Seo definitions list - Get to know seo terminology

Below you will find a seo definition list which you can copy and print and use as a reference. It will help you understanding what the hell all these seo guys are talking about.



.HTACCESS
Used for redirecting, sanitizing and excluding duplicate content.

3-way link exchange - a link agreement when there are no two sites pointing to each other

301
A permanent server redirect - a change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file on apache servers. Also useful for dealing with duplicate content issues.

404GRABBER
Unemployes your 404 page.

ADSENSE
Display paid relevant links by Google on your site.

ADWORDS
Google’s pay per click (ppc) links auction. For advertising your website on relevant sites. (Opposite of Adsense)

ADWORDS SITE (MFA)
A website made with the sole purpose to display Google Adsense advertisements.

AFFILIATE
An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or commissions.

ALGORITHM
The mathematical formula which search engines use to rank sites

ALT TAG
The alternative text that the browser displays when the website visitor does not want to or cannot see an image on a website. Placed in the image tag: img src="image.jpg" alt="image description"

AJAX
A technology to enhance web pages.

ANCHOR TEXT
The text that is clickable, also known as hyperlink.

ASTROTURFING (the opposite of full disclosure)
Attempting to advance a commercial or political agenda while pretending to be an impartial grassroots participant in a social group. Participating in a user forum with the secret purpose of branding, customer recruitment, or public relations.

AUTHORITY (trust, link juice, Google juice)
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.

AUTHORITY SITE
A website which has many incoming links from other related expert/hub sites. Because of this simultaneous citation from trusted hubs an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank, and search results placement. Wikipedia, is an example of an authority site.

BACK LINKS (BLs)
Incoming links to a website

BLACK HAT SEO
Unethical techniques used to gain high rank that do not follow Googles webmaster guidelines. Some examples are hiding written text (black letters on black background), link farming and cloaking. If caught the site can get banned from the search results.

BLOGGER
Person who blogs. Blogger is also the name of Googles free online blogging software.

BLOGGING
Goog blogs can create a lot of linkjuice.

BLOGROLL
A list of links, usually placed in the sidebar of a blog, that reads as a list of recommendations by the host of the blog

BOT (robot, spider, crawler)
A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content from websites like email addresses for spamming puposes.

BOUNCE RATE
The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.

CACHE
A storage area within a search engine's database for copies of web pages

CANONICAL (duplicate content)
Canon = legitimate or official version - It is often nearly impossible to avoid duplicate content, especially with CMSs like Wordpress, but also due to the fact that www.site.com, site.com, and www.site.com/index.htm are supposedly seen as duplicates by the search engines. It’s hard to believe that search engines can't see that it is the same site but it is true. To avoid the search engines accusing your site of having duplicate content you can use the noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the canon.

CGI-BIN
A storage folder that contains Common Gateway Interface - Binary scripts. There is normally one cgi-bin per website.

CLICK FRAUD
Improper clicks on a PPC advertisement usually by the publisher or his minions for the purpose of undeserved profit. Click fraud is a huge issue for add agencies like Google, because it lowers advertiser confidence that they will get fair value for their add spend.

CLOAKING
A black hat system of delivering different content to search engine spiders than to human visitors of your site. If caught then a virtual death penaly will follow by the search engines.

CMS Content Management System
Programs like Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal, which can make a publisher effective without having to know or understand any coding.

CODE SWAPPING (bait and switch)
Changing the content after high rankings are achieved.

COMMENT SPAMMING
Posting comments on blogs for the purpose of generating a inbound link to a site. To prevent comment spam many blogs use the nofollow link which makes comment spam useless for linkbuilding.

COPY/PASTE PENALTIES
If you copy content and publish it elsewhere, the search engines will give you a penalty. Also copying code and pasting it into another program will result in a penalty, whether you modify it or not.

COPYRIGHTS
All writings are automatically copyrighted for 75 years.

CRAWLER DIRECTIVES
Telling search engine spiders how they have to behave.

CTR
Click Through Rate. Measures clicks on ads, banners, textual ads, SERPs.

DOFOLLOW
Standard incoming links that do not have the nofollow attribute

DOORWAY PAGE
A webpage designed to draw in internet traffic and then redirect this traffic to another website. Also known as bridge, entry, gateway, jump and zebra pages [a probable engine penalty]

DUPLICATE CONTENT
My aunt has twins and a daughter. Guess which 33% of Peter, Paul and Mary count as duplicated content.

E-COMMERCE
Selling the letter “E” on the ‘net. Most instances of “E” dealers are well known for overpromising and underdelivering, if delivering goods is part of the business process at all.

FOLKSONOMY
A social system managed by users that tag and label web content. Examples include delicious.com, flickr.com and technorati.com

FRAMES
Website design using multiple, independent sections to create a single webpage. Each frame is built as a separate HTML file, but with one "master" file to identify each selection. [unfriendly to engine crawlers]

GOOGLE
A software shop in Mountain View providing the world with free services, not so free paid links, and relevant search results.

Google Analytics
A free service offered by Google which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program. With Analytics you can check the Page Views your site gets, determine pay-per-click and other paid ads quality, tracking: Keyword popularity specific to a search engine, all other referring websites and visitors' physical location

HTML
HyperText Markup Language. Designed for the creation of webpages with clickable text and other information to be displayed in a web browser

HTML validator
A tool used to check an HTML document for various write-up problems. Use of a validator, most likely, improves a web site's load time. Example: OnlineWebCheck.com's CSE HTML Validator Lite

HOTLINKING
Unscrupulous hijacking of foreign resources. Also known as bandwidth theft. A suitable method to slow down your worst enemy’s Web sites.

IBL
In bound (incoming) link

IP address
Internet Protocol address. A unique identifier that has four numbers separated by dots, like this: 59.357.894.73. All computers across the internet are assigned one. They are used like street addresses.
(Google gadget toevoegen: http://www.google.com/ig/adde?synd=open&source=ggyp&moduleurl=aruljohn.com/gadget/ip.xml )
IIS
For a definition please refer to crap.

JAVASCRIPT REDIRECTS
A sneaky method to show x-rated ads to children.

KEYWORD
A important word about the topic in a web page's content, url address or backlink titles that indicates it's subject

KEYWORD STRING
Multiple keywords which combined make a keyword string. Also reffered to as the long tail.

LANGUAGES
Used to communicate with computers. Popular languages are Cobol, Assembler, RPG, Fortran, Algol, SmallTalk and PL/I.

LINK BUILDING
Mass inserting of promotional links onto unattended Web sites. There’s a manual variant too.

LINK FARM
A group of links on a variety of pages solely for the purpose of increasing link popularity for search engines. Link farms are normally created by programs, rather than by human beings. [an engine penalty]

LINK JUICE
Traffic coming to your site generated with hyperlinks to your site.

LINK POPULARITY
The number and quality of inbound links pointing to a given web page

META tags
Write-up placed within the HTML head tags of a webpage, providing information that is not visible to browsers

MICROFORMATS
If you don’t build Web sites for search engines you really don’t need that.

MSN
MSN operates a tiny search engine called LiveSearch in Redmond. I can’t find their SERPs in my logs, hence I think they’ve just indexed the M$ campus so far, although their crawler is somewhat busy requesting compelling contents from my servers.

NATURAL LINK
A hyperlink placed on a web page because it offers useful content.

NETSCAPE
They had a browser, a directory, and whatnot. Not sure what they deal with today.

NOFOLLOW
An HTML attribute used to instruct search engines spiders that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's engine ranking. Used to give less weight to irrelevant content to improve the quality of search engine results. To attach nofollow to your link: Text.

ONE-WAY LINK
A link that has been obtained without a link exchange. A non-reciprocal link

ORGANIC SEO
Techniques used for unpaid high ranking results on search engines

PAGERANK
Google PageRank: a numerical value that represents the popularity of a website. Found on the Google Toolbar

PAID LINKS
Paid links are the backbone of the Internet. Google’s mission is to replace hard coded paid links with JavaScript ads. They shanghaied Vint Cerf already to accomplish that, and if they manage to bribe Tim Berners-Lee they will succeed. Unless Al Gore invents the World Wide Web.

PLAGIARISM
Copyrights multiplied by minus one.

POWNCE
A tool to distribute commercials, selfish myths, rumors, and fabrications. All of them votable at Digg.

PROGRESS EASYASK
A neat piece of software.

RECIPROCAL LINKS
A classic sixty-nine in cyberspace. Learn more at risky linkage.

RECOMMENDATIONS
Things you really should try buy coz they pay my bills.

REDIRECTS
Forwarding requests on the Interweb. Some sorts of redirects are used to hijack foreign contents (302), fake toolbar PageRank (301), fool visitors (JavaScript/Meta refresh), or to irritate (300, 303, 305, 307) respectively upset search engines.

RISKY LINKAGE
Every link crawlable by Google and not on their explicit list of allowed link patterns is risky. Currently this list has just one item, that is number 68: you do me and I owe you one. The other 69 link variants known to man are on the don’ts list, hence risky.

ROBOTS META TAGS
Page specific “get the fuck outta here”.

ROBOTS.TXT
Side-wide “get the fuck outta here”.

SEARCH QUALITY
High quality searchers type in my URIs for navigational queries. Clever. Low quality searchers rely on a search engine’s capability to retrieve my sales pitches from a multi billion page database. Suckers.

SEM
Search engine marketing

SEO
search engine optimization. The search engines don't like 3rd party optimization because most SEOs write scripts to optimize their SERPs.

SERP
Search engine results page. The page that users see after clicking Search at an engine

SITE-SEARCH
Annoying visitors with custom search engines which rattle, cough and claim to be buzzy but don’t deliver due to the incompleteness of their underlying search indices.

SOCIAL WEB
Spiderman and spiderwoman doing it on the web. Usually spiderwoman is a bald and bearded fake.

SPAM
Sites Positioned Above Me. Anything from the desk of Sebastian Foss. I email you and you don’t sign up for my get-rich-in-a-nanosecond thingy because I guessed a hapless email addy and you turned catchall off. Selfish voting using multiple accounts.

SPAM REPORT
Asking Matt to mark machine generated Web contents with an unavailable_after tag pointing to the stone age.

SPOOFING
In spiderwoman’s toolbox. See social Web.

TECHNORATI
A hairy monster sitting in the middle of the spider web it has spun in the blogosphere, eating pings.

TESTING
(Next) generation of Web contents the search engines may or may not list on their SERPs.

TOOLS
Both spiderman as well as spiderwoman have a tool. See social Web.

TRANSLATIONS
To post on Webmaster hangouts you need to translate some terms. For example “DMOZ clone” becomes “niche directory”, “displaying AdSense above the fold” becomes “adding value for users”, “smut gallery” becomes “photo album” and everything else considered fishy on your Web site turns into a “green widget”.

TROLLING
Outlawed assclowns posting shitloads of crap in newsgroups, blog comments and forums. Everybody is allowed to kill trolls, but feeding trolls is strictly forbidden.

TWITTER
When it’s not out of service, at least partly, that’s a neat place to point your RSS feeds to.

URI SHORTENING
A sure fire way to kill traffic, search engine rankings, and revenues on the long haul. Invented by TinyURL, made popular by Twitter, short URIs (falsely known as shortened URLs) are often abused for traffic theft and other evil Internet marketing purposes (for example bypassing filters that are supposed to prevent minors from viewing hardcore porn and other adult content).

URL
Uniform Resource Locator. A world wide web address

URL REMOVAL
The process of deleting URIs in a search index before the spam filters catch them.

USABILITY
Figuring out sure-fire methods to steer the user’s mouse pointer above the ads and trick her/him into clicking. There’s a shortcut called popup window, where the sponsor’s landing page overlays the page without user actions.

wWEB 2.0
The second generation of internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in ways previously unavailable. For example: social networking sites, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies

WEB DEVELOPMENT
Web developers version 1.0 write scripts to manage self-produced or bought respectively borrowed Web contents. Web developers version 2.0 steal the contents from their users and add nifty round corners to the output.

WEBMASTER CENTRAL
A cool Webmaster hangout where you can submit your tanked sites to have Googlers and forum regulars check them and tell you which optimization techniques you’ve to dump to get unbanned respectively unpenalized. Don’t lie there, and don’t widgetize your posts (see translations).

WEBSPAM
Showing unique and compelling contents provided by Google AdSense above the fold is Webspam and gains your site the much sought after MFA award. Of course you can enhance your Webspam by launching every paragraph of scraped or machine generated content on a gazillion of AdSense laden pages, that lowers your CTR but gains you more clicks overall. Search engines have huge departments supporting Webspam. For example Matt Cutts heads Google’s Webspam support division with its HQ in building 43 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, along with Webspam departments in Dublin, Zurich, Beijing and whereever to handle Webspam in foreign languages.

WHITE HAT SEO
Techniques for high rank that follow search engine guidelines.

X-ROBOTS-TAG
Web object specific “get the fuck outta here”.

XML
Extensible Markup Language

XML-SITEMAPS
A protocol invented by Google to mass submit Webspam to search engines. Provides settings like “priority” to tell the search engines where and how fast the Webspam should rank for its desired money terms. Google indexes and ranks such mass submissions within a few days. Other search engines support the sitemaps protocol half-hearted.

YAHOO
Yahoo sells links for an annual fee of $600 without guarantee that your link will be listed. The piped feeds contain the nofollow link.