SEO / SEM Glossary - Definition of Terms

301 Redirect: A .htaccess command that tells a visitor to your website (including the search engines) that a web page has permanently moved to another location on the website. Code 301 means that this is a permanent redirection. Severing this connection will cause problems in search rankings.

API: Application Programming Interface. Advertisers use API's to manage SEM campaigns. An API acts like a middle-man between two programs or websites. It's most common usage is for a website to be able to access and process information from another website, creating a "mash-up" of data between the two. The API provides a major key in what is known now as Web 2.0.

Ad: Advertisements place in a PPC campaign such as AdWords or any other type of advertiement including banners and text links on websites.

Affiliate Marketing: This is a process of sharing revenue by helping to push sales of an existing product or service. When you “affiliate” with a company and help boost sales of their products, you can get a portion of each sale in a type of commission.

ALT Text: ALT Text is also known as “alternative text “or “Alt Attribute”. When the images are turned off in a web browser the ALT Text is an HTML tag that provides text descriptions for these images. All the viewer needs to do is hold the mouse over the image to display the text.

Anchor Text: Anchor text is what Search Engines commonly use to determine what keyword to index a web page for. Anchor text is what falls in between <a href="http://www.website.com"> and </a>. So if one where to want to rank a website for the keyword "affordable health insurance" they would use <a href="http://www.vitalonehealth.com">affordable health insurance</a> as a link, whcih would appear like this: affordable health insurance.

Banner: A normally rectangular picture advertisement on website with a link to a landing page on your site. These are normally payed for using a CPC or CPI Model.

B2B: "Business to Business", marketing products or services to other businesses.

Backlinks: Also known as inbound links, backlinks bring the highest value to your website. They are non-reciprocated links between someone elses website and your own. They are highly valued because it is assumed that if someone links to you without you lining back then you hold some authority on the internet. When everyone is talking about you without you talking about them your rankings go up.

Black Hat SEO: Using artificially manipulative techniques to increase search engine rankigns. Often Black Hat Tactics will work for a short while, which raises red flags with search engines. Undoubtably, penalties follow suit. Stay away from these as much as possible, or use them to an absolute minimum. BlackHat SEO is often not reciprocal at all, it does not benefit the web as it uses intrusive tactics to alter the SERPs in its favor. The only reciprocation in BlackHat SEO is rankings for money.

Crawler: A Crawler is a bot (robot) program that automatically scours the internet for new websites and links in the way that a spider would its web. Every link allows the spider to crawl further and deeper into a website and therefore, the internet.

CPC (Cost Per Click): An advertisement that charges a company a fee every time the advertisement is clicked.

CPI (Cost Per Impression): An advertisement that charges a comapny a fee every time the advertisement is displayed on the page. Normally used with Banners over text links due to its branding impact. CPI is significantly cheaper per impression than CPC is per click due to volume.

CTR (Click Through Ratio): Ratio of how often How often your page has been visited divided by how many times it has been displayed to users in searches. Also can be used to find out how many people who visit your website actually become a lead/sale.

Custom Feed: A custom feed regards either a XML Sitemap feed or a Newsfeed hosted by websites such as feedburner.

Description Tag: Descriptions tags show up under your search listing as a short description of the page the Search Engine is displaying. It is a META tag that should be added to each individual page on your site.

Grey Hat SEO: Where White and Black cannot be determinted, there is Grey Hat SEO. This includes using the advantages that Web 2.0 properties bring in conjunction with manipulative tactics to pass on link equity and site authority.

Invisible Text: White text on white background, black text on black background or any similar combination thereof. This is used to "hide" text that is actually there. Often, peopel used to stuff keywords with invisible text at the bottom of their websites or even to the left or right where no one could see it (but search engines could since they read the coding of the site). This now brings penalties to your website from search engines. It is known as a Black Hat tactic.

Keyword/Keyword Phrase: When you think in keywords your efficiency with technology increases dramatically.. Technology as a whole uses keywords for quick indexing, searching and accessing information. A keyword is a simplified search phrase that the majority of users would use to access the most relevant data on a topic. Most people looking for health insurance type in just that, health insurance.

Keyword Density: A percentile(%) score of how often is a keyword repeated in a document. Repeating a keyword too many times within close proximity of one another can signal spam to search engines.

Keyword Stuffing: An old tactic, spamming your website with keywords. Sometimes websites just list hundreds of keywords in hopes search engines would pick them up. They no longer do so. Often used with Invisible text.

Keyword Tag: Keyword tags are a META property that pinpoint the keywords targetted on an individual webpage. Keywords should be relevant to the content body of the webpage. Currently Google and most other Search Engines are not using this tag for rankings. It is still somewhat beneficial to fill them out for good form.

Landing Page/Destination Page: When Internet users click on an ad it sends them to a web page which is known as the landing page.

Lead Generation: This is a marketing term that refers to websites that generate leads for the products and services that are offered by another company. Anyone visiting the lead generation site can click on the lead and it will take them to the site where they will be able to purchase the product or service.

Link Farming: This term refers to the process of exchanging links with websites in the attempt to significantly increase link popularity by increasing the number of sites that link back to the original one.

Linkbait: This will be something that you have on your site that allows viewers to link to it. When other sites link to yours, it’s a way of letting viewers know they believe you have valuable content they may be interested in seeing.

Long-tailed Keywords: Keywords that contain more than 2 words, often used to targetting keywords in different geo-locations. For example: Search Engine Optimization Miami

META: META elements, or Metadata means "data about data." This entails extra information about websites that are usually not viewed by the user, but used for indexing and recall purposes. In the web META data usually includes Keywords, Descriptions, Titles and more. Not all search engines use or follow every META element.

NoFollow: A canonical tag that tell a search engine not to count this link and authoritative. This is often used on advertisements in your site in order to not pass PageRank or link equity to an affiliate site. Crawlers will still follow the link to index other sites just not pass on any score.

Organic Search Rankings: This is the position in which a search engine displays a website for a particular keyword.

PPC Advertising: Pay Per Click advertising which means that a advertiser will pay for a click of an advertisement to their website. Tracking referal sources is important in PPC advertising to make sure data is accurate and you are not overpaying or underperforming. PPC Campaigns often direct a user to a landing page on your website to make sure that you are tracking the data correctly.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication):A feed of data that includes a mesh of frequently published content, audio, video, etc and META data about the content and the stream. This is used to syndicate content automatically, allowing people to use API's to pull content into their news reader applications or websites.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing): Increasing the SERPs of websites through various optimizations methods, paid placements and text advertising. Search engine marketing even includes things like Google AdWords that are directly tied into Search Engines.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Optimization of website content, structure, links, META data and keyword density in order to increase the chance of being picked up by search engines for targetted keywords.

SERP (Search Engine Ranking Positions): The position a website holds (usually by page number and rank number from top to bottom.) on a particular search engine. The most popular Search Engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing in order of popularity with Google leading the trend with a huge (over 50 %) marketshare.

Search Engines: Massive indexing web apps that hold a database of information about websites which use secret algorithms to place them in rank order day by day as they are indexed. Search Engines use the most commonly searched for Keywords and match websites based on relevancy found within their entire database of websites.

Spamming: Spamming normally means to unwanted or repetitive text or advertisements. In SEO, spamming includes many black hat tactics such as doorway pages, invisible text, link farms, forced or unwanted advertisement clicks and content duplication. Spamming will get you penalized or banned from SERPs. Be warned!

Title Tag: The top of your browser(or current tab) displays the title of the page you are currently on. This is set by the HTML Title tag and is what also displayed as the link to your site from a Search Engine.

Trackbacks: Allows blogs to link to each other based on relevancy of topic.

Traffic: How many visitors visited your website within a given period.

Viral Marketing: When people pick up your message, advertisement, article, etc. it's called Viral Marketing. Getting something to go Viral is difficult. It relies on others, especially those in social networks to pass along the message. There are many techniques availabel and tools to use to make things go viral.

Web 2.0: A Database Backed Web that interacts through a Series of API's, XML and CSS styled websites. "A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them." Wikipedia being one of the ultimate Web 2.0 sites.

White Hat SEO: Using recommended, clean and organic principles toward Search Engine Optimization. White Hat SEO tries to emphasize that there is a natural process toward getting yoru site noticed whicn includes traditional marketing techniques and branding concepts. If your product or service is truly relevant than you will naturally grow into this with the proper optimizations and marketing strategy. White Hat SEO is often very reciprocal, you give something to get something. Write a useful article or blog with links back to your site and people will distribute it!