SEO Glossary

200 - OK

Status - 200 means that the file request and transfer was successful. For instance an image or a requested page was successfully loaded to the browser.

301 Redirects - Moved Permanently

301 error indicates to the user that the site has been permanently moved to a different location. It is actually the most ideal way of redirecting for most websites. Now if you are planning to move your entire website to a different location, its better if you first test it by moving a single file or folder to see how that single page ranks; and if it does, you may well move the entire website. It may take a few days to a few months for 301 redirects to be picked up by search engines which depends very much on the bot crawl frequency on your website.

302 Redirects- Found

302 error indicates the user that though the requested file has been found but it has been temporarily located to a different URL. But SEO expert's prescription is to avoid using 302 redirects as some search engines struggle when it comes to handling 302 redirects. So to discourage 302 redirects some search engines even allow competing websites to hijack their listings.

304 - Not Modified

The server gives this status code when the user has sent a conditional GET request which allows him the access to the page but the page document has not been modified, it is said to be 304 status code.

307 - Temporary Redirect

Web Server responds with a 307 status code when the user requests for a resource that is temporarily residing under a different URL. Now since the redirection may vary time to time, it is advisable that the user should continue to use the same URL for his future requests. Since most users don't really understand this error status code the status page should display short hypertext note with a hyper link to the new URI.

301 Redirects - Moved Permanently

302 Redirects- Found

304 - Not Modified

307 - Temporary Redirect

400 - Bad Request

Web server displays this error code when it is not able to understand the user's request due to incorrect URL syntax

401 - Unauthorized

The web server responds with this code status when the request requires user authentication before getting access of the requested resource. The user is expected to include a www-authenticate header field containing a challenge applicable to the requested resource. But if the server respondes with 401 status code even when the user has included authorization credentials, then 401 code indicates that the authorization has been refused for the requested credentials.

402 - Payment Required

The webserver responds with this status code when the code has been reserved for future use.

403 - Forbidden

The server responds with the 403 status code when the server understood the request but refuses to fulfill it. It says that no authorization is required and the request should not be repeated at all. If the request method was not head and the server wants to tell every one that why the user request couldnt be fulfilled, it displays the possible reasons on the entity. But if the server doesnt intends to inform the reason to client it just displays the status code 404.

404 - Not Found

The browser displays this error when the server fails to locate the requested URL.

408 - Request Timed Out

The server responds with this status code when the user doesn't responds to the responds within the specified time when the server was ready to wait. The client can well request for the resource at any later time.

410 - Gone

The server responds with 410 status code when the resource requested by the user is no longer present at the server and neither there is any redirect address available. This condition is mostly considered to be permanent. Ideally if the server is not aware whether if the condition is permanent, status 404 (not found) should be displayed instead.

500 - Internal Server Error

The server responds with status 500 code when it encounters an unexpected condition which has prevented the server from performing the request made by the user.

501 - Not Implemented

Server responds with 501 status code when it doesn't support the functionality required to perform the request made by the user.

A/B Testing

Talking about A/B testing in the most simple way is that it is a testing method in which visitor is randomly showed two versions of a page ie. A & B where A is the original design and B is the version containing a changed design to determine that which of the two drives the desired result more efficiently. Similarly in 50/50 split test, we are flipping a coin to determine which page to display. A/B testing usually applies to test clicked on ad copy, landing page, headlines, designs etc.

Absolute Link

A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.
Example Absolute Link: Paintings
Example Relative Link Paintings

Accessibility

Accessibility in context to SEO is the practice of making a website easily accessible by search engines whose bots are blind to images, flash etc.

ACSS (Aural Cascading Style Sheets)

Aural cascading style sheet allows to write CSS for your webpage to define how will it sound to users who are using audio browsers, specially who are physically challenged.

ACH - Automated Clearing House Network

ACH is a secured private network that connects bank to each other to facilitate services like electronic payment in a very secured environment.

Advertisements a searcher sees after submitting a query in a search engine or web site search box. In PPC, these ads are usually text format, with a Title, Description and Display URL. In some cases, a keyword the searcher used in his or her query appears boldfaced in the displayed ad. Ads can be positioned anywhere on a search results page; commonly they appear at the top – above the natural or organic listings – and on the right side of the page, also known as “Right Rail.”

Ad Copy

The main text of a clickable search or context-served ad. It usually makes up the second and third lines of a displayed ad, between the Ad Title and the Display URL.

AdPimp

Overdoing the number of ads on a webpage is called Adpimp. Its not a good practise as the visitors dont appreciate the distraction created by these ads while they are looking for useful content.

AdSense

Google adsense is a very unique and effective way of earning ad revenue for many small and big websites publishers by placing relevant google ads. The best part of the google adsense is that the ads are always related to the nature of the website.

AdSense Link Clicking Bots

Adsense ad clicking bots can be considered as bad bots who run automatically while using hacked or random IP addresses to click on google AdSense advertisements on a particular website and thus generating google AdSense revenue for that website owner.

Ad Title

AdWords

Adwords is a cost per click process of Internet Advertising. AERT - Techniques for Accessibility and Evaluation and Repair Tools

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a process of revenue sharing that allows merchants to duplicate sales efforts by enlisting other web sites as a type of outside sales force. Successful affiliate marketing programs result in the merchant attracting additional buyers, and the affiliate earning the equivalent of a referral fee, based on click-through referrals to the merchant site.

Agent Name

Agent name is the name of the search engine crawler or spider that is currently visiting a webpage.

AJAX

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load.

Algorithm

Algorithms are the programing rules of Search engines which determine how they index the website content and display the content in the SERP.

AllTheWeb

AllTheWeb is a search engine owned by Yahoo and using its database.

Alt Attribute

The ALT attribute is designed to be an alternative text description (provide a text equivalent) for images.

Alt Tag

Alt tag is the alternate text associated with a graphic that gets displayed when a user hovers the mouse over that graphic. Alt tags not only helps a website to fetch traffic from image searches but also makes the website accessible by vision impaired people as their browser reads the text in the graphic for them.

Alt Text

Alt text refers to the text that appears when a user holds his mouse over a text link or any other graphical link. It is considered a very useful SEO tool as an alt text allows search engine bots to evaluate the relevancy of a link or an image to decide the PR of a website. The other reason why it is so important is that it allows the browsers with text reading capability to actually read out the alt text for the physically challenged users to explain them what the image or link is all about.

Alta Vista

Before the entry of Google, Alta vista was considered to be the number one search engine now has been acquired by yahoo!.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the actual text of the link that is usually underlined indicating the user that the text is hyper linking some where. Google gives a special importance to the key words in the text of the anchor text in terms of its relevance to the page being linked to.

Anchor Text Optimization

Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. Anchor text optimization can be deployed throughout your site to enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content.

AOL

AOL stands for America On Line, A corporate online service provider and Internet service provider. The AOL search engine uses google as a part of its search results.

Article / Content Syndication

Article syndication understands the power of compelling, relevant content and uses information in the form of write-ups and articles to link your online business with other relevant websites, consequently generating focused traffic. Apart from generating focused traffic, content syndication also helps viewers recognize you as a quality information provider, hence, enhancing your brand perception.

Applets

Applet is a program application (like web browser) that runs in context with another program.

API

API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is a set of routines and protocols for developing software applications. API determines how a particular service is called through the application.

ASCII

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Exchange which converts text into a language that is understandable by computers.

ASP

ASP stands for Active Sever Pages, that is a proprietary programming language invented by Microsoft for building dynamic websites

Automated Submitting

Automated Submitting is a process of submitting a website to various search engines by using automated softwares such as Web position Gold or Application Service Provider(ASP) like 'Microsoft B-Central's' 'Submit it' service. Search Engines like Alta Vista are currently following this practice by completely automating their website submission process.

B2B

Stands for “Business to Business.” A business that markets its services or products to other businesses

B2C

Stands for “Business to Consumer.” A business that markets its services or products to consumers.

Back Links

Back links are the links pointing to a different different webpage.

Banned/Delisting

A website is said to be banned when a search engine blocks a website from appearing in its search results.

Banner Advertising

A banner ad is a form of online advertising in which an advertisement is embedded into a web page and linked to the web site of the advertiser. The users who see these ads on websites click on them and reach to the advertiser’s website. The banner can be an image, JavaScript program or a multimedia object.

Banner Blindness

Banner Advertisement refers to the tendency of website visitors to overlook any information that is offered to them in form of banner ads even if its useful for them they consider it nothing more than an ad by a company to sell its products of services. To avoid this happening to your banner always try to make your banner as colorful, crisp and animated as possible.

Bait and switch

Bait and switch is considered as a spam technique when used in SEO. It provides one page for a search engine or directory and a different page for other user agents at the same URL. Sometimes it creates an optimized page and submits to search engines or directory, but replaces with the regular page as soon as the optimized page has been indexed.

Baseline Matrices

Time-lagged calculations (usually averages of one sort or another) which provide a basis for making comparisons of past performance to current performance. Baselines can also be forward-looking, such establishing a goal and seeking to determine whether the trends show the likelihood of meeting that goal. They become an essential piece of a Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

Beacon

A line of code placed in an ad or on a web page that helps track the visitor's actions, such as registrations or purchases. A web beacon is often invisible because it's only 1 x 1 pixel in size and has no color. Also known as web bug, 1 by 1 GIF, invisible GIF or tracker GIF.

Bid Management Tool

Bid Management tool is an application or a service provider that manages bids on pay-per-click search engines such as Yahoo Search Marketing/Overture, Google Adwords, etc

Bidding

Bidding is a process of placing a bid price that an advertiser is willing to pay on a Search Engine's like Google. Google than provides the top spot to the highest bidder for that particular key word.

Black Box Algorithms

Black box is technical jargon for a when system is viewed primarily in terms of input and output characteristics. A black box algorithm is one where the user cannot see the inner workings of the algorithm. All search engine algorithms are hidden.

Black List

Black listed websites are the websites that are delisted from search engine being found culprit of spamming and other unethical internet practices

Black Hat SEO

The SEO specialists who use unethical Internet practices to optimize their website to get high rankings in SER's.

Blog

Blogs are mini websites that provide news on a particular subject such as science, politics, local news, products, services etc posted by individuals as they see it. Blogs normally comprise of text, images, web pages, links to other blogs and other media related to its content. It also empowers its readers to leave their comments in a very interactive format which is an important feature of many blogs as it serves as a means to perceive an unbiased public opinion on a topic, products or services.

Blog Comment Spam

Blog Comment spam is another type of Spamdexing in which a spammers leave a link to their own website in the form of a visitor comment. With such incoming links, the PR of the spammer's website jumps artificially.

Blogola

The new trend of offering free goodies to bloggers in return of a sympathetic comments and reviews.

BAP - Blog And Ping

BAP is a method used to get the content of a blog quickly indexed on major search engines.

Blook

This is way of presenting content in a serialized manner in form of online book on blog sites. New chapters are posted one by one as blog posts.

Book Mark

Book mark is an internet browser option that enables a user to tag or book mark his favorite page. There are many website too like del.icio.us (a yahoo owner bookmark site), who are providing this service where a user can bookmark and share his favorite page with his friends. Many websites refer to these websites to evaluate the page ranking of the bookmarked site. More the bookmarks, better the content is considered and higher goes the PR.

Bot

We use bot as a short form of robot. Also known as Search Engine Spiders.

Brand

Customer or user experience represented by images and ideas, often referring to a symbol (name, logo, symbols, fonts, colors), a slogan and a design scheme. Brand recognition and other reactions are created by the accumulation of experiences with the specific product or service, both from its use, and as influenced by advertising, design and media commentary. Brand is often developed to represent implicit values, ideas and even personality. Source: Wikipedia

Brand Messaging

Creative messaging that presents and maintains a consistent corporate image across all media channels, including search.

Branding Strategy

The attempt to develop a strong brand reputation on the web to increase brand recognition and create a significant volume of impression

Bread Crumb Navigation

Bread Crumb Navigation is a navigation format allows a visitor to understand the hierarchy of the website and all the pages he passed through to reach the page he is currently viewing. Foreg.
Home > SEM > RFP

Bridge Page

A bridge page or a doorway page is a website that is optimized for specific keywords to pull maximum traffic from the search engines to divert it to some other website.

Bumping / Necroing

It is a technique of posting replies to a forum just to bring it to the top of the list.

Cache

Cache is a local hard drive where the browser stores recently and frequently opened webpages to facilitate a quicker access of the pages to the user. So it is because of Cache, why the previous page opens so quickly when we press the back button on our browser because the browser doesn't have to download it from the internet every time; it just fetches it from the Computer's own cache. Google cache facilitates its user to view the snapshot of a website if the original page is unavailable that was taken by the google crawlers when they last crawled that website.

Call To Action

A call to action is copy used in advertising to encourage a person to complete an action as defined by the advertiser. Call to action words are "doing words" such as "Click here", "Buy Now", "Enter Now" or "Click to download"

Canonicalization

Canonicalization is the process of converting data that has more than one possible representation into a "standard" canonical representation. This can be done to compare different representations for equivalence, to count the number of distinct data structures (e.g., in combinatorics), to improve the efficiency of various algorithms by eliminating repeated calculations, or to make it possible to impose a meaningful sorting order. Source: Wikipedia

Cgi-bin

Cgi-bin is a "virtual" directory contained in URLs indicates a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script is in use. A sure tip-off to the spider that your page is dynamic.

Cookie

Cookie refers to the information that a website stores on the visitor's computer.

Catablog

Catablog is a blog that explains a product or services available on some e-commerce website.

CAPTCHA

Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart

Collabulary

Collabulary is collabrative and vocabulary synergized. Content users define tags that is inturn attributed to the tag.

Click Arbitrage

Click Arbitrage is a process when you purchase PPC ads in a hope that the traffic will click on these ads and generate revenue for your website.

Click Bot

A program generally used to artificially click on paid listings within the engines in order to artificially inflate click amounts.

Click Distance

Click distance refers to the number of clicks it takes for a user to reach to a webpage, file or a document.

Click Flipping

Click flipping refers to technique of making money out of the clicking done by a user as he visits a website. Cost Per Action is the most common form of click flipping.

Click Fraud

Clicks on a Pay-Per-Click advertisement that are motivated by something other than a search for the advertised product or service. Click fraud may be the result of malicious or negative competitor/affiliate actions motivated by the desire to increase costs for a competing advertiser or to garner click-through costs for the collaborating affiliate. Also affects search engine results by diluting the quality of clicks.

Click Print

Click print is a measurement of how much average time a visitor spends and the number of pages viewed by him on a website.

Client-side Tracking

Client-side tracking entails the process of tagging every page that requires tracking on the Web site with a block of JavaScript code. This method is cookie based (available as first or third party cookies) and is readily available to companies who do not own or manage their own servers.

Clustering

Clustering is a process of a limiting a website from appearing on SER more then specified number of times.

Cloaking

Cloaking a practice done by black hat SEO's to display key word stuffed pages to Search Engines and a different page to actual users.

Cold Fusion

Cold fusion is a scripting language introduced by Adobe which is used by webdesigning professionals for database interfacing, create general softwares and develop online applications.
Cold Fusion Markup Language(CFML) is used for scripting in Cold Fusion.

Competitive Analysis

As used in SEO, CA is the assessment and analysis of strengths and weaknesses of competing web sites, including identifying traffic patterns, major traffic sources, and keyword selection.

Consumer Generated Media (CGM)

Refers to posts made by consumers to support or oppose products, web sites, or companies, which are very powerful when it comes to company image. It can reach a large audience and, therefore, may change your business overnight.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

In computing, a content management system (CMS) is a document centric collaborative application for managing documents and other content. A CMS is often a web application and often it is used as a method of managing web sites and web content. The market for content management systems remains fragmented, with many open source and proprietary solutions available.

Content Network

Also called Contextual Networks, content networks include Google and Yahoo! Contextual Search networks that serve paid search ads triggered by keywords related to the page content a user is viewing.

Content Syndication

Content syndication understands the power of compelling, relevant content and uses information in the form of write-ups and articles to link your online business with other relevant websites, consequently generating focused traffic. Apart from generating focused traffic, content syndication also helps viewers recognize you as a quality information provider, hence, enhancing your brand perception.

Content Targeting

An ad serving process in Google and Yahoo! that displays keyword triggered ads related to the content or subject (context) of the web site a user is viewing. Contrast to search network serves, in which an ad is displayed when a user types a keyword into the search box of a search engine or one of its partner sites.

Contextual Advertising

Advertising that is automatically served or placed on a web page based on the page’s content, keywords and phrases. Contrast to a SERP (search engine result page) ad display. For example, contextual ads for digital cameras would be shown on a page with an article about photography, not because the user entered “digital cameras” in a search box.

Contextual Distribution

The marketing decision to display search ads on certain publisher sites across the web instead of, or in addition to, placing PPC ads on search networks.

Contextual Network

Also called Content Ads and Content Network, contextual network ads are served on web site pages adjacent to content that contains the keywords being bid upon. Contextual ads are somewhat like traditional display ads placed in print media and, like traditional ad buys, are often purchased on the same CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model for purchased keywords, rather than a CPC basis

Contextual Search

A search that analyzes the page being viewed by a user and gives a list of related search results. Offered by Yahoo! and Google.

Contextual Search Campaigns

A paid placement search campaign that takes a search ad listing beyond search engine results pages and onto the sites of matched content web partners.

Conversion Action

The desired action you want a visitor to take on your site. Includes purchase, subscription to the company newsletter, request for follow-up or more information (lead generation), download of a company free offer (research results, a video or a tool), subscription to company updates and news.

Conversion Optimization

This is an optimization technique specific to e-commerce websites that converts your website into a selling tool by increasing the conversion rate. The user has to go through a logical sales cycle every time every time he visits the website.

Conversion Rate

The number of visitors who convert (take a desired action at your site) after clicking through on your ad, divided by the total number of click-throughs to your site for that ad. (Expressed as: total click-throughs that convert / total click-throughs for that ad=conversion rate.)

Cost Per Action(CPA)

CPA is a form of affiliate marketing in which an advertiser pays only if the user performs a specified action on a website. The action may be any thing - from user buying a product, filling up a form or clicking on a link.

Cost Per Click(CPC)

CPC is an Adsense Ad format in which the advertiser is charged only when a user clicks on an ad.

Cost Per Thousand(CPM)

CPM is a measurement unit in the advertising industry. In refrence to Internet Marketing, it is a Google Adsense format which refers to how much will it cost for an advertiser to show his ad to 1000 people. In CPM, the advertiser specifies the type of websites on which he wants his ad to be displayed. A CPM ad can be a better revenue fetcher than a CPC ad because if an advertiser specifically wants to target your the traffic on your website, he will have to bid high enough to beat the already existing CPC ads on your page.

Counter

Counter is a field on a website which tells the visitor that how many times the website has been visited before. Please keep in mind that counter signifies number of visits and not the number of visitors. However a better way to keep track on website visits is maintaining log files.

Crawls Depth

Crawl depth refers to how deep a bot crawls and index a website.

Crawler

See Bot

Creatives

Unique words, design and display of a paid-space advertisement. In paid search advertising, creative refers to the ad’s title (headline), description (text offer) and display URL (clickable link to advertiser’s web site landing page). Unique creative display includes word emphasis (boldfaced, italicized, in quotes), typeface style and, on some sites, added graphic images, logos, animation or video clips.

Cross Linking

Cross linking is when a webiste owner has a multiple websites linking to each other.

Custom Feed

Create custom feeds for each of the shopping engines that allow you to submit XML feeds. Each of the engines has different product categories and feed requirements.

Cybrarian

Cyberian is a person who explores, collects and then manage content on world wide web.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheet

CSS is used to define look, feel and navigation aspect of your website.

CTR

Acronym for Click-Through Rate, the number of clicks that an ad gets, divided by the total number of times that ad is displayed or served. (Represented as: total clicks / total impressions for a specific ad=CTR). For example, if an ad has 100 impressions and 6 clicks, the CTR is 6%. The higher the CTR, the more visitors your site is receiving; CTR also factors into you advertiser search engine Quality Score and, therefore, your minimum keyword bids on Tier I engines.

Custom Error Page

When ever server fails to fulfill the user requestes the webserver displays an error page to inform the user what possibly has gone wrong. However these default error pages gererated by the webserver are not particularly user friendly. Therefore website owners can custom design there error page to give the user a more clear picture about the error. Not Found error is one of the most common error page.

Cybersquatting

Cybersquatting is a malpractice done by some people who use a domain name and website that is resembling to some one else's website with a bad intent to capitalize on his brand name and market value. Cybersquatter then offers the website for sale to the original website owner on an inflated price.

Dangling Link

Dangling links refers to the links that point to a page with no further out going links.

Database-Driven / Dynamic webpages

Database driven webpages also known as dynamic webpages or or server side programing are the action that allow webpages to connect to the database where execution is actually happening on the server. This is unlike javascript that runs on the browser.

Database-Generated

Data-base generated webpages are the pages that retrieve data from an attached database, each time a page is loaded. The website changes automatically as we change the database.

Description Tag

Refers to the information contained in the description META tag. This tag is meant to hold the brief description of the web page it is included on. The information contained in this tag is generally the description displayed immediately after the main link on many search engine result pages.

DHTML

DHTML stands for dynamic HTML and it is a fusion of HTML with Client side scripting language such as javascript, CSS (a language that defines presentation of the content) and DOM (Document Object Model). So keeping it simple, DHTML is a combination for scripting languages to create a webpage whose content changes with time, occurrence, user etc.

Dead Links:

A link is said to be a dead link if the page linking to either no longer exists, the page has been moved to a different location or even if the server is down. Dead links normally lead to a 404 error page.

Deep Link

Deep link refers to a link that points to the most internal page within a website.

Delisting

Search engines remove the websites from their index due to reasons like spamming, copied content etc.This is called Delisting.

Directory Search

Also known as a search directory. Refers to a directory of web sites contained in an engine that are categorized into topics. The main difference between a search directory and a search engine is in how the listings are obtained. A search directory relies on user input in order to categorize and include a web site. Additionally, a directory usually only includes higher-level pages of a domain.

Display URL

The web page URL that one actually sees in a PPC text ad. Display URL usually appears as the last line in the ad; it may be a simplified path for the longer actual URL, which is not visible. DdoS Distributed Denial of Service (DdoS Attack) Ddos attack is one in which multiple requests are sent to a server untill it breaks down to eventually make it unavailable for its intended users.

DMOZ

DMOZ is a large human made editable directory made and maintained by volunteers. Many websites use it as a content reference for their website.

DNS - Domain Name System

DNS is a system that translates Domain name into IP address which are inturn used to identify each host individually.

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 themain site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Dynamic Landing Pages

Dynamic landing pages are web pages to which click-through searchers are sent that generate changeable (not static) pages with content specifically relevant to the keyword search.

Dynamic Rotation

Delivery of ads on a rotating, random basis. Dynamic rotation allows ads to be served on different pages of the site and exposes users to a variety of ads.

Dynamic Site

Dynamic website is website which is capable of changing itself with change in database.

eCPM

Acronym for Effective Cost Per Thousand, a hybrid Cost-Per-Click (CPC) auction calculated by multiplying the CPC times the click-through rate (CTR), and multiplying that by one thousand.

Entry Page

Refers to any page within a web site that a user employs to “enter” your web site. Also see Landing Page.

Error Page

Please refer to Custom error page.

Exclusive Advertising

A contract that allows advertisers to purchase all inventory on a given page or for chosen keywords.

Expandable Banner

A banner ad that can expand to as large as 468 x 240 pixels after a user clicks on it or after a user moves the cursor over the banner.

External Link

External links are nothing but links on your website that link to the other website.

E-Commerce

Ecommerce is nothing but the process of performing business and other financial transacrions over internet.

Feeds

A web document that is a shortened or updated (revised content only) version of a web page created for syndication. Usually served at user request, through subscription; also includes ad feeds to shopping engines and paid-inclusion ad models. Ad feeds are usually in Extensible Markup Language (XML) or Rich Site Summary (RSS) format.

Flux

Shuffling of search engine positions in between major search engine updates

Free For All Links (FFA)

These are the websites where any one can post links to their website. Now the problem here is that most people are using automation tools like bulk submitters resulting that no ones link gets displayed for more then an hour. Therefore it is recommended that one must avoid these links as the only good they can do to your website is to harvest your mail box to bulk spams.

Findability

Findability is a term used to describe the easiness for a user to locate your website on a search engine page.

Flash

Flash is an application developed by Macromedia that facilitates the web designers to insert interactive multimedia into webpages to make the website more lively in form of flash introductions, animated navigations and even games. Too much use of flash is considered a threat to the website's PR as the search engine crawlers cannot understand the content embedded in flash.

Flog

Flog is the name given to the blogs which are fake in nature and have been made by public relation firms, media houses and professional political operatives solely to spread their particular point of view among masses.

Folksonomy

Folsonomy or collabrative tagging or social tagging is a technique that facilitates bookmarking where users tag their favourite web content to a central place where other users can also access it and create its metadata. del.icio.us and flickr are social tagging websites that work on the principle of folksonomy.

Forums

A Forum is a place where any one can exchange information on a particular topic in the form of threads. The information threads posted by a users are visible to one other. And a user can even post a reply to the information which is again taken as a part of that thread. SEO experts and Webmasters use forums as an integral part of their SEO strategy.

Frames

Frame is a HTML technique that facilitates designers to display two or more different webpages within a single browser window. Frames are not considered good from the SEO perspective as search engine bots find it quite problematic to crawl through the pages built with frames and as a result these pages don't get indexed to these search engines properly.

Frameset

A website that is composed of multiple frames.

Fresh

Google considers the websites to be 'fresh' who maintain a frequently changing homepage. When a bot find that there are frequent changes on the homepage it starts visiting and reindexing it on a daily basis.

Fresh Bot

Fresh bot can be considered as a brother of Google bot but it crawls only high rank websites very frequently.

Fresh Crawl

Fresh crawl is when bot visits your website more frequently i.e. almost daily for capturing updates as the bot knows that there are frequent updations on your website every now and then.

FTP - File Transfer Protocol

FTP is a standard protocol which is used to transfer files between computer on a network. It is also used in file exchange between system accounts or even to access software archives on the internet.

G.U.I

Stands for “Graphical User Interface.” Means a visual representation of the functional code. Or, is a way for the average web user to interface with a database, program, etc.

GIF - Graphical Interchangeable Format

GIF graphics the oldest and the most website friendly graphical format supported by almost all web browsers and easily compressable but it doesnt supports more than 256 colors.

Geo Targeting

Geo targeting is a feature of Google Adwords that enables you to target your PPC campaign to users in specific countr, states etc. and ads are served according to the native language preferance of the user.

Google AdSense

Google Adsense is a contextual advertisement system by google in which google places relevant ads on websites, based on their content and if a user clicks on it, the ad revenue is shared by the google and website owner which comes from the party who has placed that ad.

Google Analytics

Google is a free tool made for webmasters to monitor their multiple websites for daily traffic and performance. It can be used to analyze the daily website activities like visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate etc.

Google Bowling

Google bowling is a strategy of black hat SEO experts targeted to knock out the other competitor websites our of the SERP's by pointing many doubtable links from bad websites to the victim website unless it is delisted by the Search Engine.

Google Dance

The Google Dance refers to when Google indexes are updated. This period of time often results in fluctuations in the index size and some noticeable changes in search engine result positions.

Google Everflux

Google Everflux is a strange situation in which the pages appear and then suddenly disappear from the Google Result Page Rankings. This usually happens to newly submitted webpages.
O f there is one thing Search Engine Marketers and website owners fear - it is a major algorithm update, especially by Google. Well, much as we may like it not to happen, its here. Google has recently done a major algorithm update, nick named "Jagger" update series.

Google Bot

Google bot is the name of crawlers of Google's search engine crawlers.

Google bombing / washing

Google bombing is an internet slang term used to describe any attempt to influence the ranking of a given website on Google SERP.

Google Guy

Google guy is a Google representative or employee who provides information to webmasters about the recent changes on google.

Google Traffic Estimator

Google Traffic Estimator is a tool that indicates the number of clicks to expect on Google AdWords ads for particular keywords.
The tool can be used to indicate search volume, average cost per click, estimated ad positions, estimated clicks per day and estimated cost per day.
Googlewhack - A Google search query consisting of two words, that returns a single result.
Grey Hat SEO - SEO using both Black Hat and White Hat techniques
Header / Headings
Headers are standard HTML tags foreg.

Heading tags

Heading tags are an effective SEO tool as most Search Engine crawlers give importance to text within these tags. So it is considered good practice to include headings in your website.

Header tag

Header tag is a standard HTML tag denoted by & Now the content within these tag is used to identify page title, external file loads & meta tags.

Hidden Text / Keywords

It is an SEO Spam tactic by which black hat SEO's stuff the website with keywords that are only readable by the search engine bots and not by human eyes. They do it either by writing key words with font color that is same as the back ground color or by using CSS-P. But most of the bots can easily detect hidden text on your website and take evasive action against it.

Hits

Page hit is the number of item retrievals from a webserver. It doesn't gives an actual idea about traffic.

Hoax Marketing

Hoax Marketing is technique of viral marketing in which the website owner shoots a false video and posts it to his website to attract more traffic. Some people use hoaxes to scare people to buy their products and services but this method of marketing is considered unethical and can back fire in many cases.

Home Page

Home page refers to the main page of a website ie. The index page that opens when you enter the url name of a website on your browser.

Hotbot

Hotbot is one of the largest search engine on www.

htaccess .htac

htaccess is a default name of the directory that contains the information of who can or who cannot access a file on internet or intranet.

htaccess file

A file with one or more configuration directives placed in a web site document directory. The directives apply to that directory and all subdirectories.

HTM

htm is nothing but a short form of HTML.

HTML

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language which is the most fundamental language used to make websites.

HTTP

HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is nothing but rules for exchanging files on world wide web.

>HTTPS

HTTPS stands for HTTP over Secured Socket Layer - SSL that is a secured version of FTTP that enables secured transmission of webpages over internet.

HTTP Referrer Data

A program included in most web analytics packages that analyzes and reports the source of traffic to the user’s web site. The HTTP referrer allows webmasters, site owners and PPC advertisers to uncover new audiences or sites to target or to calculate conversions and ROI for future ad campaigns.

Hyperlinks

Hyper link is link from one page to the other.

ICANN

ICANN stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is a non profit organization that takes care of the unique website url identifiers.

ICRA - Internet Content Rating Association

ICRA is another non profit organization which was founded to protect minor from potentially harmful content over internet.

IFRAME

“IFrame (from inline frame) is an HTML element which makes it possible to embed another HTML document inside the main document. The size of the IFrame is specified in the surrounding HTML page, so that the surrounding page can already be presented in the browser while the IFrame is still being loaded. The IFrame behaves much like an inline image, and the user can scroll it out of view. On the other hand, the IFrame can contain its own scroll bar, independent of the surrounding page's scroll bar.

Impression

Impression refers to the number of times an advertisement is shown to traffic by search engines.

Inbound Links

Inbound links are the links from other websites that are pointing towards your website. Inbound links are mostly a formation of link exchange with other websites. Quality inbound links are very important to improve rankings of a website.

Index

A search engine’s “index” refers to the amount of documents found by a search engines crawler on the web.

Indexability

Also known as crawlability and spiderability. Indexability refers to the potential of a web site or its contents to be crawled or “indexed” by a search engine. If a site is not “indexable,” or if a site has reduced indexability, it has difficulties getting its URLs included.

Inlinks / Inbound links / Backlinks

These are number of links pointing to your own website.

Invisible Web

Also known as Deep web. There are the webpages that search engines either fail to index or they don't do it intently and hence depriving users from the web page.

Internet Marketing

A contract that allows advertisers to purchase all inventory on a given page or for chosen keywordsInternet marketing, also referred to as online marketing, Internet advertising, eMarketing (or e-Marketing), is the marketing of products or services over the Internet. When applied to the subset of website-based advertisement placements, Internet marketing is commonly referred to as Web advertising (Webvertising) and/or Web marketing..

Interstitials

Interstitials is a rich form of pop under advertisement in which an ad created in animated gif or flash gets loaded in the background of the actual page that user is viewing. User normally sees the interstitial only when he quits that page.

IPTV

Acronym for Internet Protocol Television, which delivers digital television service using the Internet Protocol over a network. IPTV delivery may be through a high capacity, high speed broadband connection. Compared to traditional broadcast and cable television, IPTV may offer new venues for PPC search advertisers through program interfaces and stored individual preferences.

IPW - Inverted Pyramid Writing

It is a writing technique in which the first paragraph gives a precise idea about all the content present on the webpage

IP Address

IP address is a unique address given to a computer to identify it over Internet.

IP Spoofing

IP spoofing is technique of hiding your original IP address and then making it appear to be different one.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a scripting language based on prototype-based programming. It is used on a web site as client-side JavaScript, and also to enable scripting access to objects in other applications.

JPEG

JPEG an image compression format that decreases the size of an image on the cost of quality of the image.

Junk Pages

Junk Pages are meaningless key word stuffed web pages that are created only for adsense revenue.

JSP

JSP stands for Java Server Pages which is nothing but HTML with Java code units - (file.jsp).

Keyword

Keyword is a word that represents the whole class of the information, product or services that the user intends to search on the search engine.

Keyword Research

It refers to the process of identifying and selecting the best search terms or keywords for the website being optimised, based on factors like Keyword popularity and Keyword competitiveness.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is the share ratio of keywords among the total words on a web page.

Keyword Effectiveness Index

A website that is composed of multiple framesIt is just a measure of how effective a key word is for your website ranking..

Keyword Popularity

The number of searches done by Internet users of a given keyword during a particular period of time.

Keyword Prominence

Keyword refers to the prominence of a keyword on a web page as in terms of position and density and also how close that key word is from the start of the webpage.
Keyword Stemming – To return to the root or stem of a word and build additional words by adding a prefix or suffix, or using pluralization. The word can expand in either direction and even add words, increasing the number of variable options.

Keyword Stuffing/Spamming

Key word stuffing or spamming is a way of repeatably adding keywords or key phrases within the meta tags and the body text. But the bots are smart and can easily identify and penalize keyword spamming.

Keyword Tag

Refers to the META keywords tag within a web page. This tag is meant to hold approximately 8 – 10 keywords or keyword phrases, separated by commas. These phrases should be either misspellings of the main page topic, or terms that directly reflect the content on the page on which they appear. Keyword tags are sometimes used for internal search results as well as viewed by search engines.

Keyword Targeting

Displaying Pay Per Click search ads on publisher sites across the Web (see also Contextual Networks) that contain the keywords in a context advertiser’s Ad Group.

KPI, Key Performance Indicators

KPI are metrics used to quantify objectives that reflect the strategic performance of your online marketing campaigns. They provide business and marketing intelligence to assess a measurable objective and the direction in which that objective is headed. (See Module 5, Lesson 2, for key definitions for general and SEO-specific KPIs.)

LAMP

Its combination of - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python technologies.

Landing Page / Destination Page

The web page at which a searcher arrives after clicking on an ad. When creating a PPC ad, the advertiser displays a URL (and specifies the exact page URL in the code) on which the searcher will land after clicking on an ad in the SERP. Landing pages are also known as “where the deal is closed,” as it is landing page actions that determine an advertiser’s conversion rate success.

Latent Semantic Indexing

LSI uses word associations to help search engines know more accurately what a page is about.

Lead Generation

Web sites that generate leads for products or services offered by another company. On a lead generation site, the visitor is unable to make a purchase but will fill out a contact form in order to get more information about the product or service presented. A submitted contact form is considered a lead. It contains personal information about a visitor who has some degree of interest in a product or service.

Link Baiting

Link baiting is a process to get the visitors to link to your website through blogs, forums, social taggers etc.

Link Building

The process of researching and requesting links to build a site's link popularity. This can involve exchange links with relevant sites and paying for links.

Link Farm

Link farm is a website which has unlimited number of links put together irrespective of industry relevance. Fetching links from link farms is just a waste of time as they can only get you quantity and not quality links.

Link Farming

The attempt to substantially and artificially increase link popularity.

Linkbait

Also known as link bait, this is something on your site that people will notice and link to. By linking to your site, other sites are saying they value the content of your site and that they think other people will be interested in it, too.

Link

Link or hyperlink is the area on a text or a graphic clicking on which takes the user to the corresponding website. Links are the major means of navigation for Internet users.

Link Popularity

Link popularity in simple terms is how many websites are linking to your website.It is the number and quality of the back links to your website. Link Popularity is a major factor for search engines to rank your website.

Link Partner

Link Partners refers to the industry relevant websites who are exchanging links with your website. Most of the link partners are found to be reciprocally linked.

Link Text

Link text is the clickable area of text that navigates a user to a different website. Link text is also known as anchor text/link.

Linkerati

Linkeratis are the target people of link baiting websites.

Listings

Listings are the resultant list of websites shown by google from the search query entered by the user.

Log Files

Log files are the files generated and updated by the server. Log files contain all the daily analysis about the website and the overall behavior of the user on your website. You also get to know how much traffic is coming from which search engine and what key words did the user entered to arrive to your website which in turn helps the SEO in targeting those specific keywords only.

Long Tail – Keyword phrases with at least three, sometimes four or five, words in them. These long tail keywords are usually highly specific and draw lower traffic than shorter, more competitive keyword phrases, which is why they are also cheaper. Oftentimes, long tail keywords, in aggregate, have good conversion ratios for the low number of click-throughs they generate.

Made For Adsense

These are poor websites that are made from copied content specifically with Google Adsense keywords to attract traffic artificially.

Made for Digg

Made for digg are the websites that are exclusively designed to fetch traffic from digg.com by stuffing the entire website with similar funny images and posts.

Mashups

Mashups is nothing but a process of synergism of two or more sources.

Meta Description Tag / Meta data

A meta description tag contains the description of content that is there on the page.

Meta Feeds

Ad networks that pull advertiser listings from other providers. They may or may not have their own distribution and advertiser networks.

Meta Jacking

Meta Jacking is a technique of copying the contents from some other website's HTML meta tags with high PR's in a hope of garness high PR for their own website too.

Meta Keywords

Meta Keyword tags facilitates us to put additional text which is crafted just to feed the search engines crawlers and is not visible to the actual visitor otherwise.

Meta Search

In a meta search a search query is sent to multiple search engines at the same time and the result is combination of all those search engine minus duplications.

Meta Tag Masking

Meta tag is a traditional trick to hide the meta tags from the Internet browsers by using CGI scripts and only allowing the bots to actually read those meta tags.

Metrics

A system of measures that helps to quantify particular characteristics. In SEO the following are some important metrics to measure: overall traffic, search engine traffic, conversions, top traffic-driving keywords, top conversion-driving keywords, keyword rankings, etc.

Micro Formats

Micro formats are application formats which are designed primarily from a human perspective and machine format is considered secondary while designing.

Minimum Bid

The least amount that an advertiser can bid for a keyword or keyword phrase and still be active on the search ad network. This amount can range from $0.01 to $0.50 (or more for highly competitive keywords), and are set by the search engine.

Mirror Sites

Mirror Sites are the multiple copies of the same website on different servers ie. Website duplication. Bots can easily catch mirror sites and penalize them for spamming.

Misspelling Optimization

Optimizing a website to target mistyped keywords by the users is called Misspelling optimization.

Mobisode

Mobisodes are the TV movie clips that are shot specifically for mobile hand sets.

MoBlog

Moblog is a part of new generation mobile blogging introduced by blogger.com that allows a user to create a new blog from his mobile.

Mod Rewrite

Though too complex to use but Mod rewrite is APACHE's module which is a powerful way to perform all types of url manipulations.

Mouse Over

Mouse over is a javascript element that results in some kind of change in a webpage item when mouse pointer passes over it.

MSN

Micro Soft Network. It is the third most popular search engine on world wide web.

Mowser

Short form from mobile browsers.

MySQL - Popular Open Source Database

My SQL is a multi threaded and multi user database management system.

Naked Links

A posted and visible link in the text of a web page that directs to a web site.

Natural / Organic listings

The listing of a website on the algorithm based search engines is called natural listing. Paid inclusions help our website to get into natural listings, which we also call organic listing.

Narrow Casting

Narrow casting is a deviating trend of user's dependency for media content from professionally mass marketed sources like video stores to web based media content providers on internet.

Navigational Query

Navigational Query is a search engine query that returns only one satisfactory result.

Necroing

Necroing is a process of posting replies to old threads to bring them up on the forum listing.

Negative SEO

Negative Keywords

Filtered-out keywords to prevent ad serves on them in order to avoid irrelevant click-through charges on, for example, products that you do not sell, or to refine and narrow the targeting of your Ad Group’s keywords. Microsoft adCenter calls them "excluded keywords." Formatting negative keywords varies by search engine; but they are usually designated with a minus sign. Niche Aggregators Spam websites

NOFOLLOW

It is an attribute used to embed instruction for search engines to not to follow the particular link.

Non Disclosure Agreement

It is an agreement between two parties, normally the service provider and his client, to not to disclose the shared confidential information of either party to any third party.

No Frames Tag

A tag used to describe the content of a frame to a user or engine which had trouble displaying / reading frames. Frequently misused and often referred to as “Poor mans cloaking”.

No Script Tag

The noscript element is used to define an alternate content (text) if a script is NOT executed. This tag is used for browsers that recognizes the script tag, but does not support the script in it.

Off-page SEO

Link building comes under off-page SEO when the website exchange links to improve their rankings on SERP's.

On-page Off-page

Changes made to the structure of a website to make it more search engine friendly and hence to improve its SERP rankings is called On-page SEO factors.

Organic Search Rankings

Search engine ranking of web pages found in SERPs.

Orphan Page

A web page is said to be an orphan page if it neither has a link to take the user back to its home page or its immediate back hierarchy nor does it has a link to take him to any other website.

Overture

Overture is a pay per click internet advertising program by yahoo.

Opt-in

A user is said to have opt-in if he has willingly subscribed to a newsletter or similar service on a website.

Organic Listing

See natural listings

Over Optimization Penality (OOP)

Delisting of a website from a search engine for using unethical SEO techniques that are against W3C standards is called over optimization penality. However there has been a constant debate about does OOP actually exists or not?

Open Directory Project

Open Directory project is mostly referred to DMOZ.

Page Title

Page title is an HTML tag that displays title of the content being displayed on the page at the top title line of the browser.

Page Jacking

Page jacking is unethical technique of copying or stealing content from a website to other mostly in the form of source code in a hope of getting the traffic from the source website to one's own.

Page Match

Its a page match when your website's ads are served on its related websites in a cost-per-click advertising campaign.

Page Rank

Page Rank is Google's measure of importance assigned to a web page on a scale of 1 to 10. You can check the Page Rank value of any page by downloading the Google Toolbar.

Page Rank Drain

This happens when a website has multiple inbound links but has no outbound links to pass its PR value to any other website.

Page Views

Page view is the number of requests from a web browser to a server. A page view might contain several page hits.

Paid Inclusion

Paid inclusion is a process of the paying search engines like Alta vista to get your website listed in their search engine listings.

Pay-for-inclusion (PFI)

PFI is a technique in which the website owner pays search engines for a sue placement in SERP's.

Pay-for-performance (PPF)

Pay-for-performance is a system in which the website owner pays only if a visitor on the website performs a desired action.

Pay-per-click(PPC)

PPC is an advertising model in which an advertiser pays only when user clicks on the advertiser's ad.

Pay-per-click Management

The process of making strategies regarding the placement, account setup,keyword research, Ad creation, Bid management, Landing page evaluation, A/B testing, Persistent monitoring to ensure the campaign gets the maximum ROI is called PPC management.

PDF

pdf stands for Portable Document Format introduced by Adobe. Being a device and display independent format, it is a very handy format for document exchange on internet.

PERL - Practical Extraction & Report Language

Perl is an optimized interpreted language for the purpose of scanning and extracting arbitrary text files and generating reports on the fetched information.

PHP

PHP is a hyper text processor which is a scripting language that allows wed developers to create dynamic websites.

Podcatching

It is a process of subscribing to podcasts

Pop-under

Pop up window is less obstructive form of advertising window that opens up behind the browser; unlike pop up window that pops up right over the screen.

Pop-up

Pop up is a window containing content like advertisements which opens up right over the user screen when he performs a specific action on the page.

Portal

Portal is a term usually used to signify gateways of internet i.e the entry point of users to the world wide web. Yahoo, Netscape, google, AOL are few examples of web portals.

Position Preference

A feature in Google AdWords and in Microsoft adCenter enabling advertisers to specify in which positions they would like their ads to appear on the SERP. Not a position guarantee.

PPC Engine

PPC engine is a search engine that allows website owners to but their position in their SERPs based on the amount of money they are willing to pay per click on their link in the SERP list.

Pro-blogging

Pro-blogging stands for professional blogging when a person's income is fully dependent on blogging.

PSD

PSD is file format of file made in Adobe Photoshop(.psd).

QA - Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance is a process of monitoring the website development process to make sure that the process is right ie. Are we doing it right? So QA is a preventive process.

QC - Quality Control

QC is a corrective process ie. QC maintains - Is the final product, what the client actually wanted? Its about testing a website to see if it meets the client's requirements.

Query

The keyword or keyword phrase a searcher enters into a search field, which initiates a search and results in a SERP with organic and paid listings.

Ranking

Ranking is a process in which the search engines list and sort websites according to specific algorithm so that the sites with the most relevant content appear on the top pages.

Raw Data Feed

Raw data is information that has been collected but not formatted, analyzed or processed. This raw data can be used to build an optimized XML feed.

Reciprocal Linking

It is a type of linking in which two websites link to each other directly.

Redirects

301 error indicates to the user that the site has been permanently moved to a different location. It is actually the most ideal way of redirecting for most websites. Now if you are planning to move your entire website to a different location, its better if you first test it by moving a single file or folder to see how that single page ranks; and if it ranks well, you may well move the entire website. It may take a few days to a few months for 301 redirects to be picked up by search engines which depends on the bot crawl frequency on your website.

Referrer

Referrer is the website from which the user has actually arrived to your website by clicking on your link present on his page. Servers maintain a list of these referers. Now if the user has arrived from a search engine than the key words used by the users can be embedded in the referer url to evaluate the amount of traffic generated from each key phrase.

Refresh Tags

Meta Refresh Tags makes a webpage refresh after every specified period of time. It is used mainly in websites, where the content changes every minute for eg. in a score or share market website

Relevance

Relevance is the extent to which the content on a webpage relates to the key word that was entered by the user in the search engine to arrive to the page. In context to the link exchange relevance it is more about linking of the industry related websites.

Relevance Rank

It is process by which a search engine tries to rank a page according to the quality and type of websites that are linking to that page.

Request For Proposal - RFP

It is request send to a service provider to send the quotation explaing the service that he is offering and at what price.

Result Page

The pages displayed by a search engine when a user enters a specific search query also known as SERP's.

Reverse DNS

A process to determine the hostname or host associated with an IP or host address.

Rich Internet Applications

Web applications with all the features of a stand alone application is called RIA. All that RIA needs is a browser to run.

Rich Media

Media with embedded motion or interactivity. A growing option for PPC advertisers as rates of broadband connectivity increase.

Right Rail

The common name for the right-side column of a web page. On a SERP, right rail is usually where sponsored listings appear.

ROAS

Acronym for Return On Advertising Spending, the profit generated by ad campaign conversions per dollar spent on advertising expenses. Calculated by dividing advertising-driven profit by ad spending.

Robot.txt

This is simple .txt file used by webmasters to control the crawling of search engine bots by allowing and disallowing the bots to index the pages according to your own wish. Thankfully all bots respect robot.txt file. However it is not mandatory to have a robots.txt file but is always recommended from SEO point of view.

ROC - Return On Customer

ROC is the monetary return from each customer.

ROI

ROI stands for Return on Investment that implies to the amount of money spend by a website owner in building and optimizing a website over the amount of revenue he generated out of the investment.

RSS Aggregators

“A client software that uses web feed to retrieve syndicated web content such as blogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites, or in the case of a search aggregator, a customized set of search results….Such applications are also referred to as RSS readers, feed readers, feed aggregators, news readers or search aggregators. These have been recently supplemented by the so-called RSS-narrators [such as TalkingNews or Talkr] which not only aggregate news feeds but also converts them into podcasts.” Source: Wikipedia

RSS feed- Rich Site Summary

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Rich Site Syndication is a technique by which users can actually keep track of their favorite websites for fresh blog posts, goodies, podcats etc by using automated softwares like aggregator. XML is a standard language used for creating these RSS data formats.

RTF- Rich Text Format (file.rtf)

RTF is a system by which any formatted text or graphical image is encoded to transfer it easily over network between applications like MS-word.

Saturation (Search Engine Saturation)

A term relating to the number of URLs included from a specific web site in any given search engine. The higher the saturation level or number of pages indexed into a search engine, the higher the potential traffic levels and rankings.

Scope Creep

Scope creep is a term used to describe a state when the scope of a project or required effort on a project increases due to change in client's requirements or technology advancements.

Scooter

Its the name of the Alta Vista's crawler.

SE

SE is a short form of search engines.

SEA

SEA stands for Self Extracting Archive (file.sea) that is a Macintosh File Compression Format

Search Directory

Similar to a search engine, in that they both compile databases of web sites. A directory does not use crawlers in order to obtain entries in its search database. Instead, it relies on user interaction and submissions for the content it contains. Submissions are then categorized by topic and normally alphabetized, so that the results of any search will start with site descriptions that begin with some number or non-letter character, then moving from A-to-Z.

Search Engines

A search engine is a database of many web pages. Most engines display the number of web pages they hold in their database at any given time. A search engine generally “ranks” or orders the results according to a set of parameters. These parameters (called algorithms) vary among search engines; they are always improving in order to identify spam as well as improve relevance.

Search Engine Copywriting

Search Engine copywriting refers to the methods of writing and wording used to achieve higher rankings in search engines. Often referred to as content writing, it includes the strategic placement and repetition of keywords and keyword phrases on webpages. As search-engine algorithms get smarter every day, this search engine optimization (SEO) copywriting is more and more about writing for human visitors as well as for search engines, about offering fluent and readable content written in an SEO-wise manner.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM can be considered as a subset of Internet Marketing which includes tools like SEO, PPC campaigns, banner advertising to maximize the website's Return On Investment.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Search Engine Result Page (SERP)

SERP are the resultant pages that get lined up when a user enters his search query in a search engine.

Search Engine Saturation

Search Engine Saturation refers to the number of pages indexed by Search Engines.

Search Query/Term

Collection of words that a user enters to search his intended type of website is called search query or search term.

Search Submit Pro (SSP)

Search Submit Pro is Yahoo!’s paid inclusion product that uses a “feed” tactic. With Search Submit Pro, Yahoo! crawls your web site as well as an optimized XML feed that represents the content on your site. Yahoo! applies its algorithm to both the actual web site pages and the XML feed to determine which listing is most appropriate to appear in the organic search results when a user conducts a search for relevant terms.

Search Term Popularity

Search term popularity is the measurement of how often do search engine users enter a given keyword to reach a website. It simply signifies the poplularity and competetiveness of a keyword.

Secondary Links

Links that are indirectly acquired links, such as a story in a major newspaper about a new product your company released.

SERP

Acronym for Search Engine Results Page, the page delivered to a searcher that displays the results of a search query entered into the search field. Displays both paid ad (sponsored) and organic listings in varying positions or rank.

Server-side Tracking

The process of analyzing web server log files. Server-side analytics tools make sense of raw data to generate meaningful reports and trends analysis.

Session Id's

Dynamic parameters, such as session IDs generated by cookies for each individual user. Session IDs cause search engines to see a different URL for each page each time that they return to re-crawl a web site.

SFO

SFO stands for Search Friendly Optimization.

Siloing

Siloing (also known as Theming) is a site architecture technique used to split the focus of a site into multiple themes. The goal behind siloing is to create a site that ranks well for both its common and more-targeted keywords. Source: Bruce Clay Newsletter 09/06

sitemap

sitemap is the page of a website that contains all the actual links found on the website. A sitemap also works complementary for robots.txt file to guide the search engine bots what all pages on the website are available for crawling.

Slurp

It is the name of the Yahoo! search engine's spider / bot.

Snippet

Snippet is the smaller text below the title in search results after you enter a search query

Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, adding a "Digg This" button, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social Media Poisoning

Social Media Poisoning is a tactic used by black hat internet marketers who spreads a bad word about their competitor websites through spamming, articles, blogs, forums etc to not only destroy its market reputation but also degrade its page ranking in SERP's.

Spam

Spamming is a process of sending unsolicited mails or messages to the people in a lure of making them perform a specific action is called spamming. It abuses web applications by sending bulk messages. There are many types of spams, search engine spam, forum spams, blog spams, comment spams, mobile spams etc

Spam Cannon

Spam cannons are the websites that offer user sign ups in different ways to send them bulk mails in form of spams is called spam cannon.

Spamdexing / Spaming / Spoofing

Spamdexing is a technique to fool search engine bots that involves spamming practice of including information in a webpage that cause the search engines to rank the website higher on their SERP's but the content is irrelevant to the actual users.

Spamming

Refer Spam

Spamouflage

Spamouflage is process of making cosmetic changes to Search Engine Spamming to make it look legal to search engines.

Spider

Spider is an automated program that crawls over world wide web and analyzes the websites in its way and indexes them according to its search engine specific standards and algorithms.

Spidered

As soon as a search engine spider indexes a website it is said to be Spidered.

Spiderbaiting

Spiderbaiting is a process of making search engine bots to locate and index your website.

Spider Trap

The term spider trap refers to the websites on arriving on which, the search engine spiders get trapped in an infinite number of loops of code as the website code is not passing the input expected by the spider program. Some spider traps are intentional ones designed specifically to crash poorly coded crawlers and some spider traps are unintentional ones too.

Splash Page

Splash page is the actual search page of a search engine from which a user is arriving to the website.

Supplemental Index

Google supplemental index can be taken as a secondary index of google. Google retrieves the websites in the supplemental index only when it has no website matching the key word entered by the user in its primary index.

SWF - Shock Wave Flash (file.swf)

SWF file format refers to a vector based graphic format that is one of the versions of the Macromedia Flash Player launched in year 1997,

Standards Compliant

Standards compliant refers to the sites, bots or web browsers that operate in accordance to the set standards and protocols of W3C.

Static

A static webpage is page which doesn't changes untill the script of the page is altered.

Stickiness

Stickiness is the ability of a website in terms of its design and user friendliness to make a visitor stay on it and at least know what it is all about before quiting.

Stemming

Stemming is a method used by search engines, according to which it returns results by considering just the root of a word. Foreg if a

Steaming Media

Streaming media is the transmission of audio or visual file over a network to enable a user to start operating or playing(if it is a game) even before the entire file gets downloaded to the computer's virtual memory.

Syntax

The format of code used while building a website is called syntax.

Stop Words

Stop words are the most frequently used words (like - a, for, that, are) that the search engines tend to ignore so as to filter the search process to return the most precise websites relating to the search query.

Strategic Linking

Strategic linking is a process of customizing a link building campaign to exchange links with websites to get the highest ranking on the SERP's.

Submission Service / Registration

Submission service facilitates you to submit your website to search engines either manually or automatically. However there is no need for doing it if your website is properly optimized.

Tag Soup

Tag soup is an HTML code written without keeping rules and HTML syntax in mind.

Targeting

Narrowly focusing ads and keywords to attract a specific, marketing-profiled searcher and potential customer. You can target to geographic locations (geo-targeting), by days of the week or time of day (dayparting), or by gender and age (demographic targeting). Targeting features vary by search engine. Newer ad techniques and software focus on behavioral targeting, based on web activity and behaviors that are predictive for potential customers who might be more receptive to particular ads.

Themes

A theme is an overall idea of what a web page is focused on. Search engines determine the theme of a web page through analysis in the algorithm of the density of associated words on a page.

Thin Affiliates

Thin affiliates are the featureless websites that are build and optimized to garner maximum internet traffic; with a sole intention to divert the generated traffic to affiliate merchant websites for profit making without actually contributing to anything to world wide web.

Top Level Domain (TLD)

Top Level Domain are the last letters domain of the second dot in a website rel address i.e. www.yahoo.TLD. TLD's are of generally of two types - Country specific domain foreg. .ca, .in, .au that tells about the country origin of the website etc and generic top level domains (foreg. .com, .org, .mil, .gov ) that explain the genre of the website, that weather it belongs to government, organization, military or a commercial one.

Title Tag

The Title Tag is an HTML code that shows the words that appear in the Title bar at the top of your web browser. These words do not appear anywhere else on your web page.

TLP

Acronym for Top Level Page, a reference to the home page, category pages, or product pages that have unique value for the site and so are structured in the top levels of the site directory.

TLP Feed

Acronym for Top Level Page feed, the often automatic and on-subscription feed of an advertiser’s home page or unique category pages.

Trackbacks

A protocol that allows a blogger to link to posts, often on other blogs, that relate to a selected subject. Blogging software that supports Trackback includes a "TrackBack URL" with each post that displays other blogs that have linked to it. Source: Blog Terms Glossary Tech at Whatis.techtarget.com

Tracking URL

A specially designed and/or unique URL created to track an action or conversion from paid advertising. The URL can include strings that will show what keyword was used, what match type was triggered, and what search engine delivered the visitor.

Trademarks

Distinctive symbols, pictures or words that identify a specific product or service. Received through registration with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Tier I search engines prohibit bids on trademarks as keywords if the bidder is not the legal owner, though this keyword bid practice is still allowed by Google.

Traffic

As the name it self suggests, traffic is the number of visitors on a website in a specified period of time.

Traffic Analysis

The process of analyzing traffic to a web site to understand what visitors are searching for and what is driving traffic to a site.

Trusted Feed

Trusted feed is a type of free inclusion which uses bulk XML feed to get the website content directly indexed by the search engine. It can later be optimized as required for better rankings and hence better traffic.

Typosquatting / URL hijacking

Typosquatting is a genre of cybersquatting, that relies on the typing mistakes done by a user while entering the url name of a website. He is served with a similar looking website which can even be house of viruses and trojans.

Trust Rank

Trust rank is a technique of analyzing technique that separates all the inbound links of a website into relevant ones and spams.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitor is the measurement of traffic on a website counting each visitor only once in specified duration of time. It gives information to the website owner about the reach of the website and also the actul number of users and not visits.

Universal Search

Universal Search System is a searching method by google under which it mixes the listings from google news search, video search, image search etc. with the lisitings it gets from it search engine crawlers resulting in a complete universal search.

URL

URL stands for uniform resource locator which refers to the address of a website or a resource on internet.

Usability

This term refers to how "user friendly" a web site and its functions are. A site with good usability is a site that makes it easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for or to perform the action they desire. Bad usability is anything that causes confusion or problems for the user.

User Agent

User agent refers to any program, bots or web browsers that crawls into the web and at the same time requests and responds to the server. A search engine robot is an exmaple of a user agent.

User Session

SFO stands for Search Friendly Optimization.

Siloing

User session is the amount of time a user with a particular IP address spends on a website. The number of user session is almost equal to amount of traffic on a website.

USP

USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition that refers to all the unique selling propositions of a product or service that gives it a cutting edge over others.

Value Propositions

“A customer value proposition is the sum total of benefits a customer is promised to receive in return for his or her custom and the associated payment (or other value transfer).“ A customer value proposition is what is promised by a company's marketing and sales efforts, and then fulfilled by its delivery and customer service processes.” Source: Wikipedia

Vertical Creep

Positioning trends when vertical listings appear at the top of organic search engine results and below top sponsored listings (when they are displayed on the SERP).

Vertical Portal / Vortal

Search engines that focus on a specific industry or sector. Such vertical search engines (also called “vortals”) have much more specific indexes and provide narrower and more focused search results than the Tier I search engines.

Verticals

A vertical is a specific business group or category, such as insurance, automotive or travel. Vertical search offers targeted search options and PPC opportunities to a specific business category.

Viral Marketing

Also called viral advertising, viral marketing refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness. The awareness increases are the result of self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can often be word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it can also harness the network effect of the internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly. Source: Wikipedia

Visit

Each time a user arrives to a website directly or through a link is called a visit.

VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocol

VOIP is a system that breaks our voice into digital signal and passes it through the internet and then again converts it back into voice at the other end so that you can talk to a person with a regular phone.

Web browser

Web browser is the software that converts the HTML into formated webpages and allows a user to browse world wide web

Webneck

Webneck is a special slang name given to the people who are addicted to internet, most of their social circle comprises of chat friends only.

Web Forwarding

Web forwarding allows for redirects to exist within an .htaccess file on a separate server.

Web Saturation

Web saturation gives us an idea about how many pages of a website have been indexed by a search engine.

Web Server Logs

Most web server software, and all good web analytics packages, keep a running count of all search terms used by visitors to your site. These running counts are kept in large text files called Log Files or Web Server Logs. Useful for developing and refining PPC campaign keyword lists.

White Hat SEO

White hat seo refers to all the practices that are ethical in nature from the search engine's point of view.

White Paper

White paper refers to the documents that explain a solution to any given problem.

Who is Data

Who is data is a data collected from a website owner while registering his website such as name, address, telephone number etc.

Wiki

Software that allows people to contribute knowledge on a particular topic. A wiki is another web publishing platform that makes use of technologies similar to blogs and also allows for collaboration with multiple people.

WikiSoldiers

The term WikiSoldiers refers to the wikipedia soldiers who are fond of adding, editing and defending information on wikipedia.

Windows Common Keyboard Shortcuts

When using Windows software you may be aware that if you press certain key combinations simple tasks can be performed with out the need to use the mouse, these are called Keyboard short cuts. Please Click Here to view list of most common keyboard shortcuts.

WWW

www stands for world wide web. It is a system on web servers that supports HTML format documents in which a user has a navigation facility using hyper links.

W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

W3C stands World Wide Web Consortium. W3C is an International body that comprises organization members, W3C employees, public representatives etc who work together to develop, implement and maintain standards & protocols to ensure fair internet practices and long term growth of world wide web.

XML

Extensible Markup Language. It is said to be extensible as it is flexible and it allows the user to define his own tags.

XML Feeds

A form of paid inclusion where a search engine is "fed" information about pages via XML, rather than gathering that information through crawling actual pages. Marketers can pay to have their pages included in a spider-based search index either annually (per URL), or on a CPC basis (based on an XML document representing each page on the client site). New media types are being introduced into paid inclusion, including graphics, video, audio, and rich media.

XML Maps

XML maps are specially formatted links to your pages. They will never replace the need for HTML site maps.

XML sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol, and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol. XAML : Extensible Application Markup Language (Microsoft Vista)

Yahoo

Yahoo is one of the most popular web portals and a number 2 search engine for sure, Google ofcourse being the number one.

Zeitgeist - Google Zeitgeist

This is a service provided by google that enables users to understand the trend of what people are searching on google.

WEBSITE DESIGNING

WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

SEO Glossary

200 - OK

301 Redirects - Moved Permanently

302 Redirects- Found

304 - Not Modified

307 - Temporary Redirect

301 Redirects - Moved Permanently

302 Redirects- Found

304 - Not Modified

307 - Temporary Redirect

400 - Bad Request

401 - Unauthorized

402 - Payment Required

403 - Forbidden

404 - Not Found

408 - Request Timed Out

410 - Gone

500 - Internal Server Error

501 - Not Implemented

A/B Testing

Absolute Link

Accessibility

ACSS (Aural Cascading Style Sheets)

ACH - Automated Clearing House Network

Ad

Ad Copy

AdPimp

AdSense

AdSense Link Clicking Bots

Ad Title

AdWords

Affiliate Marketing

Agent Name

AJAX

Algorithm

AllTheWeb

Alt Attribute

Alt Tag

Alt Text

Alta Vista

Anchor Text

Anchor Text Optimization

AOL

Article / Content Syndication

Applets

API

ASCII

ASP

Automated Submitting

B2B

B2C

Back Links

Banned/Delisting

Banner Advertising

Banner Blindness

Bait and switch

Baseline Matrices

Beacon

Bid Management Tool

Bidding

Black Box Algorithms

Black List

Black Hat SEO

Blog

Blog Comment Spam

Blogola

BAP - Blog And Ping

Blook

Book Mark

Bot

Brand

Brand Messaging

Branding Strategy

Bread Crumb Navigation

Bridge Page

Bumping / Necroing

Cache

Call To Action