Today we're covering terms from N-P related to SEO - we're almost there!
natural search results These refer to search engine results which are the result of organic linking and not paid for or sponsored in any way.
nofollow This command is usually found in the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code (usually looks something like rel="external nofollow" when represented as part of a anchor href statement). This tells search bots to not follow either any links on the page or that specific link. Use of the nofollow statement is a form of link condom.
noindex This command is found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within an individual link code. It instructs search bots not to index that page or the specific link. Again, this is a form of link condom.
non reciprocal link This is also known as a one-way link. if site X links to site Y, but site Y does not link back to site X, then the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of dodgy behaviour between the 2 sites.
organic link organic links are those that are published only because the content creator feels they will add value for their users.
pagerank (or google PR) is typically a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google. It is a measure of link popularity and authority amongst other mostly unknown factors. Newbies should not worry about this too much for now - it can be pretty random and most SEO specialists agree that real page authority and pagerank often have little correlation. Also Google is a bit painful when it comes to assigning pagerank.. it all appears somewhat random at times. In short, don't sweat it!
pay for inclusion This practice, also known as PFI in short, basically amounts to charging a fee to include a site in a directory or search engine. Probably good not to consider a Yahoo directory submission e.g. as a paid link - it just helps with faster consideration of your site by SEs
portal A consolidator website which offers a wide range of features to entice users to make the portal their “home page” on the web. IGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN are portals.
PPA (or Pay Per Action) is similar to PPC (Pay Per Click) except here the publishers only get paid when click throughs result in a conversion - be it a sale or lead or whatever.
PPC (Pay Per Click) this is an ad scheme where sponsors pay advertising agencies, e.g. Google Adwords, whenever a user clicks on their ad.
More soon :)
Showing posts with label SEO glossary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SEO glossary. Show all posts
Friday, November 28, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
SEO Glossary - Terms J-M
So here are some more glossary terms you should feel comfortable with when discussing SEO.
keyword - This is a key phrase a user enters into a search engine when he's looking for something.
keyword cannibalization This refers to the excessive re-use of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. Doing this makes it tough for the users and the search engines to know which web page is most relevant for the keyword.
keyword density This refers to the percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.
keyword spam/ stuffing This refers to an inappropriately high keyword density.
landing page this is the page a user arrives at when he clicks on a link after a search.
latent semantic indexing or LSI - Search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as 'Long Tail Searches' - see definition below. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. The significance is that it may be too difficult to rank well for “cartoon”, it may be much easier to rank for “Jacob Zuma AIDS cartoon”. The more detail the better.
link - The thing you click on a web page that makes your browser go to another web page or another part of the same page.
link bait - This is a webpage that has been designed to attract incoming links, often mostly via social media networks like Facebook.
link building - this is the process of collecting inbound links to a website. Remember, no links, no authority, no page rank, no search engine love...
link condom This can be any of a number of techniques used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible negative results of endorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content. In blogs this is most commonly implemented using the nofollow tags (e.g. rel = "external nofollow" - when you see this in a page source it means search engines have been instructed not to follow the link or give the link authority)
linkerati or mad taggers these are the internet users who are the most productive targets of linkbait. Linkerati includes - posters in discussion forums, social taggers, bloggers and other content creators - those who are most likely to create incoming links or link generating traffic (in the case of social networkers).
link exchange a scheme to create reciprocal links often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves. The best quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance - they usually have a screening process upon submission.
link farm a site that basically consists of a bunch of links. Not looked upon with friendly eyes by search engines these days as they are seen to warp organic search results
link love An outgoing link, which passes authority or page rank, this is without the use of a link condom (the opposite of nofollow by the way is dofollow in case you want to make a countable reference to another site)
link partner - Two sites which link to each other through some kind of reciprocal arrangement. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links.
link spam - See Comment Spam earlier. Usually associated with blogs
link text - See Anchor text definition earlier
long tail - this refers to the fact that longer, more specific search queries are often more effective than shorter broad queries. E.g. see the LSI definition above. The larger percentage of all searches tend to be long tail searches.
mashup - this refers to a web page which consists primarily of software and other small programs (gadgets and widgets) or possibly links to such programs. Mashups are pretty quick and easy content to produce and are quite popular with users. Mashups can make good link bait. Tool collection pages are sometimes mashups. Others are top 10 tips for doing something etc.. e.g. top 10 SEO tips for newbies
META tags - These are important! The statements occur within the HEAD section of an HTML page and provides information about that webpage. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. The most critical thing to remember is that they should be unique and accurate - especially the META title and description tags. This is because they may be the information that the search engines most rely upon to figure out what that web page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs. The title and description is what gets displayed in the search results when a user conducts a search and your page shows up in the results.
MFA - Made For Advertisements websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for advertisements. This isn't always a bad thing.
mirror site This refers to having an identical site at a different address.
That's all for today! N-Z over the next week or so after I'm back from vacation!
keyword - This is a key phrase a user enters into a search engine when he's looking for something.
keyword cannibalization This refers to the excessive re-use of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. Doing this makes it tough for the users and the search engines to know which web page is most relevant for the keyword.
keyword density This refers to the percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.
keyword spam/ stuffing This refers to an inappropriately high keyword density.
landing page this is the page a user arrives at when he clicks on a link after a search.
latent semantic indexing or LSI - Search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as 'Long Tail Searches' - see definition below. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. The significance is that it may be too difficult to rank well for “cartoon”, it may be much easier to rank for “Jacob Zuma AIDS cartoon”. The more detail the better.
link - The thing you click on a web page that makes your browser go to another web page or another part of the same page.
link bait - This is a webpage that has been designed to attract incoming links, often mostly via social media networks like Facebook.
link building - this is the process of collecting inbound links to a website. Remember, no links, no authority, no page rank, no search engine love...
link condom This can be any of a number of techniques used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible negative results of endorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content. In blogs this is most commonly implemented using the nofollow tags (e.g. rel = "external nofollow" - when you see this in a page source it means search engines have been instructed not to follow the link or give the link authority)
linkerati or mad taggers these are the internet users who are the most productive targets of linkbait. Linkerati includes - posters in discussion forums, social taggers, bloggers and other content creators - those who are most likely to create incoming links or link generating traffic (in the case of social networkers).
link exchange a scheme to create reciprocal links often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves. The best quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance - they usually have a screening process upon submission.
link farm a site that basically consists of a bunch of links. Not looked upon with friendly eyes by search engines these days as they are seen to warp organic search results
link love An outgoing link, which passes authority or page rank, this is without the use of a link condom (the opposite of nofollow by the way is dofollow in case you want to make a countable reference to another site)
link partner - Two sites which link to each other through some kind of reciprocal arrangement. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links.
link spam - See Comment Spam earlier. Usually associated with blogs
link text - See Anchor text definition earlier
long tail - this refers to the fact that longer, more specific search queries are often more effective than shorter broad queries. E.g. see the LSI definition above. The larger percentage of all searches tend to be long tail searches.
mashup - this refers to a web page which consists primarily of software and other small programs (gadgets and widgets) or possibly links to such programs. Mashups are pretty quick and easy content to produce and are quite popular with users. Mashups can make good link bait. Tool collection pages are sometimes mashups. Others are top 10 tips for doing something etc.. e.g. top 10 SEO tips for newbies
META tags - These are important! The statements occur within the HEAD section of an HTML page and provides information about that webpage. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. The most critical thing to remember is that they should be unique and accurate - especially the META title and description tags. This is because they may be the information that the search engines most rely upon to figure out what that web page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs. The title and description is what gets displayed in the search results when a user conducts a search and your page shows up in the results.
MFA - Made For Advertisements websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for advertisements. This isn't always a bad thing.
mirror site This refers to having an identical site at a different address.
That's all for today! N-Z over the next week or so after I'm back from vacation!
Thursday, October 2, 2008
SEO Glossary - H-I
hit Refers to a hit or a server transaction - not really used any more since the concept of page impressions came about. One page impression could generate many hits.
hub - a trusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.
impression (page view) The event where a user views a webpage one time.
in-bound link (or incoming link) In-bound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
indexed Pages -These are the pages on a website which have been indexed by a search engine. Google webmaster tools are a useful way of keeping track of this
hub - a trusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.
impression (page view) The event where a user views a webpage one time.
in-bound link (or incoming link) In-bound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
indexed Pages -These are the pages on a website which have been indexed by a search engine. Google webmaster tools are a useful way of keeping track of this
Friday, September 5, 2008
SEO glossary F-G
feed - This is content that is delivered to a customer via special websites or programs such as news aggregators or readers. An example is the Google Reader - try it if you haven't already.
FFA - FFA stands for Free For All - this is a page or site with many outgoing links to unrelated websites, containing little if any unique content. Link farms are only intended for search spiders, and have little if any value to human users, and thus are ignored or penalized by the search engines.
frames a web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within its own frame. Frames are to be avoided for good SEO because search spiders often fail to navigate them correctly. Also many users dislike frames because it is almost like having two tiny screen neither of which shows a full page of information at one time.
gateway page Also known as a doorway page - This is a web page that is designed to attract traffic from a search engine and then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page isn't exactly the same as cloaking but the effect is the same in that users and search engines are served different content.
gadget - Also known as a gizmo or widget, these are small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a number of feed subscriptions, a hit counter or IP map display. Gadgets can make good link bait.
Google bomb The combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually for humorous effect. The “miserable failure” - George Bush (try it out - type miserable failure in Google and do a search).
Google bowling This is the act of maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from dodgy sources - Kind of like yelling “Hope the herpes goes away soon!” to your friend as you get off class. According to google's white papers this is usually not much of an issue since webmasters cannot control who links to their site.. don't worry about it too much.
Google juice This is usually referred to as Pagerank in Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.
Googlebot This is google’s spider program
GYM The big three search engines - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft
FFA - FFA stands for Free For All - this is a page or site with many outgoing links to unrelated websites, containing little if any unique content. Link farms are only intended for search spiders, and have little if any value to human users, and thus are ignored or penalized by the search engines.
frames a web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within its own frame. Frames are to be avoided for good SEO because search spiders often fail to navigate them correctly. Also many users dislike frames because it is almost like having two tiny screen neither of which shows a full page of information at one time.
gateway page Also known as a doorway page - This is a web page that is designed to attract traffic from a search engine and then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page isn't exactly the same as cloaking but the effect is the same in that users and search engines are served different content.
gadget - Also known as a gizmo or widget, these are small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a number of feed subscriptions, a hit counter or IP map display. Gadgets can make good link bait.
Google bomb The combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually for humorous effect. The “miserable failure” - George Bush (try it out - type miserable failure in Google and do a search).
Google bowling This is the act of maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from dodgy sources - Kind of like yelling “Hope the herpes goes away soon!” to your friend as you get off class. According to google's white papers this is usually not much of an issue since webmasters cannot control who links to their site.. don't worry about it too much.
Google juice This is usually referred to as Pagerank in Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.
Googlebot This is google’s spider program
GYM The big three search engines - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft
Friday, August 1, 2008
SEO Glossary - D-I
directory This of this is a giant yellow pages site containing an index of other relevant sites or services. An example is DMOZ or the Yahoo directory.
dofollow - Dofollow usually forms part of a link expression. It is inserted by plugins such as CommentLuv to ensure your blog gives commentors link love.
doorway - Also known as a gateway. This is another bad, bad thing to avoid doing - it is a web page that is designed specifically to attract traffic from a search engine. A doorway page which redirects users (but not spiders) to another site or page is implementing cloaking.
duplicate content - Also see canonical issues earlier. Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. You may not suffer from hosting duplicate content but also don't expect to gain any authority based on it. Be original in your content creation
e commerce - this is a website devoted to commercial sales like Amazon for example.
dofollow - Dofollow usually forms part of a link expression. It is inserted by plugins such as CommentLuv to ensure your blog gives commentors link love.
doorway - Also known as a gateway. This is another bad, bad thing to avoid doing - it is a web page that is designed specifically to attract traffic from a search engine. A doorway page which redirects users (but not spiders) to another site or page is implementing cloaking.
duplicate content - Also see canonical issues earlier. Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. You may not suffer from hosting duplicate content but also don't expect to gain any authority based on it. Be original in your content creation
e commerce - this is a website devoted to commercial sales like Amazon for example.
Monday, July 14, 2008
SEO Glossary - B an C
Today we'll cover the B and C terms important for you to know for SEO:
Bait and switch - Common con-artist terminology... In this case it refers to changing content after high rankings are achieved.
backlink - Also known as incoming links. This is any link into a page or site from any other page or site.
buying links - exactly what it sounds like - you buy links into a particular site or page
black hat SEO - Search engine optimisation technique that is bad - very bad. They do not follow google or other search engine guidelines and are techniques that effectively dupe the user into going to a page or website.
blog - This is a blog - it's a website that presents content in a chronological order. Most blogs use a CMS (see below) such as WordPress or Blogger (like this) rather than individually created webpages.
bots - These are also known as robots, spiders, crawlers. They are programs which performs an activity more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers sometimes use bots to “scrape” content for usually illegal anti-copyright reuse for their own benefits.
bounce rate - This is the percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.
canonical issues - Also known as the issue of duplicate content. It is sadly just about impossible to avoid duplicate content, particularly on blogs where numerous applications like RSS to blog help spammers scrape original content for their own use. The noindex meta tag in legitimate copies, and 301 server redirects can help search engines distinguish between duplicate content on your own site (e.g. on www.news.com and news.com and www.news.com/index.html which may all lead the user to the same default page)
click fraud - Some companies like the infamous ClickMonkey site encourage click fraud - the practice of generating clicks usually to: (a) make the advertiser of a particular competitor site incur advertising cost that will yield him no return or (b) and more commonly, getting people to click on ads on your own site to fraudulently generate revenue. Make no mistake, this is fraud and it is a felony in most parts of the world - get caught doing this and you'll be screwed (most likely in places you'd rather not be screwed)
cloak - This is the practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This is one of many Black Hat SEO techniques and is frowned upon by the search engines and carries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.
CMS Content Management System - Programs such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, which separate most of the tedious website maintenance tasks from content creation so that a content publisher can focus on what he does best - creating content.
comment spam - This is the bad, bad practice of posting blog comments for the purpose of generating a backlink to another site or webpage.
content - This is also refered to as copy. It is the part of a web page that is intended to be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, and branding messages are not usually considered to be content.
contextual advertisement Advertising which is related to the content.
conversion - This is the achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Click-throughs, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.
conversion rate - Percentage of users who convert
CPC - Cost Per Click the rate that is paid per click by an advertiser
CPM - Cost Per Mil (i.e. 1000) impressions. A metric used to quantify the cost of showing your ad 1000 times.
crawler - This is bot or spider (see earlier) that studies a website or page to capture the link structure for search engines.
Bait and switch - Common con-artist terminology... In this case it refers to changing content after high rankings are achieved.
backlink - Also known as incoming links. This is any link into a page or site from any other page or site.
buying links - exactly what it sounds like - you buy links into a particular site or page
black hat SEO - Search engine optimisation technique that is bad - very bad. They do not follow google or other search engine guidelines and are techniques that effectively dupe the user into going to a page or website.
blog - This is a blog - it's a website that presents content in a chronological order. Most blogs use a CMS (see below) such as WordPress or Blogger (like this) rather than individually created webpages.
bots - These are also known as robots, spiders, crawlers. They are programs which performs an activity more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers sometimes use bots to “scrape” content for usually illegal anti-copyright reuse for their own benefits.
bounce rate - This is the percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.
canonical issues - Also known as the issue of duplicate content. It is sadly just about impossible to avoid duplicate content, particularly on blogs where numerous applications like RSS to blog help spammers scrape original content for their own use. The noindex meta tag in legitimate copies, and 301 server redirects can help search engines distinguish between duplicate content on your own site (e.g. on www.news.com and news.com and www.news.com/index.html which may all lead the user to the same default page)
click fraud - Some companies like the infamous ClickMonkey site encourage click fraud - the practice of generating clicks usually to: (a) make the advertiser of a particular competitor site incur advertising cost that will yield him no return or (b) and more commonly, getting people to click on ads on your own site to fraudulently generate revenue. Make no mistake, this is fraud and it is a felony in most parts of the world - get caught doing this and you'll be screwed (most likely in places you'd rather not be screwed)
cloak - This is the practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This is one of many Black Hat SEO techniques and is frowned upon by the search engines and carries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.
CMS Content Management System - Programs such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, which separate most of the tedious website maintenance tasks from content creation so that a content publisher can focus on what he does best - creating content.
comment spam - This is the bad, bad practice of posting blog comments for the purpose of generating a backlink to another site or webpage.
content - This is also refered to as copy. It is the part of a web page that is intended to be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, and branding messages are not usually considered to be content.
contextual advertisement Advertising which is related to the content.
conversion - This is the achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Click-throughs, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.
conversion rate - Percentage of users who convert
CPC - Cost Per Click the rate that is paid per click by an advertiser
CPM - Cost Per Mil (i.e. 1000) impressions. A metric used to quantify the cost of showing your ad 1000 times.
crawler - This is bot or spider (see earlier) that studies a website or page to capture the link structure for search engines.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
First - the SEO glossary! - Start with A
So let's become familiar with the most important terms - a letter a day to start with. Today we'll cover numbers and the letter A:
301/ 302 server redirects - you can get two types of redirects - permanent and temporary. The change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file if you're using an Apache server.
adwords - Google product allowing website owners to advertise their products using a CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) basis. The advertisements are contextual - i.e. they depend on the context of the content on that page.
affiliate - An affiliate website is a third party marketer or reseller of products. The products and/ or services are sold in return for fees or commissions. Some types of affiliate programs can be quite lucrative - particularly in the gambling space
alt text - Alt text is a description of an image or graphic. It is not usually displayed to the end user, unless the image is not available, or a browser is used that doesn’t display images. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated image.
analytics - Another google product which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. It is free.
anchor text - Anchor text is the text of a link that's visible to the end user. Search engines such as google use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.
authority - Also known as link juice or Google juice, this is the amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites. You can trust that your authority will be zero when your website is just starting off - it takes time to build up so be patient.
authority site - This is a website which has many inbound links from other related expert or hub websites. Because of so many links from trusted sites, an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank (see later for definition), and search results placement.
301/ 302 server redirects - you can get two types of redirects - permanent and temporary. The change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file if you're using an Apache server.
adwords - Google product allowing website owners to advertise their products using a CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) basis. The advertisements are contextual - i.e. they depend on the context of the content on that page.
affiliate - An affiliate website is a third party marketer or reseller of products. The products and/ or services are sold in return for fees or commissions. Some types of affiliate programs can be quite lucrative - particularly in the gambling space
alt text - Alt text is a description of an image or graphic. It is not usually displayed to the end user, unless the image is not available, or a browser is used that doesn’t display images. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated image.
analytics - Another google product which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. It is free.
anchor text - Anchor text is the text of a link that's visible to the end user. Search engines such as google use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.
authority - Also known as link juice or Google juice, this is the amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites. You can trust that your authority will be zero when your website is just starting off - it takes time to build up so be patient.
authority site - This is a website which has many inbound links from other related expert or hub websites. Because of so many links from trusted sites, an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank (see later for definition), and search results placement.
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