Glossary

CAPTCHA
A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U V  W  X  Y  Z

A
Above the Fold: This traditional term is used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In web marketing it refers to the area of content viewable prior to scrolling.  
Absolute link: A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. This is opposed to a relative link. When you see a URL which is completely spelled out like: http://www.ckmg.com/ that is an absolute link.  Absolutely!

Accessibility: The task of making websites user friendly for blind or disabled people.

AdCenter: Microsoft’s cost per click network. Although boasting many cool features, it is quite new in comparison to Google’s Adwords.

AdSense: Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers to display relevant Google ads on their website to both earn money and enhance their content. These ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site. AdSense automatically publishes relevant advertisements near your content so you can share the profits from those ad clicks with Google.

Adwords: A system used by Google to drive its cost per click advertising system.

Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing programs work by allowing a merchant to expand their market reach by paying independent agents on a cost per action basis. The affiliate only gets paid if a visitor completes an action. This is a new way of pay a finder’s fee. Examples of affiliate compensations are pay per click, pay per lead, and pay per sale.  This is a good marketing strategy because you will not incur expenses unless you already have a result.

Agent name: This is the name of the crawler or spider that is currently visiting a page. A Spider gets sent out by search engines to catalogue or crawl around websites on the internet. You want your website to get “spidered” by the search engines.

Ajax: Short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique which allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load. This enables the web pages to increase interactivity, speed, and user friendliness.

Alexa: Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic.  Alexa is biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. This is a free service, but with that, it is not always accurate.

Algorithm: Rules that a search engine uses to rank the listings in the index in response to a search.  These algorithms are not revealed as a means to protect each search engine from competitors and spammers. Search engines change and evolve their algorithms often which will have a temporary or permanent effect of the site’s ranking.

Alt tag: Used to display a short text description of an image when you hover your mouse over it. 

AltaVista: Search engine bought out by Overture. Prior to Overture, AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search engines, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. That update along with mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of market share.

Analyticals:  See also web analytics

Anchor text: The visible text part of a link or hyperlink, which is also the text that a user would click on to follow the specified link. Search engines use this as a factor in their "hypertextual" algorithm.  Anchor texts rank highly because the anchor texts often are relevant to the landing pages and provide good search results.  Anchor texts are highly manipulated but search engines overlook this due to the high relevancy that the searches deliver.
Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. Too much similar anchor text may be considered a sign of manipulation, and are then tossed out.

Announcing: See also Submission

API or Application Program Interface: An API is a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications; it determines how a service is invoked through the application.

ASP: Active Server Pages. A programming language used to create web sites invented by no other than Microsoft, of course.

ASP: Short for Application Service Provider

Application Service Provider: A business that provides computer based services to their customers over a network. Some examples of ASPs are:

  • Functional: Like a credit card payment or payroll services.
  • Vertical Market: A solution package for a specific customer type, like a chiropractic office.
  • Enterprise: A broad spectrum solution
  • Local: Small business services within a smaller area.
  • Volume: A specialized ASP that offers a low cost solution via their own website, like Pay pal.

Authority: The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search engines.
Automated Submitting: Using an ASP or software to submit your web pages to the search engines. WebPosition Gold and Microsoft b-Central’s Submit-It are examples of these software systems. Search engines do not encourage this type of submission.

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B

Back links: Incoming links to website, which is used as a kind of voting system by search engine algorithms to determine the importance and relevance of a website.

Banned: Web pages may be removed from the search engines because they have been recognized as spam or violating search guidelines.

Bid management tool: An ASP service used to manage bids on pay per click search engines such as Overture.

Bidding: Placing a bid as an advertiser that you are willing to pay as an advertiser on a pay per click campaign.

Blacklist: a list that a search engine compiles of search engine spammers. These spammers are banned from search engines or the list is used to boycott against them.

Blind traffic: Just like it sounds, traffic that doesn’t know where it’s going. This is low quality traffic that has been misled by spam or advertising.

Blog: Short for Web Blog. These diaries kept online can be used for personal writings or as a marketing tool. They also appear in web searches.

Blog Comment Spam: Can be manually added or added via an evil software program adding no value comments to your nice little blog.
“Nice entry! Let’s be blog friends” from: Free Adult Internet Activities Hardcore

Blogger: This free blog platform is owned by Google.

Blogroll: A ride at Camp Snoopy. Also known as a link list on a blog which takes you to other blogs owned by either the same company or friends of the blogger.

Bot: Short for Robot or spider.

Bridge page: See Doorway Page

Bulk submission services: These ASPs will submit many URLs to the search engines on your behalf. These are not favored by search engines. See also automated submitting.

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C

Cache: A cache is why web pages load so quickly when you hit the back button because your computer stores copies of web pages locally on its hard drive or within the search engine’s database.

CGI-bin: A virtual directory contained in URLs indicates a CGI script is in use. CGI short for Common Gateway Interface. These URLs tell spiders that your page is exciting.

Cloaking: When a website gives different content to the search engine bots than it does to human visitors.  A web server will feed a spider content that is laced with key words fooling it in ranking it higher on the search page. In reality, the visitor is given different and unrelated content. Obviously, this is a frustrating practice and will likely lead to getting banned from the search engines.

Clustering: In a search engine result page, clustering limits a website to only appear once or twice.

ColdFusion: A web scripting language centered on database access. ColdFusion files end with the .CFM extension.

Comment tag: An HTML tag that can be seen by the search engine but not by us.

Content: Specifically for web optimization, this refers to the text and visual or aural experiences on a website. SEO companies will help you create unique, interesting, and constantly changing content to help your site rank high. But we do it the best.

Conversion: If a website convinces you to sign up for their weekly email newsletter, conversion has taken place. There is also conversion if you move from a visitor to a customer.

Conversion Rate: The rate at which visitors are converted into customers or return visitors.

Cookie: Cookies are information bits placed onto your computer by the web server. This is where remember information like email addresses and order numbers are stored.

Cost per Action: The price paid for an action like signing up for email updates, downloading a coupon, or registering on a website.

Cost per Click: The price paid for a click than leads to your landing page.

Cost per Thousand: Also shown as CPM. An advertiser pays an agreed amount for the number of times their ad is seen by a potential consumer regardless if there is an action made, like a sale. The M is Latin for thousand.

Crawler: Also known as a spider, robot, or bot. These little guys crawl through your website and assist the search engines by gathering listings or the relevant search.

Cross Linking: Multiple sites that all link to each other.

CTR: See Click through Rate

Custom Error Page: A page created to give the user a friendly message that their website is not at that location. You want to keep the visitor on your site so it is smart to offer a sitemap on your error page and male it easy for the user to move somewhere else within your site.

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D

Dead Link: A link which is not longer functional.

Deep Link: A link which points to another internal page within the website.

Dedicated server: A server which only services one website or a small collection of websites owned by one person. The opposite is a virtual server which tends to not be as reliable.

Delisting: Pages that are removed from the indexes of search engines.

Digg: A social, news site where users rank stories which in return become the popular.

Directory: A type of search engine where humans are responsible for the review and cataloging of websites as opposed to a search engine spider. DMOZ is a major directory.

DMOZ: The Open Directory Project is a large directory of websites edited by volunteer humans.

DNS or Domain Name Server: A naming mechanism used to help resolve a domain name to a specific TCP/IP address.

Domain: A scheme used for logical organization of the web. It is also used to describe a specific website.

Doorway Pages: These pages are designed to rank for highly targeted search investigations, usually designed to take the searcher to a page with other advertisements.
For example, when you see a page that says Click Here to Enter but does not offer you and information. Sometimes cloaking is used in this situation so that the user never even sees the doorway page. Search engines have strong guidelines against doorway pages.

Dreamweaver: A web development and editing software.

Duplicate Content: A search engine does not want to index a bunch of content that is similar so often this content will get filtered out.

Dynamic Content: Content that is assembled and changed depending on what the user is requesting. Also, a page that is generated just as the user views it. Search engines are somewhat sensitive to this but no longer penalize the website for dynamic content. You can spot dynamic content if the URL ends with a .cgi, .asp, or html. Do not include a ? in your URL to avoid being banned from the search engines.

Dynamic Languages: PHP & ASP are dynamic languages. These languages can build web pages in seconds when requested.  Used to create dynamic content.

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E

Editorial Link: Search engines value links as quality votes. It is better to earn links rather than buying or bartering for them.

Emphasis: An HTML tag used to highlight or emphasize text. In general, it is more important to have your text be legible to your human visitors rather than nicely jargoned for the search bots.

Entry Page: The page where the visitor enters your site.

Ethical SEO: Sounds like a character from Star Wars. SEO marketers are services which manipulate the search engine algorithms, or so the search engines say. There are ways of being unethical or ethical but more so, being effective or ineffective depending on the strategies being employed. Being an ethical SEO means disclosing risks to your clients and if you take the little guys’ money -- do something with it. See also CKMG.com for an ethical approach to SEO.

Everflux: A Googlean word referring to the continuous refreshing and updating of major search indexes.

External Link: A link which directs you to another domain.

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F

Fair Use: Stated exceptions that allow the use of work under copyright without requiring any permission of the original copyright holder.

FFA or Free for All: A page where links can be added by anyone. Ever get spam in your email?

Feed: Content management systems like blogs often allow readers to subscribe to content update notifications using RSS or XML feeds. A feed may also pertain to pay per click or merchant product feeds.

Feed Reader: Websites that are used to subscribe to feed updates and notifications. Examples of feed readers are Bloglines, Google Reader, and MyYahoo.

Filter: Filters exist in search engines to give the query a clean result. A filter may be used to find duplicate content, to seek out higher link quality, and anchor text. These filters also aid is penalizing spammers from appearing in the search.

Firefox: Another option for web browsing. This rivals Explorer. You can download Firefox to your computer.

Frames: This is an HTML technique which allows a webmaster to display two or more separate web pages within a single browser screen. Sites using frames are quite problematic for search engines to crawl and may not be indexed properly. Search engines often will only index pages linked within the <NOFRAMES> tag. If your site utilizes frames, it is highly recommended that you build a site map for your website, and link to it from within your <NOFRAMES> tag.

Fresh content: With fresh content, your give your readers reasons to pay attention to your site, as in return visitors, and you will make your pages sticky to your readers. Sticky as in: stays on your page. Fresh content is not re-working existing content, it is creating new content.

FTP or File Transfer Protocol: This is a system or protocol for transferring data between computers.
 
Fuzzy Search: When you type in goggle into your search bar and Google appears on your screen, this is an example of a fuzzy search. The search will find terms even when they are misspelled.

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G

Gateway Page: See Doorway Page

GAP or Google Advertising Professional: This program qualifies marketers as being skilled AdWords marketers.

  • Get some skills at GAP

Geo-Targeting: Also called geographical targeting. A term mainly used in paid search advertising where it describes advertising being displayed only to users from a chosen geographical region (country, state, zip code, and radius). Geo-targeting aims to increase the relevance and thus effectiveness of advertising (as measured for example in click-through or conversion rates).
Graphical Search Inventory: Banners and other types of advertising units which can be synchronized to search keywords. Includes pop-ups, browser toolbars and rich media.
Google: The world’s leading search engine in terms of reach. Google was created by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Googlebot: Google’s search engine spider.

Google base: Free database of semantically structured information created by Google.

Google bombing: This is making a page rank high for a search query by pointing hundreds of links at it with the keywords in the anchor text.

Google bowling: When knock a competing website out of rank by pointing thousands of low quality links at their website. New sites are more at risk of being bowled out versus an established site.

Google keyword tool: This keyword research tool made possible by Google, helps you estimate the competition for keywords, helps determine related keywords, and will decipher what keywords are the most relevant to your website.

Google OneBox: The spot on the search page above the organic search results which are used to highlight vertical search results from Google News, Google Base, and other potential Google vertical search services.

Google sitemaps: This program will assist webmasters in working with Google to get their site indexed. Although this is helpful in ranking, it is more imperative to develop high quality editorial links to keep your site in the index.

Google Traffic Estimator: This tool estimates bid prices and how many queries will be made for a specific keyword.

Google trends: You can look at this tool to understand and analyze how Google searches for particular keywords change over time.

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H

Header or Headings: These are denoted in HTML with tags such as <h1> or <h2> and it is a good idea to use headings in your website. Search engines give more importance and quality to the text found in the headers and within these tags.

Header tag: Denoted in HTML with <head> and </head>. This identifies the page title, external file loads, and also META tags.

Hidden text: This sneaky text is only visible to search engines and not to humans. Search engines have savvied up and this is considered spam and your website will be banned from search engines.

Hit: The number of times a website is accessed. Often a single webpage will have links to multiple images so a single load can incite multiple hits. If you have a page containing five images, a single load of your webpage will get six hits, one for your page, and five for the images. A hit is also counted when a click is made to your website from a search engine.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The language of websites and what is used to create them.

Hijacking: Convincing a search engine that another website lives at your URL.
The techniques employed to do this are often referred to as 302 redirect or meta refresh.

Home Page: This is your main page of your website which will be crucial in your brand development and used to set up the navigational system of your entire site. Your homepage will be more competitive in the search engines because it is easy to build links at a home page. You need to keep your homepage focused on your brand and do not assume that your visitors will enter through your homepage. They may come to you via a more specific key word search.

Host: See server

HTTP or HyperText Transfer Protocol: This is the main protocol used to talk between a server and a web browser. HTTP is how the data is transferred from its place of residence on a server to an active browser.

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I

Inbound Link: This is a hypertext link to a page from another site which brings traffic to that site or page. These links help determine link popularity.

Internal Link: A link within the site which moves you from one page to another on the same site.

Information Architecture: An evolving field of study. The science and/or art of making and organizing information in the hopes of helping people fulfill their information needs. Information Architects investigate, analyze, and implement design and information systems.

Inktomi: A database of search results owned by Yahoo!

IP Address: Each computer or system has one of these and the Internet uses it to identify your computer. They are expressed as a number that sometimes appears on the bottom tool bar like: 128.456.78.243.

IP Spoofing: A sneaky procedure which hides your real IP address and appearing to be a different IP address.

Index: A collection of information that a search engine keeps and a searcher can use to find relevant information. The index is like a copy of all the web pages that the bots have found when searching the web.

Internet: A huge and expansive network of computers connected via TCP/IP.

Internet Explorer: Microsoft’s web browser. Rivaled by Netscape and Firefox, among others.

ISP or Internet Service Provider: These companies sell access to the web.

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J

JavaScript: A scripting language, created by Netscape that is embedded into HTML documents to add dynamic elements. Search engines do not index JavaScript content.

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K

Keyword: A word or group of words which may be more popular or more in demand by users when searching the Internet.

Keyword density: The ratio of how many keywords to total number of words.

Keyword domain name: Most people see this as spam. This is when the domain name uses hyphens and a lot of keywords as their site name with the hopes of ranking high in the search engines.

Keyword funnels: This tool will help you analyze your customer’s search behaviors. Most often, people search in specific patterns of keywords, for example they start with Online MBA and 2.2% of the time the try mba online next.

Keyword research tools: These tools are designed to help you research and discover keywords on past search volumes, trends, and page content. Some popular research tools are Overture, Google, and Wordtracker.

Keyword stuffing: We’ve all been harshly exposed to keyword stuffing. It is uncomfortable to read. It happens when the copy uses excessive amounts of the most popular keyword with the hopes of ranking higher in the search engines. What happens is the link quality is poor and the page ranks low anyway. 

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L

Landing Page: The page where a visitor lands on after clicking on your link or on an advertisement.

Landing Page Quality Scores: Google uses this score to help filter out ads which are poor quality from their AdWords program.

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI: LSI works by indexing patterns of word distribution or word co-occurrence. This process uses mathematics and semantics to blur the boundaries of straight keyword searching. The returns on the search results may not even have the keywords in it, but instead have many similar words appearing in relevant pages. This is known by many as a smarter search engine model.

Link: A navigational tool which automatically brings the user to another webpage or section of a document. Sometimes referred to as a hyperlink. Links are a foundation of the World Wide Web. Historically these are like footnotes or citations but now we can instantly access the information.

Link baiting: If you take this bait, you have found something of interest to capture your attention. Consequently, you might place a link to it from another website thus creating traffic and editorial popularity in the search engines. This technique is a new trend in SEO.

Link building: The construction of high quality links that point to your site in order to gain trust from the search engines.  Develop good content, mix up your anchor text, register your site in well known directories, network with bloggers, and create link bait.

Link bursts: A surge of quality links pointing at a website.

Link churn: The rate that a site is losing links.

Link equity: The strength of a site based on how many inbound quality links are pointing at it and the authority of the sites that the links are coming from.

Link farm: A group of web pages that all link to each other. These can be created manually but more often are a result of an automated program. These are viewed as a form of spam and may be referred to as spamdexing.

Link popularity: Pertaining to the number and quality of inbound links to your website.
If you would like to check your website’s popularity, you can use Marketleap.

Link text: The text that appears in a link. Like Content Kings Media Group is a link which contains the link text Content Kings Media Group.

Listings: The pages that appear on a search engine after a search has been completed.

Log files: A way of monitoring your traffic and deciphering what people are searching for to find your website. Log files are general in information, if you want deeper data, try using an analytics program.

Looksmart: Originally launched as a directory but now serves as a paid search provider.

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M

Mechanical Turks: Amazon.com has created this program which will allow you to hire humans to do the easier jobs that computers are bad at.

Meta Search:  This is a consolidation technique where searches are taken from various sources and out into a single search engine results page or SERP.

Meta tags: An entity of HTML placed within the heading section of a webpage. The most common meta tags are Keyword and Description tags.  Although still used by some search engines, they are not as important as they once were.
Misspellings: How many times have you typed in “morgage laon” and the right spelling of mortgage loan comes up?  This is because an intelligent marketer has optimized his site for this traffic.

Mindshare: How many people think about you and your product when thinking of products in your brand category.

Mirror site: Sites which mirror another site’s content. Search engine prefer not to index sites with duplicate content so often these mirror sites may be seen as spam.

MSN search: Microsoft’s answer to search engines.

MySpace: Now owned by Rupert Murdoch but humbly started in Santa Monica, California. A social networking site largely used for musicians and young artists. 

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N

Natural Language Processing: Algorithms which try to convert information from computer databases in to understandable human language. In search engines they try to understand the true intent of the keywords rather than just matching the query.

Navigation: When you navigate a boat through the ocean you need clear indications of where you are going and what direction you want to head. This is the same principal to website navigation. A good navigational design will help the visitor know where they are, where thy are heading, what clicking a link will do, where the hyperlinks are, and where you have been. 

Netscape: Originally a company that created a web browser now serves as a news website allowing visitors to vote and comment on the articles.

Niche: A topic that a website focuses on.

Niche market: A focused portion of a market sector. If you are in business to service a niche market, you are providing a service that is not immediately being addressed by a mainstream provider.

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O

Open source: A program where the source code is available to the general public. This means that the code can be read and modified by anyone who wants to.

Organic listings: Listings that are not sold by the search engines.  If your site appears in the organic listings it is because you have excellent editorial content and the search engines want to include you. Also called organic search results.

Outbound links: Links on your web page that lead to other web pages.

Overture: The original leader and pioneer of pay per click search engines which sold targeted searches. Overture is now owned by Yahoo.

Overture Keyword Selector Tool: A popular keyword research tool which is geared mostly toward commercially oriented searches.

P

Page popularity: More commonly referred to as link popularity.

PageRank: A technical component of Google which helps estimate the importance of a web page. You can view a site’s page rank using their toolbar.

Paid inclusion or Pay for Inclusion (PFI): Some search engines allow websites to buy their way into the search. It is a guaranteed listing. Google does not offer this inclusion.

Paid listings: Listings in search engines that are sold to advertisers.  The opposite is organic listing.
 
Pay per performance: An advertiser friendly program where listings are guaranteed to appear in the listings and a higher rank is garnered by paying more.

Penalty: Search engines prevent some websites suspected for spamming or other annoying search behaviors from ranking in their listings.

PHP or Hypertext Preprocessor: A scripting language that is open source, and is used to create dynamic web pages.

Portal: A generic term which refers to a website which is an authority on a subject or a website which caters to a large number of users, like a Yahoo or Google. Also described as a starting point, or entry way to the web.

PPC Engine: A search engine where the results pages are governed by Pay Per Click campaigns.

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R

Ranking: Using algorithms and search rules, the process by which a search engine displays the lists of websites so that the site with the most relevancy to the search appears on the top of the list.  Using an SEO company, you may be able to get your page to rank higher. Also called position.

Reciprocal links: Two sites linking to each other.

Redirect: A way to alert the browser that the page has been moved.
301 redirects are permanent where a 302 redirect is temporary.
 
Referrer: The source of a website’s visitor.

Registration: Please see Submission

Relative link: As with all links, they tell the browser where to go to find the link. If the link is absolute, it always goes right to the same place. If the link is relative, the link starts from where you currently are and takes you someplace else within the same website. The HTML will look broken like this: 
<a href =”. ./glossary.php”>CKMG glossary </a> 

Whereas a full absolute link will look like this:
<a href=“http://www.ckmg.com/glossary/php”>

Relevancy: A measure of how a search engine gathers listings in the results page based on the keyword search query.

Results page: Also known as a SERP, after a search query has been completed, the listings appear on the results page.

Reverse index: An index of keywords where records of matching documents containing those keywords is stored. For a more thorough, coded explanation:

Robot: Also called a spider or crawler, or bot. These little programs are responsible for finding the websites for you after you have queried a search. They crawl around the hypertext looking for relevant words.

Robots.txt: A file which you can include on your web page so that the robots will not include it in the search.

ROI or return on investment: The percentage of profit generated from each investment dollar as compared to the initial money invested. ROI is used when the gains and losses are not easily compared using dollar amounts and are sometimes viewed as how well a company is managed.

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S

Search engine: Including all services which are designed to assist users in searching the web or a database for information. These engines employ spiders to crawl through the Internet and some directories use human power. Most engines offer both paid listing where the advertiser has paid to be included or organic listings where the results happen based on relevance.

Search Engine Marketing or SEM: The art, business, and process of marketing web sites via search engines to help assist in improving rank organically or by making strategic purchase with paid listings.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO: Altering the architecture of a website to ensure that is does well within the organic rankings when crawled by the search engines.

Search query: Words or a group of words entered into a search engine with the hopes of finding relevant information.

Search terms: The word or words a searcher enters into  search engine in hopes of finding relevant information . Also called query, keywords, or search words.

SEMPO: Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. A company which educates people on the value of search engine marketing.

SERP: Short for search engines results page

Siphoning: A sneaky tactic used to steal traffic from other websites.

Site Map: A way to direct, organize, and market your website. This web page shows how everything links together within your website in an intelligent and coherent way. This page will also promote spiders to crawl all of the pages in your site, however; this site map should be human friendly, not just for search bots.

Spam: Annoying and unsolicited email. Also, any marketing method that a search engine feels is contrary to delivering quality search results. A few immediate examples of spam include using a keyword excessively and creating a doorway page intended to please a search engine but is not helpful to the humans.

Spamming: Creating and distributing spam.

Spider: Also known as a crawler, or bot. The program which search engines send out to crawl through your website looking for information which is relevant to the search query.

Splash page: A very fancy and beautifully designed webpage that is hard to use and has very little to offer a search engine in terms of content and relevancy.
 
Spyware: Programs which spy on users when they are on the web in order to collect research and consumer data for marketing purposes. It is advisable to download a spyware removal software to avoid spam and extra sets of eyeballs viewing your web use.

Submission: The process of submitting a URL to a search engine in order to be included in their index.

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T

Taxonomy: Agreed upon principles in a classification system used to logically control and store topical subjects and vocabulary in an information retrieval system, like a search engine.

Technorati: A blog search engine.

Teoma: A search engine which has merged with Ask.com. Their algorithm is different and unique wherein it searches for not just the biggest, most global sites, but rather the best and most relevant to the subject being queried.

Term frequency: How many times a keyword appears in a collection of documents.

Term vector: An index of documents which is used to compare documents to documents and asses how similar they are. In a vector-space retrieval model, the queries are converted to term vectors which allows the document to be matched to the query and ranked based on the number of times the search words appear in each document.

Title: The title appears in the HTML document and is not displayed directly on the website, rather it is seen in the title of the browser being used. The title describes the elements of the document and is a very important aspect to SEO. The title needs to be unique to your page or pages, each pages has its own title. The title also needs to be descriptive and not extremely long. When you search on an engine the title is what you click on to be directed to that website so you want it to be descriptive so that it will be chosen to click on and increase your traffic.

TLD: Top Level Domain

Top Level Page: A search engine may call your default page your top level page. The engine may request your top level page because their spider will crawl through your site from this page. It is recommended that you have a link from your top level page to your sitemap.

Traffic: The visitors to your website.

Turbo 10: A search engine which goes beyond the surface searches and enters the deep web or invisible web. This inner sanctum contains documents not indexed by normal search engines.

U

Unique Visitor: A real visitor to a website. By looking at the log files and the unique visitors you can measure how many visitors come to the site.

Upload: Transferring information from a local drive to a server

URL or Universal Resource Locator: The unique address that identifies a website.

URL rewrite: A rewrite used to make a URL more unique and more descriptive to help its relevancy in the search engine’s indexing.

Usability: Referring to how easy it is for a visitor or customer to perform operations or navigate your website.

Usage data: Search engines watch things like the number of visitors, high click through rates, tracking when a visitor looks at more than one page on your site, and repeat visitors as grades of quality. It is important to track this information so you can improve it.

Usenet: A search service that caters to a specific field, or subject, or informational format.

V

Vertical Search: A search service which is specialized in a field, a specific type of information, or an information format.

Virtual Domain: A website or domain that is hosted by a virtual server.

Virtual Server: A server which allows multiple top level domains to be hosted from a single computer. This sometimes slows down the access speed but it saves on hosting costs.

Visitor: This is the number of times people visit a site versus the actual number of people visiting a site.

Vortal: These are portals that focus on one specific topic. A specific topic can be called a vertical topic. A vertical topic may be just dentists, or fish keepers.

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W

White Hat SEO: The opposite of black hat SEO. Search engines set up guidelines for marketing companies to follow and provide excessive revenue for the search engines through ads. Some marketing techniques are deemed deceptive, annoying, or improper and are labeled black hats. White hat SEO is just the opposite. Ethical and good SEO techniques. Since these guidelines are constantly changing it is hard to set protocols and definitive rules to which practices are black and which are white.

Wiki: Software which uses collaborative editing to process information.

Wikipedia: Free online encyclopedia that uses Wiki software.

Whois: Domain ownership information is stored in the Whois record for that domain. If you want to know who owns a domain, you can find out on ones of these sites.

Wordpress: A place for you to blog. Do you have one yet?

X

XHTML: Extensible Hypertext Markup Language. This language is designed to move HTML over to XML formats.

XML: Extensible Markup Language. A simple text format which has been derived from SGML and hopes to be more efficient and organized in the delivery of data over the Internet.

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Y

Yahoo!: The second most popular search engine after Google.  

Yahoo! Directory: One of the original web directories started in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang. On this search platform you can choose to search the directory or the web.

Z

Zero Impression Keywords: Keywords which have had no bearing on increasing traffic to your ads. The keywords may lack relevancy or be very obscure.