Search Engine Optimization Glossary

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) -- the process (and it IS a process) of optimizing a website or page in an effort to get it to show at the top of SERPs for a given set of key search terms. SEO comes in two basic flavors: on-site SEO which tries to ensure that the website meets the known and presumed preferences of the search engines and off-site SEO which consists largely of trying to secure links on other websites to the website being optimized, thereby increasing its apparent popularity.
• SERP (Search Engine Results Page) -- refers to the page created by a search engine in response to a search query. Basically a techie term for the list of website (URLs) displayed after a search.
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing) -- refers to the set of methods and techniques used to increase a website's visibility in the major search engines. SEM is the general category that contains SEO, pay-per-click and paid inclusion
• Spider -- the term used to describe the banks of computers employed by search engines to "crawl" the Web and thereby build their index of websites and the content they contain.
• Index -- The list of websites that a search engine stores and uses to deliver search results.
• Backlink -- a link from an external, presumably unrelated website(s) to the website being optimized
• Link Popularity -- The number and quality of links pointing to your website. This is a very important factor that search engines use to determine the value of your website.
• Page Rank (PR) -- Google's rough estimation of the relative popularity of website given a certain search term or set of search terms
• Algorithm -- the magic behind search engines. A search algorithm determines which websites appear for any given search as well how those returns are ranked. The process of SEO is a combination of complying with the explicit parameters laid out by each search engine as well as intuitive and experimental reverse engineering of presumed components of the algorithm. The job of the algorithm is to weight various aspects of the website and its inbound links and determine the relative merit and relevance of a website in response to a search.
• Alt tags/text -- text associated with an image or other non-text content; often used to boost keyword density on a website
• Anchor text -- this is the clickable text within a hyperlink; search engines place importance on these words and associate them with the target page of the link
• Cloaking -- black hat technique of tricking the search engines into seeing something other than what is displayed to the human viewer; using this technique can get websites penalized or banned from search engines
• PPC (PPC) -- refers to advertising campaigns in which the advertiser pays the ad publisher only when a user clicks on an ad; this is in contrast to CPM (Cost Per Thousand) in which the advertisers pay simply for having an displayed the 'M' refers to the fact that the ads are generally purchased in chunks of 1000 pageviews
• Cost Per Click (CPC) -- synomymous with 'pay per click'
• Directory -- A directory is a list of websites that are categorized based on their content. While sometimes confused with search engines, directories differ greatly from search engines in that they are maintained by a group of human editors that approve websites based on specific criteria.
• Doorway page -- black hat technique of setting up a dummy page that appears to the search engine to be legitimate and/or of a certain type of content but that is actually an entry page to another website, generally a spam website of some sort
• Gateway page -- synonym for doorway page
• Robot -- a computer who's job is to crawl webpages; some robots are simply looking for content, like those employed by search engines while other, less noble robots look for �harvestable� information like email address
• Unique visitor -- metric for tracking how many people have visited a website, is distinguished from hits which measure the number of times a piece of any page is served (such as an image)
• URL (Uniform Resource Locator) -- the technical term for a web address; for example, http://www.buzzseo.com/blog is a URL
• Domain -- a domain is the �name� given to a website in order to be easily remembered and accessed, such as buzzseo.com; domains must be registered and purchased through an appropriate agency
• Site map -- sitemaps serve as a 'table of contents' for site visitors and/or search engines; they can be displayed as HTML on the actual website or submitted directly to search engines
• Meta search -- a search run on several search engines simultaneously
• Meta-tags -- text within the html/site code that is used to communicate with search engines; the most common meta-tags are the keyword and description tags. The keyword meta-tag list keywords and phrases are relevant to the site content. The description meta-tag provides a brief explanation of the website. This is also the text that appears with each listing on search engine results pages (SERP).
• Conversion rate -- the number of visitors that eventually become customers or the number of people who click on an ad; usually expressed as a percentage of total traffic or ads displayed
• On-page optimization -- the area of search engine optimization that applies to the content and structure of the website
• Off-page optimization -- the area of search engine optimization that applies to building backlinks (link building)
• Organic search -- refers to the area of search engine results and marketing that are a result of optimization, in contrast to paid inclusion and pay-per-click programs
• FTP (file transfer protocol) -- the most common way to connect to a web server. This is most often use to send and receive files when working on a website.
• Page Title -- The page title appears at the top of each webpage in your browser. Search engines tend to place heavier importance on the keywords included within page titles. Page titles also appear as the link for each entry in search engine results.