301 Redirect

The primary and preferred method for redirecting a site or page, indicates that the page will moved permanently.

302 Redirect

Found location, temporarily located at another URL. Best avoided for SEO purposes as search engines do not process 302s well, and competing business can hijack listings.

Affiliate Marketing

A method to increase sales by offering a referral fee or commission to websites that drive traffic to your website. The affiliate markets products and services that are offered by another company, and receives commissions or fees.

Alexa

A free service that measures a website's traffic and offers a ranking (Alexa ranking). The ranking is in order of amount of traffic, with 1 being the most traffic on the web. Alexa offers a free toolbar available for download.

Algorithm

In reference to SEO, a complicated formula or program used by search engines to determine what results to display in searches, and in what order. A search engines algorithm is not publicly shared and a closely guarded secret, though some theories behind their logic are public knowledge.

ALT Text

An HTML tag (ALT tag) used to associate a text description with an image. This text is visible when mouse is hovered over the image. It is used by the visually impaired as a description, as well as read by search engine spiders.

Analytics

Software used to track various aspects of traffic to a website, including page views, conversion statistics, time spent on page, search queries, etc. Google Analytics is a popular and free tool.

Anchor Text

The words that are used to link to another page. In HTML code below, the words in red are considered the anchor text: SEO Moves

Authority Site

a site with a high amount of trust given by a search engine, typically a site with many incoming links, older domain, high page rank, extensive unique content. Wikipedia or DMOZ for example are considered authority sites.

Backlink (Inbound Link, Incoming Link, Inlink)

Any link pointing to a website. Backlinks are considered votes by search engines in determining a site's relevancy, and are a key part of SEO.

Blackhat (Blackhat SEO)

SEO methods that are not in congruence with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Blog

Short for Weblog. A log or journal of content given chronologically. Blogs can be personal or business oriented, on any topic. Some common platforms for blogging are Wordpress, Movable Type, and Blogger.

Bot (Robot, Crawler, Spider)

A automated program, typically employed by search engines, to visit and 'read' the information on a site.

Bounce rate

The percentage of site visitors that leave without viewing any other pages.

Breadcrumbs

On page navigation that shows users location on the site and path. Example: Clothing & Accessories ? Shoes ? Women's Shoes ? Size 6.5 Pages in the breadcrumbs should be clickable. Breadcrumbs are useful to search engines as well as users.

CMS

Content Management System, a program used to simplify the addition of content to a website such as Wordpress for blogging.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheet, a search engine friendly web design element which is used to control various design factors across multiple pages, such as font, color, etc.

CPC

Cost Per Click, the amount paid in a PPC campaign whenever a link is clicked.

CTR

A Click Through Rate: The percentage of clicks per impressions in a PPC campaign.

Canonical Issues

Refers to duplicate content, often unknowingly created by webmasters by having more than one URL referring to the same content. The URL that a search engine determines to be the most relevant or valuable is referred to as the canonical URL.

Cloaking

Displaying different content to users than what is read by search engines. Though there are cloaking tactics necessary and reasonable to employ, cloaking that is deceptive in nature is against Google Webmaster Guidelines. For example, showing content or keywords to spiders that is invisible on the page.

Content

The informational text on a site.

Contextual Advertising

Advertising that is place on a webpage automatically based on the pages relative content. Google's AdSense is the most popular contextual advertising program.

Conversion Rate

A conversion is typically a sale or other intended goal of the website (a signup, contact form, etc.) The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that make a conversion. 8 out of 100 visitors that buy an item (or fill a webform) is an 8% conversion rate.

Crawl Depth

How thoroughly a site is indexed, or how many internal pages of a site are indexed.

Crawl Frequency

How often a search engine crawler visits a site.

Crawler (Bot, Spider)

A automated program, typically employed by search engines, to visit and 'read' the information on a site.

Deep Link

a link which points to a relevant internal page in a site. Deep links are seen commonly on sites with a natural pattern of links.

Description Tag

The meta tag used to describe the web page it is on. The wording included in this tag is what is typically displayed below the main link in search results, so should be worded to encourage clicking. Example:

Del.icio.us

Popular social bookmarking site where users store and share bookmarks with others.

Digg

Social bookmarking site where users vote on news stories.

DMOZ (Open Directory Project)

Traditionally one of the most popular and important directory or catalog of websites, along with Yahoo Directory. Search engines place significant weight to links from DMOZ. DMOZ is manually edited, meaning that an inclusion is the decision of humans and not automated, which adds to the value of an inclusion in search engine's eyes. DMOZ is an AOL product. DMOZ stands for Directory Mozilla. Inclusion is free.

Doorway Page (Gateway Page)

This is a page that is created to drive traffic to another page, usually a page filled with keywords. It redirects visitors but not spiders to another page, a form of cloaking. Using doorway pages is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Duplicate Content

Content which is identical to content that is already located somewhere else on the web. Google considers the first page visited to be the trusted site regarding this content, and any site that it recognizes the same content, it will give less or no trust for that content.

Entry Page

The page where a user enters your site. The first page a particular user clicks to enter your site. Also known as a landing page.

Everflux

Google's term for the continuous refresh, the constant updating of its index. Before everflux, Google performed monthly updates, known as the Google Dance.

Feed

Commonly refers to a means to subscribe to content updates via notifications. Commonly used feeds are RSS or XML feeds.

FFA

Stands for Free for All, a page where anyone can add a link to it. This is a page of unrelated unmoderated links. These links are not valuable to humans or search engines, and should be avoided.

Firefox

A popular open source web browser for PCs, alternative to Internet Explorer.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol. Means for transferring data between computers, uploading content to a website.

Gateway Page (Doorway Page)

This is a page that is created to drive traffic to another page, usually a page filled with keywords. It redirects visitors but not spiders to another page, a form of cloaking. Using doorway pages is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Google Base

Google's

Google Bomb

A group effort to manipulate the search results for a particular term to generate either humorous or damaging results. Most famous example is searching 'miserable failure'; and the return result was George Bush. Thousands of people creating links with the anchor text 'miserable failure' and pointing it to Bush's website is how this was done.

Googlebot

The name for Google's search engine spider or crawler.

Google Bowling

A malicious negative SEO tactic a competitor would use to knock someone out of search results by pointing thousands of bad low quality links at their site.

Google Dance

Refers to the unpredictable change in search results that previously occurred during an update to Google's index. Before 1993, Google would update their index monthly which caused shifts in SERPs. Now Google does a continuous update, they call everflux. The term Google Dance is still commonly (possibly incorrectly) used to refer to unpredictable search results in many industry forums.

GWM Google Webmaster Tools

A robust and free suite of tools provided by Google to get information about your site, find problems in Google's eyes, view link traffic.

Headings

Tags used in the source code in HTML to indicate the subject of a particular section. H1 to H6 are the headings used, with 1 being the most important. Example:

This is what the next topic is about.

Hidden Text

Invisible text, text that is colored the same as the background, so is not visible to visitors. It is still read by search engines, and in the past was used to include extra keywords on the page. This practice is no longer effective, and is against search engine guidelines, usually detected by spiders, and discounted or penalized.

HTML

Hyper Text Markup Language: the code or language that determines what makes up a web page, including graphics and text. Some code is visible to users, others is not.

HTML Tags

The pieces of the code that give direction as to how standard text will be displayed on a web page. Example: TEXT IN HERE WILL BE BOLD The brackets are the tags.

Impression

One view by a user of a page or ad. Used to measure traffic, number of times an ad or listing was seen by someone (whether or not it was clicked)

Inbound Link (IBL) (also backlink)

A link pointing at a site from a separate domain. Google and other search engines use the number and quality of IBLs to determine a site's authority on keyword searches.

Index

As a noun, the data a search engine has visited and read and collected. As a verb, a search engine indexes a page when it visits and reads the page. The storage of this data is called the cache.

IP Address

Internet Protocol address. The identifying and trackable information assigned to a particular computer (or electronic device) that accesses the internet. A user's IP address will give their location for example.

Joomla

A popular open source content management system designed to assist users in building websites.

Keyword

A word a phrase that searchers might use in performing a search.

Keyword Density

The ratio of words on a web page and the number of times a particular keyword is used on the page

Keyword Stemming

Creating additional variations of keywords by adding prefixes, suffixes, plurals, related words, etc.

Keyword Stuffing/Spamming

Placing an unnatural amount of keywords into a document or web page, in an obvious way and detracting from the natural flow or the wording as read by humans.

Keyword Tag

The HTML tag that lists keywords that are important for the particular page. Example:

Landing page

The web page that a searcher will first see when they click on an ad or listing. A site owner should put thought into what page a client sees in relation to the words that they click.

LSI Latent Semantic Indexing

This is the way search engines index groups of associated words that they see on a page. For example, just seeing the word 'windows' on a page, LSI is looking for other words about an operating system or computers to attribute the word 'windows' to Microsoft or to an opening in a wall.

Link Bait

Compelling, useful content added to a web page to compel users to link to it.

Link Churn

the rate at which a site loses its incoming links.

Link exchange (Reciprocal Link)

Putting a link on your site in exchange for receiving a link on another site. Commonly seen in directories where sites can submit themselves without approval and must include a directory link on their site.

Link Farm

A network of sites created to link to each other to build links artificially.

Link Hoar

Link Hoar

Link Juice

Slang for the trust and authority passed from a link.

Link Profile

An overview or snapshot of all of a site's inbound links and their qualities.

Link popularity

A description of a site's overall link value based on the number and quality of inbound links it has.

Link Rot

Dead or broken links

Link Spam

Unwanted links such as links posted in comments

Long Tail Keywords

Keyword phrases that are more specific, typically 3+ words. Long Tail searches result in qualified clicks and are easier to rank for when appropriate to your site.

Meta tags

In the HTML code on a page, these are informational tags that do not show up on the page. They are used to describe a page to search engines or offer other direction. The description tag is what typically shows in search results.

Mirror site

A site which duplicates (or mirrors) the contents of another site.

Movable Type

One of the most popular blogging software options, along with Wordpress.

Mod Rewrite

When a webmaster reorganizes a site, for example to rename URLs to be more search engine friendly or to improve user experience.

Natural search (Organic Search)

The main search results shown by a search engine that are not paid or sponsored listings. These search results are unpaid listings and are organized by relevancy. Linkage and usage data, as well as page content, historical domain and trust related data are what determines relevancy. Organic search results account for most clicks on search results.

Navigation

refers to the methods on a web page in which a visitor can move to other pages.

Nofollow

HTML code that instructs an engine not to follow either all links on the page, or a specific link on the page. Example for full page: anchor text

Noindex

HTML code that instructs robots not to index the page or a specific link on a page.

Organic search (Natural Search)

The main search results shown by a search engine that are not paid or sponsored listings. These search results are unpaid listings and are organized by relevancy. Linkage and usage data, as well as page content, historical domain and trust related data are what determines relevancy. Organic search results account for most clicks on search results.

Outbound Link

A link from one website, linking out to relevant documents, pointing to an external website. This assists search engines in figuring out what your site is about, building your own credibility and helping the work of others as well.

PageRank (PR)

A logarithmic scale from 0 to 10 developed by Google to estimate the importance of web content and the authority of a site.

Paid Link

An inbound link or backlink that is obtained by paying another site to link to you. Generally refers to links purchased for the purpose of manipulating search rankings, though paid links can also be advertising for the purpose of generating traffic.

PPC Pay Per Click

An advertising method where the advertiser (in this case Google) is paid for every ad that is clicked, whether or not a sale takes place.

Query

The actual search string (the words typed in) that is entered into a search engine.

Ranking

The numerical position that a specific page comes up on a search engine or directory.

Reciprocal Link

Two sites that link to one another. These are not usually seen as high value links.

Redirect

A way of letting browsers know a page has been relocated. 301 redirect is permanent move, 302 is temporary relocation.

Reinclusion

A site may ask Google for reinclusion if they have been penalized for breaking Google's Webmaster Guidelines.. They may or may not be added back to search index.

Relevancy

Refers to how useful search results are to a searcher. Search engines' main goal is for relevant search results.

Reputation Management

Making sure that your brand related keywords produce results that reinforce your brand.

Robots.txt

A file in the root directory of a site that restricts or controls where spiders crawl.

ROI (Return on Investment)

A way to measure how much return is being received from each marketing dollar. This is a more sophisticated measure than profit elasticity calculations.

RSS

Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication is a way of syndicating information to a feed reader or other software which allows people to subscribe to a channel of interest to them.

Sandbox

A theory that Google puts all new sites into a 'sandbox' that prevents them from ranking well until a certain amount of time has passed. The exact behavior or its existence is not agreed upon by SEOs.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing, also known as search marketing. Marketing a website within search engines in order to achieve maximum exposure of you site. This includes paid listings, search engine optimization, and any other forms that will increase exposure and traffic to your website.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimisation. The act of optimizing a website using on and off page methods with the goal of ranking as high as possible in natural search results. SEO guides search engines in understanding how your information is relevant to relevant search queries. Keyword research, viral marketing, reputation management, information architecture, link building, brand building and building mindshare are all integral parts of SEO.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

The page which displays results for a search query, by the search engine.

Search Engine (SE)

A specific program that searches websites for relevant matches to a searcher's keyword phrase, returning an ordered list of most relevant matches. Examples are Google and Yahoo.

Site Map

a page or group of structured pages that is used to help give search engines a secondary route to navigate to your site. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory to help spiders find all of the site pages. These site maps should be useful to humans as well as search engines.

SMM (Social Media Marketing)

Brand or website promotion through social media.

Social Bookmark

A form of social media where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access and sharing.

Social Media

websites that are used to allow people to share and create the valuable content. Examples are blogs, social bookmarking sites, Facebook, MySpace, forums, wikis.

SPAM

initially referred to unwanted commercial emails. Now referenced more broadly to mean any unwanted material. To a search engine, spam is material manipulated to appear relevant when it is not. To a forum, spam is unwanted comments that are not true participation but an effort to gain promotion.

Splog

a spam blog that is low quality, stolen, or automated content.

Spider (Crawler, Bot)

A automated program, typically employed by search engines, to visit and 'read' the information on a site.

Static page

refers to a website page that was not created dynamically/automated, but created and saved in HTML.

Stemming

Search engines show search results based on variations of a root word.

Supplemental Results (Supplemental Index)

The place where pages with very low page rank, but still relevant to query results, end up.

Tags

Keywords or main ideas used to label articles, blog posts, any media posting. Also refers to meta tags in the HTML code.

Text Link

A plain HTML link that does not make use of graphic or special code, such as java script or flash. Traditionally shows up as blue underlined text, but can be in any format.

Title Tag

The text that is displayed in the blue bar at the top of a browser window. The title tag is inconspicuous to the user, but is the most important portion of text on a web page, where search engines are concerned. The title tag should be well thought out, due to search engines assigning more weight to title tags.

Trackback

A method of notifying you that someone has linked back to your site. Thus, enabling an author to keep track of who is linking or referring to their articles.

Traffic

The volume of users that surf to a site.

Typepad

A hosted blogging platform that allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off Typepad.com. It also allows you to publish content to appear as though it is on its own domain.

Unique Visitor

A numerical count of individual users who have visited your website.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

The unique web address of any specific document. AKA web address. The unique web address of any specific document. AKA web address.

User generated content (UGC)

Content that is published and created by end users, online. It is mainly comprised of videos, podcasts and posts on blogs, product reviews, wiki's and social media sites.

Usability

The ease of a use that a user experiences while browsing a website. In other words, how user friendly it is.

Vertical

Industry or field

Vertical Search

A search service that is focused on a specific field, type of information or information format.

Viral Marketing

Marketing techniques that are self propagating, such as blogging, email and word of mouth transmissions. Buzz marketing.

Web 2.0

Websites and web based services that encourage user interactions.

White Hat SEO

The SEO techniques that do not attempt to manipulate SERPs and follow best practice guidelines.

Widget

Small applications on web pages that provide specific functions.

Wiki

Software that allows the publishing of information using collaborative editing.

Wordpress

An open source blogging software program which offers downloadable blogging as well as hosting. It is written in PHP and backed by MySQL database.

XML (Extensible Markup Language)

Flexible text format derived from SGML that makes it easier to format or syndicate information using technologies such as RSS.

Yahoo! Directory

One of the original and more authoritative web directories. It was started in 1994 by Jerry Yang & David Filo. Considered a good place to obtain an authority link.

YouTube

Owned by Google, it is a social media website where users share their own videos.

Zlib

Unlike the LZW compression method used in Unix compress(1) and in the GIF image format, the compression method currently used in zlib essentially never expands the data. (LZW can double or triple the file size in extreme cases.) zlib's memory footprint is also independent of the input data and can be reduced, if necessary, at some cost in compression.