should add server reliability, and could be seen as a sign of quality. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

W 

Wales, Jimmy Co-founder of the popular Wikipedia .

Weblog (see Blog )

Webmaster Tools (see Google Webmaster Tools )

Whois Each domain has an owner of record. Ownership data is stored in the Whois record for that domain.

Some domain registrars also allow you to hide the ownership data of your sites. Many large scale spammers use fake Whois data.

See also:

  • DomainTools Whois Source  – shows Whois information by domain name. Paid members may also view other domains on the same IP address  and the domain ownership history.

White Hat SEO Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO . Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next.

Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

See also:

Wiki Software which allows information to be published using collaborative editing.Wikipedia Free online collaborative encyclopedia using wiki  software.

See also:

Wordnet A lexical database of English words which can be used to help search engines understand word relationships.

See also:

WordPress Popular open source  blogging software platform, offering both a downloadable blogging program and a hosted solution.

If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity  and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

See also:

Wordtracker Feature rich paid keyword research tool  which collects data from a couple popular meta search engines, like Dogpile.

Due to Wordtracker’s small sample size their data may be easy to game.

See also:

X 

Xenu Link Sleuth Popular free software for checking a site for broken internal or external links and creating a sitemap.

See also:

  • Xenu  – official site

XHTML Extensible HyperText Markup Language is a class of specifications designed to move HTML to conform to XML  formatting.

See also:

XML Extensible Markup Language is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML, used to make it easy to syndicate or format information using technologies such as RSS .

See also:

Y 

Yahoo! Internet portal company which was started with the popular Yahoo! Directory .

See also:

Yahoo! Answers Free question asking and answering service which allows Yahoo! to leverage social structures to create a bottoms up network of free content.

See also:

Yahoo! Directory One of the original, most popular, and most authoritative web directories, started by David Filo and Jerry Yang in 1994.

The Yahoo! Directory is one of a few places where most any legitimate site can pick up a trusted link. While the cost of $299 per year may seem expensive to some small businesses, a Yahoo! Directory link will likely help boost your rankings in major search engines.

See also:

Yahoo! Search Marketing Yahoo!’s paid search platform, formerly known as Overture .

See also:

Yahoo! Site Explorer Research tool which webmasters can use to see what pages Yahoo! has indexed from a website, and what pages link at those pages.

See also:

YouTube Feature rich amateur video upload and syndication website owned by Google.

See also:

Z 

Zeal Non-commercial directory which was bought by Looksmart  for $20 million, then abruptly shut down with little to no warning.

 

This page is licensed under a Creative Commons license. You can modify it, distribute it, sell it, and keep the rights to whatever you make. It is up to you however you want to use any of the content from this page.

Creative Commons License 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License .

WEB DESIGN PORTFOLIO
Voice Over Portfolio Websites
OUR SERVICES INCLUDE:
World of Voices Industry Partner
Voice Over Fun Apparel

Reserve your SUPPORT FEE SPEECH t-shirt now!

VOICE OVER SCRIPTS, TIPS, TRICKS & FAQ

WEB DESIGN + VOICE OVER
Over 20 years of experience in Web Design and Voice Over!

Copyright © 2024 WebStuff LLC owns and operates VoiceActorWebSites.com | Providing Website Services for the Voice Over Industry

Home | Our Services | Meet Our Team | Portfolio | FAQ | Free Voice Over Scripts | Voice Over Jobs | Female Voice Over Talent | Male Voice Over Talent | VO Work | VO Genres |Blog | VO Library | Privacy Policy | Contact Us