SEO Glossary and SEM Glossary = SEOM Glossary

Merge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Glossary and Search Engine Market (SEM) Glossary

A/B Testing – A/B testing is used in diverse industries and research to optimize an existing product or service. In SEOM, website visitor is shown one webpage version of a page – (A) version or (B) version – and the results are tracked for changes in behavior based on which version the visitor viewed. The (A) version is usually for existing design (“control” in statistics verbiage); and (B) version is the “challenger” with one design element or copy changed. A/B testing is mainly used to enhance more results by testing for landing page copy, clicked-on ad copy or website designs.

AdSense – Google AdSense is an advertising program in which business enterprises can display relevant Google advertisements on their websites and earn revenue from site visitors’ ad clicks. AdSense offers targeted advertisements to partner websites. Site owners earn revenue each time

AdWords – Google’s advertisement and link platform. The platform uses ads that are keyword targeted and auctioned on a cost per click basis. This results in specific advertisement targeting to your audience.

Affiliate – Websites that provide market services or products on behalf of an affiliate partner website or business in return for fees or commissions.

Affiliate Marketing – An online marketing method that uses revenue sharing schemes between web publishers, merchants and salespersons. Revenue is generated by the affiliate through performance measures such as, ad clicks, sales, registrations or other factors and combinations.

Analytics – A web application or software that permits you to track detailed information about your website visits such as, page views, conversion statistics, user paths and additional usage data from a JavaScript tracking code placed on your website pages.

Anchor Text – Text or words used as an anchor to link to another webpage. The anchor text link is assumed by search engines to be authoritative for the text or the anchor for which it was used.

Alt Text – Also known as Alt Attribute. It is alternate text used for graphics on web pages, text description of the image is displayed when the site visitor hovers over the graphic. The purpose of the alt attribute or alt text is make the internet more accessible to the people with disabilities.

Authority – The level of trust a site has with search engines. The level of trust is reflected in how well the domain or page rank in search engines. Manly five features of a website are associated with page and website authority: website age, link equity, website history, traffic trends and original unique quality content.

Backlink – Also known as an inbound link or incoming link. It is a hyperlink to a site page or website from an external site page or website. .

Blog – A blog or weblog started as an online personal journal or dairy of an individual. However, in the recent years, the blog has morphed into a commercial platform for businesses and individuals. Blogs cover diverse topics and areas of interest.

Blogger – A free Google blog platform. Blogger allows one to create a website on a subdomain off of Blogspot.com. For example, the Google blog URL looks like this:

http://www.googleblog.blogspot.com

Broken Link – It is a hyperlink that doesn’t work. The broken link is pointing to a site or file that is no longer available or a link that has a typo in it.

Cache – Stores copies of website pages on your computer hard drive or on a search engine database. Cache feature is the reason site visitors can view web pages quickly when they hit the Back button on the web browser.

Canonical URL – Canonicalization is the procedure of choosing the best URL out of several URL choices. For example, to the majority of people these would be seen as the same URLs:

• www.mysite.com
• mysite.com/
• www.mysite.com/index.html
• mysite.com/home.asp

However, technically all of the above are different URLs. A server may return entirely different content for all of the URLs above. When Google “canonicalizes” a URL, it is attempting to choose the URL that best represents the URL set.

Co-citation – An assessment by search engines to determine similarity among links on web pages that may be seen as related to one another in topical based search algorithms.

Conversion – A conversion is accomplished when a website visitor performs a task on a site which was the intention of the webmaster. For example, the goals could include:

• filling out a lead form
• requesting a consultation
• completing a survey
• signing up for a newsletter
• shopping on online

Copyright – type of intellectual property that provides exclusive right for a period of time to the original work of an author.

Cookie – When a visitor visits a website, the site may place a data file on the site visitor’s computer. The cookie gives the website an opportunity to retrieve the visit’s data as to ascertain the site visitor’s online habits, and other data. The data assists the website in customizing the site visitor’s experience and help online marketing efforts.

CPC – Also known as Cost Per Response (CPR). Cost per click is the cost paid by an advertiser each time a visitor clicks on search and contextually targeted advertisements on the internet as a method to generate traffic to their site.

CPM – An advertiser pays a website on Cost per thousand ad impressions. For example, one million impressions at $5 CPM equals a $5,000 total price.

1,000,000 / 1,000 = 1,000 units
1,000 units X $5 CPM = $5,000 total price

Crawl Frequency – The frequency a search engine crawls a site or certain web page in an attempt to index the Internet. Generally, higher trust and authority websites are crawled more often than lower trust sites.

Deep Linking – A link which is directed at an internal page within a website. The following is an example of deep internal linking within a site.

www.mysite.com
www.mysite.com /seom
www.mysite.com /seom consulting

Duplicate Content – Content that is a copy or near copy in nature across a web page or multiple web pages. Search engines like unique quality content and disdain duplicate content. Duplicate content can negatively affect the rankings of the website.

Dynamic Content – Content that changes over time based on creating customized responses to requests for data by a website user. Meanwhile “static content,” offers the same data to all website visitors.

External Link – A link directed to another website.

Google Bot – Google’s automated search engine spider that crawls sites and stores the data into the Google index.

Hubs – Websites that link to other trusted and authoritative websites in their topical community.

Inbound Link – Links directed to your site from other websites. Inbound links aid in improving a site’s link popularity.

Index – The depot of indexed content of every web page by search engine spiders in a unified database.

Information Architecture – Building website content that is designed, structured, categorized and organized in a meaningful manner. Excellent information architecture takes into account how people and search engine spiders access a site:

• Specific topic for each web page
• Use of breadcrumb navigation
• Use of unique original content
• Describe web pages using meta-tags
• Use relevant keywords to anchor text for links
• Use applicable headings to divide up the text
• Link to associated information from within the site content area
• Use good web usability standards to make the website more accessible, easier to navigate for the site visitors helping also to improve conversions

Internet Marketing – an all-inclusive terminology for describing marketing products and services on the internet.

Internal Link – Using linking strategy to link from one web page to another web page within the site. A proper descriptive internal linking strategy using good anchor text helps people and search spiders index a website.

Keyword – Certain words or phrases search engines look for in web pages to determine their relevancy. Overtime words or phrases convert to keywords as multiple searches are performed.

Keyword Density – An older method used by search engines to determine the relevancy of a web page based on how many times a given keyword appears on an web page. Extra weight was given to keywords that appeared more times to a webpage.

Keyword Research – Research into discovering relevant keywords and phrases to optimize website content and marketing efforts.

Landing Page – It is a site page that a website visitor arrives at after clicking on a hyperlink. A landing page can be a home page, or any other page in your website.

Link – A text or graphic on a web page, when clicked directs the site visitor to another web page location. The link is reflected as a URL.

Link Baiting – Using diverse methods including marketing to encourage links to your website from other websites. Link bait is a critical feature in improving rank due to use of backlinks as a factor by search engines to determine site ranking.

Link Building – The efforts by a websites to garner links from external sites to their own website in order to increase both search engine ranking and direct referrals (people clicking on the links). Links generated by link building efforts are evaluated by search engines based on trust, authority, and relevancy.

Link Popularity – Ranking higher in search based on quantity and quality of websites that link to your website.

Long Tail – A phrase pioneered by Chris Anderson to describe frequency distributions for internet searches that show huge amount of niche keywords or phrases being used to search for products and services.

Meta Description – a meta tag observable in the HTML code of the web page describing the web page’s content. The description should be about 140 to 160 characters long. The meta description is displayed in the search results and can help improve traffic but doesn’t affect site rankings.

Meta Keywords – A meta tag hidden in the HTML that lists keywords relevant to the page’s content. Out of the major search engines, only Yahoo uses meta keywords in its calculations.

Navigation – Component of the site architecture that helps website visitors’ in understanding their current location and their options in navigating the rest of the site.

Nofollow – A spam fighter HTML attribute pioneered by Google. Nofollow attribute places the onus from Google to websites to deter spam, the creation of this attribute reflects the inability of search engines to fight spam. The nofollow attribute looks like this on a link:

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

Noindex - An HTML tag that tells search engine spiders not to index a certain web page. Noindex tag can be used for diverse reasons including keeping content private.

The noindex HTML tag appears as such: <meta content=”noindex”>

Ontology – In the search arena, ontology is the attempt to engineer a rigorous and exhaustive conceptual schema about a website. Essentially, it is a hierarchical data structure that has the total components, their relationships and guidelines within a site.

Open Source – software provided to the public with the source code, thus permitting developers or users to customize as seen fit.

Organic Search Results – Unpaid search results as a consequence of a search query in a search engine. Organic search results are meant to be objective, trustworthy and unsponsored. This differs from organic search from paid search results.

Outbound Link – Links from one website directed to another website.

PageRank – A system used by the Google search engine for ranking pages on websites. PageRank was developed by Google co-founder Larry Page. The pagerank score is between – 0 and 10, the closer a website gets to 10, the better the site will perform on Google’s organic search results.

Paid Inclusion – Paying a directory, a website or a search engine to be listed in the directory or search results.

Pay per Performance – Advertisers pay only based on the internet ad’s performance, unlike CPM, where you pay for advertisement irrespective of results.

PPC – Pay Per Performance advertising model in which advertisers pay based on the number of clicks an advertisement receives.

Query – a search query for a specific keyword or phrase.

Reciprocal Links – A widespread method used in an attempt to enhance rank by trading links between websites. For example, Site 1 links to Site 2 and Site 2 reciprocates by linking to Site 1.

Redirect – A method of directing websites or search engines from one URL to another URL Common redirects are 301 redirects for permanent change of URL location and 302 redirects are for impermanent change of URL location.

Search Engine – A web site that allows users to search the indexed content of the internet for certain keywords or phrases in order to obtain information.

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing (SEOM) – The next evolution in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). SEOM is the convergence of SEO and SEM into one platform as the two diverse platforms over the years have been overlapping. SEOM merges SEO and SEM into one efficient entity that is all-inclusive of the two platforms and builds upon them

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – A part of SEOM that takes steps to improve quality or volume of traffic to a website from search engines via “orgamic” or un-paid search results.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – A part of SEOM, using online marketing strategies to improve the rankings of a website. It uses paid search advertising.

SEO Copywriting – using principles of search engine optimization and marketing to develop web content that is relevant to search queries.

SERP – Short for Search Engines Results Page, it is the page website visitors see after entering their search query into a search engine.

Site Map – A web page that makes it easier for search engine spiders to index a site.

Social Media – Websites driven mainly by user-generated content with components of social community involvement. For example, famous sites like Wikipedia Myspace, StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook Orkut and YouTube.

Spider – An automated web bot or crawler of a search engine used to index websites.

Taxonomy – Classification system of controlled vocabulary that is mainly used to classify topical subjects, generally hierarchical in style.

Title Tag – Displayed text at the top of the web browser window that describes content on the web page. The title tag and meta description are displayed on the search engine query page.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator or the web address of a site or web page.

Usability – Also known as web usability, associated with making the website navigations friendly.

Viral Marketing – Viral marketing is a method of spreading content “like a virus” among internet users in a short period of time to promote a certain product, service or idea. It is a form of internet marketing that relies on attention grabbing content to get quick bursts of interest in whatever is being marketed.

Web Publisher – An online publisher that advances products and services from advertisers in return for fees or commissions.