Landing Page: The specific web page that a visitor reaches after clicking on a PPC listing. Online marketers work to improve conversion rates by testing different iterations of landing page creative text, which encompass the entire user experience including navigation, layout, and copy.
Link Farm: A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (or PR). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the terms of service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Link Text: The text that is contained within a link. For example, search engine is a link that contains the link text “search engine.”
Listings: The information that appears on a search engine’s results page in response to a search.
Link baiting: Link baiting is a technique by which a website owner will modify information so that their audience will point high quality links to that website, thus ensuring the website owner high ranking and traffic.
Link building: Link building is the act of building high quality links to and from your website. This will make a search engine recognize your site as being trustworthy and relevant. Some good examples of link building are – link baiting, unique links, registering in directories that are relevant, deep linking and always ensuring fresh content.
Link bursts: This is the term for when there is a sudden burst of top quality links that point towards a website. This will happen naturally as time progresses however a topical site may receive a lot of links over a short period of time, or if there is an increase in brand awareness more links will point towards relevant sites, increased usage will also lead to more links.
Link churn: Link churn is the term for the speed at which a website might lose its links.
Link equity: This is the strength of a website based on its links and the inbound link popularity.
Link farm: These are websites that pay no attention to the editorial quality of sites that are linked to and from them.
Link hoarding: Link hoarding is a method of getting as many inbound links to your website as you can without having any outbound links in return. This however is seen as spam and will not increase link popularity as thought.
Link popularity / linkage: Link popularity is a very important factor in SEO and it is a form of measuring the quality of inbound links on a website.
Link swop / link swap: Link swap is very similar to reciprocal links where two websites (or more) will swap links to try to increase their link popularity.
Long tail / longtail: Long tail is a phrase used to explain the fact that for every category of product on the market there is a higher demand for non-hits than hits. A long tail keyword will have a very high value as it is so specific.
Meta Tags: Information placed in a web page not intended for users to see but instead which typically passes information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications.
Meta Description Tag: Allows page authors to say how they would like their pages described when listed by search engines. Not all search engines use the tag.
Meta Keywords Tag: Allows page authors to add text to a page to help with the search engine ranking process. Not all search engines use the tag.
Mirror sites: Mirror sites are websites that will copy the content of other sites. A search engines will not on the whole index such as site, however some hosting companies will offer mirror sites for free that will lead to open source software sites that are popular for the purpose of gaining and building good link equity.
Natural linking: Natural linking is the name given to links which are within a body of text, these will then link to an expansion of the topic or a further detailed document. Little consideration is given to their link popularity value.
Navigation: Navigation is the term given to the process that allows a user to know where they have been and where they are going on a website. Using HTML is easier for this than JavaScript which is harder to index.
Organic Listings: Listings that search engines do not sell (unlike paid listings). Instead, sites appear solely because a search engine has deemed it editorially important for them to be included, regardless of payment. Paid Inclusion content is also often considered “organic” even though it is paid for. This is because that content appears intermixed with unpaid organic results.
Open source: Open source is a type of software that will include its source code. This is so that developers can alter it as they see fit. This can create a huge amount of mindshare and exposure for the creators.
Outbound link: An outbound link is a link on a website to another one.
Page view / page impression: This is a term that can be confused with hits, it is however the total number of pages viewed by all visitors to the site within a set time period, not the number of files viewed.
Penalty: A penalty is the punishment given to a website which has been found guilty of spamming by a search engine that they are included on. The penalty will prevent the site from ranking highly or even being included on the search engine. These penalties can either is manually enforced which usually means a very long ban from the search engine with a reinclusion request, or algorithmically, then the website has to wait for a set period of time before it will be ranked again.
Pop-under / popup / pop up: A pop up is an advert that will pop up on your screen whose purpose is for you to click through on to another website. These are often in the form of competitions which claim you have won a prize. These are bogus and should not be clicked on. A pop under is the same as a pop up but it occurs under the screen you are viewing and you might not realize it is on your computer.
PR0 / PR zero: This is a term that means PageRank zero and it is rumored that this is what Google does to any site found guilty of spamdexing. Google however denies this.
Proximity: Proximity is the term given when determining how similar certain words are to one another. This can help when looking at words that are near others as they would naturally occur. However if there is excessive use of keywords or similar words it can be an indication of very low quality content.
Paid Inclusion: Program guaranteeing that all pages of a web site are included in Yahoo, leading ISP portals, and 35 other search providers within three days in exchange for payment. However no guarantee of good ranking is given. Website content is refreshed in natural search listings every 48 hours, providing control of what and when search engines display information about web pages. This allows your SEO team to tweak listings for higher conversions. Marketers pay to be included in search engines and directories on a per-URL listing fee plus a fixed cost per click that is currently under £0.50 per click.
Pay Per Click (PPC): A concept for online advertising where you pay a certain amount of money each time somebody clicks on your ad.
PPC: Abbreviation of pay per click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads.
PR: Abbreviation of PageRank, Google’s proprietary measure of link popularity for web pages. Google offers a PR viewer on their toolbar.
Page swapping: This is a little-used technique of placing one page at a site and then, after the page has attained a good position, removing it and replacing it with a less-optimized page. One serious problem with this technique is that some search engines now reindex pages very quickly, and it’s impossible to know when the search engines will return.
Page jacking: Some truly unethical search engine marketers have employed the technique of using other peoples? High-ranking Web pages, in effect stealing pages that perform well for a while. This is known as page jacking.
Quality content: Quality content is the content of a website or page that is not copied from elsewhere and is totally original, hence the term quality. When performing searches, search engines look for quality content when ranking websites.
Reciprocal Link: A link exchange between two sites. Reciprocal links can often increase Page Rank and provide higher listings in natural search results.
Results Page: After a user enters a search query, the page that is displayed is referred to as the results page. Sometimes it may be called SERPs, for “search engine results page.”
Robots.txt: Robots.txt is a file on a web server which well-behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.
Ranking: Ranking is the rank of a website on a search engines results. The higher the rank, or page, the more relevant to the search the website is. To be ranked first, or on the first two pages of a search is a sought after position. As websites with a high ranking are more likely to be clicked into.
Redirect: Redirect is a term used to describe what happens when a user is redirected from one page to another on a website. This can be done automatically, or by the user clicking on a link. However this technique has been abused so much that sites that redirect people are often de-listed by search engines.
RSS: RSS, Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary is way of syndicating information and allowing users to subscribe to a channel of interest, it works by using software such as a feed reader.
Sandbox: This is where sites are kept till they get mature enough to be included in the top rankings for a particular keyword.
Supplemental results: Filtered results those are similar to the ones already shown.
Search Engine: Any service generally designed to allow users to search the web or a specialized database of information. Web search engines generally have paid listings and organic listings. Organic listings typically come from crawling the web, though often human-powered directory listings are also optionally offered.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): The act of marketing a web site via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings (SEO), purchasing paid listings (PPC) or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Abbreviated to SEO. The act of altering a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. In the past, has also been used as a term for any type of search engine marketing activity, though now the term search engine marketing itself has taken over for this.
Search Terms: The words (or word) a searcher enters into a search engine’s search box. Also used to refer to the terms a search engine marketer hopes a particular page will be found for. Also called keywords, query terms or query.
SERP: Abbreviation of Search Engine Results Page/Positioning. This refers to the organic (excluding paid listings) search results for a given query.
Spam: Any search engine marketing method that a search engine deems to be detrimental to its efforts to deliver relevant, quality search results.
Spider: Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
Submission: The act of submitting a URL for non-paid inclusion into a search engine’s index. Submission does not generally guarantee a listing. In addition, submission does not help with rank improvement on crawler-based search engines unless search engine optimization efforts have been taken. Submission can be done manually (fill out an online form and submit) or automatically, where a software program or online service may process the forms behind the scenes.
Stop Words: Words – such as the, a, an – that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries.
Scooter: Scooter is the name of the spider owned by Alta Vista; it was named after Alta Vista’s annual motorbike race.
Search jacking: This is similar to spamdexing, whereby a webpage is optimized for search terms that are popular, but the site does not contain any relevant information. Although this technique can get traffic to a website it will not benefit from it as the visitors have been misdirected.
Search marketing: Search marketing is the term for marketing that is done for a website on a search engine. This can take the form of buying PPC advertisements and SEO techniques.
Search results: This is the term for the results that search engine will provide in response to a query.
Search terms: These are the words that are entered into a search engine to form the query.
SEO copywriting: SEO copywriting is the method of writing for websites in order to maximize their potential ranking for search engines. SEO copywriters know about keywords, keyword density and other such methods of ensuring good SEO in a body of text.
SERP: SERP’s or Search Engine Results Pages are the pages that are returned to a user after they have entered a query into a search engine.
Server: A server is a computer which is only used to serve and host files to the World Wide Web. A dedicated server is more expensive to run but it is better than a virtual server which is cheap but is not owned by the website.
Tags: Refers to the correct labeling of key areas of web pages such as the web page title, the meta content, alt attributes on images and keyword links, and anchor tags within the page content.
Targeted Traffic: The number of people that visit your website and actually have the potential to become customers right away or at a further moment.
Traffic: The number of people that visit your webpage, being led there by your ads.
Unique Visitor: The unique IP address that describes the identity of the visitor.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator): A unique sequence of characters that describes the location of a webpage.