SEO Glossary

An absolute link, or absolute URL (sometimes wrongly referred to as a “permalink”), defines the location of the page or document absolutely including the protocol to use to get the document, the server to get it from, the directory it is located in, and the name of the page or document itself. The HTML code below shows an absolute link.

{code type=html}SEO – Glossary of Terms{/code}

The top half of the first page. A graphic design concept that refers to the location of an important news story or a visually appealing photograph on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.

Accessibility is the practice of making websites usable by disabled people – especially blind people. Because search engines are essentially blind accessible websites tend to have better search engine rankings than inaccessible websites. The more optimised the site, the more accessible it will be to search engines.

Microsoft pay per click ad network. Comparable to Google’s AdWords.

Google’s contextual advertising network. Companies and websites large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google. A highly scalable revenue system that is almost entirely automated- making it easy for small content publishers to make money for visitors to their site- by dedicating small ad space on their site, filled with relevant ads provided by Google’s ad network.

The popular paid-advertising system run by Google. AdWords is Google’s flagship advertising product and main source of revenue. Google’s total advertising revenues were USD$21 billion in 2008. AdWords offers pay per click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.

A marketing technique that uses affiliates in order to generate leads. Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. The affiliate is compensated for displaying the advertisement.

Age (site age, page age, etc.)

Some social networks or search systems, such as Google’s search algorithm, may take site age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents dependent on age.

This is the name of the Crawler/spider that is currently visiting a page. Spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalogue websites on the internet. When a spider crawls a particular website, this is known as ‘being spidered’.

Ajax (shorthand for asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a group of interrelated Website Development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. It allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load.

Amazon owned search service which measures website traffic. Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.

An algorithm is an operational programming rule that determine how a search engine indexes content and displays the results to its users. Usually referring to Google’s ranking and indexing algorithm that determines a sites rank for a specific query.

Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features. Made its debut in mid-1999, it grew out of FTP Search, Tor Egge’s doctorate thesis at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare.

Most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object.

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Looks like this…

Alt tags alternate text associated with a web page graphic that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the graphic. Alt tags should convey what the graphic is for or about and contain good relevant keywords. Alt tags also make web pages more accessible to the disabled. For example, a vision-impaired user may have a web browser that reads aloud the text and alt tags on a page. (For those familiar with HTML, “alt” isn’t actually a tag by itself but an attribute to the “img” tag.). Note that the value of Alt tags for SEO have been discounted over time by the search engines to the point that now it is of minimal value

One of the largest internet retailing website. Amazon.com is rich in consumer generated media. Amazon also owns a number of other popular websites, including IMDB and Alexa.

Software, sometimes provided as a service, which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site. In the SEO industry Google Analytics is a very popular option, as it is feature-rich and free.

Anchor text is the actual text part of a link (often underlined). Used by search engines as an important ranking factor. Google pays particular attention to the text used in a hyperlink and associates the keywords contained in the anchor text to the page being linked to.

An ad with movement/animation, often an interactive Java applet, Shockwave or Flash file.

‘Announce’ a website to the engines by adding a link to it from another site; that is, one that’s already indexed by the search engines.

Popular web portal which merged with Time Warner. AOL Inc. , formerly known as America Online is an American global Internet services and media company.

Application Program Interface – a series of conventions or routines used to access software functions. Most major search products have an API program.

An acronym for Active Server Pages, a Microsoft-invented, proprietary programming language for building dynamic web sites. ASP is also an acronym for Application Service Provider, a hosted service available via the Internet.

Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they dumped Jeeves in early 2006. Their search engine is powered by the Teoma search technology, which is largely reliant upon Kleinberg’s concept of hubs and authorities.

The ability of a domain or page to rank well in search engines. Five large factors associated with site and page authority are link equity, site age, traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content. Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web.

Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority.

Pay Per Click search engines are growing increasingly complex in their offerings. To help large advertisers cope with the increasing sophistication and complexity of these offerings some search engines and third party software developers have created software which makes it easier to control your ad spend. Some of the more advanced tools can integrate with your analytics programs and help you focus on conversion, ROI, and earnings elasticity instead of just looking at cost per click.

Automated Submitting is using automated software such as WebPosition Gold or an Application Service Provider (ASP) such as Microsoft b-central’s Submit-It service to submit your web pages to the search engines.

This tactic is frowned upon by the search engines. Indeed, some search engines such as AltaVista have completely automated submissions by requiring the user to re-key in a one-time use submission code that is displayed on the submission page as a graphic.