Search Engine Optimization Dictionary
Getting a high ranking on the Search Engines is a science. We hereby present our little overview of the terminology, trends and twists.
A | B | C | DA
Above the fold
Originally a term used to describe the top area of a news paper, it is now used to reference the area of the website that users see before scrolling. This is the prime real estate for advertisements on a commercial website, but it should be mentioned that many users suffer from banner blindness, and, contrary to common sense, the top banner is often overlooked.
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Google AdSense heat map - an illustration displaying the click-through-rates averages.
Google AdSense heat map - an illustration displaying the click-through-rates averages.
AdCenter
Microsoft's cost per click ad network. Includes features like dayparting and demographic based bidding.
AdSense
aka 'Webmaster's Welfare'. Google's advertisement network. Although AdSense is often underpriced, it is preferred by many as it automatically matches adverts to publishers content.
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Google Adsense
Google Adsense
Age
Some search engines and other systems, base their level of trust on the age of the domain or documents. Like fine wine, it only gets better with age. There are many opinions on the importance of age in search engines, but some claim that Google has a "sandbox" - a temporary holding index for newly registered domains - to combat fraud and unserious websites. Therefore, it may be a good idea to upload your files during the early stage of the development process to let it cook.
Algorithm
"An algorithm is a sequence of finite instructions, often used for calculation and data processing. It is formally a type of effective method in which a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task will, when given an initial state, proceed through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in an end-state." (Thank you, Wikipedia. That made us so much more confused) Basically, in the SEO-universe, an algorithm is the method the search engines use, when determining the relevance of a website to any given search query. These algorithms are constantly altered to optimize the search engine.
Alt Attibute
When it comes to images, most major search engines are blind. They cannot see them. Thus, to be friendly towards crawlers, you can provide an alt attribute, which is a short description of the image.
Example
<img src =PATH TO IMAGE alt=THE DESRIPTION OF THE IMAGE />
<img src =PATH TO IMAGE alt=THE DESRIPTION OF THE IMAGE />
Anchor text
The text that is the link. It is imporatant to put descriptive text in here, and not just the good old "Click here". Anchor text is important in SEO, although often neglected, as the various crawlers (and guests on your site!) look at this text to determine what happens after the jump.
Example
<a href =LINK-URL>ANCHOR TEXT</a>
<a href =LINK-URL>ANCHOR TEXT</a>
B
Backlink
a.k.a ‘inbound link’. A backlink is a link from another pointing to your website, and they are of great importance to your ranking. If you get a link from a website with a high PageRank, it will have a positive influence on your website’s ranking. There should be some equilibrium between the amount of outbound links (links on your site pointing to external sources) and inbound links. Many search engines allow you to see a sample of the links pointing to a document by using the link: function. Note that Google will present a much smaller amount of the linkage data than other search engines.
Example
In Google type in "link:www.yoursite.com"
In Google type in "link:www.yoursite.com"
Ban
a.k.a ‘delisting’. If search engines catch you playing ‘dirty’, they can exclude you from their index and strip of your ranking. You may apply for re-inclusion in the index. See Black Hat SEO.
Internet surfers have become accustomed to ignoring most graphic ads on a website - what is known as ‘banner blindness’ - because the ads often are irrelevant or, well, annoying. The next generation of ads became the text ads that in some ways became more successful than the graphic ditto. Text ads popularity can be credited to the fact that they often are more relevant, and at the same time resembles (or at least blends in with) the website's content. Due to the recent rise in popularity of text ads, most surfers are beginning to learn to ignore these ads as well.
a.k.a ’Dirty SEO’, is a term covering the dirty tricks that can be used to rank a page higher. It is not a criminal offence as some would have you to believe, but the result, if caught, may be temporary or permanent exclusion from the search engines. High risks and high gains. Of course, there are some ethical guidelines, but overall, a good agency can utilize a little Black Hat SEO to give a client that final competitive edge.
Blog
An online journal (a Web Log), frequently updated with posts that often are sorted in descending chronological order. Typically, readers of the blog can subscribe to a blog-feed, and leave comments on each post. The blog is of a very personal nature, but has been picked up by many companies, as it can increase traffic on a website and give the company a more 'human' face to the public.
C
Cache
Cache (pronounced "cash") "is a collection of data duplicating original values stored elsewhere" (*Wikipedia*) When you search the web through a search engine, you are not actually searching the web. You are in fact searching through the search engine’s index, i.e. the collection of web pages it has stored.
Canonical URL
Using a consistent linking structure on a website, is important when optimizing a website for search engines, because the search engine will attempt to pick one address as the "canonical URL" (www.website.com is NOT the same as website.com to a search engine - therefore, it is important to links to the same URL).
Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique that displays different content to search engines and human visitors. This can be done in several ways (e.g. making the font colour the same as the background colour), but search engines will penalize websites that utilize such methods - and they are getting better at identifying cloaked sites all the time.
CMS
Content Management System. A system for administrating a website’s content, often through a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI). There is an abundance of CMS options.
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Collection of opensource CMS
Collection of opensource CMS
Cookie
Small data file placed on a local computer to a user's local machine. Cookies are used to track user behaviour, save personal settings or authentication.
CPA
Cost per action. Advertiser pays an agreed amount per action. An action can be anything from a click, to filling out a form, signing up to a news letter or actually purchasing a product.
Cost per click. Advertiser pays a certain amount each time an advertisement is clicked. This scheme is often used in contextual or searchword advertising.
CPM
Cost per mile. The cost per thousand ad impressions (number of times the banner is loaded). Advertiser pays an amount for every thousand exposures of banner. CPM is often very low, as it does not guarantee a purchase or even exposure to the right audience, therefore CPM is rather used to estimate how profitable a website is or has potential to become. Furthermore, some advertisers use CPM as a shotgun approach.
Crawler
Spiders, robots, crawlers are some of the terms used to describe the automated scripts that browse a website for content. It is, of course, paramount to SEO that your website is friendly towards these little fellows in order for them to crawl your content.
CTR
Clickthrough rate. The percentage of viewers that actually click on an advertisement, 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 the searcher's demand.
Cybersquatting
The act of registering a domain name that is closely related to a famous brand, website or trademark in order to cash in on the traffic it might generate. The online doucebags.
d
Deep Link
Links pointing to an interior page of a website. A high deep link ratio (the ratio between links pointing to internal pages and overall links pointing to a the website) often indicates a natural, healthy link profile.
Del.icio.us
A social bookmarking portal. Obviously, a good marketing tool for creating that online buzz.
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Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us
Description
Each entry in a directory or search engine is likely to contain a short description to introduce a quick overview of the website’s content other than just the title. This can be in form of a snippet (extract of text relevant to search query), the page’s meta-tag or a description from a trusted directory such as DMOZ.
Directory
A catalogue of websites, often edited/organised manually by topical editors. If a catalogue does not exercise some form of editorial control, search engines are less likely to trust their links. The most important directories are DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory.
The Open Directory Project, owned by AOL, is the most comprehensive human edited directory of websites. The queue to be listed is long, but worth the wait.
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DMOZ
DMOZ
DNS
Domain Name Server or Domain Name System. A naming system to "translate" IP Address (or similar identifiers) to more human-friendly domain names/host names - sort of like a phone book.
Doorway Pages
Pages created for spamdexing (spamming the search engine’s index) and redirecting any unlucky soul that clicks by to another destination. Also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages etc.
Dreamweaver
Popular and fairly user-friendly web-development software. Web-pages designed with Dreamweaver are not always SEO-friendly and design can be rigid.
Duplicate Content
To avoid indexing multiple versions of the same content (which would leave users frustrated), search engines are strict in filtering out duplicate content. There are often legitimate reasons for having duplicate content (pages for mobile browsing, print-friendly versions, shopping-sites with multiple URLs for their items or SEO-hostile CMS), but it is advisable to be careful, as it can hurt a web-site’s ranking.
See more:
Google discusses duplicate content
Google discusses duplicate content
Dynamic Content
Content that changes over time or is created in a dynamic language such as PHP or ASP to help render the page. Search engines are getting more aggressive at indexing dynamic content, but it is still recommendable to rewrite URLs to help make dynamic content look static.