| 404 Error |
A 404 Error Page is the page that a user lands on when he has clicked a broken link within a website. A sitemap is the best choice for a custom 404 Error page, so that a user can navigate to the desired page. |
| 800 x 600 |
Minimum resolution of most flat panel screens. |
| 301 Redirect |
An automated response that indicates that a page has moved permanently. |
| Above the fold |
The part of a web page that appears on the screen before scrolling downward. |
| Absolute link |
An absolute link gives a specific location of the Web file or document including: how to go get the document, what server it comes from, the directory, and the actual document. |
| Accessibility |
means that people regardless of disability as well as machines can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the web. |
| ActionScript |
A scripting language used in Macromedia Flash. It is similar to JavaScript. |
| AJAX |
This is a technology that allows a webpage to make small requests back to the server, and change page elements based on response without a page refresh. |
| Algorithm |
formula to determine the rankings of Web sites returned within search queries, based on criteria such as number of incoming links, keywords, quality of the site, page titles, meta descriptions, and more. The exact algorithm formulas are closely guarded by the search engines to keep the rankings fair. |
| Alt Attribute |
Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object. |
| Analytics |
Tools and methods used by search marketers to determine the effects of SEO on a Website’s traffic and conversions. |
| Anchor text |
The clickable text in a link. The text will usually give the user an idea as to what information the destination will contain. |
| ASP |
(Application Service Provider) a company that provides computer services to it’s clients through a network. |
| Application Service Provider |
(ASP) a company that provides computer services to it’s clients through a network. |
| Avg. Page Views |
The average number of pages each visitor sees within a single session. Higher values when combined with a long visit length indicate users read lots of content. High values with short visit length indicate visitors are clicking around but not reading. |
| Avg. Time on Site |
The average amount of time in seconds visitors spend on the site. This is a measurement of how effective you are at holding on to visitors once they have reached your site. When this number is low, you should consider what those visitors were looking for, and why they failed to find it on your site. |
| Anchor Text |
Link text is the clickable text which connects one web page to another. Example: <a href=”page.html”>link text or anchor text</a> |
| Adsense |
An ad serving application run by Google Inc that enables ads on a user’s webpage. |
| Adwords |
An ad product that offers pay per click advertising and site-targeted ads in both text and banners |
| Affiliate Marketing |
Working with other companies/advertisers in a joint effort to advertise products |
| Affiliate Program |
Working with other companies/advertisers in a joint effort to advertise products |
| Alt Tag |
Alternate text for an image, graphic, etc |
| Anchor Tag |
Used for creating links in HTML |
| Android |
Google’s mobile operating system. It is open source and appears on phones like the Motorola Droid. |
| API |
(Application Programming Interface) The portion of a program that a user can manipulate to create an interface. |
| Application Programming Interface |
(API) The portion of a program that a user can manipulate to create an interface. |
| Apps |
(Applications) Short for Applications, “Apps” are simply programs that a device can run. Term has become more mainstream due to iPhone applications. |
| Backbone |
Is your core network infrastructure. Typically used in reference to how you connect to the Internet but in a large corporate or service provider environment the backbone includes all elements of your network NOT used to connect to the end-points. For example core switches or routers which exchange data between other switches and routers. |
| Backlinks |
Links that are pointing to a given domain from other sites; often called a site’s link popularity. |
| Black Hat SEO |
Unethical SEO techniques used to (temporarily) increase search engine rankings; results in being banned by the Search Engine’s once discovered. |
| Blog |
Slang for ‘weblog’, an online log, or diary, can be about any topic imaginable. |
| Block list |
a collection of names or addresses that do not have permission to access a given resource. This is also called a black list. |
| Breadcrumb Navigation |
Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between pages. |
| Bandwidth |
Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred from one place to another within a certain amount of time. Digital devices measure bandwidth in bytes per second. The bigger the bandwidth, the faster the data can be transferred. |
| Blogosphere |
The term blogosphere describes the information available on blogs and/or the sub-culture of those who create and use blogs. By its nature, the blogosphere tends to be democratic, inclusive, and encourages two-way communication between its participants. |
| Bridge page |
An entry page to a Web site, sometimes known as a splash page. Doorway pages endure a negative connotation due to illicit techniques that send visitors to an entirely different site than the destination they clicked in Google. |
| Buzz keyword |
Coined by Clinton Cimring in 2006, a buzz keyword is a newly created keyword that usually just became recognized as an auto suggestion in Google and Yahoo!. |
| B2B |
(Business To Business) A marketing strategy that involves the sale of goods or services between businesses. |
| Business To Business |
(B2B) A marketing strategy that involves the sale of goods or services between businesses. |
| B2C |
(Business To Consumer)A marketing strategy that involves the sale of goods or services from a business to its customers. |
| Business To Consumer |
(B2C) A marketing strategy that involves the sale of goods or services from a business to its customers. |
| Blogging |
Short for “weblog”, originally web server logs, and now it is a collection of journal-like entries used either for personal or business use. |
| Bot |
(Web Robot) Programs that automatically complete simple, repetitive tasks online; such as scanning a website’s HTML code. |
| Browser |
A program used to translate website code (HTML, XML, etc) into a viewable format. |
| CSS |
(Cascading Style Sheet) A language/document that allows developers to separate presentational style (e.g. fonts, colors, images, layout and spacing) from HTML and XML documents and contain them separately to then be referenced as needed. |
| Cascading Style Sheet |
(CSS) A language/document that allows developers to separate presentational style (e.g. fonts, colors, images, layout and spacing) from HTML and XML documents and contain them separately to then be referenced as needed. |
| Cart Abandonment Rate |
The total number of people who complete the checkout process divided by the total number of people who add to cart. The Cart Abandonment Rate is helpful because it can help identify potential weaknesses in the shopping cart process |
| Clicktracks |
A system of tracking and analyzing SEO efforts and trends. |
| Cognitive Load |
A theory based on the idea that website and other interactive media create a certain amount of stress on the brain. A goal of good Web design is to reduce the cognitive load, make it easy to use and as stress free as possible. |
| CMS |
(Content Management System) A system built into a website to allow the site owner to make updates and additions to the content / copy as needed. |
| Content Management System |
(CMS) A system built into a website to allow the site owner to make updates and additions to the content / copy as needed. |
| Conversions |
A conversion is reached when a desired goal is completed, such as email sign up, newsletter sign up or a completed sale. |
| Conversion Rates |
he percentage of visitors to a website who take a positive action is considered a conversion. Conversions include making a purchase, completing a request for more information, etc., depending on the type of site. For instance, if 100 people visit a site and 3 people make a purchase, the conversion rate is 3%. |
| Conversion tracking |
the act of tracking user actions in order to analyze behavior, and thus adjust SEO and design efforts accordingly. |
| Cookie |
Small data file written to a user’s local machine to track them. Cookies are used to help websites customize your user experience and help affiliate program managers track conversions. |
| CRM – |
Customer Relationship Management |
| Custom error page |
A page designed specifically for a certain website, so that when a user clicks a broken link inside the site, they will not leave the site. The sitemap is often used as a Custom error page. |
| Cloud Hosting |
Cloud Hosting is web hosting where more than one server is used as a host. This may be in the context of multiple servers in one single location or multiple servers in multiple locations. The benefit of the first option of cloud hosting is that if there is a power outage in one geographic location, the second server would not be affected. The benefit of the second option of cloud hosting would be that server resources can be combined for the same files. |
| Cloaking |
A type of search-engine subterfuge in which an indexed Web page is not shown to visitors who click its link in Google (or another search engine). The cloaking works two ways: Visitor content is cloaked from Google, and Google’s indexed content is cloaked from visitors. This serves to give a high PageRank to content that ordinarily would rate a low PageRank. Cloaking is not always illicit. A certain type of cloaking are used to deliver pages tailored to a visitor’s ISP (America Online, for example) or specific Web browser |
| Congregate Websites |
congregate website is a term coined by Clinton Cimring in 1998, which refers to any website that compiles other websites in bulk such as directories or networking websites. |
| Content Dilution |
content dilution is the result of either 1) having too much content on a page that is being optimizer for thereby diluting the keyword densities of keywords that would otherwise be featured or 2) having too many pages on a website and thereby loosing the ability to feature all of them. |
| Crawler |
See spider |
| Cross linking |
Intentionally or unintentionally, cross linking creates large backlink networks among sites that exist in the same domain or are owned by the same entity. Unintentional cross linking happens when a site generates a large number of pages with identical navigation links or when at least two sites mutually link related content. When cross linking is done intentionally, the Webmaster is seeking to raise the PageRank of the involved sites. Excessive cross linking can backfire. If Google decides that the resulting enhanced PageRank is artificial, any or all of the sites might be expelled from the Web index. Innocent cross linking between two related sites is usually not a problem. |
| ComScore |
A marketing research company that monitors Internet traffic for its subscribers. |
| Content |
Another word for text information on a webpage. Can refer to music, text, video, etc. |
| Conversion |
The act of moving a person browsing a website to take a beneficial action such as completing a form or making a purchase. |
| CPA |
(Cost Per Acquisition) The amount of money paid by advertisers for each action performed (clients gained, etc) |
| Cost Per Acquisition |
(CPA) The amount of money paid by advertisers for each action performed (clients gained, etc) |
| CPC |
(Cost Per Click) The amount of money paid by advertisers for each click on their ads by users. |
| Cost Per Click |
(CPA) The amount of money paid by advertisers for each click on their ads by users. |
| CRM |
(Customer relationship management) Software used to handle customer information, sales leads, contact info, etc. |
| Customer relationship management |
(CRM) Software used to handle customer information, sales leads, contact info, etc. |
| CTR |
(Click Through Rate) The success of a clickable, online ad. (Users who clicked divided by Times Ad Was Displayed) |
| Click Through Rate |
(CTR) The success of a clickable, online ad. (Users who clicked divided by Times Ad Was Displayed) |
| Database Driven Web site |
A dynamic site that can be changed easily, run by a database. |
| Datacenter |
the room with all the blinking lights that Chad won’t let us enter. It is a climate controlled room, with special heat sensors and fire protection where we store all the servers. It is the nerve center. |
| Deep Link |
A link to any page on a site other than the home page. Could be a hyperlink from another site or a result from a search engine. |
| Dedicated hosting |
having your own server. |
| Direct Traffic |
The number of visitors who directly accessed your site. Direct visits can be the result of bookmarks, browser home page, or manually typing in your domain URL. In other words, these visitors did not click on a search engine result, PPC ad, or link to access your site. |
| Directory |
A website that includes links under specific categories, to enable the user to find sites that have what they are looking for rapidly. |
| DNS |
An acronym for Domain Name System. Domain Name System servers are used to resolve a human-readable name (such as www.tkg.com) into an IP address. Computers use IP addresses (a string of 4 octets such as 192.168.0.1) to give each node on a network unique-id. |
| Domain |
The human readable name of an I.P. address, such as www.tkg.com. |
| Dreamweaver |
A program used to build web pages. |
| Dynamic content |
Content that changes regularly, such as on a blog or e-commerce site. |
| Deepbot |
The unofficial name for Google’s monthly spider. Freshbot is the unofficial name of Google’s frequently crawling spider. The official name for both crawlers is Googlebot. |
| Density |
Most search engines look for keyword density. Some will only look at the first 200-400 characters of your site, and count the number of times the keyword appears. Some index a small amount of text from the top, middle, and bottom parts of your web page, and search them for keywords. Generally keyword density should be in the 6-8% range. Simply repeating the keyword will not work because some search engines consider grammar structure in their calculations. For a very competitive keyword you could aim a little higher perhaps targeting a 10% range, but you have to take into consideration the search engine may consider this spamming. |
| Directory Submissions |
he act of supplying a URL to a search engine in an attempt to make a search engine aware of a site or page |
| Domain name registration |
The process of taking ownership of a domain name. Registrations are processed by dozens of registrars approved by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). The cost of domain ownership is no more than $35 per year. (Hosting the domain’s Web site is an additional expense.) Registration takes place online, and the activation of a new domain (or moving a domain from one host to another) generally requires no more than 48 hours. |
| Doorway page |
n entry page to a Web site, sometimes known as a splash page. Doorway pages endure a negative connotation due to illicit techniques that send visitors to an entirely different site than the destination they clicked in Google |
| Digg |
(digg.com) Website that displays popular news, links, etc based on user submissions |
| Display Advertising |
A type of ad that includes some form of most media, on the Internet, web banners. (text, video, music) |
| Domain Name |
The top-level name of a network. Internet example: www.ebay.com vs. www.myspace.com/pics/me |
| Dynamic Website |
A website with content generated as users view it. Rarely relies on regular HTML. |
| Ebay |
(ebay.com) An online marketplace where auction-style bidding takes place, as well as outright purchasing. |
| Ecommerce |
Electronic commerce is the act of doing business over the Internet. |
| Email Marketing |
Similar to mailing out postcards or newsletters, email marketing is simply using the Internet to accomplish this. |
| E-Commerce |
Commerce performed through a Web site. |
| Entry page |
See doorway page. |
| Fixed-Width |
A design that remains the same width regardless of the browser window size and does not “stretch” to fill the screen. |
| Fluid Design |
Sometimes called “stretchy”. A site that expands to fill the width of the browser. |
| Front Page |
A Microsoft Office application that enables the authoring of Web pages. |
| Feed reader |
A feed reader (also known as an RSS reader, news reader, or feed aggregator) is an application (desktop or web-based) that allows you to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds, allowing you to read the content from many websites from one place. |
| Folksonomy |
The word folksonomy is a combination of folks, meaning “people”, and -onomy, meaning “management”. Users create informal social Specials using tags to organize content so that others may easily find and share it. |
| Forum |
A forum is a web-based application that allows people to hold discussions through individual posts. The posts will be displayed in chronological order or as threaded discussions. |
| Fresh crawl |
Google’s frequent scan of Web content that occurs between the deep monthly crawls. Google does not publicize the schedule of its intermediate crawls or its target sites. The term “fresh crawl” is an unofficial one used by Webmasters, site optimizers, and other Google obsessive’s. |
| Freshbot |
The unofficial name for Google’s near-daily spider. Deepbot is the unofficial name of Google’s monthly-crawling spider. The official name for both crawlers is Googlebot. |
| Facebook |
(facebook.com) The current leader in Social Networking. Allows for addition of friends, businesses, etc. Free to join |
| Firefox |
Open source web browser currently taking up a large market share. |
| Flash |
A coding language/web plugin that allows for creation of impressive graphical content, video streaming, and more |
| Flickr |
(flickr.com)An online photo album site. |
| Google Analytics |
Google’s search engine optimization analysis program. |
| Google bomb |
efforts by Internet users to create anchor text that skews results to produce a ranking for a page that is not relevant or really related to the query. |
| Geo-targeting |
Geo-targeting applied to organic SEO is the process of combining keywords with geographic criteria such as city names, metropolitan areas, or zip codes. An example may be, “personal trainer boca raton.” These results would appear on the left-hand side of the screen. Geo-targeting applied to SEM is displaying ads based on the target audiences’ IP Address. In this case, the searcher would type in, “personal trainer,” and the results would appear on the right hand side for searchers who live in zip codes within Boca Raton or the surrounding area. |
| Googlebot |
Google’s Web spider |
| Google |
Top search engine on the Internet. Also provides email and many other free features. |
| Google Adsense |
See Adsense |
| Google Adwords |
See Ad words |
| Google PageRank |
System of rating webpages based on their content, as well as their connectedness to other sites around the Web with quality content. |
| Hits |
Represents the number of file requests made to the server, but this figure serves as an inaccurate gauge of a site’s traffic. In fact, ignore it. |
| Homepage Exit Rate |
indicates how many people viewed your site’s homepage and then left. This data may indicate that your site’s design, navigation, or usability is flawed, or that your keyword list is targeting the wrong traffic. |
| HTML |
(Hypertext Markup Language) the main language for coding Web pages. |
| Hypertext Markup Language |
(HTML) the main language for coding Web pages. |
| Host |
The computer or server providing content. |
| Incoming/Inbound link |
See backlink. |
| Index |
In the context of Google, the index is the database of Web content gathered by the Google spider. When Google receives a search query, it matches the query keywords against the index. |
| Internet Marketing |
Internet marketing is the act of promoting products and services by increasing a web site’s online visibility. Some of these promotion techniques includes: natural SEO, pay per click advertising, e-mail marketing, newsletter distribution, blogging, community forums, article writing and distribution, and banner advertising. |
| IP Address |
Short for “internet protocol address”, this is a unique number that identifies a computer connected to the Internet to other Internet hosts. An example of an IP address is 127.0.0.1. |
| Impression |
The count of a delivered basic advertising unit from an ad distribution point. Impressions are how most Web advertising is sold and the cost is quoted in terms of the cost per thousand impressions. |
| Javascript |
Coding language used in web content to create scripts to automate processes, among other things. |
| Keyword |
A word used by a searcher to find relevant webpages on a search engine. |
| Keyword Research |
Allows you to discover what people are searching for on the engines. Knowing this information proves to be invaluable when running both organic and Pay-Per-Click campaigns since you can tailor your keyword list accordingly. |
| Keyword Count, Occurrence |
How often a keyword or keyword phrase occurs in a particular XHTML page section. The key word count is used is used in a calculation determine the key word density. |
| Keyword density |
A proportional measurement of keywords embedded in a page’s content. High keyword density focuses the page’s subject in a way that Google’s spider understands. The spider can interpret too high a density as spam, which results in a lower PageRank or elimination from the index. Most optimization specialists recommend a density between 5 and 15 percent. |
| Keyword stuffing |
The attempt to gain a higher PageRank (or higher ranking in any search engine) by loading a page’s XHTML code or text with keywords. In most cases a visitor can’t see the keywords because they’re buried in XHTML tags, camouflaged against the background color of the page, or reduced to a tiny typeface. Keyword stuffing violates Google’s guidelines for Webmasters and can result in expulsion from the index. |
| Landing Page |
The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement. |
| Link Building |
the process of acquiring backlinks to a site by submitting the site to various directories, other similar sites and asking for a link to be added to their website, leading back to yours. |
| Link Popularity |
The Number of pages that link to a particular site. |
| Link Traffic |
The number of visitors who were on another site before clicking a link which led into your site. |
| Link farm |
A site whose only function is to display outgoing links to participating Web sites. Link farms are disreputable versions of legitimate, topical link exchange sites through which visitors gain some content value. Link farms often have no topicality and present no guidelines or standards of submission. Google does not explicitly threaten expulsion for joining link farms, but it discourages their use. |
| Link Text or Anchor Text |
Link text is the clickable text which connects one web page to another. |
| Local Internet Marketing |
Internet marketing geo-targeted through directories, Google maps, and social networking sites. |
| Latent Semantic Indexing |
is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text. LSI is based on the principle that words that are used in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings |
| Linkedin |
A social networking site for working professionals. More formal than Facebook or MySpace |
| Local Search |
Using a search engine with geographical limitations imposed. (i.e. restaurants in Hunt Valley) |
| Load Time |
The amount of time in seconds that it takes a page to fully load. |
| Manual Submission |
Submitting sites to Directories and search engines by hand, instead of using a program. |
| Meta Tag |
An HTML tag that describes to the Search Engines what the page is about, when it was last updated and who created the page. |
| Mobile Web Design |
designing for mobile devices such as PDAs, Blackberrys, cell phones and more. |
| Mirror site |
Mirror sites duplicate content and are used for both legitimate and engine-spamming purposes. Legitimate mirror sites assist in downloading when a great deal of traffic is trying to reach a page or acquire a file. Illicit mirror sites attempt to fill a search results page with multiple destinations owned by a single entity. When Google discovers a mirror site whose only purpose is to dominate a search page, that site risks expulsion. |
| Marketing |
The act of promoting your business, product, or service to the public through various means so as to produce interest in the item. |
| Merchants |
Those who sell goods/services to others. |
| Meta Data |
A way to describe files, usually dealing with characteristics of the item being described |
| Mixx |
Mixx.com A news aggregate site |
| Natural or “Organic” Results |
Results from a computer ranking (algorithm) with no paid placements or inclusions. |
| Natural SEO |
Results from a computer ranking (algorithm) with no paid placements or inclusions. |
| Page Rank |
What Google thinks a webpage is worth; Google ranks pages on a 1-10 basis. |
| Page Weight |
How large a page is in megabytes or gigabytes (size of all the combined files on the page); relevant to how long the page takes to load. |
| PPC |
(Pay-Per-Click) Listing result placed as a result of monetary bid or paid inclusion. Usually called a “Sponsored Links/Sites” |
| Pay-Per-Click |
(PPC) Listing result placed as a result of monetary bid or paid inclusion. Usually called a “Sponsored Links/Sites” |
| PHP |
programming language used for programming sites. |
| PPC Traffic |
The number of visitors who clicked on a paid ad which led into your site |
| Propagation |
Internet changes need to be recognized by other computers throughout the net. This is known as propagation. |
| Page redirect |
A background link that sends site visitors to another site. Page redirects can be used legitimately, as when a site moves from one domain to another. In that scenario, the Webmaster sensibly keeps the old domain active for a while, seamlessly sending visitors to the new location when they click the old one. As an illicit optimization technique, page redirects deflect visitors from the site indexed by Google to another site that would not be able to gain as high a PageRank. This type of redirect, when uncovered by Google, risks the expulsion of both sites from the index. |
| Pixel tracking |
Implementation of a code into the website of the advertiser. This then tracks the user’s behavior on the website and reports information back to the adserving system .Pixel tracking is used for Optimization and Tracking conversions. |
| Prominence |
Prominence is the ratio of the position of one keyword or keyword phrase to the positions of the other keywords in an XHTML section of the page. For example in the text enclosed by the BODY tag is one of sections of the page we measure keyword prominence in. Your most important keywords must appear in the crucial locations on your web pages because search engines like pages where keywords appear closer to the top of the page. They should preferable appear in the first paragraphs of your page. Also keep in mind if you include keywords closer to the bottom of your page it will have a negative effect on the overall keyword prominence calculations. |
| Paid Link Building |
Similar to Link Building, only these sites require payment to include webpages in their directories |
| Paid Search |
A form of contextual advertising,which scans a page for keywords and then tailors advertisements to those keywords |
| Reciprocal Link |
A link that is exchanged with another website relevant to your own to increase link popularity, in hopes of gaining higher search engine ranking. |
| Referral Rate |
A measure of the traffic visiting your Web site broken out by channel: search engine, PPC, link, or direct. The Referral Rate can help determine which channel is most effective at driving traffic to your site. |
| Referring Site |
A site that sends visitors your site’s way and may include directories, banner advertisements, or any other sites targeted during link-building campaigns. |
| Returning Visitor |
a Unique Visitor that has come back for more; in other words, they’ve visited your site at least twice. Keep an eye on how many Returning Visitors your site enjoys to get a feel for your site’s “sticky-ness” factor. |
| RFP |
Request for Proposal – An invitation for companies to submit a proposal for specific services or products |
| Robots.txt |
A website command in HTML that tells search engine spiders to stop indexing a site or page. |
| Rank Theft |
a term coined by Clinton Cimring in 2001, Rank Theft is a method directories and other congregate websites use to gain the would-be page rank attributed to a website by offering subpages on their own domain. This is different to Google Jacking or spoofing where one website is redirected to another website. Most recently, sites like Myspace and Merchant Circle began offering subpages for free with the hopes that users would use these pages instead of building their own websites. Based on this approach myspace.com’s page rank rose approximately 1 point per month. Merchantcircle.com rose from a PR of 0 in 2005 to a PR of 7 in 2008. In contrast, website like wordpress.com and blogger.com offer subdomains rather than subpages in order to avoid these false attributes. |
| Reverse SEO |
a term coined by Clinton Cimring in 2006, Reverse SEO is reducing the ranking or placement of results like negative press in a search engine by optimizing other pages for the same results. For more on Reverse SEO See our Reverse SEO page: http://www.searchenginepartner.com/First-page-placement/reverse-seo.html |
| RSS feed |
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is a document that contains either a summary of content from a web site or the full text of a website. RSS feeds makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites automatically rather than checking them manually. |
| RSS |
(Really Simple Syndication) An XML document that provides users with information from a website. Usually news feeds. |
| Really Simple Syndication |
(RSS) An XML document that provides users with information from a website. Usually news feeds. |
| Scope Creep |
When the scope of a project gets somewhat out of control, resulting in cost overruns, loss of time management and focus. |
| Search Engine Optimization |
the process of making changes to a website to encourage high rankings in the search engines and therefore increased traffic to a given website. |
| Search Engine Referrals |
Relates directly to how often a user got to your site by way of a search engine. This lets you know whether or not your site’s rankings are having an effect on your traffic. Look to your conversion rate when analyzing this figure, as well, to see if you’re making any profit from your referral rate. Also, a high referral rate coupled with a low conversion rate may indicate that your site is ranked under the wrong keywords or phrases. |
| SERP |
Search Engine Results Page: the page that a search engine returns with the results of your query. |
| Search Engine Saturation |
Describes the number of pages a Search Engine has indexed for a particular website. |
| Search Engine Submission |
The act of manually submitting your website for inclusion in a Search Engine database. |
| Search Engine Traffic |
The number of visitors who clicked an organic search result (non PPC) which led into your site. |
| Search friendly |
A site that has been designed and optimized for the easiest crawling of the search engine bots. |
| Semantic Markup |
Semantic markup is a method of writing HTML that employs using HTML tags that add meaning to the content they contain that is descriptive enough to allow humans and the machines we program to recognize it and make decisions about it. In other words, markup means something when we can identify it and do useful things with it. In this way, semantic markup becomes more than merely descriptive. It becomes a brilliant mechanism that allows both humans and machines to “understand” the same information. |
| Server Co-location |
When an entire copy of your site is hosted in another server. |
| Shopping cart |
The virtual shopping cart that a user can place items from an e-commerce site in until she is ready to check out. |
| Sitemap |
A map of a website that lists each page and it’s subpages. Ideally this is used as the 404 Error Page, to help users find what they need when they get an error or just need a quick way to find what they need. |
| Social Media |
Online technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and media themselves. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. The social media sites typically use tools like message boards, forums, podcasts, bookmarks, communities, wikis, blogs, etc. (Wikipedia) Popular social media sites include Technorati, Digg, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo! Answers, and del.icio.us. |
| Spec |
Acronym for Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, a nonprofit corporation set up by many computer and microprocessor vendors to create a standard set of benchmark tests. The most widely used set of tests, known as SPEC CPU2000 contains two benchmark suites: CINT2000 for measuring and comparing compute-intensive integer performance, and CFP2000 for measuring and comparing compute-intensive floating point performance. The SPEC CPU2000 benchmark tests are also called CPU2000 tests. |
| Spider |
A program that surfs the web in order to index information for a search engine. |
| SSL |
(secured socket layer) Secures a site so that it is safe to send personal information. |
| Secured Socket Layer |
(SSL) Secures a site so that it is safe to send personal information. |
| SE |
(Search Engine) A site, such as Google.com, that matches keywords to Web page content. |
| Search Engine |
(SE) A site, such as Google.com, that matches keywords to Web page content. |
| SEM |
(search engine marketing) SEM is SEO that focuses on the marketing aspect of optimization in order to produce results rather than the backend programming, coding, content and design of a website. This marketing is usually associated with pay-per-click campaigns, banner ads, and affiliate networks intended for branding versus action by viewers. The long term results of SEM are usually much higher than organic SEO and may even have a negative return on investment. |
| Search Engine Marketing |
(SEM) SEM is SEO that focuses on the marketing aspect of optimization in order to produce results rather than the backend programming, coding, content and design of a website. This marketing is usually associated with pay-per-click campaigns, banner ads, and affiliate networks intended for branding versus action by viewers. The long term results of SEM are usually much higher than organic SEO and may even have a negative return on investment. |
| SEO 2.0 |
SEO 2.0, a term coined by Clinton Cimring in 2006, is an optimization reaction to Google’s new Universal algorithm and to Web 2.0 social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, and StumbleUpon. It includes the following results within Google: images, videos, indented pages, subpages, a search within a search, and SML descriptions. For more on SEO 2.0 See our SEO 2.0 page: http://www.SearchEnginePartner.com/seo-2.0.html |
| SEO Copywriting |
Writing specifically for web pages involves incorporating target keywords that tell the search engines what a specific web page is about. Effective SEO copywriting achieves two goals. 1) It creates persuasive, informative content for the web site visitor while 2) maintaining an optimum keyword count for the search engines to index. |
| SEO Footprint |
An SEO footprint is the imprint a search engine optimizer leaves on the web that can be used to trace his/her activity through various sites. It can be used to locate multiple accounts and multiple sites he/she owns. An SEO footprint is an obvious sign of search engine manipulation and can be used to by Google or competition to rip apart his/her network. |
| Search Engine Ranking |
A program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Although search engine is really a general class of programs, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Alta Vista and Excite that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web and USENET newsgroups |
| Server |
A server is a computer running administrative software that controls access to the network and its available resources such as printers and disk drives. It also provides resources to computers that are operating on the network. A server can also be a program that contains data or files and that responds to commands. |
| Social Networking |
A social networking site allows you to identify your contacts and establish a link between you and each of your contacts. |
| Spam |
Generally refers to repeated and irrelevant content. As an optimization term, spam refers to loading a page with keywords or loading a search engine’s index with mirror sites. Google reacts strongly to spamming, and takes harsh measures against Web sites that use spamming techniques to improve PageRank. |
| Spider |
An automated software program that travels from link to link on the Web, collecting content from Web pages. Spiders assemble this vast collection of content into an index, used by search engines to provide relevant sites to searchers. Spiders are also called crawlers, bots (short for robots), or Web bots. Google’s spider appears in Webmaster logs as Googlebot. |
| Splash page |
See doorway page. |
| StopWords |
Words that are common in a full-text file but have little value in searching. Words in a stopword file will be excluded from the indexes, considerably reducing the size of the indexes and improving search performance. For example these are stopwords: a, about, an, are, as, at, be, by, com, for, from, how. |
| Social Networking |
Connecting with people online to exchange information of many kinds |
| Static Website |
A website that uses HTML that does not change when different users access it |
| Stumbleupon |
(stumbleupon.com) A social link sharing website, similar to DIGG |
| Supplemental Results |
is a URL residing in Google’s supplemental index, a secondary database containing pages of less importance, as measured primarily by Google’sPageRank algorithm. |
| Text link |
A link that looks like highlighted text on a web page or in a document. |
| Top Converting Keywords |
This report breaks out the top keywords and phrases which lead to a conversion. The Karcher Group will often use these words in order to identify additional optimization opportunities and/or phrases worth purchasing for PPC. Within the keywords report you may see ‘other’ or ‘none’ being listed. ‘Other’ indicates that there were additional words or phrases that are not showing in this list. ‘None’ indicates that there were additional conversions that occurred as a result of non-search/PPC traffic channels (link or direct). |
| Traffic Referral Rates |
The total traffic visiting your website broken out by channel: search engine, PPC, link, or direct. The Traffic Referral Rate can help determine which channel is most effective at driving traffic to your site. |
| Tag |
A tag is a keyword used to describe a piece of data (such as a blog post, photo, video, etc.). Tags can either be assigned by the author of the content or the consumer of the content. |
| Title Tag |
XHTML tag used to define the text in the top line of a Web browser, also used by many search engines as the title of search listings. |
| Title Attribute |
Link title is the attribute of the link and adds information about the link, it is rendered as a tool tip in the browser. – Example: <a href=”title-attribute.html” title=”link title”>text</a> |
| Trackback |
When a blog links to another blog, a trackback is a notification sent between the two blogs letting the receiving blog’s author know (s)he is being linked to (this implies that both blogs have the ability to send and receive trackbacks) |
| Tweet |
A “Tweet” is an individual message (or “update”) posted from Twitter |
| TLD |
(Top Level Domain) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. (Wikipedia) |
| Top Level Domain |
(TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. (Wikipedia) |
| Unique Visitor |
An actual human being who has spent time on your site. This, and not hits, is the number you want to pay attention to when evaluating your site’s traffic status. |
| Usability |
A website’s usability is determined by the navigation, cart system, forms, etc. Conversions are more likely in a site that is easy to use, navigation is simple and not too much effort is required by the user. |
| User Path |
This information tracks what a user did while on your site and in what order. If the user made a purchase, the User Path would tell you what page they entered on and any subsequent pages they visited before making the purchase. |
| User Session |
an accumulation of the total time a user spends on your site and what they do while on your site. The session is usually “ended” when all pages have been closed or after a specific time of inactivity. |
| >URL |
A URL (Universal Resource Locator) is the address of documents and resources on the internet. Most search engines look for the keywords in the domain name, folder name and page name. Keywords should be separated by hyphens. – Example: http://www.keyword1.com/keyword2-keyword3.html |
| Visitor Session |
represents how much time a Unique Visitor spent on your site. As you read through our site, for instance, you’re adding one “Visitor Session” to our statistics. Thanks! |
| W3C |
(World Wide Web Consortium) They develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the web to its full potential. |
| World Wide Web Consortium |
(W3C) They develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the web to its full potential. |
| Web Analytics |
The act of analyzing a site’s SEO, usability and statistics to determine what factors created the greatest traffic and conversions, or what changes need to be made. |
| Web Hosting |
Where a website “lives” – where the data for a site is actually stored. |
| Web Mail |
email that can be accessed over the internet from any internet connection. |
| Web Standards |
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call “web standards”, are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market. |
| White Hat SEO |
SEO techniques that follow Search Engine guidelines. Search Engine Optimization performed with high ethical standards. Also known as ethical SEO. |
| WYSIWYG |
What you see is what you get – A desktop or web application that allows someone without knowledge of HTML to construct web pages/sites. Typical online solutions work very similar to Microsoft word by dragging and dropping elements as the application writes the supporting HTML in the behind the scenes. |
| Web 2.0 |
Web 2.0 is a trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies (the practice of catgorizingcontent through tags). Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the internet. |
| Web 3.0 |
Web 3.0 is a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, which refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called the ‘intelligent Web’—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience. Nova Spivack defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously. |
| Wiki |
A wiki is a website or piece of software that allows users to create and edit webpages. Users are able to link to outside sites and collaborate on the information that is posted. |
| Web Design |
The process of crafting a website and the related elements |
| Widgets |
Tiny programs that fill very specific functions. I.e. Providing weather details on a webpage |
| WordPress |
Free blogging software used to power many blogs. Can be obvious or hidden. |
| Yahoo |
Yahoo.com is a website providing a web portal and a search engine. |
| Youtube |
Social media site that allows for users to upload original video content for global viewing |
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