There are so many acronyms to learn with in Search Engine Optimisation, so I thought I would keep this up to date for every one to gain a understanding of SEO and SEM terminology. See the A to Z, and learn some of the terminology in SEO.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization – The process of optimizing web pages to achieve high rankings in the search results of a search engine.
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.
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
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.
Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example:
< a href=”http://www.seo-help.com/” >This is the anchor text< /a >
What anchor text appears in links pointing to your web site is really important in the process of Search Engine Optimization. e.g. if your web site is about network monitoring the anchor text ‘Network monitoring site’ will help your rankings more than the anchor text ‘Some site about something’.
Avatars are graphical images representing people. They are what you are in virtual worlds. You can build a visual character with the body, clothes, behaviours, gender and name of your choice. This may or may not be an authentic representation of yourself.
B
Breadcrumb Navigation
Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between pages.
C
Cloaking
Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Conversion
Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose.
Crawl Page
A document consisting of links to other pages, provided for the sole purpose of giving crawlers (robots) links to follow. Spammers used to submit these puppies to the search engines en masse.
Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries. Generally good copywriting will include key words within the first paragraph of each page.
D
Doorway Page
A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific key phrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors.
Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Digg is a website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories, in a social and democratic spirit. Voting stories up and down is the site’s cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most dugg stories appear on the front page.
Digg’s popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites with a story submission and voting system
Doamin Squatter
After attending SMX Singapore Gillian Muessig of SEOmoz spoke of Domain Squatters..Well a Domain Squatter is some one who buys multiple domain names, and basically hangs onto them and probably does not do much with them.
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F
Facebook is a social networking website launched on February 4, 2004.[1] The free-access website is privately owned and operated by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves.
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K
Key Phrases
A group of keywords put together make a key phrase.
SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and key phrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries. EG. A keyphrase for this page would be “SEO Glossary”.
L
Landing page
A content-rich doorway used to receive PPC traffic. Copy is written for the visitor, not the search engine, making a sales pitch
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.
M
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O
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.
P
Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites, such as blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an advertisement to visit the advertisers’ website.
Page Impressions
The exact number of times a specific Web site has been accessed or viewed by a user. A page impression acts as a counter for Web pages, informing site owners how many times their sites were visited. Page impressions are also referred to as hits.
Q
R
Robots.txt
Text file placed in a websites root directory and linked in the html code.
Allows for SEO’s to control the actions of search engine spiders on the site or even deny them access.
ROI – Return On Investment
The benefit gained in return for the cost of investing budget into advertising or project. ROI can be measured by the following calculation:
“Total Revenues (generated from campaign or project) minus Total Costs”
Reciprocal Links
A reciprocal link occurs when a web site links to a site and in turn the linked-to site links back to the linking site i.e. the link is reciprocated by both parties.
They aid in driving traffic to a web site and in some cases also add to site’s link popularity .
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.
S
Site Map
A special page on a web site that contains a tree-like representation of the link structure of the site.
It allows a search engine spider to index all the most important pages of the site with ease because it can access them all from one page. A link to the site map should be clearly accessible/indexable from the home page at least.
Social Bookmarking / Tagging
This type of Social Media allows you to share the sites you like through a bookmarking system (not unlike how to would save your favourites in Internet Explorer or Firefox). Most Social Bookmarking services allow you to add ‘tags’ which help to categorise the sites and some of the site also allow for comments to be associated with your bookmarks. You’ll also find that some of the sites will display “recently bookmarked” or “most popular bookmarks” on their front page.
T
TITLE Tag
The TITLE tag is used to specify what text appears at the top of a browser window when visiting a web page. It also appears as the link text when your web site appears in search engine results.
Title Tags influence rankings to a good extent, so spending time on them is worth it .Ensure that the right text is in it (i.e. include keywords / keyphrases relevant to the web page).
Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google and Yahoo.
U
V
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.
W
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a term which describes the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs.
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