SEO Glossary

Jimmy Donal Wales (; born August 7, 1966), also known as “Jimbo”, is an American Internet entrepreneur and a co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia.

Software installed on the Internet user’s computer that allows him or her to view web pages. Popular web browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Also known as a ‘web robot’ or ‘web spider’, it is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner.

Web standards are widely adopted guidelines for CSS, XHTML etc. Web standards help ensure that web sites are accessible on a wide variety of platforms and to a wide range of users including users with disabilities.

Web2.0 refers to the new generation of web based services and communities characterised by participation, collaboration and sharing of information among users online. Web2.0 applications include wikis, folksonomies, blogs and social networking sites which encourage user-generated content (USG) and social interaction online.

A weblog, or “blog” is an online journal. Weblogs are something of a phenomenon and have become increasing mainstream. Blog search engine Technorati listed 71 million weblogs as of May 2007.

Weblog authors choose whether to blog openly or anonymously. Weblog entries are made regularly and chronologically but are displayed in reverse chronological order. The range of topics covered is endless. Some weblogs focus on a particular subject like travel, fashion, or astrology while others are personal online diaries.

Weblogs typically are made up of posts, images, videos, comments and links.

Popular blogging platforms include: Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, LiveJournal and Dreamhost.

Each domain has an owner of record. Ownership data is stored in the Whois record for that domain.

Some domain registrars also allow you to hide the ownership data of your sites. Many large scale spammers use fake Whois data.

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.

People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs.

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.

Software which allows information to be published using collaborative editing.

Launched in January 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is now the largest and fastest growing encyclopedia online. In fact it is one of the world’s ten most visited websites.

As of September 2007 the English Edition of Wikipedia had a massive 2 million articles and 609 million words, making it around 15 times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The site has more than 100 servers set up to deal with the 10,000 – 35,000 page requests every second.

Wikipedia is multilingual and is currently available in 253 languages. Operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, it is a collaboratively written by volunteers around the world.

Contributing to Wikipedia:

Is a peer-reviewed publicatin.

Does not require contributors legal names.

Requires contributions are supported by published and verifiable sources.

Due to its open nature, Wikipedia has been criticized as an easy target for trolls, vandals, internet marketers, advertisers, and even those with a political agenda to push. However studies have shown that vandalism is usually short-lived and that generally the site is as accurate as other encyclopedias.

Wikipedia uses MediaWiki as its software platform, MediaWiki is free open source software built on a MySQl database.

For More: www.wikipedia.org

A lexical database of English words which can be used to help search engines understand word relationships.

WordPress is an excellent open-source web publishing system or content management system. Created primarily as blogging software, WordPress is written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database, it is ideal for managing content that is frequently updated.

Distributed under the GNU General Public License the latest version, WordPress 2.2.3, was released on Sept 8, 2007 and now has an install base of more than 20,000,000.

WordPress is described as a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability by its creators.

Features include:

Integrated link management

Plugin support

Search friendly permalink structure

Static Pages

Trackbacks

Pingbacks

Typographic filters

WYSIWYG

Nested categories

Multiple authors

For More: www.wordpress.org

Wordtracker is a popular keyword research tool established by Andy Mindel and Mike Mindel in 1997.

It is designed to assist search marketing professionals and webmasters in identifying important keywords and phrases relevant to their website. It provides detailed information on the number of searches, predicted number of daily searches, competing pages and KEI data. Information can be broken down by search engine.

Search terms are collected from – Dogpile and Metacrawler which represent around 1% of searches online. Due to its relatively small sample size Wordtracker is vulnerable to competitor spamming, and errors in the database can be magnified. Some terms can appear to be more popular than they really are – and others will be omitted all together.

For more: Wordtracker.com