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Affiliate
- usually a partner who resells for another person and gets paid per CPA.
Alternate Text (ALT TXT)
- text associated with a specific webpage image that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the image. Alt tags should convey what the image/website is about and contain relevant keywords because they are spidered by search engines.
Anchor Text
- the actual text part of a textlink and which greatly affects your rankings in search results.
Backlink (a.k.a Incoming Link or Inbound Link)
- links that point to your website from other/external websites. Backlinks can be in the form of text (textlink), image or flash file. Depending on the topic, PageRank (PR) and number of outbound links on that webpage, backlinks affect your ranking on SERPs.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
- ratio of the number of clicks on an advertisement against the number of page views, e.g. a 6% CTR means for every 100 users who looked at the ad, 6 users clicked on it.
Cloaking
- serving different content to search engine spiders and to human visitors, e.g. the web server feeds spiders keyword-rich content, thus fooling the search engine into placing that page higher in the search results. Yet when the visitor clicks on the link they are given totally unrelated content. This practice is known as "blackhat SEO" and get your website banned if caught.
Contextual Ad
- a technology used by Google and Yahoo to display advertisements dynamically based on the page content, e.g. Dell Inspiron laptop advertisements on a laptop blog.
CPA (Cost per Action)
- cost paid to a publisher when a visitor from his/her website completes a set of agreed action, e.g. completing a survey and downloading trial software.
CPC (Cost per Click)
- cost paid to a publisher when a visitor from his/her website clicks on your advertisement.
CPM (Cost per Thousand)
- cost paid to a publisher for every 1,000 times an advertisement is displayed on his/her website.
Directory
- a website (usually about a certain topic) that contains links to other websites or resources. The links are sorted into categories and provide individual website descriptions. The links are usually user-submitted but are edited and approved by the directory owner. Paid listings are common for either a faster inclusion into the directory or for you link to be displayed more prominently.
Doorway Page
- also known as a "bridge page", it simply means any page created for the sole purpose of driving website traffic from the search engines, and is not a functional part of the website.
Googlebot
- Google's spiders.
Google Adwords
- pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising program by Google that lets you advertise in their search results. Overtime, it has expanded to include different charging models, support for various ad formats and coverage on partner sites and content network - reaching 80% of Internet users. Read more about Google Adwords.
Google Dance
- The period when Google is updating its database and there is a frequent change in rankings.
Hallway Page
- a page that serves as an index to a group of pages that you would like the search engine spiders to find. Once a search engine spider indexes the hallway page, it should also follow all the links on that hallway page and in turn index those pages as well. A site map acts as a hallway page.
Header Tags
- HTML tags that is often used to denote a page or section heading on a web page and is paid extra attention by search engines.
Hits
- number of downloads from a webpage, i.e. every item on a webpage counts as a hit. Thus, a single access on a webpage that contains 20 images will register as 21 hits - 20 for the images and 1 for the HTML page. Hits should be discounted when evaluating to advertise on a particular website, as opposed to other important traffic data like unique visitors and page views.
Inbound Links
- see backlinks.
Index
- a search engine's database with textual information about webpages that its spider visits.
Java Script
- client-side scripting language, i.e. runs on the user's computer rather than the web server. Search engines cannot run Java Scripts and hence, are worthless from an SEO perspective.
Keywords
- words that a search engine user will probably use to find something.
Keyword Density
- ratio of the number of times that a given keyword appears on a web page versus the total number of words. Most SEO experts agree that 4-8% should be the maximum keyword density.
Keyword Popularity
- the number of searches done by Internet users on a given keyword during a period of time.
Keyword Prominence
- the placement of a given keyword on a webpage. The higher up in the page a particular word is, the more prominent it is and hence, is accorded more weight by search engines.
Keyword Stuffing
- placing excessive amount of keywords on a webpage for the purpose of boosting the page's rankings SERPs in such a way that it detracts from the readability and usability of a given page. This includes hiding keywords on the page by making the text the same color as the background, hiding keywords in comment tags and over-filling ALT tags with long strings of keywords.
Link Building
- requesting backlinks from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your link popularity, usually through reciprocal link exchanges.
Link Farm
- sites created and maintained solely for the purpose of constructing links between member sites. Should be avoided as it violates most search engine policies and may result in a ranking penalty.
Long Tail, The
- a term coined by Chris Anderson in 2004 describing the growing importance/potential of niche products with the advent of the Internet - Read More.
Mod-Rewrite
- a module in Apache servers that can be used to rewrite requested URLs on the fly and supports an unlimited number of rules. This can be used to offer both user and search engine-friendly URLs, thus increasing indexing chances especially for a dynamic database-driven website.
Meta Tags
- Meta-information (information about information) that is associated with a web page and placed in the HTML but not displayed on the webpage. The 3 important meta tags are the meta title, meta description and meta keywords - they control how your webpage is displayed on search results.
Outbound Link
- outgoing link from your site to a other/external website, i.e. the opposite of backlink.
PageRank (PR)
- a method designed by Google's Larry Page to rank webpages on Google's search results. A webpage is ranked between a scale of 0 and 10. PageRanks are now only updated once in every 3 months to discourage webmasters from paying too much attention to them.
PHP
- an "open source" programming language for building dynamic web sites and is currently the most popular web programming language. PHP be embedded into HTML, is more secure, easier to learn, more efficient, and faster to code and deploy.
Pop-Under
- a pop-up (usually advertisement) that appears underneath the currently active web browser window.
Pop-Up
- an annoying form of advertisement that appears in a new window, rather than the currently active browser window. The ads can be set to pop-up on entry, on exit or after a pre-defined time lapse.
Redirect
- where the site visitor is automatically taken to another webpage. Redirects are generally not good for SEO as they are known to "dilute" PageRanks.
Referrer
- the source the led a particular visitor to your webpage.
Reciprocal Linking
- the practice of trading links for the purpose of exchanging traffic and increasing PageRank.
Search Engine
- a web site that offers its visitors the ability to search for content (e.g. information, products, etc.) on the Internet. Search engines periodically spider webpages and add the textual information into their index. Contrast this with a directory, that requires human submission, editing and approval.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- a form of online marketing, generally refers to SEO and PPC program like Google Adwords, which final objective is to increase a website's presence in the search engine results for relevant keywords. Read more about SEM.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- increasing your rankings on SERPs, and hence traffic, by optimizing the webpages for search engines, link building, etc. Read more about SEO.
Spider (a.k.a bot, robot and crawler)
- programs used by a search engine to periodically explore your web site to retrieve information and store in its index. Spiders can also be used to automate tasks like checking links or validating codes, and sometimes for ill intentions like harvesting e-mail addresses for spam.
Stop Character
- special characters like "&" and "=" webpage's URL that tip off a search engine that the page in question is dynamic. Search engines are cautious of indexing dynamic pages for fear of spider traps, thus pages that contain stop characters in their URL run the risk of not getting indexed.
Stop Word
- words like "the" and "a" are so common and meaningless that a search engine ignores them. As a result, including too many stop words in your title tag will dilute the keyword density.
SERP
- acronym for Search Engine Results Page.
Traffic
- the amount of visitors to a website usually measured as unique visitors per day or per month.
Unique Visitors
- a count of individual visitors who have accessed your web site for a given period.
Viral Marketing
- a clever marketing technique that compels users to promote your website/products/services to their friends and family, e.g. by using a flash game.
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