SEO Glossary

KPIs help organizations achieve organizational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. The key indicators are agreed upon by an organization and are indicators which can be measured that will reflect success factors. The KPIs selected must reflect the organization’s goals, they must be key to its success, and they must be measurable. Key performance indicators usually are long-term considerations for an organization.”

A search phrase made up of keywords. See “keyword”.

A word that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn’t appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it’s highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay per click search engine).

An old measure of search engine relevancy based on how prominent keywords appeared within the content of a page. Keyword density is no longer a valid measure of relevancy over a broad open search index though.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

The relationship between various related keywords that searchers search for. Some searches are particularly well aligned with others due to spelling errors, poor search relevancy, and automated or manual query refinement.

Keyword matching is the process of selecting and providing advertising or information that match the user’s search query.

The number of occurrences of searches done by Internet users of a given keyword during a period of time. Both WordTracker.com and Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool provide keyword popularity numbers.

The location of a given keyword in the HTML source code of a web page. The higher up in the page a particular word is, the more prominent it is and thus the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search engine user. Consequently, it’s best to have your first paragraph be chock full of important keywords rather than superfluous marketingspeak. This concept also applies to the location of important keywords within individual HTML tags, such as heading tags, title tags, or hyperlink text. So get in the habit of starting off your title tags with a good keyword rather than “Welcome to.”

Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search. Search engine optimization professionals research keywords in order to achieve better rankings in their desired keywords

Tools which help you discover potential keywords based on past search volumes, search trends, bid prices, and page content from related websites.

A shortlist of the most popular keyword research tools:

SEO Book Keyword Research Tool – free, driven by Overture, this tool cross references all of my favorite keyword research tools. In addition to linking to traditional keyword research tools, it also links to tools such as Google Suggest, Buzz related tools, vertical databases, social bookmarking and tagging sites, and latent semantic indexing related tools.

Overture (defunct) – free, powered from Yahoo! search data. Heavily biased toward over representing commercial queries, combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single data point.

Google – free, powered from Google search data.

Wordtracker – paid, powered from Dogpile and MetaCrawler. Due to small sample size their keyword database may be easy to spam.

Writing copy that uses excessive amounts of the core keyword.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

When a given page or bit of text is chock full of good keywords rather than a bunch of meaningless words (e.g. “welcome”, “click here”) or irrelevant words (e.g. “solution”)

Born October 1971, is an American computer scientist, MacArthur Fellow, Nevanlinna Prize winner, and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Scientist largely responsible for much of the research that went into hubs and authorities based search relevancy algorithms.