SEO Glossary

The Outsourcing SEO Services provides a glossary of acronyms, jargon and adapted terminology used in the Internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and search engine marketing (SEM) industries. If there is a term missing from the SEO glossary that you think should be here, please Contact us.

Affiliate Linking
The provision of reciprocal links between affiliates.

Spider Engines
Automated Spider Engines are Search engines that deploy an automated program to visit and retrieve data from your web site.

Cloaking
It is the process by which your web site displays different pages under different circumstances. It serves an optimized page to each search engine spider and a different one to visitors.

CPA
Cost per Acquisition is a payment model based solely on qualifying actions such as sales or registrations.

CPC
Cost per Click — actual average cost incurred by the advertiser by the action of a potential customer following a link found.

CPM
Cost Per Impression (1,000 page views)

Character Set
Character set is an encoding scheme in which each character is represented by a different binary value. For example, ISO8859-1 is an extended Latin character set that supports more than 40 Western European languages.

Domain
A name by which a computer connected to the Internet is identified. For e.g. http://outsourcingseoservices.com/

Doorway Page
A web page designed to draw in Internet traffic from search engines. This page serves as an entry point through which visitors pass to the main content.

Deep Linking
It is the process of linking web pages embedded in the directories of your website from your home page or other pages, to facilitate indexing of the page by the Search Engine spiders.

Editorial Search Engine
Search engines that rank sites using human editors.

Featured Site
It is a term used by many portals that incorporate some element of bid-listing results in their normal search results.

Frameset
An HTML file that defines the layout of a Web page that is composed of other, separate HTML files.

Generic Keywords
An HTML file that defines the layout of a Web page that is composed of other, separate HTML files.

Google PageRank
Algorithms used by Google for assigning numerical weightings to hyperlinked documents (or web pages) indexed by Search engines.

Googlebot
The crawler used by Google on a daily basis to find and index new web pages.

Hit
Hit is a questionable measure of web site traffic. Each browser request made by a web server is measured as a hit. For example, a page containing 5 images counts 6 hits each time it is viewed.

Hyperlink
It is a link in a document that directs to information within that document or another document, which are usually represented by highlighted words or images.

Hallway page
It is a page containing links to various doorway pages.

IP Address
Internet Protocol address (IP address) is the numeric address of a computer connected to the Internet. IP address takes the form of four numbers separated by dots, for example: 123.45.67.890

IP Spoofing
IP Spoofing is an attack whereby a system attempts to illicitly impersonate another system by utilizing its IP network address.

IP Delivery (Cloaking)
IP Delivery is a form of cloaking used to present web content that has been specifically optimized to rank well at each search engine while presenting the different content to visitors.

Inbound links
They are links coming from an external source into a web site. Inbound links increase traffic and your site popularity according to search engines. A search engine listing to your site would be considered as an inbound link.

Indexing
It is the process of converting a collection of data into a database suitable for easy search and retrieval.

Keyword Search
A broad natural language search strategy, which allows patrons to locate citations to individual records containing a word or combination of words in designated fields from an online catalog or database.

Key Phrases
Combinations of keywords, also called "search terms".

Keyword Frequency
Number of search requests for particular keyword.

Keyword Density
The ratio of the number of occurrences of a particular keyword or phrase to the total number of words in a page.

Keyword Proximity
Keyword proximity measures the closeness between two keywords.

Keyword stuffing
A technique where too many keywords are put into a web page without any context or use to make keyword rich or increase keyword density.

Link building
It is a Search Engine Optimization technique where webmasters attempt to build relevant, quality inbound links to their website with the intention of increasing the website importance, and thus gain high ranking in major Search Engines.

Link Popularity
Link Popularity refers to the number of sites that link to your web pages from various search engines.

Message Boards
It is a virtual bulletin board, where people post and view messages. Unlike email, all discussions take place in public, anyone can join in.

Meta Search Engine
Search engine that utilizes information from other Search Engines to get its listings, rather than through its own efforts.

Meta Tag
It is an HTML tag, which provides information such as the author, date of creation or latest update for the page, and keywords, which indicate the subject matter.

Mirror Sites
Websites or web pages with the same or similar content.

Newsletter Marketing
The process of building relationships with existing customers and gaining new ones by publishing and mass distributing an email containing features and articles of interest to them.

Outbound links
They are links on a particular web page leading to web pages on a different domain.

Paid Linking
It is the act of paying a web site to link to your own.

Page View (Impression)
The act of loading a webpage by a browser.

PPC
Pay Per Click - It is an advertising model where advertisers pay an agreed amount for each click delivered to his or her site from a link or listing.

Portal
A web site that provides a starting point, a gateway, or portal, to other resources on the Internet or an intranet such as search, email, news, weather and shopping.

Search Query
A word, phrase or group of words characterizing the information a user seeks from search engines and directories. The search engine subsequently locates Web pages to match the query.

Reciprocal Linking
The act of two sites linking to each other for mutual benefit and with no cost incurred by either site.

Robots
A robot is an automated software program that runs at many search engines, reads websites' content, analyzes it, and inserts them into the index (or collects information for later insertion into the index). Also known as a "crawler" or "spider".

REP
Robots Exclusion Protocol - A method that allows Web site administrators to indicate to visiting robots which parts of their site should not be visited by the robot.

ROI
Return on Investment - A measure of the monetary as well as business success of a marketing campaign in proportion to the money spent on that campaign.

Search Engine
This is a program or tool, which acts as a card catalog for the Internet in response to a text query. Search engines attempt to index and locate desired information by searching for keywords in which a user specifies.

Search Engine Optimization
Also Known as "SEO". This is the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. It is the process of maximizing search property driven traffic to a site by analytical means.

Search Engine Log Data
Actual search engine logs, from which SEO service provider retrieve data on search frequency of particular keywords.

Search Term Evolution
New words or phrases, which are relevant to your industry.

SEO
This is the abbreviation of the phrase "Search Engine Optimization". See Search Engine Optimization.

SEM
This is the abbreviation of the phrase "Search Engine Marketing".

SERP
This is the abbreviation of the phrase "Search Engine Results Pages".

Spam/Spammed
This is a general term relating to practices not approved by the engines and editors. The term spamming is also used by search engines to mean web sites that try to gain a higher listing by submitting hundreds of almost identical pages or by inserting hundreds of keywords within a web document.

Spiders
Spiders are programs that search the Internet for new, publicly accessible resources such as Web pages and files in public FTP archives. Also called wanderers or robots (bots).

Search Engine Submission
The process of submitting the website to search engines. This is done to make search engines aware of the presence of new web pages and sites. Each search engine will have its own individual process for doing this.

Targeted Traffic
Targeted traffic is the number of potential customers who visit your site. Targeted traffic means pre qualified leads and a higher percentage of visitors who become customers. It is the concept of directing traffic to a website based on the requirements of that traffic with site provisions.

Traffic Intelligence
Traffic Intelligence is a service that bridges the gap between software and end-users. Traffic Intelligence can identify user paths through the site.

User Agent Delivery
Similar to IP Delivery, except that Search Engine Spiders are recognized by their name (user agent) rather than by their IP address. This technique is spam.

Viral Marketing
A self-sustaining and self-promoting form of marketing. The core idea is that the public take on the role of 'spreading the message' themselves. It is very effective, and at the same time the control and even 'ownership' of the campaign is relinquished.

Visitor Session
The period of a complete visit (from start to finish) by a user to a website. This is usually considered complete if a user is inactive for a set period of time, generally 30 minutes.

Search Engine Visibility
The parameter of congeniality for search engines to find and crawl through a page.

Web Crawling
A web crawler (also known as a web spider or ant) is a program, which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches.

W3C
World Wide Web Consortium, the governing body for web standards.

Webmaster
The person responsible for maintaining and updating a website.

Web browser
A program used to access the Internet services and resources available through the World Wide Web.

XML Feed
A powerful method to get your content and products into the major search listings. It is very useful to web sites whose content changes rapidly or cannot be accessed with conventional spidering technology.

www2/www3/www-xx
Google dance watchers use these terms as shorthand to refer to Google's different data centers. You can add.google.com to the end of them to visit the data center that corresponds to the term.

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