SEO Glossary

Some search engine marketers lacking in creativity try to market their services as being ethical, whereas services rendered by other providers are somehow unethical. SEO services are generally neither ethical or unethical. They are either effective or ineffective.

SEO is an inherently risky business, but any quality SEO service provider should make clients aware of potential risks and rewards of different recommended techniques.

Unique visitors are a count of individual users who have accessed your web site. It should be noted that the “user session” metric does not yield an accurate unique visitor count, as multiple user sessions can be generated by one unique visitor

The term “universe” in the world of advertising means the total population of the target audience

Search engines frequently update their algorithms and data sets to help keep their search results fresh and make their relevancy algorithms hard to update. Most major search engines are continuously updating both their relevancy algorithms and search index.

Uniform Resource Locator is the unique address of any web document.

A technique used to help make URLs more unique and descriptive to help facilitate better sitewide indexing by major search engines.

How easy it is for customers to perform the desired actions.

The structure and formatting of text and hyperlink based calls to action can drastically increase your website usability, and thus conversion rates.

Things like a large stream of traffic, repeat visitors, multiple page views per visitor, a high clickthrough rate, or a high level of brand related search queries may be seen by some search engines as a sign of quality. Some search engines may

Bulletin board network featuring thousands of newsgroups.

The name of the browser/spider that is currently visiting a page.

User-generated-content (USG) is content created and published by the end-users online. USG is comprised of videos, podcasts and posts on discussion groups, blogs, wiki’s and social media sites. USG allows for a wider content provider base and the chance for all users to share their opinions online. Criticism of USG includes credibility and quality issues.

An instance of an Internet user accessing your web site for a length of time, then leaving. During a user session any number of pages may be accessed. A user session is considered finished once an arbitrarily chosen period of inactivity – typically 30 minutes – is exceeded.