Glossary of SEO Terms - Common SEO Terms Explained

301 Redirect (permanent redirect)	Interpreted by search engine robot that the current domain is no longer valid. All links to the domain (and pagerank) are typically assigned to the site which is pointed to by the redirect. Used to amalgamate pagerank and give a single URL for a company or group of products. This redirect is implemented on the server (server-side).
302 Redirect (temporary redirect)	Interpreted by search engine robot that both the target domain and the current domain are temporarily valid. Use for geolocation to point country specific domains (ccTLDs) as separate listings. But note this is used for domain hijacking and as a consequence can result in sites getting penalised. This redirect is implemented on the server (server-side).
Accessibility	An approach to site design intended to accommodate site usage using different browsers and settings particularly required by the visually impaired.
‘Alt’ image tags	Graphical images that form each page can have ‘hidden text’ associated with them that is not seen by the user, but will be indexed by the search engine. This is required for accessibility compliance (screen-readers used by the blind and visually impaired, read-out the ‘alt’ tags), but is also used by the search engines to determine relevance.
Affiliate marketing	Typically, a commission-based arrangement where referring sites (publishers) receive a commission on sales or leads by merchants (retailers). A lead may be based on data captured during an enquiry, or it could be simply a visitor to the site (a click), in which case it overlaps with paid-search marketing.
Backlinks	Hyperlinks which link to a particular web page (or website). Also known as inbound-links. Google PageRank and Yahoo! WebRank are methods of enumerating this. Outbound links are the origination point of backlinks.
Black-hat SEO	An approach to SEO that pushes the boundaries of ethical practice. Potentially contravenes the search engine’s terms of service. High risk, high-reward approach. May gain more visitors if techniques are more effective than those of companies following an ethical, white-hat SEO approach. However, may be subject to algorithm changes.
Blog	A commentary on particular topics which is updated daily, weekly or monthly by an individual or a group of people.
Brand mis-spellings	A user mistypes a brand into the search box or into the URL address box. Best practice is to ensure the brand is visible.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)	Web page content (text body copy) is separated from code used for presentation (layout and formatting), which is stored in a separate Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file (.css).
Cloaking	Showing a different version from of search engines to search robots and human visitors according to the user agent of the site visitor. Generally consider as spamming except when used to improve index inclusion, e.g. through permitting Session ids.
Content management system (CMS)	Software to manage the addition, review and modification of web pages on a server. Includes tools for editing and workflow.
Deep linking	The search engines (or another site) take a visitor straight through to page within the site rather than the homepage.
Domain	A label indicated by the domain naming system (DNS) to denote the Internet address (IP address) of a server. Global Top-level domains (gTLDs) include countries such as .co.uk, .fr, .de as well as .com etc
Domain popularity	The number of different domains that link to you. Term not as widely used as link popularity, but useful since indicates the number of unique domains (many links from the same domain may be counted together).
Domain hijacking	Potential search visitors are directed elsewhere. The most common situation is where web domains that have expired are claimed by another owner and then used for some other purpose. It also means where the search traffic for a site is hijacked using a 302 redirect.
Doorway or bridge pages	An approach to SEO no longer widely used and no longer recommended due to search engine penalties. Doorway pages not connected to the remainder of the site and are optimized for a particular key phrase to entice site visitors and sometimes a specific search engine. Often used cloaking and redirected to other content.
Duplicate content penalty	Search engines make an assessment of duplicate content within a site or on different domains and may penalise for this if they judge duplication. Alternatively, they may simply give a higher relevance and ranking to the page with the highest link equity. Limited duplication such as print and screen versions of content should not cause a problem. You should check for duplication of your site.
Generic search phrase	A simple keyphrase without any qualifiers such as ‘car insurance’
Google Bombing.	The practice of denigrating someone or an organization by creating many pages which link to a site based on a theme (high link context). The best known is the ‘miserable failure’ example. The site does not contain this phrase, but contain links into the site with pages or links referencing this phrase.
Google “sandbox effect”	Sites which are added to the index do not peform well in terms of ranking for a period of several months. Although the existence of this effect is debated, it is evident in many cases and is clearly intended to prevent unscrupulous sites gaming the index by frequently creating new sites in order to game the index.
Google quality score	An assessment of the quality of a Google Adwords ad based on its historical clickthrough rates and from late 2005, the conversion on the ,
Google sitemaps	A facility to submit an index of a site’s pages to Google to assist its robots with spidering the site. Also contains reporting tools.
Inbound links	See backlinks.
Index	A database created by search engine robots which contains information on the URL of each page crawled, the keyphrases it contains together with other information which determines weighting in SERPs such as keyword density, formatting and PageRank.
Index coverage	The number and proportion of all the pages on a domain which are included within the index of each search engine.
Index inclusion	Ensuring that as many of the relevant pages from your domain(s) are included within the search engine indexes you are targeting to be listed in. See search engine submission.
Information architecture	The combination of organisation, labelling, and navigation schemes comprising an information system.
IP address	The unique numerical address of a computer.
Keywords	The keyphrase or search query which is typed into the search engine.
Keyword density	The proportion of a page taken by a keyword or keyphrase. Usually expressed as a percentage.
Keyword stuffing	The repeated use of a keyphrase within a page or within a meta keyword tag. Penalties may be applied for keyword stuffing.
Keyphrase (keyword phrase)	The combination of words users of search engines type into a search box which form a search query.
Keyphrase analysis	A structured approach to identification of key phrases used to attract visitors to your site through search marketing
Keyphrase qualifiers	These are added to the generic keyphrase (e.g. car insurance) to narrow the search, e.g. ‘car insurance uk’.
Keyphrase variants	Different forms of a given keyphrase, i.e. plurals and different word sequence. Careful analysis of these can give better results.
Link anchor text	The hypertext used to form the text of a link, in the HTML <a href=http://www.domain.com>Anchor text which forms link when viewed in browser</a.>
Link-building	A structured activity to include good quality hyperlinks to your site from relevant sites with a good PageRank and Link context.
Link context	The relevance of a link for a particular keyphrase based on different aspects of the page where the link originates. Context includes link anchor text, keywords adjacent to the link, keyword density and markup in other tags such as title tag.
Link equity	A page that is rated by the search engine as having higher relevance based on its link popularity and link content.
Link farm	A network of sites that link to other sites for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity. Tend to contain links to totally unrelated sites. Search engines can identify and penalise most forms of link farms.
Link popularity	An assessment of page quality based on the number of inbound or backlinks
Link quality	An assessment of the importance of a link in indicating relevance for a particular keyphrase based on the link context, the PageRank of the page and the dilution effect of outbound links. Alternatively, an assessment of the link popularity for a range of backlinks for a page or site.
Long-tail concept	A frequency distribution showing the typical decline in popularity of items within a sector when a consumer has a choice in selecting these items. In search, the most common search terms for a site or market sector have much higher volumes than the less common phrases, which together are important in generating qualified visitors.
Mesh structure	An approach to SEO where a group of pages link to each other to distribute PageRank more evenly.
Meta description meta tag	A meta tag which summarises the content of the page in a short paragraph
Meta keywords meta tag	A meta tag which used to list keywords relevant to the page.
Meta-tags	Markup which is part of the HTML file, typed in by web page creators, which are read and displayed by the browser.
Natural or organic listings	The pages listing results from a search engine query which are displayed in a sequence according to relevance of match between the keyword phrase typed into a search engine and a web page according to a ranking algorithm used by the search engine.
On-page optimisation	Devising page content, structure and HTML markup to prove relevance of a search keyphrase to the search engines.
Outbound links	Links from a page to another page. The origination point of backlinks or inbound links.
PageRank	Google’s trademarked approach to assess the value of a web page based on the number of inbound links or backlinks.
Ranking factors	The criteria used by the search engine in their algorithms to determine how high a website / page is displayed in the natural listings for a particular phrase.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS)	An XML-based content distribution format commonly used for accessing blog information and other feeds of information that are regularly updated. Accessed by different forms of RSS reader.
Reciprocal linking	Links are exchanged between sites. The effectiveness of this will depend on the link quality and whether links are direct or not.
Robots	Automated software agents located on a search engine server that collect page data from different sites by following links between pages and sites. Robots follow policies which determine how often they visit a site. Search engine robots collect data about each page which is added into the search engine index.
Search engine filters	Elements of the algorithm which may penalize pages or sites for search engine spamming.
Search engine ranking algorithm	The search engine users a complex evaluation of different ranking factors occurs to assess the order of relevance of results returned on the SERPs for a given search phrase.
Search engine index	A database containing details of pages crawled by search engine robots. Includes assessments of keyphrases and information need to determine ranking factors.
Search engine marketing (SEM)	Promoting an organisation through search engines to meet its objectives by delivering relevant content in the search listings when they search and encouraging them to click through to a destination site. The two key techniques of SEM are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to improve results from the natural listings and Paid-search marketing to deliver results from the sponsored listings within the search engines through Pay Per Click (PPC) paid-search engine marketing and through Content-network paid-search marketing (which may be on a PPC basis or on a CPM basis).
Search Engine Optimisation/Optimisation (SEO)	A structured approach used to increase the position of a company or its products in search engine natural or organic results listings for selected keyphrases.
Search journey	The sequence of searches a user will type in and the different types of sites they will visit from when they start searching until they find what they are looking for
Search engine results page (SERP)	The page(s) containing the results after a user types in a keyphrase into a search engine. SERPS contain both natural or organic listings and paid or sponsored listings.
Search engine submission (registration)	A search engine is notified of a URL (usually the homepage) for indexing either directly or indirectly.
Session IDs	Included as part of the URL as a parameter for tracking visitors between different pages. May cause difficulty in the robot indexing the site.
Strategic keyphrases	Important target keyphrases that are targeted for SEO since they combine high volume and intent to purchase or other required site outcome, consistent with usage by the site’s target audience.
Target keyphrases	The phrase(s) that a particular page is being optimized for or that a landing page has Google Adwords or other paid-search as the destination URL.
<TITLE> tag	Part of the markup in the <HEAD> section of an HTML document which is used as the hyperlink in the SERPs and appears at the top of browser window. It is also important since phrases within it are a major factor in determining the relevance of a page by the search engine.
Usability	An approach to website design intended to enable the completion of user tasks and to improve the user experience. Typically measured by increasing task completion rates and decreasing completion time (or number of clicks).
URL (uniform or universal resource locator)	A web address used to locate a web page on a web server.
User agent	The client application or software service which initiates a request for a web page. Examples include web browsers and spiders.
Viral marketing	Online viral marketing involves generating word-of-mouth – sometimes called ‘word of mouse’ – using e-mail to circulate links through to a website which includes a viral agent such as a video clip, game, competition or other content. Traditional word-of-mouth too helps spread the news about the content.
Web analytics	Techniques used to assess and improve the contribution of E-marketing to a business including reviewing traffic volume, referrals, clickstreams, online reach data, customer satisfaction surveys, leads and sales. Web analytics tools used in SEM include browser-based using Javascript and image tags and server-based transaction file log methodologies.
White-hat SEO	An approach to SEO which follows an ethical approach of what is generally agreed as acceptable best-practice within the industry. of Black-hat SEO.
WHOIS record.	A record of the geolocation and owner of a domain. The WHOIS server (www.whois.sc) can be queried manually and is also queried by search engines to determine the country where a server is registered.