SEO - Search Engine Optimisation Terms & Acronyms

Here is a basic introduction to some of the more common terms, acronyms and lingo in regards to SEO. This is by no means a complete list and will be updated with new entries as time goes on.

Alt Tag

An alt tag is a form of meta data, basically a written description of an image. It has several purposes. People who are vision imparied – or those surfing with images turned off – can “read” what an image is about, without actually seeing it. It’s also displayed when there is a broken image, e.g. one that does not display due to an error.

Backlink

A hyperlink which points from one website to another. Backlinks are considered one of the core way to improve your search engine ranking positions (SERPS). Most search engines use backlinks as a way to measure a site’s “quality”.

Black Hat SEO

If Luke Skywalker did SEO, he’d do White Hat SEO. Darth Vader would practice Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is the practice of achieving higher search engine rankings (therefore more vistors, more traffic and ultimatley more revenue) using any methods possible. Often these methods are unscrupulous and are frowned upon by all of the major search engines as these practices violate their guidelines. Because of this, using black hat SEO techniques can often result in a pentalty – or complete ban – from a search engine.

Blog

Originally a shortned form of “web log” (see if you can spot the connection). Today, blog, blogging and all related terms have entered the public lexicon in their own rights. Blogs can cover a wide variety of topics, from personal ones to corporate blogs. The term “blog” is so far reaching that it has almost become a generic term these days.

Bot

These are nifty little programs which wander all over the web and harvest information. Some bots are good – such as the GoogleBot – which lets Google find out about what content is where. Other bots are not so nice, such as those used by spammers to collect email addresses. Bots are basically how search engines build their indexes of content. They’re also used for other purposes, such as a bot which visits a web site to see that it is “up” and running correctly. Bots go under quite a few monikers, such as web robots, web spiders, spiders, internet bots and so on. One name that has yet to catch on is the mega intertube spider web bot, but I’m sure it will one day.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of showing one set of content to a search engine bot, and delivering different (or completely different) content to an end-user. It’s commonly used by spammers to get visitors to a web site, when they were probably expecting something completley different. It is also used by some subscription websites to get visitors, but not actually deliver the content until they subscribe. This can be quite annoying when you are searching for something and realise you have to pony up the cash to see what you thought you were going to see for free.

Conversion

See our online marketing page.

CSS – Cascading Style Sheet

See our general web terms page.

CTR – Click through ratio

See our online marketing page.

Dynamic Website

A website that is generally generated, on the fly, by a programming lanaguage/and or database. If a static website is the online equivalent of a book, a dynamic website is one that constantly changes based upon the actions of the reader. So, um, not really like a book at all.

Keywords

Keywords - words that are evaluated and processed by a search engine to work out what a particular website/web page is about. When a user enters a “keyword” (example: dogs), the search engine then returns a list of results which it believes are most relevant to that keyword.

Keyphrase

Essentially a series of keywords in a phrase, using the above example as “dog” as the keyword, “how to care for dogs” would be a keyphrase.

Keyword Density

The formula for determining how often a keyword appears on a web page. Once deemed critical to the SEO process, it’s fallen out of favour lately. Most SEO’ers believe that having a target keyword appear a few times on a page is good, but going strictly on a formula and therefore breaking any natural language, is bad.

Landing Page

Landing pages can be one of two things. Firstly, a landing page can be something a visitor is directed to after clicking on an advertisement. This sort of landing page is meant to be highly targetted and tailored to the original marketing message, ensuring that the visitor is immediality presented with something that is relevant and on topic. In the second sense, a landing page is every page of a website. Thanks to search engines, a visitor may land on any page of your website, and not just one that you wanted them to. Therefore each page should have easy navigation and an appropriate marketing message and “call to action” (if it’s a commercial web site).

LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing

Fancy mathametical algorithms which evaluate not just a word’s importance, but how the word is used in context of other words (or on a web page). If you have a webpage about cats & dogs, then LSI would be used to determine the relevance of other words on that page: such as “pets, puppies, kittens” and so on.

Linkbait

The process of publishing content with the deliberate intention of getting a large number of links pointing to it. Linkbait content can be something like highly unique, interesting content, or – more usually – it is something controversial which is going to cause an online furor. An example would be publishing a post on a blog like “Apple iPods sux0r!” and so on. Angry bloggers would then link to the content in question. The idea is that all these links will be noted by search engines and drive up the SERPs for that page or website.

Link spam

Similar to the email type, link spam is where someone places a link to their website on another website, usually through a comment form, which are common on many websites. Link spam is “spammy” because it contributes nothing to the website, except to garner a link (and therefore improve the target website’s ranking). An example would be on someone’s blog about cats & dogs, a comment about viagra linking to a viagra site. Hardly appropriate.

Meta Data

Otherwise known as “metadata” or metainformation. Meta data is, in simplistic terms, information about data, e.g data about data. You can take this to the nth degree as well, meta meta data would be data about data about data. However this is not recommened, especially as a way to impress people at parties. Meta data can also be used to describe content as a collection of heirachical levels, such as in a database schema. This is also something you don’t want to bring up at parties.

Meta Tags

Once the de-facto way to improve search engine rankings (during the 1990s), but no longer a major practice. Meta tags are HTML tags in the source code of a web page which give specific information regarding the site. Most commonly, meta tags cover site descriptions (“This is a website about cats and dogs) and keywords (“cats, dogs, pets”) related to the web page’s content. While the practice of implementing meta tags is generally regarded as non-critical for SEO purposes, it’s still nice to have, as long as you don’t abuse them. Stuffing meta tags with unrelated content was one of the early black hat SEO techniques.

Nofollow

With the widespread adoption of link spamming, blog owners found themselves dealing with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of useless spam comments. Google’s answer was to introduce the “nofollow” meta element for links. A hyperlink with the attribute of “nofollow” indicates to search engines that the link should not pass on its “vote” to the website the link points to. Most blogs now implement the nofollow attribute to external links, specifically in their comments section.

Organic Search Results

The foundation of today’s search engines are based on indexing and returning results that they have determined to be most relevant and topical for the end-user’s enquiry. Therefore they are not meant to be judged on a commercial basis. By being “commercially” neutral, a search engine tries to deliver results which it considers most relevant to the end-user’s query. Business is business though, and all search engines will display advertising next to these organic (natural) results. This form of advertising is known as paid search engine advertisng.

PageRank – Google PageRank

If you have the Google toolbar installed, this is easy to see. Essentially it’s a numeric “rank” – between 0 and 10, that Google gives to a website and/or a particular web page. The rank is meant to be indicative of the number of other web sites that link to that page. PageRank was one of Google’s first patents. Originally PageRank was deemed one of – if not the most – critical elements for SEO. However these days it’s more regarded as a general indication of incoming links. A high page rank does not guarantee a web site/page a top spot in the SERPs. While it’s nice to have, PageRank is just one factor of many in good search engine optimisation.

Paid Linking

The practice of paying for a hard link to a website. In order to boost their search engine rankings, many webmasters, marketers and search engine optimisers will pay another website owner to link back to their site(s). This break’s Google’s own quality guidelines, as it is a process to artificially inflate and change search engine rankings. That said, it is a common practice, and many sites participate in the practice. If Google suspects a site is selling links – indeed it is easy to report such an activity in their Webmaster’s area – it may penalise the site that is selling the links.

Reciprocal Link

When two sites (or more) both link to each other. Often done when two websites have something in common, they’ll often link to each other. Reciprocal linking was once seen as pointless, as it was believed if two sites linked to each other, they would “cancel” each other out. In all fairness, if the sites are related, it can only be a positive, after all what is wrong with friends shaking hands?

Search Engine

In the early days of the web, no search engines existed. Instead you would generally go to a web portal, which is more or less a directory. Yahoo started out this way. However searching is the most easiest and direct way to find something you are after. There were quite a few search engines in the 90s, most of them have since faded away. What killed them was Google, which took searching to a whole new level, making it the itnernet colussus that it is today.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

The practice of trying to achieve commercial results using a marketing message through search engines. Technically SEM covers both Search Engine Optimisation and um, search engine marketing. However these days SEM is generally percieved to be about getting traffic by paying for it through pay per click methods, whereas SEO is about getting traffic for free from organic rankings. To be pedantic, SEO is really a subset of SEM, but they’re now considered (almost) completley different fields. In typical web agency roles, SEO and SEM will usually be fullfileld by two different people. They both are highly intertwined and cross over with each other, however.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

Some would say it is neither an art nor a science, but SEO is the somewhat vague process of ensuring a web site does as best as possible to rank highly in the search engines. It covers a whole range of areas, from technical, to content, to how a web site is “linked” in with the world wide web at large. Just like religion, there are many demoniations regarding what is the one true school of SEO thought. Just like religion, there is often bickkering and disagreement about the best practices. However there are certain baselines which everyone agrees are either good or bad for search engine optimisation.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page

What a user sees when they enter a term in a search engine: a listing of websites. Some search terms may only list a handful of results, others may return many millions. The higher up in the SERPs you are, the more visitors you will receive. If it’s a commonly search term, being at the uper echelon of the results will drive the most visitors. Most users do not go beyond the first 10 results, so achieving a high SERP ranking is the ultimate goal of SEO.

Spider, Web Spider

See Bot

Splash Page

Ever gone to a website and the only thing you see is a slow-loading Flash animation which “welcomes” you? That’s called a splash page. Once splash pages were all the rage, the thinking being that they give a brilliant first impression to an end-user. However they have two major weaknesses: they are lacking in content, and the end-user doesn’t actually want to be impressed, they want to go straight to a website’s core content. Accordingly the age of splash pages has long since passed, and seeing one on a website is a sure clue that the website owners have no clue.

Static Website

The original format of the web, hard coded HTML/XHTML which is not driven by a database. Because it is static, such websites can become unruly to manage and edit when they get large, and are also not able to offer certain functionalites. Originally, SEO though was that static web sites would always rank better than dynamically (database) driven web sites. This is no longer the case, and most websites of any complexity are no longer static. Much of the “olden era” web – that was not created by companies – was static.

Title Tag

Meta data which gives every web page a title, or what appears in the title bar of your browser window. Also used by most search engines as the basis for the link which goes to your web site. Considered one of the most critical elements of SEO as it is basically the… er… title of your web page! The title tag should always be a brief but concise description of a page’s content.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator

Technical and confusing name which only geeks and internet savvy folks actually know what it means. Basically, it’s a web address. www.thisisaurl.comwould be a URL.

White Hat SEO

White hat search engine optimisation is the practice of SEO which tries to abide by the rules that the search engines set for “quality” and “relevancy”. White hat SEO is primarily about achieving improved search engine rankings without disrupting the end user’s experience, and without trying to use unethical techniques to fool the search engines. There is also the term “grey hat SEO” which refers to those who practice techniques somewhere in between black and white hat. Little known is the term Fusicha SEO, which is more about improving your gardening skills than actuall having anything to do with search engine optimisation.