seo glossary

AdWords

AdWords is a product from Google, designed and programmed for keyword marketing. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and website targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. Top positions can be achieved, using those frequently used key words. You only pay for the actual click on your ad.

ALT-Tag

Alternative Tags are mainly used for pictures in graphical navigations. The alt attribute is used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify text that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered. Search Engines cannnot read the content of graphic files, so this attribute is used, when embedding the graphics, it helps people with disabilities to be able to better navigate through web pages, by rolling over a graphic they will know what the graphic is. It also useful for search engine spiders and bots to determine the content of your web pages.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. This method is controversial and as such search engines prohibit the use of cloaking, sites found to be caught cloaking will be blacklisted by search engines.

CPC Cost per Click

CPC or cost per click is an advertising model used on search engines, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website. It is not a set price, it’s a maximum price that is set before the release of the ad, where companies essentially put in a bid for a certain position in a search engine. If your website is for example www.tvmaniagame.com and you deal with tv board games, then building a Cost per Click on the fact that your website is dealing with tv questions and is a board game then it’s accurate for a search engine to rank you with tv board game in a search. If your website content matches that of which your trying to advertise a search engine will note this as a relevant advertisement, if your content in your cost per click campaign doesn’t match your website and no one is clicking on your advertisement your cost per click increases and your slowly are seen as not credible in the eyes of the search engines. This method basically weeds out irrelevant search terms from your cost per click campaign plus also targets users searches more accurately.

Crawler / Robot / Spider / Bot

A web crawler (also known as a web spider or web robot or bot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Search engines use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. The web crawler also finds dirty methods, like hidden text, forwarding or cloaking.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages (a humorous arbitrary coinage by Jill Whalen of High Rankings Advisor), jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names. Doorway pages that redirect visitors without their knowledge use some form of cloaking. This provides a very unhelpful sogginess to any web experience.

Keyword

A keyword captures the essence of the topic of a document or a search query. When a descriptor is descriptive, it can be an effective search parameter. It is used to retrieve documents in an information system, for instance a catalogue or a search engine.

Keyword Marketing

Almost every search engine gives you the opportunity to have search related key words on their website. The efficiency of this method is very high, because the ad is directly associated the user’s search term, keyword marketing is a very effective way to target specific search terms for your website.

Link

A hyperlink, is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document or to another document that may be
on a (different) website.

Link-Popularity

Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off the page criteria to determine quality content. In theory, off the page criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings. Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a website among the top of the search results. Indeed, some search engines require at least one or more links coming to a web site, otherwise they will drop it from their index. Search engines such as Google use a special link analysis system to rank web pages. Citations from other WWW authors help to define a site’s reputation. The philosophy of link popularity is that important sites will attract many links. Content poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them.

META-Tags

Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorise them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site. Meta elements have significantly less effect on search engine results pages today than they did in the 1990s and their utility has decreased dramatically as search engine robots have become more sophisticated. This is due in part to the nearly infinite re-occurrence (keyword stuffing) of meta elements and/or to attempts by unscrupulous website placement consultants to manipulate (spamdexing) or otherwise circumvent search engine ranking algorithms.

Paid Listings / Pay For Placement

There are different kinds of paid listings, which differ in display (text, banner), frequency and costs. Widely spread are the search term related text ads. Their display and order are set by auctions and are calculated via the so called CPC (Cost per Click).

Pay Per Click

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website.

Ranking

Ranking is the process of positioning search terms on an ordinal scale in relation to others. A search engine may rank the pages it finds according to an evaluation of their relevance, making it possible for the user quickly to select the pages they are likely to want to see.

Spam

Spam is not only the sending of illegal emails, but also using illegal methods to gain a good ranking in search engines, like used by cloaking. Sometimes it’s hard to define Search Engine Optimisation or Spam.

Search Engine

Search Engines, like Google and Fireball mainly develop their database using programs (web crawlers). They do not interpret graphics and
scripts, therefore they are depended on text content and links of websites.

Webcatalogue

Unlike in search engines, entries are added to web catalogues by editors. They examine the website and decide about the registration in
the web catalogue, using specific guidelines.