Glossary of Terms
Above the fold - The content of a web page that is seen by the visitor without scrolling.
Adwords - The name of Google's cost per click advertising system.
Algorithm - A set of rules or formula that a search engine uses to rank the listings contained within its index, in response to a particular query. Search engines never reveal how their algorithms function.
ALT text - The text that appears when you mouse over an image or photo on a web page.
Anchor Text - The text part of a link. Anchor text is often assigned a heavy weighting in search engine algorithms as a ranking factor.
Back Link - All links pointing at a particular web page.
Banned - When web pages are removed from a search engine's index specifically because the search engine has deemed the pages to be spamming or violating one or more of its guidelines.
Below the fold - The content of a web page that is only seen when a visitor scrolls down.
Click Through - Occurs when a visitor clicks on a link that leads to another website.
Click Through Rate (CTR) - The percentage of those clicking on a link out of the total number who see the link.
Cloaking - The act of getting a search engine to record content for a URL that is different than what a searcher will ultimately see. Many search engines have explicit rules against cloaking and anyone violating these rules might find their web pages penalized or banned from a search engine's index.
Clustering - Clustering limits each website to one or two listings in search engine results.
Conversion Rate - The relationship between visitors to a web site and actions consider to be a "conversion," such as a sale or request to receive more information. Conversion rate is usually expressed as a percentage.
Cost Per Click (CPC) - A program where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for each click someone makes on a link leading to their web site
CPM - A program where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for the number of times their ad is seen by a consumer, regardless of the consumer's subsequent action. Typically used in print, broadcasting and direct marketing, as well as with online banner ad sales. CPM stands for "cost per thousand," since ad views are often sold in blocks of 1,000.
Crawler - A component of search engine that gathers listings by automatically "crawling" the web. A search engine's crawler, also called a spider or robot, follows links to web pages. It makes copies of the web pages found and stores these in the search engine's index.
Cross Linking - Multiple sites all linking to each other.
CTR - Click Through Rate.
Dead Link - A link to a web page that can no longer be found often because the page has been deleted, has moved, or the web server is offline.
Direcotry - A type of search engine where listings are gathered through human efforts, rather than by automated crawling of the web. In directories, web sites are often reviewed, summarized and categorized by humans.
Doorway Page - A web page created expressly in hopes of ranking well for a term in a search engine's non-paid, also called organic or natural, listings and which itself does not deliver much information to those viewing it. Instead, visitors will often see only an enticement on the doorway page leading them to other pages, or they may be automatically redirected quickly past the doorway page. With cloaking, they may never see the doorway page.
Filter Words - Words such as, is, am, were, was, the, for, do, that search engines deem irrelevant for indexing purposes.
Frames - A web page layout that displays two or more separate web pages within a single browser screen. Sites using frames often cannot be spidered or indexed.
Google - Currently, the largest and most popular search engine.
Googlebot - Spider used by Google to index webpages.
Header Tag - Denoted by <head> and </head>. Contained within the header tags are title tags, meta tags, javascript and external file links.
Hidden Text - Text on a website that is hidden from view but is visible to search engines. A trick that should never be used to stuff web pages with keywords where the text colour is the same as the background colour. Search engines consider hidden text as spam. If your site is identified using this hidden text it will be banned from all major search engines.
Hit - A single access request made to the server. Often used to describe the amount of traffic to a website but it is a very misleading indicator of true traffic.
Inbound Link - A link from another site to your site.
IP Address - Used to uniquely identify a computer or server on the internet.
Index - The collection of information a search engine has that searchers can query against. With crawler-based search engines, the index is typically copies of all the web pages they have found from crawling the web. With human-powered directories, the index contains the summaries of all web sites that have been categorized.
Keyword - This is a word used in a search query. For example, searching for "wooden desk" includes the keywords "wooden" and "desk".
Keyword Stuffing/Spamming - The process of repeating keywords or key phrases in meta tags and body text. This can result in keyword densities over 50%, and is seen as spam by most search engines.
Landing Page - The specific web page that a visitor reaches after clicking a search engine listing.
Link Popularity - A measure of both the number and the quality of inbound links. Most search engines consider this factor when ranking websites in SERPs.
Log Files - Log files are generated and maintained by web servers and contain details of all file accesses including file accessed, date and time accessed, referring page, user agent, and more.
Meta Tags - Meta tags placed within the heading section of html code. The most common are the meta description tags and meta keyword tags. These tags are not visible on the web page.
Mirror Sites - Multiple copies of a website, usually for redundancy and on different servers, are called mirror sites. It is best to allow the only the primary site to be spidered by search engines. If mulitple, identical sites are found by the spiders, your sites could be banned from the search engine indexes since this would be considered spam.
Organic Listings - Listings in search engines that appear without payment because a search engine has deemed the related site to be editorially important for them to be included.
Outbound Links - Links from a page on your site to another site.
Page Views - The number of times distinct pages of your website are served.
Paid Inclusion - Advertising program where web pages are guaranteed to be included in a search engine's index in exchange for payment, though no guarantee of ranking is typically given. Marketers pay to be included in the directory, on a CPC basis or per-URL fee basis, with no guarantee of specific placement.
Paid Placement - Advertising program where listings are guaranteed to appear in response to particular search terms, with higher ranking typically obtained by paying more than other advertisers. Paid placement listings can be purchased from a portal or a search network. Search networks are often set up in an auction environment where keywords and phrases are associated with a cost-per-click (CPC) fee. Google and Yahoo are the largest networks.
PPC - Pay Per Click.
PPC Engines - Search Engines whose results are driven by PPC listings.
Query - The execution of a search on a search engine.
Rank - How well a particular web page or web site is positioned in a search engine's results. Rank is also referred to as "position".
ROI - Return on Investment.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - The act of marketing a web site via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - A component of search engine marketing, SEO is the act of altering a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) - The page returned by a search engine after a user enters a search query.
SEP - Search engine placement.
SERP - Search Engine Results Page.
Spam - Any search engine marketing method that a search engine deems to be detrimental to its efforts to deliver relevant, quality search results. Any activity a particular search engine deems harmful may be considered spam, whether or not there are published guidelines against it.
Stemming - Word variations. For example, if a visitor queries "build", a search engine that supports stemming might return results that include "building", "builder" or "builds".
Stop Word - A word which is ignored in a query because the word is so commonly used that it makes no contribution to relevancy. Examples are common words such as "an", "and" "of", "the" and "or".
Submission - The act of submitting a URL for inclusion into a search engine's index. Unless done through paid inclusion, submission generally does not guarantee listing. Submission does not help with rank improvement on crawler-based search engines unless search engine optimization efforts have been undertaken.
Unique Visitor - An instance of a unique site connecting to your server.
URL - Universal Resource Locator.
