SEO Glossary

The portion of relevant documents that were retrieved when compared to all relevant documents.

Sometimes expressed as the percentage of the universe of a target audience, however it is measured by the total number of unique users who will see the ad over a specific period of time.

Nepotistic link exchanges where websites try to build false authority by trading links, using three way link trades, or other low quality link schemes.

When sites link naturally there is going to be some amount of cross linking within a community, but if most or all of your links are reciprocal in nature it may be a sign of ranking manipulation. Also sites that trade links off topic or on links pages that are stashed away deep within their sites probably do not pass much link authority, and may add more risk than reward.

Quality reciprocal link exchanges in and of themselves are not a bad thing, but most reciprocal link offers are of low quality. If too many of your links are of low quality it may make it harder for your site to rank for relevant queries, and some search engines may look at inlink and outlink ratios as well as link quality when determining how natural a site’s link profile is.

Where the Internet user is automatically taken to another web page address without him/her clicking on anything. Redirects are generally not good for search engine rankings, as they dilute PageRank. There is also the risk that the search engine spider will not follow your redirect.

Fees paid in exchange for delivering a qualified sales lead or purchase inquiry. For example, an affiliate drives traffic to other companies’ sites, typically in exchange for a percentage of sales or a flat referral fee.

A web page, containing a link to your web page, that delivered your visitor to your web page. For example, if Google’s search results (for example on a search for “britney spears”) contained a link to a page on your site and the user clicked on that link.

A company which allows you to register domain names.

The source from which a website visitor came from.

Ensuring your brand related keywords display results which reinforce your brand. Many hate sites tend to rank highly for brand related queries.

A link which shows the relation of the current URL to the URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.

Example relative link

{code type=html}Cool Stuff{/code}

Example absolute link

{code type=html}Cool Stuff{/code}

If a site has been penalized for spamming they may fix the infraction and ask for reinclusion. Depending on the severity of the infraction and the brand strength of the site they may or may not be added to the search index.

A measure of how useful searchers find search results.

Many search engines may also bias organic search results to informational resources since commercial ads also show in the search results.

Low-cost advertising space that is relatively undesirable or otherwise unsold.

Format and stylize HTML source code into the final format for the visitor’s screen. For example, text within tags will be made bold.

A repeat visitor is a single individual or browser who accesses a website or webpage more than once over a specified period of time.

A copy of a dynamic web site or a group of web pages from a dynamic site, saved as static HTML files.

An index of keywords which stores records of matching documents that contain those keywords.

Much like search engine submission, resubmission is generally a useless program which is offered by businesses bilking naive consumers out of their money for a worthless service.

Can refer to SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

As in “URL rewriting”

See “spider”

A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search engines which files not to crawl. Some search engines will still list your URLs as URL only listings even if you block them using a robots.txt file.

Return on Investment is a measure of how much return you receive from each marketing dollar. While ROI is a somewhat sophisticated measurement, some search marketers prefer to account for their marketing using more sophisticate profit elasticity calculations.

The scheduling of ads across an entire site, often at a lower cost than the purchase of specific pages or sub-sections of the site. A run-of-site ad campaign is rotated on all general, non-featured ad spaces on a site.

Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication is a method of syndicating information to a feed reader or other software which allows people to subscribe to a channel they are interested in.