SEO Jargon Buster

301 – A permanent redirect – a change of address for a web page. This is sometimes used when a site is redesigned, and is useful for transferring any good attributes such as Google pagerank or links from an old webpage or website to a new one.
302 – A temporary redirect, the same as a 301 but only on a temporary basis.
404 – This is shown when a page can not be found, or when a page has been moved to a new address or no longer exists. You will see an error message in your browser window.
Google Adwords – This is Google’s Pay per Click advertising scheme, and is a very popular way of advertising and selling online. These results are shown at the top and right of a search results page.
Affiliate – A website that’s licensed to sell products and services belonging to another website for commission.
Algorithm – This is the complicated program which search engines use to decide in what order websites are shown in their search results. These algorithms are changed and updated on a regular basis to improve and refine their results.
Alt text – This is the description applied to a photo so that when a search engine trawls a website they can tell one photograph from another.
Analytics – A program that gathers all of the data on a website such as which keywords are used, and the geographic locations of your visitors. This is very useful for measuring the success of your SEO campaign.
Anchor text – This is the visible text used to link to another page, search engines use this in gathering information on the site. For example I could say include the term ‘the best website for up to date news’. The word news once clicked takes you to the mentioned website, and therefore is the anchor text.
Back Link – A link to a page within your website from another site, also known as incoming link. Having a good number of these can increase your page rank, and also the amount your site is trusted by Google.
Black Hat – These are frowned upon tactics used by some companies to help get ahead of those abiding to the rules. Search engines will eventually spot such behaviour, and even ban those who are persistent offenders. This is not a method for any business with any long term online ambitions.
Bot – (also know as – crawler, robot and spider) this is a computer program that crawls the web and gathers information on websites. This information is then used to configure the rankings within search results.
Bounce Rate – This is the exact percentage figure, which tells you how many users enter a website and leave without viewing any further pages. Details of which can be found using the analytics program.
Click Fraud – When a computer program, automated script or person imitates a user by repeatedly clicking on a PPC advertisement. This will cost the advertiser money and could result in their daily budget being used, and therefore no longer showing their advert. This is when the company that commits the offence can gain a bigger percentage of clicks to their own site, safe in the knowledge that users will not be directed to your website.
Cloak - This is the art of sending content to the search engine which differs from that seen by the user. This is commonly used by people employing black hat techniques and will quite often result in that website being banned from showing in any search results.
CMS – Content management system. Just like Technicweb ‘S own CMS this is a system which assists in both the development and upkeep of a website. And requires no coding experience from the user.
Content – This is the text/copy of a website, which is intended to contain all of the value of the website. Being of interest to the user based on their previous search query, advertising and branding are not usually included as part of the content.
Conversion – This is a measure of how many goals the website has hit over a period of time. Whether that is clicks, contact forms completed or in fact sales. This is measured using the:
Conversion rate – The percentage number of users that convert from people browsing your site to customers or points of contact.
CPC – (Cost per click) the amount the advertiser pays for a single click through to their website.
CPM – (cost per thousand impressions) this is the statistical way of getting the average value/cost of pay per click, giving you the amount you pay for every one thousand advertisements shown. M is the Roman numeral for one thousand.
Domain – This is the name which gives the site its identity within the web, for example Technicweb.com
Doorway – This is a page which is designed to rank highly on a search engine for certain keywords. This is a black hat technique and again could result in a websites expulsion from search engine results
Duplicate content – Content very similar or in fact copied from another website, this will have a direct effect on the pages rank within search engine results. And it is far more rewarding to come up with your own original content.
E Commerce site – A site dedicated to the sale of products, such as EBay.
Feed – Content which is delivered to the user via a news source.
Frames – A web page design which has two or more documents appearing on the same screen, both of which have their own frame. If you imagine the page as layers containing information with two layers with differing content. These are very bad for SEO purposes because bots fail to navigate them correctly.
Google bowling – This is where competitors rather spitefully try to lower one another’s site rank by sending a site links from a ‘bad neighbourhood’. Although there is some confusion as to whether this actually works or is a myth causing companies with high ranking sites paranoia all over the web.
Google Dance – A change in the rankings shown by a search engine caused by an update of the database or algorithm.
Googlebot – A google specific bot, which trawls the internet in order to determine Google’s search engine rankings.
GYM – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft -  which are the big 3 search engines.
Hit – This was once the best way of measuring web traffic, and has now been replaced page views and impressions. The problem with this method is that a hit is recorded each time that a server sends an object – documents, graphics, include files etc. This means that a single user clicking on a page could result in many hits.
Hub – This is a trusted page which links out to websites related to its topic.
HTML – (Hyper Text Markup Language) This is a type of language used to construct a website. This is also the main language of the search engines, so should be adhered to on web pages as much as is possible.
Impression – (page view) an action in which a user views a webpage.
Index (noun) – A search engines database of websites. E.g. Google’s index of websites.
Index (verb) - Adding a web page to a search engine index. E.g. Yahoo indexes the page and adds it to their database.
Indexed Pages – The pages within a website which have been indexed
Keyword/ key phrase – This is quite simply the text which the user inputs into the search engine in order to find the topic which they wish to find out about.
Keyword density – This refers to the percentage amount of times the keyword appears on a webpage.
Keyword Research – The job of researching which keywords are realistically worth targeting
Keyword Spam (keyword stuffing) – When too many mentions of the keyword occur on a page. For example a page about hats which basically included hats every 3 words would be seen as keyword stuffing/spam.
Landing Page – This is the page which a user lands on when they click on a link within the search results.
Link – An element in a page that when clicked on takes the user to another website or webpage altogether, or to a specific part of the page they are on.
Link Building – Attempting to gain incoming links, via the use of original and interesting content. Or factual or instructional information.
Link exchange – Also referred to as reciprocal linking, where two websites agree to link to one another. In order to gain their own sites additional page rank and trust from Google. Such schemes can be dangerous as there are many so called ‘bad neighbourhoods’ which use such methods, therefore it can be seen as ‘black hat’ and therefore unethical practice.
Link Farm – Similar to a link exchange, but between many more websites. In which they all link to each other, the use of link farms can cause search engines to restrict or even ban your inclusion in search results.
Link Spam – Blog posts where the only purpose is to include a link to your own site. Blog sites and forums hate this, as their purpose is for people to gives their views and opinions. Not use their set up to make personal gain.
Long Tail searches – These are search queries from users arriving at search engine homepages with more specific needs. An example of this might be; ‘Properties for sale in W19 Wimbledon London’. Compared to houses in London, the search results would be far more specific, and answer the users query with greater accuracy.
META tags – These are located in the head section of the website, although not visible to the users anywhere else but in the initial search result page. Search engines rely very heavily on them to determine what a webpage is about. 
Mirror Site – A website that is a duplicate to another, but on a different domain name.
Monetise – This is the term used when a site wants to start bringing in an income. You can monetise a website by selling advertising space.
Natural search results – These are the results shown on a search engine results page which are not sponsored or paid for. Being naturally listed can be made possible using carefully planned Search Engine Optimisation.
Non Reciprocal link – If one site links to another and that site does not in turn link back the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines give such links more weight as it means there is no collaboration between the two sites.
Organic link – These are links published by the webmaster because they would be considered to add value for users.
Pagerank – This is a score between 0 and 10 which is given to a site by Google, which gives an indication of how trusted the site is and its popularity.
PPA (Pay per action) – This is similar to pay per click, except those advertising only have to pay when a user actually converts.
PPC (pay per click) – This is an advertising program in which every time a user clicks on the advert; an amount is paid to the agency. For example Google have PPC advertisement space on nearly all search results.
Robots.txt – This is a file that can be uploaded to a site server stopping search engines from indexing some or all areas of their website.
ROI (return on investment) – Mainly scrutinised when running a PPC campaign, a good method is using analytics. This allows you to analyse fully your return on investment, and whether your campaign is succeeding or failing.
Sandbox – This is a speculative issue regarding websites being put into a ‘sandbox’ during early months of being live. There is apparently an amount of time in which it will be nearly impossible to rank highly in results at the early stages of a websites lifespan. This is a very much debated point among SEO experts, and some argue that in fact such an occurrence does not even happen.
Scrape - This is the art of copying content from a website, which can also be carried out by automated bots. In a similar way to the indexing of a webpage.
SE – The abbreviated term for a Search Engine
Search engine spam – These are pages or websites created to cause irregularities within search results, for example a website optimised to sell information when a user searches for something as simple as a baseball cap.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – This is the term used to describe the different ways in which people market their websites, whether its using natural search results, PPC or blogging etc.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – This is the process of making changes to the structure of a website in order to gain both increased traffic and also more quality traffic. Bringing users which are more likely to either be interested in or buy your products, services or information.
SERP – Search Engines Results Page
Site Map – A page which shows and links to pages within a website, the idea being that the site map is the outlay of the site itself. XML site maps are often in the root directory of a website to help search engine bots find all content pages in a site.
Sock Puppet – The act of deception when a person wants to conceal their true identity or have a number of user profiles.
Social Media – Online technologies used by people all over the world to share information. From news to photos, videos, podcasts, blogs and forums etc.
SMM (Social Media Marketing) – Brand and website promotion through the use of social media.
Spam – Both the manipulation of a webpage and also sending e-mails and SMS to companies or individuals that have not asked for information or signed up to anything. And also a canned luncheon meat product.
Spider trap – A continuous loop of links that have been automatically generated, they can ‘trap’ search engine bots and prevent them from scraping content from your site. Also stopping them from harvesting your e-mail address which will later be spammed!
Static page – A page of this type has no dynamic content, and is very good for SEO because it is easily indexed by search engines.
Stickiness – The stickiness of a page is the measure of how long a user stays and views the content within. To increase stickiness you can make changes to a webpage to make it more interesting to the user.
Submission – Suggesting a website address to a search engine via either a form or software.
URL (Uniform Resource Locater) – Also referred to as a website address e.g. www.technicweb.com
Widget (gadget, gizmo) – These are small applications used by websites that have specific functionality. Such as traffic hit counters or IP address display.

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