SEO is ever evolving and over time a new vocabulary, specific to the industry, has formed. New internet marketers learning about the industry benefit from a comprehensive list of terms with corresponding definitions. We offer the most complete list of key terms on the internet of SEO and online marketing phrases, to be used as a learning resource and reference library.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

SEO Glossary: A

Absolute Link

An absolute link, or absolute URL, defines the location of the page or document absolutely including the protocol to use to get the document, the server to get it from, the directory it is located in, and the name of the page or document itself.  The below code shows an absolute link.

<a href=”http://www.gravitateonline.com/marketing101/glossary.html”> Glossary of Terms</a>

Above the Fold

The top half of the first page. A graphic design concept that refers to the location of an important news story or a visually appealing photograph on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.

Accessibility

Accessibility is the practice of making websites usable by disabled people – especially blind people. Because search engines are essentially blind accessible websites tend to have better search engine rankings than inaccessible websites. The more optimized the site, the more accessible it will be to search engines.

AdCenter

Microsoft pay-per-click ad network. Comparable to Google’s AdWords.

AdSense

Google’s contextual advertising network. Companies and websites large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google. A highly scalable revenue system that is almost entirely automated- making it easy for small content publishers to make money for visitors to their site- by dedicating small ad space on their site, filled with relevant ads provided by Google’s ad network.

AdWords

The popular paid-advertising system run by Google. AdWords is Google’s flagship advertising product and main source of revenue. Google’s total advertising revenues were USD$21 billion in 2008. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.

Affiliate Marketing

A marketing technique that uses affiliates in order to generate leads. Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. The affiliate is compensated for displaying the advertisement.

Age (site age, page age, etc.)

Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents.

Agent Name

This is the name of the Crawler/spider that is currently visiting a page. Spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalogue websites on the internet. When a spider indexes a particular website, this is known as ‘being spidered’.

AJAX

Ajax (shorthand for asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. It allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load.

Alexa Rank

Amazon owned search service which measures website traffic. Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.

Algorithm

An algorithm is an operational programming rule that determine how a search engine indexes content and displays the results to its users. Usually referring to Google’s ranking and indexing algorithm that determines a sites rank for a specific query.

AllTheWeb

Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features. Made its debut in mid-1999, it grew out of FTP Search, Tor Egge’s doctorate thesis at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

AltaVista

Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare.

Alt Attribute

Most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object.

<img src=”http://www.gravitateonline.com/images/seo-success.jpg” height=”180″ width=”100″ alt=”SEO Ranking Success Example” />

Alt tags

Alt tags alternate text associated with a web page graphic that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the graphic. Alt tags should convey what the graphic is for or about and contain good relevant keywords. Alt tags also make web pages more accessible to the disabled. For example, a vision-impaired user may have a web browser that reads aloud the text and alt tags on a page. (For those familiar with HTML, “alt” isn’t actually a tag by itself but an attribute to the “img” tag.). Note that the value of Alt tags for SEO have been discounted over time by the search engines to the point that now it is of minimal value

Amazon.com

One of the largest internet retailing website. Amazon.com is rich in consumer generated media. Amazon also owns a number of other popular websites, including IMDB and Alexa.

Analytics

Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site.  In the SEO industry Google Analytics is a very popular option, as it is feature-rich and free.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the actual text part of a link (often underlined). Used by search engines as an important ranking factor. Google pays particular attention to the text used in a hyperlink and associates the keywords contained in the anchor text to the page being linked to.

Animated Ad

An ad with movement/animation, often an interactive Java applet, Shockwave or Flash file.

Announce site to search engines

‘Announce’ a website to the engines by adding a link to it from another site; that is, one that’s already indexed by the search engines.

AOL

Popular web portal which merged with Time Warner. AOL Inc. , formerly known as America Online is an American global Internet services and media company.

API

Application Program Interface – a series of conventions or routines used to access software functions. Most major search products have an API program.

ASP

An acronym for Active Server Pages, a Microsoft-invented, proprietary programming language for building dynamic web sites. ASP is also an acronym for Application Service Provider, a hosted service available via the Internet.

Ask.com

Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they dumped Jeeves in early 2006. Their search engine is powered by the Teoma search technology, which is largely reliant upon Kleinberg’s concept of hubs and authorities.

Authority

The ability of a domain or page to rank well in search engines. Five large factors associated with site and page authority are link equity, site age, traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content. Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web.

Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority.

Automated Bid Management Software

Pay per click search engines are growing increasingly complex in their offerings. To help large advertisers cope with the increasing sophistication and complexity of these offerings some search engines and third party software developers have created software which makes it easier to control your ad spend. Some of the more advanced tools can integrate with your analytics programs and help you focus on conversion, ROI, and earnings elasticity instead of just looking at cost per click.

Automated Submitting

Automated Submitting is using automated software such as WebPosition Gold or an Application Service Provider (ASP) such as Microsoft b-central’s Submit-It service to submit your web pages to the search engines.

This tactic is frowned upon by the search engines. Indeed, some search engines such as AltaVista have completely automated submissions by requiring the user to re-key in a one-time use submission code that is displayed on the submission page as a graphic.

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SEO Glossary: B

Backlinks

Inbound links pointing to a web page. Inbound links were originally important,  prior to the emergence of search engines, as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in helping search engines determine quality content and sites to be ranked high.

Bait and Switch

Marketing technique where you make something look overtly pure or as though it has another purpose to get people to believe in it or vote for it (by linking at it or sharing it with friends), then switch the intent or purpose of the website after you gain authority.

Banned

When a search engine blocks your site from appearing in its search results. Usually the result of breaching their terms of service and/or participating in illegitimate and manipulative optimization tactics.

Banner Ad

A graphic image, usually a GIF or JPEG, that can be placed anywhere on a web page, most frequently centered across the top. The tile ad is a smaller counterpart, typically grouped with other tile ads along a side margin. The standard banner ad is 468 x 60 pixels; the most common size for tile ads is 125 x 125 pixels.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau regulates guidelines and standards for display advertising sizes

Banner Blindness

During the first web boom in the 1990′s many businesses were based on eyeballs more than actually building real value. Many ads were typically quite irrelevant and web users learned to ignore the most common ad types. In many ways text ads are successful because they are more relevant and look more like content, but with the recent surge in the popularity of text ads some have speculated that in time people may eventually become text ad blind as well.

Battelle, John

John Linwood Battelle is a journalist as well as founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing. He has been a visiting professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and also maintains Searchblog, a weblog covering search, technology, and media. Popular search and media blogger who co-founded The Industry Standard and Wired, and authored a popular book on search called The Search.

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.

Behavioral Targeting

Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or implied intent. For example, if I recently searched for mortgages then am later reading a book review the page may still show me mortgage ads.

Bias (Search Engine)

Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of the largest search engines may bias their organic search results toward informational (ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is heavily cited.

Search personalization biases our search results based on our own media consumption and searching habits.

Beyond The Banner

Any advertisement that is not a banner, such as an interstitial or a pop-up ad. This is the idea that, in addition to banner ads, there are other ways to use the Internet to communicate a marketing message.

Bid management tool

Software or an ASP service used to manage bids on pay-per-click search engines such as Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google AdWords.

Bidding

Bidding means placing a bid price that you are willing to pay as an advertiser on a pay-per-click search engine. The highest bid for a given keyword achieves the top spot in the PPC search results. In Overture, the top three bids are “featured” on Overture’s partners’ sites, including AOL, Altavista, Infospace, and others. The minimum bid amount on Overture is 5 cents per clickthrough.

Black Hat SEO

Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next.

Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

Blacklist

Lists that either search engines or vigilante users compile of search engine spammers, which may be used to ban those spammers from search engines or to boycott them

Block Level Analysis

A method used to break a page down into multiple points on the web graph by breaking its pages down into smaller blocks. Block level link analysis can be used to help determine if content is page specific or part of a navigational system. It also can help determine if a link is a natural editorial link, what other links that link should be associated with, and/or if it is an advertisement. Search engines generally do not want to count advertisements as votes.

Blog

Also known as a “weblog”. An online diary with entries made on a regular if not daily basis. Some blogs are maintained by an anonymous author who uses a nickname or handle instead of his or her real name. A content management system that makes distributing content fast and easy.

Blog Comment Spam

Either manually or automatically (via a software program) adding low value or no value comments to other sites.

Blogger

Blogger is a free blog platform owned by Google. It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Blogspot.com, or to FTP content to your own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

Blogroll

An assembly of blog URLs – blogs that the blogger reads regularly – displayed at the sidebar of the blog.

Bold

A way to make words appear in a bolder font. Words that appear in a bolder font are more likely to be read by humans that are scanning a page. A search engine may also place slightly greater weighting on these words than regular text, but if you write natural page copy and a word or phrase appears on a page many times it probably does not make sense or look natural if you bold ever occurrence.

Example use:

<b>Rankings</b> from SEO
<strong>Rankings</strong> from SEO

Either appear as: Rankings from SEO

Body copy

The ‘meaty’ textual content of a web page. Body copy refers to text visible to users, doesn’t include graphical content, navigation, or information hidden in the HTML source code.

Bookmarks

Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy.

Boolean Search

A method of searching for information in databases that combines search terms with the operators AND, OR, NOT, and parentheses. By default most search engines include AND with your query, requiring results to be relevant for all the words in your query.

Bot

Short for robot, Googlebot or ‘spider.

Branded Keywords

Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand. Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle, and are some of the highest value and highest converting keywords.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation aid used in user interfaces. It gives users a way to keep track of their locations within programs or documents. The term comes from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.

Brin, Sergey

Russian American computer scientist and industrialist who, with Larry Page, is best known as the co-founder of Google, Inc.

Bridge page

Also known as a doorway page, an information page, or spam. A web page created for the sole purpose of ranking well in the search engines. This is something that you do not want to have on your website.

Broad Match

Broad Match is a form of “keyword matching” and refers to the matching of a search listing or advertisement to selected keywords in any order.

This means if selected keywords are “running shoes”, then ads or a search listing may be displayed if the users searches upon the following example keywords:

Any Order: “shoes running”
Synonym: “running sneakers”
Plural, Singular: “running shoe”

Broad match terms are less targeted than exact or phrase matches.

Broken Link

A hyperlink which is not functioning. A link which does not lead to the desired location.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are

• a website going offline
• linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
• moving a page’s location
• changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

Browser

Program used to view the world wide web. The most popular browsers are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

Bush, Vannevar

WWII scientist who wrote a seminal research paper on the concepts of hypertext and a memory extension device titled As We May Think.

Business.com

A well trusted directory of business websites and information. Business.com is also a large pay per click arbitrage player.

Bulk submission services

An ASP that submits many URLs to the search engines on your behalf. For example: SubmitWolf. Search engines don’t like these. (see “automated submitting”)

Button

A clickable graphic that takes the user to another page or executes a program, such as a software demo or a video player.

Buying Cycle

Before making large purchases consumers typically research what brands and products fit their needs and wants. Keyword based search marketing allows you to reach consumers at any point in the buying cycle. In many markets branded keywords tend to have high search volumes and high conversion rates.

The buying cycle may consist of the following stages:

• Problem Discovery: prospect discovers a need or want.
• Search: after discovering a problem look for ways to solve the need or want. These searches may contain words which revolve around the core problem the prospect is trying to solve or words associated with their identity.
• Evaluate: may do comparison searches to compare different models, and also search for negative information like product sucks, etc.
• Decide: look for information which reinforces your view of product or service you decided upon.
• Purchase: may search for shipping related information or other price related searches. purchases may also occur offline.
• Reevaluate: some people leave feedback on their purchases . If a person is enthusiastic about your brand they may cut your marketing costs by providing free highly trusted word of mouth marketing.

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SEO Glossary: C

Cache

A cache ( ) is a component that improves performance by transparently storing data such that future requests for that data can be served faster. Copy of a web page stored by a search engine. When you search the web you are not actively searching the whole web, but are searching files in the search engine index.

Some search engines provide links to cached versions of pages in their search results, and allow you to strip some of the formatting from cached copies of pages.

Calacanis, Jason

American Internet entrepreneur and blogger. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York, and his second venture capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL. Founder of Weblogs, Inc. Also pushed AOL to turn Netscape into a Digg clone.  Currently, he runs Mahalo, a human powered search engine.

Canonical URL

Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use PageRank or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.

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”

Catch All Listing

A listing used by pay per click search engines to monetize long tail terms that are not yet targeted by marketers. This technique may be valuable if you have very competitive key words, but is not ideal since most major search engines have editorial guidelines that prevent bulk untargeted advertising, and most of the places that allow catch all listings have low traffic quality. Catch all listings may be an attractive idea on theme specific search engines and directories though, as they are already pre qualified clicks.

CGI

Common Gateway Interface – interface software between a web server and other machines or software running on that server. Many cgi programs are used to add interactivity to a web site.

Cgi-bin

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.

Client

A program, computer, or process which makes information requests to another computer, process, or program.

Click-down Ad or Click-within Ad

An ad that allows the user to stay on the same web page, while viewing requested advertising content. Click-downs display another file on the user’s screen, normally below or above the initial ad. Click-withins allow the user to drill down for more information within the ad.

Clickthrough

The action of clicking an ad element and causing a redirect to another web page.

Clickthrough rate

CTR is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the “number of users who clicked on an ad” on a web page by the “number of times the ad was delivered” (impressions).

Cloaking

Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine. Cloaking is basically a “bait and switch” tactic, where the web server feeds visiting spiders content that is keyword-rich, thus fooling the search engine into placing that page higher in the search results. Yet when the visitor clicks on the link they are given different content, which may be totally unrelated. Search engines frown upon this practice and some will penalize or ban sites that they catch doing it.

Cluetrain Manifesto, The

Book about how the web is a marketplace, and how it is different from traditional offline business. A set of 95 theses organized and put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what is suggested to be a newly-connected marketplace

Clustering

In search results the listings from any individual site are typically limited to a certain number and grouped together to make the search results appear neat and organized and to ensure diversity amongst the top ranked results. Clustering can also refer to a technique which allows search engines to group hubs and authorities on a specific topic together to further enhance their value by showing their relationships.

CMS

Content Management System. Tool used to help make it easy to update and add information to a website.

Blog software programs are some of the most popular content management systems currently used on the web. Many content management systems have errors associated with them which make it hard for search engines to index content due to issues such as duplicate content.

Co-citation

In topical authority based search algorithms links which appear near one another on a page may be deemed to be related to one another. In algorithms like latent semantic indexing words which appear near one another often are frequently deemed to be related.

Cold Fusion

A web scripting language with limited capabilities, mostly centered around database access. ColdFusion program files are saved on the web server with a .CFM file extension.

Comments

Leaving enlightening and thoughtful comments on someone else’s related website is one way to help get them to notice you.

Comments Tag

Some web developers also place comments in the source code of their work to help make it easy for people to understand the code.

HTML comments in the source code of a document appear as <!– your comment here –>. They can be viewed if someone types views the source code of a document, but do not appear in the regular formatted HTML rendered version of a document.

Compacted Information

Information which is generally and widely associated with a product. For example, most published books have an ISBN.

Conceptual Links

Links which search engines attempt to understand beyond just the words in them. Some rather advanced search engines are attempting to find out the concept links versus just matching the words of the text to that specific word set. Some search algorithms may even look at co-citation and words near the link instead of just focusing on anchor text.

Concept Search

A search which attempts to conceptually match results with the query, not necessarily with those words, rather their concept.

For example, if a search engine understands a phrase to be related to another word or phrase it may return results relevant to that other word or phrase even if the words you searched for are not directly associated with a result. In addition, some search engines will place various types of vertical search results at the top of the search results based on implied query related intent or prior search patterns by you or other searchers.

Content Integration

Advertising woven into editorial content or placed in a special context on the page, typically appearing on portals and large destination sites. Also known as web advertorial or sponsored content.

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. The advertisements themselves are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed to the user.

Conversion

The act of converting a web site visitor into a customer or at least taking that visitor a step closer to customer acquisition (such as convincing them to sign up for your e-mail newsletter).

Conversion rate

The rate at which visitors get converted to customers or are moved a step closer to customer acquisition.

Cookie

Small data file written to a user’s local machine to track them. Cookies are used to help websites customize your user experience and help affiliate program managers track conversions.

Copyright

The legal rights to publish and reproduce a particular piece of work.

Copywriting

Copywriting is the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. Although the word copy may be applied to any content intended for printing (as in the body of a newspaper article or book), the term copywriter is generally limited to such promotional situations, regardless of media

Cost Per Action (CPA)

The cost incurred or price paid for a specific action, such as signing up for an email newsletter, entering a contest, registering on the site, completing a survey, downloading trial software, printing a coupon, etc.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Cost per click. Many search ads and contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is charged a certain price per click.

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

Pricing based on the number of new leads generated.

For example, people who click from an ad and then complete an inquiry form is considered to be a lead. The advertiser would pay based on the number leads received

Cost Per Order (CPO)

Pricing based on the number of orders received as a result of your ad placement. Also known as cost-per-transaction.

Cost Per Sale (CPS)

Pricing based on the number of sales transactions your ad generates. Since users may visit your site several times before making a purchase, you can use cookies to track their visits from your landing page to the actual online sale. Also known as cost-per-acquisition or pay-per-sale.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM)

The cost incurred or price paid for a thousand impressions. Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a website is or has the potential of becoming.

Counter

A simple program which tracks the total number of webpage impressions.

Crawler

Search engines use a crawler (also called a spider or robot) to crawl the web, following hyperlinks from one page to the next, in order to index web pages for their database. Some links use the “nofollow” tag to prevent a spider from passing on page rank from the link.

Crawl Depth

How deeply a website is crawled and indexed.

Since searches which are longer in nature tend to be more targeted in nature it is important to try to get most or all of a site indexed such that the deeper pages have the ability to rank for relevant long tail keywords. A large site needs adequate link equity to get deeply indexed. Another thing which may prevent a site from being fully indexed is duplicate content issues.

Crawl Frequency

How frequently a website is crawled.

Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority. Sites with highly artificial link authority scores (ie: mostly low quality spammy links) or sites which are heavy in duplicate content or near duplicate content (such as affiliate feed sites) may be crawled less frequently than sites with unique content which are well integrated into the web.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheet – used to control the design of website.

Note: Using external CSS files makes it easy to change the design of many pages by editing a single file. You can link to an external CSS file using code similar to the following in the head of your HTML documents

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.seobook.com/style.css” type=”text/css” />

CTR – Click Through Rate

Clickthrough rate – the percentage of people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to measure how relevant a traffic source or keyword is. Search ads typically have a higher clickthrough rate than traditional banner ads due to being highly relevant to implied searcher demand.

Custom error page

You can customize the content and the look-and-feel of the default page that is displayed on your web server when a 404 File Not Found error occurs. A good 404 error page has a friendly message explaining that the page they requested doesn’t exist at the location, a site map to encourage the user to continue exploring the site, a search box so the user can conduct a search, and a look-and-feel that matches the rest of the site, including navigation of course. Creating a custom 404 error page not only helps keep visitors in your site, it is also an important part of the search engine optimization process. Inevitably pages on your site will get moved and removed over time. When a search engine spider returns to your site to reindex those now non-existent pages, they will have a set of links to explore in the form of the site map on the custom 404 page. You can test for whether a site has a custom 404 error page by trying to access a web page with a nonsense filename after the domain name in the web site address. For example: www.gravitateonline.com/blah

Cutts, Matt

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google and cracking down on link spam.

Cybersquatting

Registering domains related to other trademarks or brands in an attempt to cash in on the value created by said trademark or brand.

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SEO Glossary: D

Database-driven

As in “database-driven web site.” Means that the website is connected to a database and web page content is based in part on information extracted from those databases.

Database-generated

As in “database-generated web page.” Means that a web page is created dynamically ‘on-the-fly’ from a database, in contrast with a static HTML page.

Daughter Window

An ad that runs in a separate window associated with a concurrently displayed banner. In normal practice, the content and banner are rendered first and the daughter window appears a moment later.

Dayparting

Turning ad campaigns on or off, changing ad bid price, or budget constraints based on bidding more when your target audience is available and less when they are less likely to be available.

Dead Link

A link which is no longer functional.

Most large high quality websites have at least a few dead links in them, but the ratio of good links to dead links can be seen as a sign of information quality.

Deep Link

A link which points to an internal page within a website.

When links grow naturally typically most high quality websites have many links pointing at interior pages. When you request links from other websites it makes sense to request a link from their most targeted relevant page to your most targeted relevant page. Some webmasters even create content based on easy linking opportunities they think up.

Deep Link Ratio

The ratio of links pointing to internal pages to overall links pointing at a website.

A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a legitimate natural link profile.

Deep submitting

Submitting URLs of pages deep in your site to the search engines. For example, if a webmaster of 200-page website submits each of those 200 pages. This tactic is frowned upon by some search engines because it unnecessarily clogs up their submission database when the search engine spider could find those pages on its own by exploring links starting at the home page.

Dedicated Server

Server which is limited to serving one website or a small collection of websites owned by a single person.

De-Listing

Temporarily or permanently becoming de-indexed from a directory or search engine.

Del.icio.us

Popular social bookmarking website.

Demographics

Statistical data or characteristics which define segments of a population.

Some internet marketing platforms, such as AdCenter and AdWords, allow you to target ads at websites or searchers who fit amongst a specific demographic. Some common demographic data points are gender, age, income, education, location, etc.

Denton, Nick

Nick Denton (born August 24, 1966) is a British journalist and internet entrepreneur, the founder and proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and the managing editor of the New York-based Gawker.com.

Description

Directories and search engines provide a short description near each listing which aims to add context to the title.

Directory

Human editors group websites into categories and provide site descriptions or edit descriptions that are submitted to them. With a directory, picking the right category and composing a description rich in key phrases will ensure maximum visibility. Contrast this with a search engine, which is unedited and concerned primarily with the HTML of a site’s constituent pages.

DMOZ

The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL, and is primarily ran by volunteer editors.

DNS

Domain Name Server or Domain Name System. A naming scheme mechanism used to help resolve a domain name / host name to a specific TCP/IP Address.

Domain

Scheme used for logical or location organization of the web. Many people also use the word domain to refer to a specific website.

Doorway page

Scheme used for logical or location organization of the web. Many people also use the word domain to refer to a specific website.

Dreamweaver

Popular web development and editing software offering a what you see is what you get interface.

Duplicate Content

Content which is duplicate or near duplicate in nature.

Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of similar content. For example, printer friendly pages may be search engine unfriendly duplicates. Also, many automated content generation techniques rely on recycling content, so some search engines are somewhat strict in filtering out content they deem to be similar or nearly duplicate in nature.

Dynamic

Generated ‘on-the-fly’ from a database. Also see “database-driven.”

Dynamic Content

Content which changes over time or uses a dynamic language such as PHP to help render the page.

In the past search engines were less aggressive at indexing dynamic content than they currently are. While they have greatly improved their ability to index dynamic content it is still preferable to use URL rewriting to help make dynamic content look static in nature.

Dynamic Languages

Programming languages such as PHP or ASP which build web pages on the fly upon request.

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.

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SEO Glossary: E

Earnigns Per Click

Many contextual advertising publishers estimate their potential earnings based on how much they make from each click.

Editorial Link

Search engines count links as votes of quality. They primarily want to count editorial links that were earned over links that were bought or bartered.

Emphasis

An HTML tag used to emphasize text.

Please note that it is more important that copy reads well to humans than any boost you may think you will get by tweaking it for bots. If every occurrence of a keyword on a page is in emphasis that will make the page hard to read, convert poorly, and may look weird to search engines and users alike.

<em>emphasis</em> would appear as emphasis

Entry Page

The page which a user enters your site.

If you are buying pay per click ads it is important to send visitors to the most appropriate and targeted page associated with the keyword they searched for.

Ethical SEO

Search engines like to paint SEO services which manipulate their relevancy algorithms as being unethical. Any particular technique is generally not typically associated with ethics, but is either effective or ineffective.

Error page

A web page stating an error message such as “File Not Found”

Everflux

Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux.

Expert Document

Quality page which links to many non-affiliated topical resources.

External Link

Link which references another domain.

Exact Match

Exact Match is a form of keyword matching where the search query must be exactly the same as the advertisement keyword.

This means that the term “running shoes” will only match ads or search listings that contain the exact words “running shoes”.

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.

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SEO Glossary: F

Fair Use

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship. The stated exceptions of allowed usage of work under copyright without requiring permission of the original copyright holder. Fair use is covered in section 107 of the Copyright code.

Favicon

Favorites Icon is a small icon which appears next to URLs in a web browser. Upload an image named favicon.ico in the root of your site to have your site associated with a favicon.

Feed

Many content management, systems such as blogs, allow readers to subscribe to content update notifications via RSS or XML feeds. Feeds can also refer to pay per click syndicated feeds, or merchant product feeds. Merchant product feeds have become less effective as a means of content generation due to improving duplicate content filters.

Feed Reader

Software or website used to subscribe to feed update notifications.

Findability

How easily found your site is using search engines.

Firefox

Popular extensible open source web browser. Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation.

Flash

Vector graphics-based animation software which makes it easier to make websites look rich and interactive in nature.

Flash intro

An animated ‘short’ created using Flash that Internet users are made to sit through upon entry to a home page. Flash intros annoy users. They also typically take the place of text content on a home page, and since search engines can’t ‘read’ content embedded in Flash, the rankings of a home page that’s just a Flash intro will suffer.

Floating Ads

An ad that appears within the main browser window on top of the page’s normal content, appearing to “float” over the top of the page.

Flux

Shuffling of search engine positions in between major search engine updates.

Forums

A virtual community. Also known as discussion forums. Used by search engine optimizers and webmasters for information exchange. Users can post messages in different forums, either to the group at large or to certain users. However, all postings can be seen by anyone else who has access to that forum, so save sensitive materials for private email. Forums are also threaded, which means a reply to a particular posting becomes part of the “thread” of that posting that can be followed to provide a cohesive progression through a particular topic.

Frames

A technique created by Netscape used to display multiple smaller pages on a single display. This web design technique allows for consistent site navigation, but makes it hard to deep link at relevant content.

Frameset

A web page that is made up of frames. A useful analogy: if the individual frames that make up the frameset are the ‘children,’ then the frameset is the ‘parent.’

Frequency

The number of times an ad is delivered to the same browser in a single sessions or time period.

Fresh Content

Content which is dynamic in nature and gives people a reason to keep paying attention to your website. Many SEOs talk up fresh content, but fresh content does not generally mean re-editing old content.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol is a protocol for transferring data between computers.

Many content management systems (such as blogging platforms) include FTP capabilities. Web development software such as Dreamweaver also comes with FTP capabilities. There are also a number of free or cheap FTP programs such as Cute FTP, Core FTP, and Leech FTP.

Fuzzy Search

In computing, approximate string matching (often colloquially referred to as fuzzy string searching) is the technique of finding approximate matches to a pattern in a string.

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SEO Glossary: G

GAP – Google Advertising Professional

Google Advertising Professional is a program which qualifies marketers as being proficient AdWords marketers.

Gateway page

Also called a “doorway page” or a “bridge page”. A gateway page is a low quality web page that contains very little content and exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. This is done through spamdexing, spamming the index of a search engine. Gateway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings.

Geo-Targeting

Advertising that is distributed based on geographic location. Online advertising allows for targeting of countries, states, cities and suburbs (in some markets).

Gladwell, Malcolm

Malcolm Gladwell (born September 3, 1963) is a Canadian journalist, author, and pop sociologist, based in New York City. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He is best known for his books The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), and What the Dot Saw: And Other Adventures (2009).

Godin, Seth

Popular blogger, author, viral marketer and business consultant.

Google

The world’s leading search engine in terms of reach. Google pioneered search by analyzing linkage data via PageRank. Google was created by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Google AdSense

Paid ads webmasters may place on their websites.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offering detailed visitor statistics. The tool can be used to track all the usual site activities: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rates and average time on site etc.

But it can also be used to specifically track Adsense traffic  therefore helping webmasters to optimize Adwords adverts based on where visitors come from, time on site, click path and geographic location.

Modeled on Urchin’s analytics tool, after Google purchased Urchin Software Group in 2005, Google Analytics was first rolled out in late 2005. The response was overwhelming and Google had to suspend sign ups only a few days later. After a short period using a lottery type of invitation system the tool made generally available in August 2006.

Google Base (Froogle, Google Product)

Free database of semantically structured information created by Google. Google Base may also help Google better understand what types of information are commercial in nature, and how they should structure different vertical search products.

Google bombing

Making a page rank well for a specific search query by pointing hundreds or thousands of links at it with the keywords in the anchor text.

Google Bowling

Knocking a competitor out of the search results by pointing hundreds or thousands of low trust low quality links at their website. Typically it is easier to bowl new sites out of the results. Older established sites are much harder to knock out of the search results.

Google cache

Web caching is the caching of web documents (e.g., HTML pages, images) to reduce bandwidth usage, server load, and perceived lag. A web cache stores copies of documents passing through it; subsequent requests may be satisfied from the cache if certain conditions are met.

Google Checkout

Google’s online payment processing service, Google Checkout, was designed to simplify the online purchase/payment process.

It works by allowing users to store their credit card and shipping details on their Google Account. Therefore minimizing the amount of information they need to input at the point of purchase. Purchases can be made at the click of a button.

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.

The term Google Dance was adopted as while an update is being processed the position of a website in Google seems to “dance” as it fluctuates. The fluctuation is due to each of Google’s nine datacenters being updated out of sync – meaning for a time the results are different.

Google Juice

Internet slang to refer to the substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks. Pages with lots of links pointing to them acquire much ‘Google Juice’ and pages which link to highly ‘juicy’ pages acquire some reflected ‘Google Juice’.

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool

Keyword research tool provided by Google which estimates the competition for a keyword, recommends related keywords, and will tell you what keywords Google thinks are relevant to your site or a page on your site.

Google Labs

Google Labs is the home to Google’s latest innovations and beta products. It is a testing ground for new services in development. A number of popular products are graduates of Google Labs including: Google Reader, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Video, Personalized Search, Google Desktop and iGoogle.

Google OneBox

Portion of the search results page above the organic search results which Google sometimes uses to display vertical search results from Google News, Google Base, and other Google owned vertical search services.

Google Pack

Free software specifically selected by Google. There are no trial versions or spyware and it’s ready to use in just a few clicks.

Google Sitemaps

On some search results where Google thinks one result is far more relevant than other results (like navigational or brand related searches) they may list numerous deep links to that site at the top of the search results.

Google Sitelinks

This list of Google products includes all major desktop, mobile and online products released or acquired by Google Inc. They are either a gold release, in beta development, or part of the Google Labs initiative.

Google Supplemental Index

Google’s Supplemental Index, is a secondary database containing Supplemental Results pages deemed to be of less importance by Google’s algorithm or are less trusted.

The primary measure of a pages importance is the number and quality of links pointing to that page. Pages in the Supplemental Index can still rank in search results, but this will depend on the number of pages in the main index relevant to the search.

Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer

Google Toolbar is Internet browser add on available for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Google Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox

Google Toolbar is Internet browser add on available for both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.

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.

Google Traffic Estimator does not provide a numeric estimate of the number of search queries, instead it offers only a visual estimation of search volume in a small graphic.

Google Trends

Tool which allows you to see how Google search volumes for a particular keyword change over time.

Google Website Optimizer

Free multi variable testing platform used to help AdWords advertisers improve their conversion rates.

Google XML Sitemap

Google Sitemaps are XML files that list the URLs available on a site. The aim is to help site owners notify search engines about the URLs on a website that are available for indexing.

Webmasters can include information about each URL, such as when it was last updated and its importance in the context of the site.

You should try to make all pages on your site easily accessible to search engines without the use of google sitemaps. But there are situations when your site might benefit from Sitemaps Protocol like for instance if your site is built in rich AJAX or Flash, or if you have a large database driven site that isn’t well linked.

Googlebot

Googlebot is a search bot used by Google. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine. If a webmaster wishes to restrict the information on their site available to a Googlebot, or other well-behaved spider, they can do so by with the appropriate directives in a robots.txt file

Googleware

The assortment of tools produced by google that can be used to search, report, play, research.

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.

Guestbook Spam

A type of low quality automated link which search engines do not want to place much trust on.

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SEO Glossary: H

Hallway page

A webpage that serves as an index or linking point for a group of pages. Typically, all the main pages in a site are reachable via the hallway page. A site map is the typical hallway page.

Heading tag

The heading element briefly describes the subject of the section it introduces.

Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower numbered headings being most important. You should only use a single H1 element on each page, and may want to use multiple other heading elements to structure a document. An H1 element source would look like:

<h1>Your Topic</h1>

Heading elements may be styled using CSS. Many content management systems place the same content in the main page heading and the page title, although in many cases it may be preferential to mix them up if possible.

Headline

The title of an article or story.

Hidden keywords

Keywords that are placed in the HTML source in such a way that these words are not viewable by human visitors looking at the rendered web page.

Hidden Text – SEO Spam Tactic

Hidden Text is a SEO spam tactic to hide contextual html text from human visitors to a webpage, however making it available to search engines to spider the text.

The theory is that if you place more relevant html text content on the page rich with targeted keywords, then it will assist the page gaining ranking within search engine results. Some website owners do like text content on their page because they believe it negatively affects their brand and user web experience. So, they hide the text in the hope that the page will still rank for targeted keywords.

Hidden Text is an illegal technique as search engines consider it search engine spam. By undertaking this practice, it will eventually harm natural search performance of a website.

Hijacking of Websites

Hijacking of websites is a practice that makes search engines believe that a specific website resides at another URL. It is a form of search engine spam and cloaking. The reason why this method is undertaken by spammers is to increase rankings in search engine result pages. Webpage Hijacking is an illegal spam tactic.

When spiders crawl websites and they discover two pages with the same content, the search engine will decide which is the main url while the other is not indexed. Spammers will use tactics to ensure that their page is the one that is chosen by the search engine.

An example of website hijacking is where there are two pages with exactly the same content but at different addresses  company.com (the real site) and company.net (the rogue site). Spammers use tactics to ensure their site ranks above the real site.

Hilltop

Algorithm which ranks results largely based on unaffiliated expert citations.

HITS

Link based algorithm which ranks relevancy scores based on citations from topical authorities. A download of a file from a web server. Hits do not correlate with web page visits. Every graphic on a web page counts as a hit. Thus, a single access of a web page with 20 unique graphics on it register as 21 hits – 20 for the graphics and 1 for the HTML page. Web metrics guru Jim Sterne says hits “stand for How Idiots Track Success.” People who talk in terms of hits are usually either ignorant or are trying to snow their boss into thinking the website is doing better than it really is.

Homepage

A homepage is the main page of a website. Like a cover of a book or the front of a store, its function is to welcome people and to inform them of the overall purpose of the website. The homepage offers an index of navigation that organizes content and leads to other parts of the website.

The homepage usually accumulates the most PageRank score since its url is usually where other sites link to the most. The url of a homepage usually ends in a domain name extension such as .com, .org, .edu, etc.

Other terms used to describe a homepage are front page, main web page and webserver directory index.

It’s interesting to note that in some countries such as Japan, Korea and Germany, the term homepage usually refers to the whole website, not just the first page.

Even though the home page is designed to be the entry point of the website, people can go directly to other pages within the site without ever seeing the front page.

.htaccess

Apache directory-level configuration file which can be used to password protect or redirect files.

As a note of caution, make sure you copy your current .htaccess file before editing it, and do not edit it on a site that you can’t afford to have go down unless you know what you are doing.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the language in which pages on the World Wide Web are created.

HTML Source

The raw, unrendered programming code. It can be accessed in Internet Explorer by going to the “View” menu then selecting “Source”.

HTTP

HyperText Transfer Protocol is the foremost used protocol to communicate between servers and web browsers. Hypertext transfer protocol is the means by which data is transferred from its residing location on a server to an active browser.

HTTP 301

The 301 status code means the URI requested has Moved Permanently and has been assigned a new URI. Any future requests should use one of the returned URIs.

It is best practice to use 301 Redirects when multiple copies of the same document reside on different URIs. This will ensure that duplicate content is removed from the site and each and every unique page will only have one URL.

HTTP 302

The 302 status code means that the document requested is found however temporarily resides under a different URL. Since a permanent redirect has not been used, the client should continue to use the original requested URL for future requests

HTTP 400

The 400 status code means a ‘Bad Request’ stating that the server is not able to understand the document request due to a malformed syntax. The user is required to modify its request prior to repeating it.

HTTP 401

The 401 status code means ‘Unauthorized’. This server requests user authentication prior to fulfilling the document request.

HTTP 403

The 403 status code means ‘Forbidden’. The server understood the request, however is refusing to fulfill it. The webmaster may wish to alert the user why their request has been denied. If the organization does not wish to provide this reason then a 404 (Not Found) status code can be displayed instead.

HTTP 404

The response error message ’404′ represents a document ‘Not Found’. This means that the client was able to communicate with the server, however could not find the requested document. Alternatively, the server could be configured to not fulfill the request and not provide a reason why.

HTTP 410

Similar to a 404 Not Found error message, the 410 status code states that the requested document is ‘intentionally gone’, is no longer available and there is no forwarding address.

The 410 status code is usually used for limited display documents such as promotional information. It is up to the discretion of the web master to determine at what point to remove the 410 status message.

HTTP 500

The 500 status code error message states that there was an internal server error which has prevented the document from being fulfilled.

HTTP 501

The 501 status code message is displayed when the server does not recognize the document request method. The server is not capable of fulfilling this request and states the request was ‘Not Implemented’.

Hubs

Topical hubs are sites which link to well trusted within their topical community. A topical authority is a page which is referenced from many topical hub sites. A topical hub is a page which references many authorities.

Hyperlinks

Text containing a link is underlined and appears in a different color, usually blue or purple. Clicking on a link takes you to a different page.

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SEO Glossary: I

IDF

Inverse Document Frequency is a term used to help determine the position of a term in a vector space model.

IDF = log ( total documents in database / documents containing the term )

Impression

The number of times your search ad is served to users by search engines.

Inbound links (IBL)

Links that point to your site from sites other than your own. Inbound links are an important asset that will improve your site’s PageRank (PR).

Most search engines allow you to see a sample of links pointing to a document by searching using the link: function. For example, using link:www.seobook.com would show pages linking to the homepage of this site (both internal links and inbound links). Due to canonical URL issues www.site.com and site.com may show different linkage data. Google typically shows a much smaller sample of linkage data than competing engines do, but Google still knows of and counts many of the links that do not show up when you use their link: function.

Index

Collection of data used as bank to search through to find a match to a user fed query. The larger search engines have billions of documents in their catalogs.

When search engines search they search via reverse indexes by words and return results based on matching relevancy vectors. Stemming and semantic analysis allow search engines to return near matches. Index may also refer to the root of a folder on a web server.

Inktomi

First introduced in September 1995, Inktomi Corporation from California was a key player in the search engine market where it pioneered online search technologies. It initially provided software to ISPs (Internet Service Providers) but then went onto power other well-known web search tools such as HotBot, Looksmart, MSN, regional search engines and others.

It ultimately displaced Alta Vista when Inktomi started using a distributed network technology (instead of operating everything on one machine) that enabled them to index more than 1.3 million documents on the web at that time.

Inktomi was the first to launch a paid inclusion service that meant websites would receive regular and frequent re-indexing for a fee. It also invented a proxy cache for ISP web traffic called ‘Traffic Server’.

During its short life, Inktomi acquired many businesses including Webspective, Infoseek, eScene Networks and FastForward Networks. Once the Internet bubble had burst in 2000, many of its acquisitions were sold off due to the financial collapse of most of its customer base.

Yahoo! purchased Inktomi in 2003 which remains central to its search engine database today.

Information Architecture

Information architecture (IA) is the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems. Among these activities are library systems, Content Management Systems, web development, user interactions, database development, programming, technical writing, enterprise architecture, and critical system software design. Information architecture has somewhat different meanings in these different branches of IS or IT architecture. Most definitions have common qualities: a structural design of shared environments, methods of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, and online communities, and ways of bringing the principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Information Retrieval

The field of science based on sorting or searching through large data sets to find relevant information.

Inlinks

A synonym for back links. Popularized by Yahoo!

Insertion Order (I/O)

A contract that specifies the details of your search advertising campaign, including placements options, keywords, ad creative, landing page, pricing, geo-targeting, and language options.

Internal Links

Link from one page on a site to another page on the same site.

It is preferential to use descriptive internal linking to make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is about. Use consistent navigational anchor text for each section of your site, emphasizing other pages within that section. Place links to relevant related pages within the content area of your site to help further show the relationship between pages and improve the usability of your website.

Internet

Sometimes called “The Net”, the Internet is a publicly accessible worldwide system of computer networks that enable people to send and receive information from other computers. The Internet uses the TCP/IP network protocols to facilitate data transmission.

There are three levels of hierarchy including backbone networks, mid-level networks and stub networks. These include commercial (.com or .co), university (.ac or .edu) and other research networks (.org, .net).

The origins of the Internet began in 1962 where a government agency called RAND was commissioned by the US Air Force to develop a military research network that could survive a nuclear attack. Packet Switching was invented as a way of sending data.

The first email program was created in 1972. The TCP/IP Protocol was developed in 1973 and by 1983 it became the core Internet protocol.

The same year of 1983 saw the development of the Domain Name System (DNS) by the University of Wisconsin. The domain name system made it easier for people to access other servers rather than having to remember the corresponding long IP numbers.

In 1992 the World Wide Web was released by CERN and the Internet Society was chartered who controls the Internet. The first graphical user interface to the WWW called ‘Mosaic for X’ was released.

By 1996, most Internet traffic was carried by independent ISPs. The Internet Society is building a new TCP/IP that will allow billions of addresses rather than the limited supply that we have today.

Internet Explorer

Microsoft’s web browser. After they beat out Netscape’s browser on the marketshare front they failed to innovate on any level for about 5 years, until Firefox forced them to.

Interstitial Ad

An ad page that appears for a short period of time before the user-requested page is displayed. Also known as a transition ad, splash page, or Flash page.

Inventory

Advertising space available for purchase on a website. Based on projections, inventory may be specified as number of impressions or as a share of voice. Also known as ad avail.

Invisible Web

Portions of the web which are not easily accessible to crawlers due to search technology limitations, copyright issues, or information architecture issues.

IP Address

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is usually a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Its role has been characterized as follows: “A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there.”

ISP – Internet Service Provider

ISP is an abbreviation for Internet Service Provider. An ISP provides a range of Internet related services to customers including Internet connectivity, email, website hosting, domain name registration and hosting.

Usually provided for a monthly fee, an ISP can be a commercial business, a university, a government organization, a school or any other entity that provides access to the Internet to members or subscribers.

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SEO Glossary: J

Java Applets

Small programs written in the Java programming language that can be embedded into web pages. Applet programs run on the Internet user’s computer rather than the web server’s computer. Search engines can not run Java applets. Consequently, if navigation or content is embedded in a Java applet, it will be invisible to the search engines and will not get indexed. Java source code gets compiled into executable code called “bytecode.”

JavaScripts

A client-side scripting language that can be embedded into HTML documents to add dynamic features.

Search engines do not index most content in JavaScript. In AJAX, JavaScript has been combined with other technologies to make web pages even more interactive.

Jump Page Ad

A microsite reached by clicking a button or banner. The jump page itself can list several topics, which can link to your site.

Junk Pages

Meaningless documents that serve no purpose other than to spam the search engines with keyword stuffed pages in hopes a visitor might click on an adsense ad.

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SEO Glossary: K

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs help organizations achieve organizational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. The key indicators are agreed upon by an organization and are indicators which can be measured that will reflect success factors. The KPIs selected must reflect the organization’s goals, they must be key to its success, and they must be measurable. Key performance indicators usually are long-term considerations for an organization.”

Key Phrase (or keyword phrase)

A search phrase made up of keywords. See “keyword”.

Keyword

A word that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn’t appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it’s highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine).

Keyword Density

An old measure of search engine relevancy based on how prominent keywords appeared within the content of a page. Keyword density is no longer a valid measure of relevancy over a broad open search index though.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

Keyword Funnel

The relationship between various related keywords that searchers search for. Some searches are particularly well aligned with others due to spelling errors, poor search relevancy, and automated or manual query refinement.

Keyword Matching

Keyword matching is the process of selecting and providing advertising or information that match the user’s search query.

Keyword Popularity

The number of occurrences of searches done by Internet users of a given keyword during a period of time. Both WordTracker.com and Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool  provide keyword popularity numbers.

Keyword Prominence

The location of a given keyword in the HTML source code of a web page. The higher up in the page a particular word is, the more prominent it is and thus the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search engine user. Consequently, it’s best to have your first paragraph be chock full of important keywords rather than superfluous marketingspeak. This concept also applies to the location of important keywords within individual HTML tags, such as heading tags, title tags, or hyperlink text. So get in the habit of starting off your title tags with a good keyword rather than “Welcome to.”

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search. Search engine optimization professionals research keywords in order to achieve better rankings in their desired keywords

Keyword Research Tools

Tools which help you discover potential keywords based on past search volumes, search trends, bid prices, and page content from related websites.

Short list of the most popular keyword research tools:

• SEO Book Keyword Research Tool – free, driven by Overture, this tool cross references all of my favorite keyword research tools. In addition to linking to traditional keyword research tools, it also links to tools such as Google Suggest, Buzz related tools, vertical databases, social bookmarking and tagging sites, and latent semantic indexing related tools.
• Overture – free, powered from Yahoo! search data. Heavily biased toward over representing commercial queries, combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single data point.
• Google – free, powered from Google search data.
• Wordtracker – paid, powered from Dogpile and MetaCrawler. Due to small sample size their keyword database may be easy to spam.

Keyword Stuffing

Writing copy that uses excessive amounts of the core keyword.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

Keyword-Rich

When a given page or bit of text is chock full of good keywords rather than a bunch of meaningless words (e.g. “welcome”, “click here”) or irrelevant words (e.g. “solution”)

Kleinberg, Jon

Born October 1971, is an American computer scientist, MacArthur Fellow, Nevanlinna Prize winner, and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Scientist largely responsible for much of the research that went into hubs and authorities based search relevancy algorithms.

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SEO Glossary: L

Landing Page

The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.

Landing Page Quality Scores

A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of their AdWords program.

When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market, but as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to try to keep their ads relevant.

Link Bait

The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media and bloggers.

Link Building

The process of building high quality linkage data that search engines will evaluate to trust your website is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy.

Link Bursts

A rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing at a website.

When links occur naturally they generally develop over time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral articles receive many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of quality as well.

Link Churn

The rate at which a site loses links.

Link Equity

A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity and the authority of the sites providing those links.

Link Farm

Website or group of websites which exercises little to no editorial control when linking to other sites. FFA pages, for example, are link farms.

Link Popularity

When other web sites link to your site, your site will rank better in certain search engines. The more web pages that link to you, the better your link popularity.

Link Spam

Links between pages that are specifically set up to take advantage of link-based ranking algorithms such as Google’s PageRank (PR).

Links

A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document.

Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.

Log File

All accesses to a web site can be logged by the web server. Data that is usually logged includes date and time, filename accessed, user’s IP address, referring web page, user’s browser software and version, and cookie data.

Long Tail

Phrase describing how for any category of product being sold there is much more aggregate demand for the non-hits than there is for the hits.

How does the long tail applies to keywords? Long Tail keywords are more precise and specific, thus have a higher value.

Looksmart

Company originally launched as a directory service which later morphed into a paid search provider and vertical content play.

LSI

Latent Semantic Indexing is a way for search systems to mathematically understanding and representing language based on the similarity of pages and keyword co-occurance. A relevant result may not even have the search term in it. It may be returned based solely on the fact that it contains many similar words to those appearing in relevant pages which contain the search words.

Link Hoarding

A method of trying to keep all your link popularity by not linking out to other sites, or linking out using JavaScript or through cheesy redirects.

Link Reputation

The combination of your link equity and anchor text.

Link Rot

A measure of how many and what percent of a website’s links are broken.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are:

• a website going offline
• linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
• moving a page’s location
• changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Live.com

New search platform provided by Microsoft.

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SEO Glossary: M

Machine-generated

Don’t use software tools that purport to auto-generate doorway pages. These pages are usually devoid of meaningful content. Google, in particular, is working on ways to identify and exclude machine-generated doorway pages.

Malda, Rob

Founder of Slashdot.org, a popular editorially driven technology news forum.

Manual Review

All major search engines combine a manual review process with their automated relevancy algorithms to help catch search spam and train their relevancy algorithms. Abnormal usage data or link growth patterns may also flag sites for manual review.

Manual submitting

Submitting by hand to an individual search engine, rather than using an automated submission tool or service. Manual submitting is the more polite way to submit, and as such is less likely to land you in trouble with the search engines. But the best approach is not to submit at all and let the search engine spiders find your site through links from other sites to your site.

Mechanical Turk

Amazon.com program which allows you to hire humans to perform easy tasks that computers are bad at.

Meme

In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins defines a meme as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” Many people use the word meme to refer to self spreading or viral ideas.

Meta description

The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of the page.

Meta keywords

The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to highlight keywords and keyword phrases which the page is targeting.

The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”keyword phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more “>

Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers typically never see the tag, so most search engines do not place much (if any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags.

Meta Refresh

A meta tag used to make a browser refresh to another URL location.

A meta refresh looks like this

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”10;url=http://www.site.com/folder/page.htm”>

Generally in most cases it is preferred to use a 301 or 302 redirect over a meta refresh.

Meta Search

A search engine which pulls top ranked results from multiple other search engines and rearranges them into a new result set.

Meta tag stuffing

Repeating keywords in the meta tags and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content.

Meta tags

People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the page title in with these.

• The page title is highly important.
• The meta description tag is somewhat important.
• The meta keywords tag is not that important.

Mindshare

A measure of the amount of people who think of you or your product when thinking of products in your category.

Sites with strong mindshare, top rankings, or a strong memorable brand are far more likely to be linked at than sites which are less memorable and have less search exposure. The link quality of mindshare related links most likely exceeds the quality of the average link on the web. If you sell non-commodities, personal recommendations also typically carry far greater weight than search rankings alone.

Mirror site

Site which mirrors (or duplicates) the contents of another website.

Generally search engines prefer not to index duplicate content. The one exception to this is that if you are a hosting company it might make sense to offer free hosting or a free mirror site to a popular open source software site to build significant link equity.

Miserable Failure

A well known example of “Google bombing”, it poignantly illustrates how inbound text links can affect SERPs. In this instance, hyperlinks containing the keyword phrase miserable failure seem to reflect America’s & the world’s opinion of George W. Bush’s performance, while positioning his White House bio in the #1 position for that search term.

So effective have the results been that today George W. Bush’s White House biography is positioned at #1 on Google for the single word term, failure, forever soiling the reputation of America and office of the President.

Movable Type

For sale blogging software which allows you to host a blog on your website. Movable Type is typically much harder to install that WordPress is.

Mod_rewrite

A module or plugin for Apache web servers that can be used to rewrite requested URLs on the fly.

It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism. Which can be used to offer both search engine friendly URLs, thus increasing indexing chances for a dynamic database driven website.

Mouseover

Where hovering the mouse over a text or graphic link without clicking displays something new on the page. For example, a horizontal navigation bar may display further sub-section choices underneath the section hovered over

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a web browser that has steadily grown in popularity over the last few years. It’s currently used by about 15% of the world’s Web browsers.

Firefox is free and open source software developed by the Mozilla Corporation and a community of external contributors. This cross-platform browser, provides support for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

MSN Search

Search engine built by Microsoft. MSN is the default search provider in Internet Explorer.

Multi Dimensional Scaling

The process of taking shapshots of documents in a database to discover topical clusters through the use of latent semantic indexing. Multi dimensional scaling is more efficient than singular vector decomposition since only a rough approximation of relevance is necessary when combined with other ranking criteria.

MySpace

One of the most popular social networking sites, largely revolving around connecting musicians to fans and having an easy to use blogging platform.

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SEO Glossary: N

Natural Language Processing

Algorithms which attempt to understand the true intent of a search query rather than just matching results to keywords.

Navigation bar (nav bar)

A web site’s navigation icons, usually arranged in a row down the left hand side or along the top that plays crucial roles in directing spiders to the site’s most important content and in getting site visitors to go deeper in the site.

Negative Keyword

Negative Keyword is a term referenced by Google AdWords and is a form of keyword matching. This means that an advertiser can specify search terms that they do not want their ad to be associated with.

For example, if you add the negative keyword “-nike” to the keyword “running shoes”, the ad will not be displayed if a person searches upon the term “nike running shoes”.

Negative keyword matching ensures that only qualified traffic is clicking upon advertising.

Negative SEO

The act of demoting a page or site from the SERPS. Most often used against a competitor that is above your site in the SERPS but can be used purely for fun.

Netscape

Originally a company that created a popular web browser by the same name, Netscape is now a social news site similar to Digg.com.

Niche

A topic or subject which a website is focused on.

Noframes tag

Alternative non-framed HTML on a frameset page for very old, non-frames capable web browsers and search engine spiders. Placing good keyword-rich text in noframes tags is a good idea if your site is framed, but a much better idea is to ditch frames altogether and rebuild the site properly. A framed web site is not search engine friendly as long as it uses noframes tags.

Nofollow

Attribute used to prevent a link from passing link authority. Commonly used on sites with user generated content, like in blog comments.

The code to use nofollow on a link appears like
<a href=”http://wwwseobook.com.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text </a>

Nofollow can also be used in a robots meta tag to prevent a search engine from counting any outbound links on a page. This code would look like this

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

Google’s Matt Cutts also pushes webmasters to use nofollow on any paid links, but since Google is the world’s largest link broker, their advice on how other people should buy or sell links should be taken with a grain of salt. Please note that it is generally not advised to practice link hoarding as that may look quite unnatural. Outbound links may also boost your relevancy scores in some search engines.

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SEO Glossary: O

Ontology

In philosophy it is the study of being. As it relates to search, it is the attempt to create an exhaustive and rigorous conceptual schema about a domain. An ontology is typically a hierarchical data structure containing all the relevant entities and their relationships and rules within that domain.

On-theme

Refers to content specific to a particular topic.

Open Source

Software which is distributed with its source code such that developers can modify it as they see fit. On the web open source is a great strategy for quickly building immense exposure and mindshare.

Opera

A fast standards based web browser.

Organic Search Results

Most major search engines have results that consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. The unpaid / algorithmic listings are called the organic search results. Organic search results are organized by relevancy, which is largely determined based on linkage data, page content, usage data, and historical domain and trust related data.

Most clicks on search results are on the organic search results. Some studies have shown that 60 to 80% + of clicks are on the organic search results.

Outbound links

A link from one website pointing at another external website.

Overture

The company which pioneered search marketing by selling targeted searches on a pay per click basis. Originally named GoTo, they were eventually bought out by Yahoo! and branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Overture Keyword Selector Tool

Popular keyword research tool, based largely on Yahoo! search statistics. Heavily skewed toward commercially oriented searches, also combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single version.

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SEO Glossary: P

Page, Larry

Lawrence “Larry” Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist best known as co-founder of Google Inc.

Page title

See “title tag”

Pagejacking

Stealing high-ranking web page content from another site and placing it on your site in the hopes of increasing your own site’s search engine rankings. Pagejacking is yet another shady way of gaming the search engines and, as such, its use should be strongly discouraged.

PageRank (PR)

Google uses a weighted form of link popularity called PageRank. Not all links are created equal. Google differentiates a link from an important site (such as CNN.com) as being better than a link from Jim-Bob’s personal home page. The Google Toolbar (which is a free download from http://toolbar.google.com) has a PageRank meter built into it, to see which web pages are considered important by Google and which aren’t. PageRank scoring ranges from 0 to 10, 10 being the best. PageRank scores get exponentially harder to achieve the closer to 10 they are. For example, increasing your own homepage’s PageRank from a 2 to 3 is easy with not a lot of additional links, jumping from a 7 to an 8 is very difficult to achieve. The higher the PageRank of the page that’s linking to you, the more your site’s PageRank will benefit. The better your PageRank, the better you’ll do in Google, all else being equal.

Since PageRank is widely bartered Google’s relevancy algorithms had to move away from relying on PageRank and place more emphasis on trusted links via algorithms such as TrustRank.

The PageRank formula is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

PR= PageRank
d= dampening factor (~0.85)
c = number of links on the page
PR(T1)/C(T1) = PageRank of page 1 divided by the total number of links on page 1, (transferred PageRank)

Pageviews

A page view (PV) or page impression is a request to load a single page of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web a page request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another HTML page pointing to the page in question.

Paid inclusion

Paying a search engine to have your web pages included in that search engine’s index

Paid placement

Paying a search engine to have your listing show up prominently. These listings are usually denoted as “sponsored listings.”

Pay-for-performance

A pricing model based on delivering sales or something else that can be directly attributed to the bottom line. Contrast this with traditional banner advertising which is based on impressions, a chunk of which come from people you have no desire or ability to do business with

Pay-per-click (PPC)

A pay-for-performance pricing model where advertising (such as banners or paid search engine listings) is priced based on number of clickthroughs rather than impressions or other criteria. Overture is an example of a search engine which charges advertisers on a pay-per-click basis.

Pay-per-post (PPP)

A website designed to help content creators such as bloggers find advertisers willing to sponsor specific content.

PDF

Portable Document Format is a universal file format developed by Adobe Systems that allows files to be stored and viewed in the original printer friendly context.

Penalty

Search engines prevent some websites suspected of spamming from ranking highly in the results by banning or penalizing them. These penalties may be automated algorithmically or manually applied.

If a site is penalized algorithmically the site may start ranking again after a certain period of time after the reason for being penalized is fixed. If a site is penalized manually the penalty may last an exceptionally long time or require contacting the search engine with a reinclusion request to remedy.

Personalization

Altering the search results based on a person’s location, search history, content they recently viewed, or other factors relevant to them on a personal level.

PHP

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side scripting language used to render web pages or add interactivity to them. an “open source” programming language for building dynamic web sites. PHP can be used to write server-side programs that access databases. PHP is the most popular web programming language – more popular than Microsoft’s ASP (Active Server Pages), JSP (Java Server Pages), and Macromedia’s Cold Fusion. PHP is especially well-suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP is secure, easy to learn, efficient, fast to code and fast to deploy. PHP is being used by over nine million web sites (over 24% of the sites on the Internet), due largely to benefits such as quicker response time, improved security, and transparency to the end user.

Phrase Match

Phrase Match is a form of keyword matching where an ad will be displayed if the user’s search query includes the exact phrase, even if their query contains additional words.  For example if the terms “running shoes” are associated with an ad and the user searches upon the term “blue running shoes”, the ad will be displayed. However, the ad will not be displayed if the search query is “shoes for running”.

Precision

The ability of a search engine to list results that satisfy the query, usually measured in percentage. (if 20 of the 50 results match the query the precision is 40%)

Profit Elasticity

A measure of the profit potential of different economic conditions based on adjusting price, supply, or other variables to create a different profit potential where the supply and demand curves cross.

Proximity

A measure of how close words are to one another.

A page which has words near one another may be deemed to be more likely to satisfy a search query containing both terms. If keyword phrases are repeated an excessive number of times, and the proximity is close on all the occurrences of both words it may also be a sign of unnatural (and thus potentially low quality) content.

Poison Word

Words which were traditionally associated with low quality content that caused search engines to want to demote the rankings of a page.

Pop-under

A pop-up that appears underneath the currently active web browser window. An annoying, if not shady, tactic used by some web advertisers.

Pop-up

A web page that displays within a new, typically smaller, web browser window, rather than the currently active browser window. Search engine spiders don’t typically follow pop-up (or pop-under) links. Pop-ups are often times used for promotions, ads, email newsletter invitations, survey invitations, and the like.

Portal

Web site offering common consumer services such as news, email, other content, and search.

Pull-down list

On a web form, where the user chooses from a list of items. For example, if you are asked to identify which country you are from, this will typically be done using a pull-down list. A pull-down list is usually displayed with the first item within a box and a down arrow immediately to the right. Clicking on the down arrow will display the full list to choose from. Search engine spiders can’t fill out forms or pull down on lists, so content that is only accessible through pull-down lists will not be indexed and will be part of the “Invisible Web.”

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SEO Glossary: Q

Quality Content

Web content that is user friendly as well as search engine friendly is considered quality content. For a website to rank high on SERPs and be popular among users it must provide interesting, well written, relevant and unique content.

Quality Link

Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links.

There are a variety of ways to define what a quality link is, but the following are characteristics of a high quality link:

• Trusted Source: If a link is from a page or website which seems like it is trustworthy then it is more likely to count more than a link from an obscure, rarely used, and rarely cited website. See TrustRank for one example of a way to find highly trusted websites.
• Hard to Get: The harder a link is to acquire the more likely a search engine will be to want to trust it and the more work a competitor will need to do to try to gain that link.
• Aged: Some search engines may trust links from older resources or links that have existed for a length of time more than they trust brand new links or links from newer resources.
• Co-citation: Pages that link at competing sites which also link to your site make it easy for search engines to understand what community your website belongs to. See Hilltop for an example of an algorithm which looks for co-citation from expert sources.
• Related: Links from related pages or related websites may count more than links from unrelated sites.
• In Content: Links which are in the content area of a page are typically going to be more likely to be editorial links than links that are not included within the editorial portion of a page.

While appropriate anchor text may also help you rank even better than a link which lacks appropriate anchor text, it is worth noting that for competitive queries Google is more likely to place weight on a high quality link where the anchor text does not match than trusting low quality links where the anchor text matches.

Query

A keyword, or phrase inquiry entered into a search engine or database. A person types in words and the search engine database returns results that matches the user’s query.

Query Refinement

Some searchers may refine their search query if they deemed the results as being irrelevant. Some search engines may aim to promote certain verticals or suggest other search queries if they deem other search queries or vertical databases as being relevant to the goals of the searcher.

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SEO Glossary: R

Recall

The portion of relevant documents that were retrieved when compared to all relevant documents.

Reach

Sometimes expressed as the percentage of the universe of a target audience, however it is measured by the total number of unique users who will see the ad over a specific period of time.

Reciprocal linking

Nepotistic link exchanges where websites try to build false authority by trading links, using three way link trades, or other low quality link schemes.

When sites link naturally there is going to be some amount of cross linking within a community, but if most or all of your links are reciprocal in nature it may be a sign of ranking manipulation. Also sites that trade links off topic or on links pages that are stashed away deep within their sites probably do not pass much link authority, and may add more risk than reward.

Quality reciprocal link exchanges in and of themselves are not a bad thing, but most reciprocal link offers are of low quality. If too many of your links are of low quality it may make it harder for your site to rank for relevant queries, and some search engines may look at inlink and outlink ratios as well as link quality when determining how natural a site’s link profile is.

Redirect

Where the Internet user is automatically taken to another web page address without him/her clicking on anything. Redirects are generally not good for search engine rankings, as they dilute PageRank. There is also the risk that the search engine spider will not follow your redirect.

Referral Fees

Fees paid in exchange for delivering a qualified sales lead or purchase inquiry. For example, an affiliate drives traffic to other companies’ sites, typically in exchange for a percentage of sales or a flat referral fee.

Referrer

A web page, containing a link to your web page, that delivered your visitor to your web page. For example, if Google’s search results (for example on a search for “britney spears”) contained a link to a page on your site and the user clicked on that link.

Registrar

A company which allows you to register domain names.

Referrer

The source from which a website visitor came from.

Reputation Management

Ensuring your brand related keywords display results which reinforce your brand. Many hate sites tend to rank highly for brand related queries.

Relative Links

A link which shows the relation of the current URL to the 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 relative link

<a href=”../folder/filename.html”>Cool Stuff</a>

Example absolute link

<a href=”http://seobook.com/folder/filename.html”>Cool Stuff</a>

Reinclusion

If a site has been penalized for spamming they may fix the infraction and ask for reinclusion. Depending on the severity of the infraction and the brand strength of the site they may or may not be added to the search index.

Relevance

A measure of how useful searchers find search results.

Many search engines may also bias organic search results to informational resources since commercial ads also show in the search results.

Remnant Inventory

Low-cost advertising space that is relatively undesirable or otherwise unsold.

Render

Format and stylize HTML source code into the final format for the visitor’s screen. For example, text within <b> tags will be made bold.

Repeat Visitor

A repeat visitor is a single individual or browser who accesses a website or webpage more than once over a specified period of time.

Replica

A copy of a dynamic web site or a group of web pages from a dynamic site, saved as static HTML files.

Reverse Index

An index of keywords which stores records of matching documents that contain those keywords.

Resubmitting

Much like search engine submission, resubmission is generally a useless program which is offered by businesses bilking naive consumers out of their money for a worthless service.

Results

Can refer to SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

Rewrite

As in “URL rewriting”

Robot

See “spider”

Robots.txt

A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search engines which files not to crawl. Some search engines will still list your URLs as URL only listings even if you block them using a robots.txt file.

ROI – Return On Investment

Return on Investment is a measure of how much return you receive from each marketing dollar. While ROI is a somewhat sophisticated measurement, some search marketers prefer to account for their marketing using more sophisticate profit elasticity calculations.

Run of Site (ROS)

The scheduling of ads across an entire site, often at a lower cost than the purchase of specific pages or sub-sections of the site. A run-of-site ad campaign is rotated on all general, non-featured ad spaces on a site.

RSS

Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication is a method of syndicating information to a feed reader or other software which allows people to subscribe to a channel they are interested in.

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SEO Glossary: S

Safari

A popular Apple browser.

Salton, Gerard

Scientist who pioneered the information retrieval field.

Scraper sites

Designed to ‘scrape’ search-engine results pages or other sources of content (often without permission) to create content for a website. Scraper sites are generally full of advertising or redirect the user to other sites.

Scumware

Intrusive software and programs which usually target ads, violate privacy, and are often installed without the computer owner knowing what the software does.

Search engine

A tool or device used to find relevant information. Search engines consist of a spider, index, relevancy algorithms and search results.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries.

SEO consists largely of keyword research, SEO copywriting, information architecture, link building, brand building, building mindshare, reputation management, and viral marketing.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

A page of search results delivered by a search engine.

Search History

Many search engines store user search history information. This data can be used for better ad targeting or to make old information more findable.

Search engines may also determine what a document is about and how much they trust a domain based on aggregate usage data. Many brand related search queries is a strong signal of quality.

Search Marketing

Marketing a website in search engines. Typically via SEO, buying pay per click ads, and paid inclusion.

Search term

A keyword, or phrase used to conduct a search engine query.

Search term popularity

See “keyword popularity”.

Select list

See “pull-down list”.

SEM

Acronym for Search Engine Marketing.

SEO

Acronym for “search engine optimization” and/or “search engine optimizer.”

SEO Copywriting

Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries.

There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly

1. Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content for your site or already have an amazingly authoritative site.
2. Write page titles that are exceptionally compelling to link at. If enough people link at them then your pages and site will rank for many relevant queries even if the keywords are not in the page titles.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page is the page on which the search engines show the results for a search query.

Server

Computer used to host files and serve them to the WWW.

Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

Server Logs

Files hosted on servers which display website traffic trends and sources.

Server logs typically do not show as much data and are not as user friendly as analytics software. Not all hosts provide server logs.

Singular Value Decomposition

The process of breaking down a large database to find the document vector (relevance) for various items by comparing them to other items and documents.

Important steps:

• Stemming: taking in account for various forms of a word on a page
• Local Weighting: increasing the relevance of a given document based on the frequency a term appears in the document
• Global Weighting: increasing the relevance of terms which appear in a small number of pages as they are more likely to be on topic than words that appear in most all documents.
• Normalization: penalizing long copy and rewarding short copy to allow them fair distribution in results. a good way of looking at this is like standardizing things to a scale of 100.

Siphoning

Techniques used to steal another web sites traffic, including the use of spyware or cybersquatting.

Sitemap

Page which can be used to help give search engines a secondary route to navigate through your site.

Tips:

• On large websites the on page navigation should help search engines find all applicable web pages.
• On large websites it does not make sense to list every page on the site map, just the most important pages.
• Site maps can be used to help redistribute internal link authority toward important pages or sections, or sections of your site that are seasonally important.
• Site maps can use slightly different or more descriptive anchor text than other portions of your site to help search engines understand what your pages are about.
• Site maps should be created such that they are useful to humans, not just search engines.

Session

See “user session”.

Share of Voice

Refers to the relative portion of exposure of an advertiser within a defined market sector over a period of time.

Share of Voice can refer to the portion of exposure in advertising, the blogosphere, etc.

Shoskeles

An animated ad that moves across the browser, usually with sound effects. It animates only long enough to play a message before settling into a stationary ad on the page

Skyscraper

A tall, thin ad unit that runs down the side of a web page. A skyscraper can be 120 x 600 pixels or160 x 600 pixels.

Slashdot

Central editorially driven community news site focusing on technology and nerd related topics created by Rob Malda.

Sniffer script

A small program or script that detects which web browser software an Internet user is using and then serves up the particular browser-specific cascading style sheet to match. Sniffer scripts are also used to detect whether a user has the Macromedia Flash plug-in installed, and if so, a Flash version of the page is displayed.

Social Media

Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are social bookmarking sites and social news sites.

Spam

Unsolicited email messages.

Search engines also like to outsource their relevancy issues by calling low quality search results spam. They have vague ever changing guidelines which determine what marketing techniques are acceptable at any given time. Typically search engines try hard not to flag false positives as spam, so most algorithms are quite lenient, as long as you do not build lots of low quality links, host large quantities of duplicate content, or perform other actions that are considered widely outside of relevancy guidelines. If your site is banned from a search engine you may request reinclusion after fixing the problem.

Spamdexing

Spamdexing (also known as search spam, search engine spam or web spam) involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

Spamglish

Keyword-rich gibberish used as search engine fodder instead of thoughtfully written, interesting content. Spamglish often includes meaningless sentences and keyword repetition.

Spamming

The act of creating and distributing spam.

Spider

Search engine crawlers which search or “spider” the web for pages to include in the index.

Many non-traditional search companies have different spiders which perform other applications. For example, TurnItInBot searches for plagiarism. Spiders should obey the robots.txt protocol.

Spider trap

An infinite loop that a spider may get caught in if it explores a dynamic site where the URLs of pages keep changing. For example, a home page may have a different URL and the search engine may not be able to ascertain that it is the home page that it has already indexed but under another URL. If search engines were to completely index dynamic web sites, they would inevitably have large amounts of redundant content and download millions of pages.

Splash page

Feature rich or elegantly designed beautiful web page which typically offers poor usability and does not offer search engines much content to index.

Splog

Spam blog, typically consisting of stolen or automated low quality content.

Spyware

Software programs which spy on web users, often used to collect consumer research and to behaviorally targeted ads.

Squidoo

Topical lens site created by Seth Godin.

SSI

Server Side Includes are a way to call portions of a page in from another page. SSI makes it easier to update websites.

Standards compliant

Sites that use valid XHTML and CSS, separate the content layer from the presentation layer. Because standards compliant sites are accessible and usable to both humans and spiders alike, they tend to rank better in search engines than non-compliant sites.

Static

As in “static web page.” Means that the web page was not created dynamically from a database, but instead previously created and saved as a HTML file.

Static Content

Content which does not change frequently. May also refer to content that does not have any social elements to it and does not use dynamic programming languages.

Many static sites do well, but the reasons fresh content works great for SEO are:

• If you keep building content every day you eventually build a huge archive of content
• By frequently updating your content you keep building mindshare, brand equity, and give people fresh content worth linking at

Stemming

Using the stem of a word to help satisfy search relevancy requirements. EX: searching for swimming can return results which contain swim. This usually enhances the quality of search results due to the extreme diversity of word used in, and their application in the English language.

Stop character

Certain characters, such as ampersand (&), equals sign (=), and question mark (?), when in a web page’s URL, tip off a search engine that the page in question is dynamic. Search engines are cautious of indexing dynamic pages for fear of spider traps, thus pages that contain stop characters in their URL run the risk of not getting indexed and becoming part of the “Invisible Web.” Google won’t crawl more than one dynamic level deep. So dynamic pages with stop characters in its URL should get indexed if a static page links to it. Eliminating stop characters from all URLs on your site will go a long way in ensuring that your entire site gets indexed by Google.

Stop word

Common words (ex: a, to, and, is …) which add little relevancy to a search query, and are thus are removed from the search query prior to finding relevant search results.

It is both fine and natural to use stop words in your page content. The reason stop words are ignored when people search is that the words are so common that they offer little to no discrimination value.

Streaming media

Audio-visual content that is played as it is being downloaded. Thus, an Internet user could begin watching a video clip as the footage downloads rather than having to wait for the clip to download in its entirety beforehand.

Submitting

The act of making information systems and related websites aware of your website. In most cases you no longer need to submit your website to large scale search engines, they follow links and index content. The best way to submit your site is to get others to link to it.

Some topical or vertical search systems will require submission, but you should not need to submit your site to large scale search engine.

Sullivan, Danny

Founder and lead editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, who later started SearchEngineLand.com.

Supplemental Results

Documents which generally are trusted less and rank lower than documents in the main search index.

Supplemental Pages

Pages which are indexed in Google but do not exist at this time. But during searching for a particular thing they are shown in the search result pages. These pages provides additional information about the particular search.

Syndication

An option that allows you to extend your reach by distributing ads to additional partner sites.

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SEO Glossary: T

Tagging, tags (see Bookmarks)

Word descriptions.

Target Audience

The target audience is the market in which advertisers wish to sell their product or service to.

Target markets are defined in terms of demographics, psychographics, purchase behavior, media or product usage.

Taxonomy

Classification system of controlled vocabulary used to organize topical subjects, usually hierarchical in nature.

Technorati

Search engine for blogs.

Telnet

Is a user command and an underlying TCP/IP protocol for accessing remote computers.

Teoma

An internet search engine.

Term Frequency

The number of times a term occurs in a document.

Term Vector Database

A database using relative vectors (or relevancy) for different search phrases and pages.

Text Ad

A text ad is a concise, action-oriented copy describing the product or service that is being advertised. The text ad appears alongside natural search results and links to a specified web page.

Text Link Ads

An advert in the format of a text link.

The Tragedy of the Commons

A conflict between individual interests and the common good.

Theme

The main keyword focus of a web page.

Thesaurus

Similar to a dictionary but contains a lists of synonyms rather than definitions.

Title Attribute

Is intended to provide supplementary information about an element.

Title tag

The text displayed in the blue bar at the very top of the browser window, above “Back,” “Forward,” “Refresh,” “Print,” etc. Although inconspicuous to the user, the title tag is the most important bit of text on a web page as far as the search engines are concerned. Search engines not only assign the words in the title tag more weight, they also typically display the title tag in the search results, making the title tag an important potential call-to-action as well. Thus, the wording of each page’s title tag should be thought through carefully. Also see “keyword prominence.”

Token

A tracer or tag attached by the receiving server to the address (URL) of a page requested by a user. A token lasts only through a continuous series of requests by a user, regardless of the length of the interval between requests. Tokens can be used to count unique users.

Toolbar

Many major search companies aim to gain marketshare by distributing search toolbars. Some of these toolbars have useful features such as pop-up blockers, spell checkers, and form autofill. These toolbars also help search engines track usage data.

Topic-Sensitive PageRank

Method of computing PageRank which instead of producing a single global score creates topic related PageRank scores.

Trackback

Automated notification that another website mentioned your site which is baked into most popular blogging software programs.

Due to the automated nature of trackbacks they are typically quite easy to spam. Many publishers turn trackbacks off due to a low signal to noise ratio.

Tracking

Online advertising opens the opportunity to track audience response throughout the life of a campaign. Tracking and reporting tools can help you learn as you go, so you can refine your ad creative, placement options, and spending levels if you’re not seeing the results you expect. The publisher of your ads typically will provide reports on ad impressions and clickthrough. For additional analysis of your traffic and actual customer conversion rates, you’ll need to build tracking mechanisms into your website.

Trademark

A trademark is a word, phrase, logo or symbol that identifies and distinguishes a product or service from others in the marketplace.

Multiple trademark owners may claim the right to the same term, as long as each owner operates in a different industry. Trademark ownership is location-based, and therefore must be obtained on a country-by-country basis.

In search advertising, it is an unethical practice to use trademark terms that do not belong to the advertiser within a campaign.

Traffic

The amount of users that surf to a site

Traffic Estimator

Google’s AdWords Traffic Estimator is a tool that provides search volume, average cost-per-click, and position estimates for search advertising in Google’s search results and content network. It can be used to predict advertising performance before starting a campaign.

The Traffic Estimator tool is available free at:

https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Tragedy of the Commons

Story about how in order to protect the commons some people will have to give up some rights or care more for the commons. In marketing attention is the commons, and Google largely won distribution because they found ways to make marketing less annoying.

TrustRank

Search relevancy algorithm which places additional weighting on links from trusted seed websites that are controlled by major corporations, educational institutions, or governmental institutions.

Typepad

Hosted blogging platform provided by SixApart, who also makes Movable Type.

It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Typepad.com, or to publish content which appears as though it is on its own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

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SEO Glossary: U

Unethical SEO

Some search engine marketers lacking in creativity try to market their services as being ethical, whereas services rendered by other providers are somehow unethical. SEO services are generally neither ethical or unethical. They are either effective or ineffective.

SEO is an inherently risky business, but any quality SEO service provider should make clients aware of potential risks and rewards of different recommended techniques.

Unique visitors

Unique visitors are a count of individual users who have accessed your web site. It should be noted that the “user session” metric does not yield an accurate unique visitor count, as multiple user sessions can be generated by one unique visitor

Universe

The term “universe” in the world of advertising means the total population of the target audience

Update

Search engines frequently update their algorithms and data sets to help keep their search results fresh and make their relevancy algorithms hard to update. Most major search engines are continuously updating both their relevancy algorithms and search index.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator is the unique address of any web document.

URL Rewrite

A technique used to help make URLs more unique and descriptive to help facilitate better sitewide indexing by major search engines.

Usability

How easy it is for customers to perform the desired actions.

The structure and formatting of text and hyperlink based calls to action can drastically increase your website usability, and thus conversion rates.

Usage Data

Things like a large stream of traffic, repeat visitors, multiple page views per visitor, a high clickthrough rate, or a high level of brand related search queries may be seen by some search engines as a sign of quality. Some search engines may

Usenet

Bulletin board network featuring thousands of newsgroups.

User agent

The name of the browser/spider that is currently visiting a page.

User Generated Content

User-generated-content (USG) is content created and published by the end-users online. USG is comprised of videos, podcasts and posts on discussion groups, blogs, wiki’s and social media sites. USG allows for a wider content provider base and the chance for all users to share their opinions online. Criticism of USG includes credibility and quality issues.

User session

An instance of an Internet user accessing your web site for a length of time, then leaving. During a user session any number of pages may be accessed. A user session is considered finished once an arbitrarily chosen period of inactivity – typically 30 minutes – is exceeded.

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SEO Glossary: V

Verticle Search

A search service which is focused on a particular field, a particular type of information, or a particular information format.

For example, Business.com would be a B2B vertical search engine, and YouTube would be a video based vertical search engine.

Viral Marketing

Self propagating marketing techniques. Common modes of transmission are email, blogging, and word of mouth marketing channels.

Virtual Domain

An alias for an IP address or server operated by an ISP or web host. A virtual domain allows hosting clients to have a domain name without the effort and cost of maintaining a server.

Virtual Server

A server which allows multiple top level domains to be hosted from a single computer.

Using a virtual server can save money for smaller applications, but dedicated hosting should be used for large commercial platforms.Most domains are hosted on virtual servers, but using a dedicated server on your most important domains should add server reliability, and could be seen as a sign of quality. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

Visibility

How well-placed your web site is in the search engines for relevant keyword searches. Also see “Invisible Web.”

Visit

See “user session”.

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SEO Glossary: W

Wales, Jimmy

Jimmy Donal Wales (; born August 7, 1966), also known as “Jimbo”, is an American Internet entrepreneur and a co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia.

Web browser

Software installed on the Internet user’s computer that allows him or her to view web pages. Popular web browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Web Crawler

Also known as a ‘web robot’ or ‘web spider’, it is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner.

Web standards

Web standards are widely adopted guidelines for CSS, XHTML etc. Web standards help ensure that web sites are accessible on a wide variety of platforms and to a wide range of users including users with disabilities.

Web 2.0

Web2.0 refers to the new generation of web based services and communities characterised by participation, collaboration and sharing of information among users online. Web2.0 applications include wikis, folksonomies, blogs and social networking sites which encourage user-generated content (USG) and social interaction online.

Weblog

A weblog, or blog is an online journal. Weblogs are something of a phenomenon and have become increasing mainstream. Blog search engine Technorati listed 71 million weblogs as of May 2007.

Weblog authors choose whether to blog openly or anonymously. Weblog entries are made regularly and chronologically but are displayed in reverse chronological order. The range of topics covered is endless. Some weblogs focus on a particular subject like travel, fashion, or astrology while others are personal online diaries.

Weblogs typically are made up of posts, images, videos, comments and links.

Popular blogging platforms include: Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, LiveJournal and Dreamhost.

Whois

Each domain has an owner of record. Ownership data is stored in the Whois record for that domain.

Some domain registrars also allow you to hide the ownership data of your sites. Many large scale spammers use fake Whois data.

White Hat SEO

Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next.

Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

Wiki

Software which allows information to be published using collaborative editing.

Wikipedia

Launched in January 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is now the largest and fastest growing encyclopedia online. In fact it is one of the world’s ten most visited websites.

As of September 2007 the English Edition of Wikipedia had a massive 2 million articles and 609 million words, making it around 15 times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The site has more than 100 servers set up to deal with the 10,000 – 35,000 page requests every second.

Wikipedia is multilingual and is currently available in 253 languages. Operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, it is a collaboratively written by volunteers around the world.

Contributing to Wikipedia:

• Is a peer-reviewed publicatin.
• Does not require contributors legal names.
• Requires contributions are supported by published and verifiable sources.

Due to its open nature, Wikipedia has been criticized as an easy target for trolls, vandals, internet marketers, advertisers, and even those with a political agenda to push. However studies have shown that vandalism is usually short-lived and that generally the site is as accurate as other encyclopedias.

Wikipedia uses MediaWiki as its software platform, MediaWiki is free open source software built on a MySQl database.

For More: www.wikipedia.org

Wordnet

A lexical database of English words which can be used to help search engines understand word relationships.

WordPress

WordPress is an excellent open-source web publishing system or content management system. Created primarily as blogging software, WordPress is written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database, it is ideal for managing content that is frequently updated.

Distributed under the GNU General Public License the latest version, WordPress 2.2.3, was released on Sept 8, 2007.

WordPress is described as a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability by its creators.

Features include:

• Integrated link management
• Plugin support
• Search friendly permalink structure
• Static Pages
• Trackbacks
• Pingbacks
• Typographic filters
• WYSIWYG
• Nested categories
• Multiple authors

For More: www.wordpress.org

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a popular keyword research tool established by Andy Mindel and Mike Mindel in 1997.

It is designed to assist search marketing professionals and webmasters in identifying important keywords and phrases relevant to their website. It provides detailed information on the number of searches, predicted number of daily searches, competing pages and KEI data. Information can be broken down by search engine.

Search terms are collected from – Dogpile and Metacrawler which represent around 1% of searches online. Due to its relatively small sample size Wordtracker is vulnerable to competitor spamming, and errors in the database can be magnified. Some terms can appear to be more popular than they really are – and others will be omitted all together.

For more: Wordtracker.com

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SEO Glossary: X

Xenu Link Sleuth

Popular free software for checking a site for broken internal or external links and creating a sitemap.

XHTML

Extensible HyperText Markup Language is a class of specifications designed to move HTML to conform to XML formatting.

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML, used to make it easy to syndicate or format information using technologies such as RSS.

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SEO Glossary: Y

Yahoo!

One of the oldest and most established directories; also one of the top 3 search engines.

Yahoo! Answers

Free question asking and answering service which allows Yahoo! to leverage social structures to create a bottoms up network of free content.

Yahoo! Directory

One of the original, most popular, and most authoritative web directories, started by David Filo and Jerry Yang in 1994.

The Yahoo! Directory is one of a few places where most any legitimate site can pick up a trusted link. While the cost of $299 per year may seem expensive to some small businesses, a Yahoo! Directory link will likely help boost your rankings in major search engines.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo!’s paid search platform, formerly known as Overture.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Research tool which webmasters can use to see what pages Yahoo! has indexed from a website, and what pages link at those pages.

Youtube

Feature rich amateur video upload and syndication website owned by Google.

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SEO Glossary: Z

Zeal – Volunteer Built Web Directory

Non-commercial directory which was bought by Looksmart for $20 million, then abruptly shut down with little to no warning. First launched in 1999, Zeal was a volunteer-built web directory which was bought by LookSmart for $20 million in October 2000. Combining the work from Looksmart’s paid editors with that of volunteers, they wrote profiles of websites and submitted them in relevant subcategories of the Zeal database.

The directory content was downloaded and used by Looksmart and its partners including MSN, Lycos and Altavista.

To become a Zeal volunteer, one needed to pass an introductory level test prior to submitting website profiles and being able to edit other people’s work. As one gained more experience and kudos, an editor was able to create and maintain special categories of interests. The more experienced editors called Zealots and Expert Zealots were responsible for developing community and assist those people called ‘Community Members’.

Zeal had volunteer members from all over the world including USA, United Kingdom, Australia, India, Spain, Switzerland, Japan and New Zealand. When MSN pulled from the relationship, Zeal’s traffic had declined considerably which lead to its closure on 28th March 2006.

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