Vancouver Search Marketing - Glossary of Common SEO Terms

A tool that tracks visitors to your website, page views, keywords used to reach your site, geographic location of visitors, amount of time spent on your site, and everything else you could possibly want to know about the traffic driven to your website through the search engines, via direct (the visitor types in your website address into the browser), or referred sites (another website that has a link to your website posted on it).  Web Warrior Marketing uses Google Analytics.

In email or web marketing this is the area of content viewable on the computer monitor without having to scroll downwards.

The text that a user would click on to follow a link.

Some individuals or companies use what are referred to as ‘black hat’ techniques  which can get traffic to your website short term...until the search engines discover they are being tricked - then your website has the chance of being banned temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing! SEO is not about "tricking" the search engines with doorway pages, keyword stuffing, or cloaked pages.  Plus, it’s not about just getting visitors to your site – you want targeted visitors who actually need your service or product - not because a bunch of common/unrelated words were hidden within your site just to draw traffic.  You won't see conversions from that anyway - people will just leave your site if they were lead there because of deceitful techniques. 

A periodically updated journal, typically formatted in reverse chronological order. Many blogs not only archive and categorize information, but also provide a RSS feed and allow users to leave comments. The majority are personal in nature. Blogs generally have heavy link equity because they give people a reason to frequently come back to their site, read their content, and link to whatever they think is interesting.

A person who writes a blog

A hyperlink which is not functioning and does not lead to the desired destination.  This may be from a website going offline, if content linked to it is only temporary, or if the location of a page is moved.   You want to avoid having broken links on your website – if a visitor keeps encountering broken links, they are likely to move onto another website.

To view the Internet, you use a browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.

This is when a copy of a web page is stored by a search engine. When you search online, you are not actively searching the whole web, but are searching files in the search engine index.

Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines.

Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine.

Content Management System is a tool used to help make it easy to update and add information to a website.

Small data file written to a user's local machine to track them. They help websites customize your user experience.

Cost per click/Pay per click - Many search ads and contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is charged a certain price per click based on the competitiveness of the words used in the ad.

How deeply a website is crawled and indexed.

How frequently a website is crawled. Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority. Sites with highly artificial link authority scores (ie: mostly low quality spammy links) or sites which are heavy in duplicate content or near duplicate content (such as affiliate feed sites) may be crawled less frequently than sites with unique content which are well integrated into the web.

A link which is no longer functional.

A link which points to an internal page within a website. When links grow naturally typically most high quality websites have many links pointing at interior pages. When you request links from other websites it makes sense to request a link from their most targeted relevant page to your most targeted relevant page.

The ratio of links pointing to internal pages to overall links pointing at a website. A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a legitimate natural link profile.

Temporarily or permanently becoming de-indexed from a directory or search engine.

Directories and search engines provide a short description near each listing which aims to add context to the title.

Your domain is your website address.

Pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other advertisements.

Content which is the same or almost the same in nature. Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of similar content and this can result in penalties.

The page which a user enters your site.

Link which references another domain.

Many content management systems such as blogs, allow readers to subscribe to content update notifications via RSS or XML feeds.

Free for All - these are pages which allow anyone to add a link to them. Generally these links do not pull much weight in search relevancy algorithms because many automated programs fill these pages with links pointing at low quality websites.

Content which is dynamic in nature and gives people a reason to keep paying attention to your website. Fresh content does not generally mean re-editing old content. It more often refers to creating new content. Frequently updated websites are more likely to be crawled frequently.

The world's leading search engine in terms of reach.

Google's search engine spider.

The heading element briefly describes the subject of the section it introduces. Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower numbered headings being most important.

SEO technique used to show search engine spiders text that human visitors do not see. While some sites may get away with it for a while, generally the risk to reward ratio is inadequate for most legitimate sites to consider using hidden text.

Making a search engine believe that another website exists at your URL.

The main page on your website, which is largely responsible for helping develop your brand and setting up the navigational schemes that will be used to help users and search engines navigate your website.  As far as SEO goes, a home page is typically going to be one of the easier pages to rank for some of your more competitive terms, largely because it is easy to build links at a home page. You should ensure your homepage stays focused and reinforces your brand though, and do not assume that most of your visitors will come to your site via the home page. If your site is well structured many pages on your site will likely be far more popular and rank better than your home page for relevant queries.

HyperText Markup Language - the language in which pages on the Web are created.

HyperText Transfer Protocol - is the foremost used protocol to communicate between servers and web browsers. Hypertext transfer protocol is the means by which data is transferred from its residing location on a server to an active browser.

Link pointing to one website from another website.

Collection of data used as bank to search through to find a match to a user fed query. The larger search engines have billions of documents in their catalogs.

Link from one page on a site to another page on the same site. It is preferential to use descriptive internal linking to make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is about.

Designing, categorizing, organizing, and structuring content in a useful and meaningful way.

Vast worldwide network of computers connected via TCP/IP.

Internet Protocol Address - Every computer connected to the internet has an IP address. Some websites and servers have unique IP addresses, but most web hosts host multiple websites on a single host.

Internet Service Providers – they sell end users access to the web.

A client-side scripting language that can be embedded into HTML documents to add dynamic features. Search engines do not index most content in JavaScript.

A word or phrase which implies a certain mindset or demand that targeted prospects are likely to search for.

The process of discovering relevant keywords and keyword phrases to focus your SEO.

Writing copy that uses excessive amounts of the core keyword.

The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.

A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document. Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.

A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity and the authority of the sites providing those links.

Website or group of websites which exercises little to no editorial control when linking to other sites.

The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of the page. A good meta description tag should be relevant and unique to the page; reinforce the page title; and focus on including offers and secondary keywords and phrases to help add context to the page title.

People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the page title in with these.

Scheme to help website users understand where they are, where they have been, and how that relates to the rest of your website.

A link from one website pointing at another external website.

Search engines prevent some websites suspected of spamming from ranking highly in the results by banning or penalizing them. These penalties may be automated algorithmically or manually applied. If a site is penalized algorithmically the site may start ranking again after a certain period of time after the reason for being penalized is fixed. If a site is penalized manually the penalty may last an exceptionally long time or require contacting the search engine with a reinclusion request to remedy.

Portable Document Format - a universal file format developed by Adobe Systems that allows files to be stored and viewed in the original printer friendly context.

Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links. If a link is from a page or website which seems like it is trustworthy then it is more likely to count more than a link from an obscure, rarely used, and rarely cited website. The harder a link is to acquire the more likely a search engine will be to want to trust it and the more work a competitor will need to do to try to gain that link. Some search engines may trust links from older resources or links that have existed for a length of time more than they trust brand new links or links from newer resources.

A method of alerting browsers and search engines that a page location moved.

A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search engines which files not to crawl. Some search engines will still list your URLs as URL only listings even if you block them using a robots.txt file. Do not put files on a public server if you do not want search engines to index them!

Return on Investment - a measure of how much return you receive from each marketing dollar.

A tool or device used to find relevant information. Search engines consist of a spider, index, relevancy algorithms and search results.

Search engine optimization - the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries.

Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries.

Search Engine Results Page is the page on which the search engines show the results for a search query.

Marketing a website in search engines.

Page which can be used to help give search engines a secondary route to navigate through your site.

Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are social bookmarking sites and social news sites.

Social Networking websites function like an online community of internet users who share a common interest such as hobbies, religion, or politics. Once you join a social networking website you can begin to socialize. This socialization may include reading the profile pages of other members and possibly even contacting them. More and more businesses everyday are joining sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote themselves and connect with potential clients…the possibilities are endless, as you can reach people you may not ever had another opportunity to connect with.

Unsolicited email messages.

Search engine crawlers which search or "spider" the web for pages to include in the index.

Feature rich or elegantly designed beautiful web page which typically offers poor usability and does not offer search engines much content to index.

Software programs which spy on web users, often used to collect consumer research and to behaviorally target ads.

Using the stem of a word to help satisfy search relevancy requirements. EX: searching for playing can return results which contain play. This usually enhances the quality of search results due to the extreme diversity of word used in, and their application in the English language.

Common words (ex: a, to, and, is ...) which add little relevancy to a search query, and are thus are removed from the search query prior to finding relevant search results. It is both fine and natural to use stop words in your page content. The reason stop words are ignored when people search is that the words are so common that they offer little to no discrimination value.

The title element is used to describe the contents of a document. The title is one of the most important aspects to doing SEO on a web page. Each page title should be unique to that page and descriptive.

Search engines frequently update their algorithms and data sets to help keep their search results fresh and make their relevancy algorithms hard to update. Most major search engines are continuously updating both their relevancy algorithms and search index.

Uniform Resource Locator - the unique address of any web document.

Self propagating marketing techniques. Common modes of transmission are email, blogging, and word of mouth marketing channels.

It is likely that while surfing the Internet, you have come across a 301 page.  This means that the file has been moved permanently to a new location, and is the preferred method of redirecting for most pages or websites. If you are planning to move an entire site to a new location you may want to test moving just a file or folder first, and then if that ranks well,  proceed with moving the entire site.

If a server is unable to locate the URL you have landed on, you will likely come to a 404 page, meaning that it is not found.