Confused with all the SEO terms you may have heard?

Anar Group takes the confusion out of SEO with our online SEO glossary A-Z.

301 - A permanent server redirect - a change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file on
apache servers. Also useful for dealing with canonical issues.

Adwords - Google Pay Per Click contextual advertisement program, very common way of basic
website advertisement. See also SEM.

Adwords site - (MFA) Made For Google Adsense Advertisements - websites that are designed from
the ground up as a venue for GA advertisements.
This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV programming is usually Made For Advertisement.

affiliate - An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or
business in exchange for fees or commissions.

algorithm - (algo) A program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given
search query.

alt text - A description of a graphic, which usually isn't displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is
undeliverable, or a browser is used that doesn't display graphics. Alt text is important because search
engines can't tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the
spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to
the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated picture. Special web
browsers for visually challenged people rely on the alt text to make the content of graphics accessible
to the users.

analytics - A program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google
analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program.

anchor text- The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of
the referring site and of the link to the
content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

astroturfing - (the opposite of full disclosure) attempting to advance a commercial or political agenda
while pretending to be an impartial grassroots
participant in a social group. Participating in a user forum with the secret purpose of branding,
customer recruitment, or public relations.

authority - (trust, link juice, Google juice) The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular
search query. Authority/trust is derived from
related incoming links from other trusted sites.

authority site - A website which has many incoming links from other related expert/hub sites.
Because of this simultaneous citation from trusted hubs
an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank, and search results placement. Wikipedia, is an example of an authority site.

B2B - Business to Business.

B2C - Business to Consumer

back link - (inlink, inbound link, incoming link) Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.

black hat - Search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the
Google Webmaster Guidelines. Black hat techniques
will get a website banned from SERPs

blog - short for weblog. Blogs are an ideal source of new content for a website. When integrated into
an existing website, an active blog,
updated at least weekly, will have a significant positive effect on search engine rankings since the
search engines provide greater weight to websites that
are updated frequently.

blog submission - Submission of a blog page or site, to a blog directory.
This provides back links and increases page rank for the target website.

bot - (robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously.
Search engines use bots to find and add web pages
to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to "scrape" content for the purpose of
plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.

bounce rate - The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.

bread crumbs - Web site navigation in a horizontal bar above the main content which helps the
user to understand where they
are on the site and how to get back to the root areas.

canonical issues - (duplicate content) canon = legitimate or official version - It is often nearly
impossible to avoid duplicate content,
especially with CMSs like Wordpress, but also due to the fact that www.site.com, site.com,
and www.site.com/index.htm are supposedly seen as dupes
by the SEs - although it's a bit hard to believe they aren't more sophisticated than that.
However these issues can be dealt with effectively in several ways
including - using the noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the canon.

click fraud - Improper clicks on a PPC advertisement usually by the publisher or his minions for the purpose of undeserved profit. Click fraud is a huge issue for add agencies like Google, because it lowers advertiser confidence that they will get fair value for their add spend.

cloak - The practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and caries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.

cloaking - The technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

CMS - Content Management System - Programs such as Wordpress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so chose.

code swapping - (bait and switch) Changing the content after high rankings are achieved.

comment spam - Posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an inlink to another site.

competitive analysis - Researching the top 10 competitors to any business, industry, or website, in
order to discover their keywords and report on their rankings in the SERPs. This can include analysis
of a collection of backlinks, a list of header terms, meta tag data, and SEM campaigns.

content - (text, copy) The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.

contextual advertisement - Advertising which is related to the content.

conversion - (goal) refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a
product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure
conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC, other advertising campaigns, and visitors
the arrive as a direct result of SEO. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some
scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website.

conversion rate - Percentage of users who convert - see conversion.

CPC - Abbreviation for Cost Per Click. It is the base unit of cost for a PPC campaign.
See also SEM

CPM - (Cost Per Thousand impressions) A statistical metric used to quantify the average
value / cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M - from the Roman numeral for one thousand.

crawler - (bot, spider) A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way
of the link structure to gather data.

CTA - Abbreviation for Content Targeted Ad(vertising). It refers to the placement of relevant PPC
ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.
See also SEM

CTR - Abbreviation for Click Through Rate. It is a ratio of clicks per impressions in a PPC
campaign. See also SEM

deeplink - A link to a specific page in a website other than the homepage.

deeplink submission - Submission of a deeplink to a deeplink directory. This SEO tactic allows
a website to highly target specific topics with maximum relevance and optimized landing pages.

directory - A site devoted to directory pages. The Yahoo directory is an example.

directory page - A page of links to related WebPages.

directory submission - Asking a directory to list a website or webpage under a certain category
in its directory listings. This is a good basic way to begin and accentuate a well-crafted SEO campaign

doorway page - Also called a gateway page. A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of
driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific
keyphrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

duplicate content - Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another
website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive
little if any Trust from the search engines compared to the content that the SE considers being the original.

eCommerce site - (eCom, e commerce, e-commerce) A website devoted to retail sales.

feed - Content which is delivered to the user via special websites or programs such as news aggregators.

FFA - (Free For All) A page or site with many outgoing links to unrelated websites, containing
little if any unique content. Link farms are only intended for spiders, and have little if any value to
human users, and thus are ignored or penalized by the search engines.

frames - A web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen,
each within it's own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to
correctly navigate them. Additionally, most users dislike frames because it is almost like having
two tiny monitors neither of which shows a full page of information at one time.

gadget - See gizmo

gateway page - (doorway page) A web page that is designed to attract traffic from a search engine and
then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page is not exactly the same as cloaking but the effect
is the same in that users and search engines are served different content.

gizmo - (gadget, widget) Small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit
counter or IP address display. Gizmos can make good link bait.

Google bomb - The combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually
for humorous effect.

Google bowling - Maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from the "bad neighborhood"
- Kind of like yelling "Good luck with that infection!" to your buddy as you get off the school bus - there is
- some controversy as to if this works or is just an SEO urban myth.

Google dance - The change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The
cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time
during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.

Google juice - (trust, authority, pagerank) Trust / authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links
to other pages.

Googlebot - Google's spider program

GYM - Google - Yahoo - Microsoft, the big three of search

hit - Once the standard by which web traffic was often judged, but now a largely meaningless
term replaced by pageviews AKA impressions. A hit happens each time that a server sends an object
- documents, graphics, include files, etc. Thus one pageview could generate many hits.

htaccess file - (.htaccess) A file in the root of a website hosted on a Linux server that can be used to
rewrite links, redirect pages, eliminate cannonical issues, and many other useful SEO features.

HTML - (Hyper Text Markup Language) Directives or "markup" which are used to add formatting and web
functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines,
and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.

hub - (expert page) Atrusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.

impression - (page view) The event where a user views a webpage one time.

in bound link - (inlink, incoming link) Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and
pagerank.

index - Noun - a database of WebPages and their content used by the search engines.

index - Verb - to add a web page to a search engine index.

indexed Pages - The pages on a site which have been indexed.

inlink - (incoming link, inbound link) Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and
pagerank.

keword analysis - Researching the industry and target demographics of a specific company or website
for keywords, find related keywords, discover top searched terms, report on your rankings in the SERPs
key phrase The phrase that a user enters into a search engine. SEO will target certain keywords or
phrases to maximize search traffic.

keyword cannibalization - The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the
same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page
is most relevant for the keyword.

keyword density - The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value
is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.

keyword research - The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.

keyword spam - (keyword stuffing) Inappropriately high keyword density.

keyword stuffing - Refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are
added for the 'benefit' of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to
human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the
words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible
that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (ie. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.

keyword - The word that a user enters into a search engine. SEO will target certain keywords or phrases
to maximize search traffic.

keywords - Words which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are multi-word phrases used in
search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and keyphrases so that
they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.

landing page - The page that is specifically constructed to convert a visitor to complete a desired
transaction, which could be a sale, providing an e-mail address, subscribing to something, filling
out a form, etc… All SEM campaigns should have highly optimized landing pages.

latent semantic indexing - (LSI) This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly
associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as "Long Tail
Searches". The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also "long tail".
The significance is that it might be almost impossible to rank well for "mortgage", but fairly easy to
rank for "second mortgage to finance monster truck team". Go figure.

link - An element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page
or another part of the current page.

link bait - A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media.

link building - Actively cultivating incoming links to a site.

link condom - Any method that prevents link juice from flowing through a link on a web page.
This could be anything from nofollow to noindex to proxy linking through temp URLs
(MySpace.com does this with most profile links now.)

link exchange - A reciprocal linking scheme often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages.
Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves.
Quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.

link farm - A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of
inflating link popularity (or PR). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms Of Service of
most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

link juice - (trust, authority, pagerank)

link love - An outgoing link, which passes uninhibited trust and PR.

link partner - (link exchange, reciprocal linking) Two sites which link to each other. Search engines
usually don't see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal nature.

link popularity - A measure of the value of a site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it

link spam - (Comment Spam) Unwanted links such as those posted in user generated content like blog
comments.

link text - (Anchor text) The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the
relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share
some keywords in common.

long tail - Longer more specific search queries that are often less targeted than shorter broad queries.
For example a search for "widgets" might be very broad while "red widgets with reverse threads" would be a long tail search. A large percentage of all searches are long tail searches/

local search - The act of searching for a business or service based on location, thus making the search
results highly targeted and more likely to convert.

local search submission - A powerful SEO tool that allows business to aquire highly targeted visitors,
networking with other business, generate powerful backlinks, and much more.

LSI - See Latent Semantic Indexing

mashup - A web page which consists primarily of single purpose software and other small programs
(gizmos and gadgets) or possibly links to such programs. Mashups are quick and easy content to
produce and are often popular with users, and can make good link bait. Tool collection pages are
sometimes mashups.

META tags - Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information
about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very
important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the
information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also,
they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.

metric - A standard of measurement used by analytics programs.

MFA - Made For Advertisements - websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV programming is usually MFA.

mirror - In SEO parlance, a mirror is a near identical duplicate website (or page). Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to target different keywords/keyphrases. Using mirrors is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning or duplicate content pentalies when calculating PR.

mirror site - An identical site at a different address.

monetize - To extract income from a site. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetize a website.

natural search results - The search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.

nofollow - A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code,
which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link.

noindex - A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code,
which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link.

non reciprocal link - If site A links to site B, but site B does not link back to site A, then the link is
considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to
reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of collusion between sites.

organic link - Organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.

pagerank - (PR) a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors. Often confused with Toolbar Pagerank.

pay for inclusion PFI - The practice of charging a fee to include a website in a search engine or directory.
While quite common, usually what is technically paid for is more rapid consideration to avoid Googles
prohibition on paid links.

PFI - Abbreviation for Pay For Inclusion. Many search engines offer a PFI program to assure frequent
spidering / indexing of a site (or page). PFI does not guarantee that a site will be ranked highly (or at all)
for a given search term. It just offers webmasters the opportunity to quickly incorporate changes to a site
into a search engine's index. This can be useful for experimenting with tweaking a site and judging the
resultant effects on the rankings.

portal - Designation for websites that are either authoritative hubs for a given subject or popular content
driven sites (like Yahoo) that people use as their homepage. Most portals offer significant content and
offer advertising opportunities for relevant sites.

PPA - (Pay Per Action ) Very similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs
result in conversions.

PPC - (Pay Per Click) A contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies
(such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

PR - Abbreviation for PageRank - Google's trademark for their proprietary measure of link popularity for
web pages. Google offers a PR viewer on their Toolbar.

press release - A press release is a great way to get the word out to the media about something
newsworthy. They tell a short story of who, what, when, where and why. You use the press release
to hopefully get some media coverage. A press release will guarantee you a good quality backlink.
Not as useful for direct traffic increases or sales pitches.

proprietary method - Sales term often used by SEO service providers to imply that they can do
something unique to achieve "Top Ten Rankings". Proprietary SEO methods are essentially fictional
and do not exist.

reciprocal link - (link exchange, link partner) Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually
don't see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal and potentially incestuous nature. See also
non reciprocal link.

redirect - Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is
moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.

regional long tail - A key phrase which contains a city or region name. Especially useful for the service
industry.

RLT - See REGIONAL LONG TAIL

robots.txt - A file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.

ROI - (Return On Investment) One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment,
and thus cost / benefit of different schemes.

sandbox - There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a "sandbox,"
preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or
exact behavior of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs.

scraping - Copying content from a site, often facilitated by automated bots

SE - See SEARCH ENGINE

search engine - (SE) A program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches
of a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such
as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.

search engine spam - Pages created to cause search engines to deliver inappropriate or less relevant
results. Search Engine Optimizers are sometimes unfairly perceived as search engine Spammers.
Of course in some cases they actually are.

SEM - Short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching,
submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your
Web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine
related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.

SEO - Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization for both onsite and offsite. Short for search engine
optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the
search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the
chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few
pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favorably ranked by the search engine. SEO covers the process of:
- making websites spider friendly (so search engines can read them)
- making web pages relevant to desired keyphrases
- increasing the position of A website in the SERPs for certain key phrases or terms

SERP - Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page/Positioning. This refers to the organic
(excluding paid listings) search results for a given query.

site map - (sitemap) A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible
page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site
for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine
spiders to find all of the site pages.

SMM - (Social Media Marketing) Website or brand promotion through social media

SMP - (Social Media Poisoning) Any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques designed to
implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example, blog comment spamming in the name / brand of a
competitor

social bookmark - A form of Social Media where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.
This is usually a list of articles that are tagged and/or rated by members of the community.

social bookmark submissions - Is a form of SEO used to gain PR and valuable alternative searchability
for the articles or blog posts on a website.

social media marketing - (SMM) Website or brand promotion through social media

social media poisoning - (SMP) Any of several black hat techniques designed to implicate a competitor
as a spammer - For example blog comment spamming in the name / brand of a competitor

social media - Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs,
wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.

sock puppet - An online identity used to either hide a persons real identity or to establish multiple user
profiles.

spam ad page - (SpamAd page) A Made For Adsense/Advertisement page which uses scraped or machine
generated text for content, and has no real value to users other than the slight value of the adds.
Spammers sometimes create sites with hundreds of these pages.

SPAM - In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of
Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds
for banning.

spamdexing - Describes the efforts to spam a search engine's index. Spamdexing is a violation of the
Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

spammer - A person who uses spam to pursue a goal.

spider - (bot, crawler) A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their
indexes.

spider - Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in
purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

spider trap - An endless loop of automatically generated links which can "trap" a spider program.
Sometimes intentionally used to prevent automated scraping or e-mail address harvesting.

splash pages - Introduction pages to a web site that are heavy on graphics (or flash video) with no
textual content. They are designed to either impress a visitor or complement some corporate branding.

splog - Spam Blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or
made up of scraped content.

static page - A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static
pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.

stickiness - Mitigation of bounce rate. Website changes that entice users to stay on the site longer, and
view more pages improve the sites "stickiness".

stop words - Words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search
queries. Common words such as the.

supplemental index - Pages with very low pagerank, which are still relevant to a search query, often
appear in the SERPs with a label of Supplemental Result. Googles representative's say that this is
not indicative of a penalty, only low pagerank.

text link - A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.

time on page - The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of
quality and relevance.

toolbar pagerank - (PR) Avalue between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies
page importance and is not the same as pagerank. Toolbar Pagerank is only updated a few times a year,
and is not a reliable indicator of current status. Often confused with Pagerank.

trust rank - Amethod of differentiating between valuable pages and spam by quantifying link relationships
from trusted human evaluated seed pages.

Uniform Resource Locator - See URL

URL - A Uniform Resource Locator is the web address of any particular web page on the Internet

user generated content - (UGC) Social Media, wikis, Folksonomies, and some blogs rely heavily on
User Generated Content. One could say that Google is exploiting the entire web as UGC for an
advertising venue.

Video SEO- Is the process of systematically applying SEO Strategy to video. Videos are submitted under target keywords to multiple video sharing sites, blogs, social networking, social bookmarking sites and itunes.

walled garden - A group of pages which link to each other, but are not linked to by any other pages.
A walled garden can still be indexed if it is included in a sitemap, but it will probably have very low
pagerank.

web 2.0 - Is characterized by websites that encourage user interaction and typically use user generated
content as the primary source of new content

white hat - SEO techniques, which conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to
unscrupulously "game" or manipulate SERPs.

widget - 1) (gadget, gizmo) small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as
a hit counter or IP address display. These programs can make good link bait. 2) a term borrowed from
economics which means "any product or commodity."