SEO Glossary

A popular Apple browser.

Scientist who pioneered the information retrieval field.

Designed to ‘scrape’ search-engine results pages or other sources of content (often without permission) to create content for a website. Scraper sites are generally full of advertising or redirect the user to other sites.

Intrusive software and programs which usually target ads, violate privacy, and are often installed without the computer owner knowing what the software does.

A tool or device used to find relevant information. Search engines consist of a spider, index, relevancy algorithms and search results.

Strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines.

Search engine optimisation is the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries.

SEO consists largely of keyword research, SEO copywriting, information architecture, link building, brand building, building mindshare, reputation management, and viral marketing.

A page of search results delivered by a search engine.

Many search engines store user search history information. This data can be used for better ad targeting or to make old information more findable.

Search engines may also determine what a document is about and how much they trust a domain based on aggregate usage data. Many brand related search queries is a strong signal of quality.

Marketing a website in search engines. Typically via SEO, buying Pay Per Click ads, and paid inclusion.

A keyword, or phrase used to conduct a search engine query.

See “keyword popularity”.

See “pull-down list”.

Acronym for Search Engine Marketing.

Acronym for “search engine optimisation” and/or “search engine optimiser,” the person who does the optimising.

Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries.

There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly

1. Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content for your site or already have an amazingly authoritative site.

2. Write page titles that are exceptionally compelling to link at. If enough people link at them then your pages and site will rank for many relevant queries even if the keywords are not in the page titles.

Search Engine Results Page is the page on which the search engines show the results for a search query.

Computer used to host files and serve them to the world wide web.

Files hosted on servers which display website traffic trends and sources.

Server logs typically do not show as much data and are not as user friendly as analytics software. Not all hosts provide server logs.

The process of breaking down a large database to find the document vector (relevance) for various items by comparing them to other items and documents.

Important steps:

Stemming: taking in account for various forms of a word on a page

Local Weighting: increasing the relevance of a given document based on the frequency a term appears in the document

Global Weighting: increasing the relevance of terms which appear in a small number of pages as they are more likely to be on topic than words that appear in most all documents.

Normalization: penalizing long copy and rewarding short copy to allow them fair distribution in results. a good way of looking at this is like standardizing things to a scale of 100.

Techniques used to steal another web sites traffic, including the use of spyware or cybersquatting.

Page which can be used to help give search engines a secondary route to navigate through your site.

Tips:

On large websites the on page navigation should help search engines find all applicable web pages.

On large websites it does not make sense to list every page on the site map, just the most important pages.

Site maps can be used to help redistribute internal link authority toward important pages or sections, or sections of your site that are seasonally important.

Site maps can use slightly different or more descriptive anchor text than other portions of your site to help search engines understand what your pages are about.

Site maps should be created such that they are useful to humans, not just search engines.

See “user session”.

Refers to the relative portion of exposure of an advertiser within a defined market sector over a period of time.

Share of Voice can refer to the portion of exposure in advertising, the blogosphere, etc.

An animated ad that moves across the browser, usually with sound effects. It animates only long enough to play a message before settling into a stationary ad on the page

A tall, thin ad unit that runs down the side of a web page. A skyscraper can be 120 x 600 pixels or160 x 600 pixels.

Central editorially driven community news site focusing on technology and nerd related topics created by Rob Malda.

A small program or script that detects which web browser software an Internet user is using and then serves up the particular browser-specific cascading style sheet to match. Sniffer scripts are also used to detect whether a user has the Macromedia Flash plug-in installed, and if so, a Flash version of the page is displayed.

Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are social bookmarking sites and social news sites.

Unsolicited email messages.

Search engines also like to outsource their relevancy issues by calling low quality search results spam. They have vague ever changing guidelines which determine what marketing techniques are acceptable at any given time. Typically search engines try hard not to flag false positives as spam, so most algorithms are quite lenient, as long as you do not build lots of low quality links, host large quantities of duplicate content, or perform other actions that are considered widely outside of relevancy guidelines. If your site is banned from a search engine you may request reinclusion after fixing the problem.

Spamdexing (also known as search spam, search engine spam or web spam) involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

Keyword-rich gibberish used as search engine fodder instead of thoughtfully written, interesting content. Spamglish often includes meaningless sentences and keyword repetition.

The act of creating and distributing spam.

Search engine crawlers which search or “spider” the web for pages and pictures to include in the index.

Many non-traditional search companies have different spiders which perform other applications. For example, TurnItInBot searches for plagiarism. Spiders should obey the robots.txt protocol.

An infinite loop that a spider may get caught in if it explores a dynamic site where the URLs of pages keep changing. For example, a home page may have a different URL and the search engine may not be able to ascertain that it is the home page that it has already indexed but under another URL. If search engines were to completely index dynamic web sites, they would inevitably have large amounts of redundant content and download millions of pages.

Feature rich or elegantly designed beautiful web page which typically offers poor usability and does not offer search engines much content to index.

Spam blog, typically consisting of stolen or automated low quality content.

Software programs which spy on web users, often used to collect consumer research and to behaviorally targeted ads.

Topical lens site created by Seth Godin.

Server Side Includes are a way to call portions of a page in from another page. SSI makes it easier to update websites.

Sites that use valid XHTML and CSS, separate the content layer from the presentation layer. Because standards compliant sites are accessible and usable to both humans and spiders alike, they tend to rank better in search engines than non-compliant sites.

As in “static web page.” Means that the web page was not created dynamically from a database, but instead previously created and saved as a HTML file.

content which does not change frequently. May also refer to content that does not have any social elements to it and does not use dynamic programming languages.

Many static sites do well, but the reasons fresh content works great for SEO are:

If you keep building content every day you eventually build a huge archive of content

By frequently updating your content you keep building mindshare, brand equity, and give people fresh content worth linking at

Using the stem of a word to help satisfy search relevancy requirements. EX: searching for swimming can return results which contain swim. This usually enhances the quality of search results due to the extreme diversity of word used in, and their application in the English language.

Certain characters, such as ampersand (&), equals sign (=), and question mark (?), when in a web page’s URL, tip off a search engine that the page in question is dynamic. Search engines are cautious of indexing dynamic pages for fear of spider traps, thus pages that contain stop characters in their URL run the risk of not getting indexed and becoming part of the “Invisible Web.” Google won’t crawl more than one dynamic level deep. So dynamic pages with stop characters in its URL should get indexed if a static page links to it. Eliminating stop characters from all URLs on your site will go a long way in ensuring that your entire site gets indexed by Google.

Common words (ex: a, to, and, is …) which add little relevancy to a search query, and are thus are removed from the search query prior to finding relevant search results.

It is both fine and natural to use stop words in your page content. The reason stop words are ignored when people search is that the words are so common that they offer little to no discrimination value.

Audio-visual content that is played as it is being downloaded. Thus, an Internet user could begin watching a video clip as the footage downloads rather than having to wait for the clip to download in its entirety beforehand.

The act of making information systems and related websites aware of your website. In most cases you no longer need to submit your website to large scale search engines, they follow links and index content. The best way to submit your site is to get others to link to it.

Some topical or vertical search systems will require submission, but you should not need to submit your site to large scale search engine.

Founder and lead editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, who later started SearchEngineLand.com.

Documents which generally are trusted less and rank lower than documents in the main search index.

Pages which are indexed in Google but do not exist at this time. But during searching for a particular thing they are shown in the search result pages. These pages provides additional information about the particular search.

An option that allows you to extend your reach by distributing ads to additional partner sites.