SEO Glossary

Inbound links pointing to a web page. Inbound links were originally important, prior to the emergence of search engines, as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in helping search engines determine quality content and sites to be ranked high.

Marketing technique where you make something look overtly pure or as though it has another purpose to get people to believe in it or vote for it (by linking at it or sharing it with friends), then switch the intent or purpose of the website after you gain authority.

When a search engine blocks your site from appearing in its search results. Usually the result of breaching their terms of service and/or participating in illegitimate and manipulative optimization tactics.

A graphic image, usually a GIF or JPEG, that can be placed anywhere on a web page, most frequently centered across the top. The tile ad is a smaller counterpart, typically grouped with other tile ads along a side margin. The standard banner ad is 468 x 60 pixels; the most common size for tile ads is 125 x 125 pixels.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau regulates guidelines and standards for display advertising sizes

During the first web boom in the 1990′s many businesses were based on eyeballs more than actually building real value. Many ads were typically quite irrelevant and web users learned to ignore the most common ad types. In many ways text ads are successful because they are more relevant and look more like content, but with the recent surge in the popularity of text ads some have speculated that in time people may eventually become text ad blind as well.

John Linwood Battelle is a journalist as well as founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing. He has been a visiting professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and also maintains Searchblog, a weblog covering search, technology, and media. Popular search and media blogger who co-founded The Industry Standard and Wired, and authored a popular book on search called The Search.

A line of code placed in an ad or on a web page that helps track the visitor’s actions, such as registrations or purchases. A web beacon is often invisible because it’s only 1 x 1 pixel in size and has no color. Also known as web bug, 1 by 1 GIF, invisible GIF or tracker GIF.

Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or implied intent. For example, if I recently searched for mortgages then am later reading a book review the page may still show me mortgage ads.

Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of the largest search engines may bias their organic search results toward informational (ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is heavily cited.

Search personalization biases our search results based on our own media consumption and searching habits.

Any advertisement that is not a banner, such as an interstitial or a pop-up ad. This is the idea that, in addition to banner ads, there are other ways to use the Internet to communicate a marketing message.

Software or an ASP service used to manage bids on pay per click search engines such as Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google AdWords.

Bidding means placing a bid price that you are willing to pay as an advertiser on a pay per click search engine. The highest bid for a given keyword achieves the top spot in the PPC search results. In Overture, the top three bids are “featured” on Overture’s partners’ sites, including AOL, Altavista, Infospace, and others. The minimum bid amount on Overture is 5 cents per clickthrough.

Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next.

Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

Lists that either search engines or vigilante users compile of search engine spammers, which may be used to ban those spammers from search engines or to boycott them

A method used to break a page down into multiple points on the web graph by breaking its pages down into smaller blocks. Block level link analysis can be used to help determine if content is page specific or part of a navigational system. It also can help determine if a link is a natural editorial link, what other links that link should be associated with, and/or if it is an advertisement. Search engines generally do not want to count advertisements as votes.

Also known as a “weblog”. An online diary with entries made on a regular if not daily basis. Some blogs are maintained by an anonymous author who uses a nickname or handle instead of his or her real name. A content management system that makes distributing content fast and easy.

Either manually or automatically (via a software program) adding low value or no value comments to other sites.

Blogger is a free blog platform owned by Google. It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Blogspot.com, or to FTP content to your own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

An assembly of blog URLs – blogs that the blogger reads regularly – displayed at the sidebar of the blog.

A way to make words appear in a bolder font. Words that appear in a bolder font are more likely to be read by humans that are scanning a page. A search engine may also place slightly greater weighting on these words than regular text, but if you write natural page copy and a word or phrase appears on a page many times it probably does not make sense or look natural if you bold every occurrence.

Example use:

Rankings from SEO

Rankings from SEO

Either appears as: Rankings from SEO

The ‘meaty’ textual content of a web page. Body copy refers to text visible to users, doesn’t include graphical content, navigation, or information hidden in the HTML source code.

Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy.

A method of searching for information in databases that combines search terms with the operators AND, OR, NOT, and parentheses. By default most search engines include AND with your query, requiring results to be relevant for all the words in your query.

Short for robot, Googlebot or ‘spider.

Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand. Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle, and are some of the highest value and highest converting keywords.

Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation aid used in user interfaces. It gives users a way to keep track of their locations within programs or documents. The term comes from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.

Russian American computer scientist and industrialist who, with Larry Page, is best known as the co-founder of Google, Inc.

Also known as a doorway page, an information page, or spam. A web page created for the sole purpose of ranking well in the search engines. This is something that you do not want to have on your website.

Broad Match is a form of “keyword matching” and refers to the matching of a search listing or advertisement to selected keywords in any order.

This means if selected keywords are “running shoes”, then ads or a search listing may be displayed if the users searches upon the following example keywords:

Any Order: “shoes running”

Synonym: “running sneakers”

Plural, Singular: “running shoe”

Broad match terms are less targeted than exact or phrase matches.

A hyperlink which is not functioning. A link which does not lead to the desired location. Links may be broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are:

• a website going offline
• linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
• moving a page’s location
• changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

Program used to view the world wide web. The most popular browsers are Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Opera.

The borders of a Web browser window, which include the window frames, menus, toolbars and scroll bars. When designing a Web page, the browser chrome must be added to determine the width of the page.

WWII scientist who wrote a seminal research paper on the concepts of hypertext and a memory extension device titled As We May Think.

A well trusted directory of business websites and information. Business.com is also a large Pay Per Click arbitrage player.

An ASP that submits many URLs to the search engines on your behalf. For example: SubmitWolf. Search engines don’t like these. (see “automated submitting”)

A clickable graphic that takes the user to another page or executes a program, such as a software demo or a video player.

Before making significant purchases consumers typically research what brands and products fit their needs and wants. Keyword based search marketing allows you to reach consumers at any point in the buying cycle. In many markets branded keywords tend to have high search volumes and high conversion rates.

The buying cycle may consist of the following stages:

• Problem Discovery: prospect discovers a need or want.
• Search: after discovering a problem look for ways to solve the need or want. These searches may contain words which revolve around the core problem the prospect is trying to solve or words associated with their identity.
• Evaluate: may do comparison searches to compare different models, and also search for negative information like product sucks, etc.
• Decide: look for information which reinforces your view of product or service you decided upon.
• Purchase: may search for shipping related information or other price related searches. purchases may also occur offline.
• Reevaluate: some people leave feedback on their purchases . If a person is enthusiastic about your brand they may inadvertently cut your marketing costs by providing free highly trusted word of mouth marketing.