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Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing Glossary

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• 301 Redirect
  

  Also known as a permanent redirect, this instructs web browsers to display a different URL from the one the browser requested when a page has undergone a lasting change in its URL. A permanent redirect is a type of server-side redirect that is handled properly by search engine spiders.

• 302 Redirect
  

  Also known as a temporary redirect, this instructs web browsers to display a different URL from the one the browser requested used when a page has undergone a short-term change in its URL. A temporary redirect is a type of server-side redirect that is handled properly by search engine spiders.

• Adwords
  

  Google's sponsored link advertising, Adwords are displayed on Google's search result page. Adwords use a contextual advertising algorithm to display the most appropriate links for the keywords being searched. The position of the advert on the sponsored link results is purchased through a bidding system.

• Affiliate Marketing
  

  An advertising scheme in which a website (the affiliate marketer) directs web visitors to its affiliate sponsor and is paid via a commission on the visitor’s purchases (if any), this is a pay per result arrangement. There are dozens of affiliate marketing networks. eCommerce merchants use affiliate networks to publicise their products by submitting product feeds, which are then used by affiliate publishers on their sites.

• Algorithm
  

  An algorithm is a set of rules used by a search engine to rank the listings contained within its index in response to a particular query. No search engine reveals exactly how its own algorithm works, to protect itself from competitors and those spamming the search engine.

• Altavista
  

  A popular search engine in the late 1990s, Altavista’s main URL is www.altavista.com. When it failed to compete with Google during 2000, losing much of its market share, Altavista was acquired by Overtures then Yahoo, and has recently resurfaced as a specialised vertical search service that remains a strong brand online.

• Anchor Text
  

  Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink, and is increasingly important in the ranking algorithm used in search engines.

• Applet
  

  A small program, often written in Java, Applets usually run in a web browser, as part of a web page. It is possible that the use of such a program may cause spiders and robots to stop indexing a page.

• Ask Jeeves
  

  A meta search engine, askjeeves.com can be asked questions in English. Recently rebranded as ask.com.

• Backlink
  

  Backlinks comprise all the links that point to a particular web page. Inbound links are an important part of website marketing as they can deliver targeted visitors directly from another website, and can help to improve the ranking position of your site on engines that use link popularity as a part of their algorithm. Also known as inbound link.

• Banned or Banning
  

  Banning occurs when pages are removed from a search engine's index specifically because the search engine has deemed them to be spamming or violating search engine guidelines.

• Bot
  

  Bot is the abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

• Cache
  

  A copy of a website held on a computer, or in a search engine's index, is known as the cache. On personal computers, the cache is used to save a copy of website's images, text and code to help speed up download upon future visits to the site. On search engines, the cache serves as a record of the content of a web page when a search engine last visited and indexed it.

• Click-Through
  

  Click-through occurs when a user clicks a link on a web page and passes through to the website represented by that link. Click-through amounts related to each keyword search can be tracked to see if a particular term (or keyword) is being used by Internet users to find a service or product. The study is referred to as keyword analysis.

• Click-Through-Rate
  

  The click-through rate measures how frequently users click on links, correlated with how often the ad is displayed. It refers to the number of click throughs per hundred ad impressions, expressed as a percentage.

• Cloaking
  

  The cloaking technique serves a different page up to a search engine spider than the one the visitor views. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the guidelines of most search engines and could be grounds for banning

• Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
  

  CGI Common Gateway Interface is the original technique by which a web server runs a program to dynamically create the page’s HTML and to return it to the visitor’s web browser.

• Content Management System (CMS)
  

  CMS software allows easy creation, update, approval and publishing of web pages to a website. Hundreds and thousands of pages can be updated simultaneously, on user friendly interfaces. CMS systems often use dynamic content, with dynamic URLs, which makes the website invisible to spiders. Toptimised's services are compatible with most CMS systems, and generates search engine friendly pages for each of your products - be it 100 or 1,000,0000.

• Content Network
  

  Non-search engine sites that publish contextual link advertising, such as Google Adwords, are known as content networking. AdWords advertisers decide whether or not they want to release their ads to this expanded network.

• Content Rich
  

  A content rich web page is one that contains complete and relevant content to the topic in question. Google's programmers aim to reward sites that provide users with complete and relevant content on keywords, i.e. their aim is to find the most content-rich sites for each keyword.

• Contextual Link Advertising
  

  Search engines such as Google and other text-link advertising networks have expanded their network distribution to include contextual link advertising. Also known as contextual inventory, these listings display website pages, (generally not search engines), where the written content on the page indicates to the ad-server that the page is a good match to specific keywords and phrases. Google's Adsense(TM) and Adwords advertising network generates a significant amount of traffic through contextual (not Google search) inventory.

• Conversion, Conversion Factor or Conversion Rate
  

  Conversion occurs when the visitors conducts a transaction (such as buying a product, registering for a newsletter, and so on). In the context of AdWords, conversion is the final step of a successful clickthrough. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that complete such a transaction, and is used to judge the effectiveness (and return on investment) of visitors acquired through campaigns such as Pay-Per-Click.

  Effective conversion tracking requires web analytics tools which use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website.

• Cookie
  

  A cookie is a method by which browsers store information that web pages need to remember. For example, a page can store your visitors’ names in cookies so that their names can be displayed on your home page each time they return.

• Copywriting
  

  Copywriting comprises the editorial or web content team responsible for crafting the words that appear on a web page designed to convey information, as opposed to selling products.

• Cost per thousand or CPM
  

  Advertising with banners works by charging you a fixed amount per thousand times your banner is displayed to a user. The advertising rate is referred to as cost per thousand ads.

• Cost-Per-Acquisition or CPA
  

  Refers to the cost of acquiring a user who conducts a transaction such as a sale or registrations. It is the total cost of the campaign to bring visitors to the site, divided by the number of transactions achieved through the campaign; the cost per click divided by the conversion factor.

• Cost-Per-Click or CPC
  

  Advertising on search engines now works by charging you a fixed amount every time a user clicks on a 'sponsored link' or pay-per-click ad. The price of each click depends on the popularity of the keyword associated with the ad. The total cost of the campaign is the number of clicks multiplied by the cost-per-click or CPC.

• Crawler
  

  Also called bots or spiders, crawlers follow links to visit websites on behalf of search engines. Crawlers then process and index the code and content of a web page according to an algorithm and store the pages in the search engine's database. Googlebot is the crawler that travels the web finding and indexing pages for the Google search engine.

• Directory Listing
  

  Site owners who submit a page for possible inclusion within a directory are said to have a directory listing when that submission is accepted. Directory and Open Directory dmoz.org are the most famous examples of web directories. For Search Engine Optimisation, it is important to submit your site to all the relevant business and trade listings and directories for your market. Toptimised provides a directory submission service which will manually search all the major trade and business directories relevant to your sector, then go through the submission procedures to get your website admitted.

• Doorway Pages
  

  Similar to cloaking, doorway pages exist only to drive traffic to another page. Doorway pages are rarely written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the most search engine guidelines and could be grounds for banning.

• Dynamic Content or Dynamic Pages
  

  Dynamic pages are those web pages whose HTML is generated when they are displayed. Dynamic pages are necessary when the content is only available in a database, for example because it is refreshed by other systems, like quickly changing product prices or changing stock inventories. Dynamic pages are also necessary when a page contains content that must change based on the visitor's request, such as an order status screen. A software program must retrieve the order status for the visitor from a database and build the HTML that shows the correct information on the screen.

  Also used when the content is based on a large database of products, dynamic pages pose difficulties for search marketing that static pages do not. Search engines will index dynamic content in the same way as static content unless the URL includes a question mark (?). However, if the URL does include a question mark, many search engines will ignore the URL. Toptimised provides solutions for dynamic web pages.

• Dynamic URLs
  

  Dynamic URLs are web addresses for dynamic pages and dynamic content, where the web server runs a program that queries databases and other sources of information and then constructs and serves the HTML code. The URLs for these dynamic pages usually contain information for the automatic program that generates the pages. Looking at the URL, any keyword which follows a question mark (?) is a parameter for the program. Generally, spiders crawl dynamic URLs in a limited way; search engine crawlers much prefer friendly URLs that can be relied upon to represent specific content.
  

• Exact Match
  

  Exact match is one of Google’s keyword-matching options, forcing the search engine to display only your ads on search result pages that exactly match your selected keyword or key phrase. Exact match may be selected for individual keywords in an Ad Group.

• Flash
  

  Flash technology was invented by Macromedia to bring a far richer user experience to the web than drab, older HTML, allowing animation and other interactive features to enrich visual tours and demonstrations. Search engine spiders are unable to index content in the flash programs, and may not index web pages containing heavy flash programming.

• Frames
  

  Framing is an HTML technique allowing website designers to display two or more pages in the same browser window. Many search engines do not index framed web pages properly - they only index the text present in the NOFRAMES tag. Unless a web page which uses frames contains relevant content in the NOFRAMES tag, it is unlikely to get a high ranking in those search engines.

• Gateway Page
  

  ‘Also called a doorway page, a gateway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimised to target one specific keyphrase. Gateway pages are rarely written for human visitors; they are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using gateway pages is a violation of most search engine guidelines and could be grounds for banning.

• Google Adsense
  

  Google Adsense is an advertising program run by Google. Website owners can enrol in this program to enable text and image advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on a per-click basis.

• Google Dance
  

  Google Dance refers to the continuous changing of results from Google as they are upgrading the datacenters from which the results are served.
  

  Your ranking in the results appears to ‘dance,’ varying from minute to minute: Google Dance is an unofficial term for these continuous changes during the period in which Google is performing the update to its index.
  

  Though Google may upgrade their systems to achieve a continuous update of the algorithm, the dance still occurs every one to three months.

• Googlebot
  

  Googlebot is the Google's spider, crawler or bot; it travels the web finding and indexing pages for the Google search engine. Googlebot leaves its identity on your web server's log file. Webmasters should study their server log files closely to see if the Googlebot's visit is successful and is able to crawl the whole site.

• Hit
  

  Also referred to as a page hit, a 'hit' is a request from a visitor's browser to your web server for a file, whether it be an HTML page, an image, an MP3 file, or any other type. A single web page can generate many hits because they often have many images and other files on the page.

• Inbound Link (IBL)
  

  Also called a backlink, an IBL is any link on another page that points to your page.

• Indexed Pages
  

  Indexed pages are included in a search engine’s index. An important step in search engine optimisation lies in ensuring that your website pages are included, or indexed, in the search engine databases. Search engines index pages through the spiders or robots. The ratio of the indexed pages relative to the total pages of a site is termed the inclusion ratio. Search engine friendly sites have high inclusion ratios.

• Internet Marketing
  

  Promoting a company with a target group of users is known as Internet marketing. The marketing goals can be brand reinforcement, generating sales leads, or straight online sales.

• JavaScript
  

  The programming language JavaScript can provide special effects inside a browser that cannot be performed in HTML. Search marketing success depends on certain standards about how and when JavaScript programming is used, because JavaScript, when misused, can prevent search spiders from indexing certain pages.

• Keyword
  

  A keyword or phrase is one entered into a search engine in order to search for a specific product or service.

• Keyword Analysis
  

  Keyword analysis discovers all the possible words and phrases that a marketing project should target.

• Keyword Density
  

  Keyword density refers to the ratio of a keyword term relative to all keywords on a page. For example, if you want your 200 word page to be found for the query 'wallpaper' and your page contains 20 occurrences of that word, the keyword density of your page is 10 percent for the term 'wallpaper'. Generally, search engines consider pages with about six to eight percent keyword density to be high quality pages. (Higher keyword densities are sometimes penalised as spamming.)

• Link Popularity
  

  Link popularity analysis is undertaken by search engines to determine the authority or ranking of web pages by examining the network of connections between web pages. Search engines use link analysis when ranking search results by relevance—pages that have many inbound links from high-authority pages are ranked higher than other pages in the search results.

• Listing
  

  The links and associated descriptions on a search engine’s results page, in response to a search query, is known as its listing.

• Meta Tags
  

  Meta tags are terms within web pages’ HTML not intended for users to see, but used by search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications.

• Natural Linking
  

  Natural links are created by individual webmasters who link to a third party for the benefit of their readers, as opposed to internal links within the same site, which tend to a systematic menu of links on the foot or side of the web page. Natural links tend to be deep links, in that the web page’s author points to specific pieces of information.

  In the eyes of the search engine programmers and their algorithm these links will be more likely to provide an accurate representation of the content that appears on a website.

• Natural Search
  

  Also known as organic search, a natural search is the search engine technology that locates the most relevant matches for a searcher’s query from all of the pages indexed from the web.

  Natural search contrasts with paid search, in which webmasters can pay for the highest rankings. Being listed in the results of natural search is the object of search engine optimisation..

• Organic Search Results
  

  Also known as natural search, an organic search is the search engine technology that locates the most relevant matches for a searcher’s query from all of the pages indexed from the web.
  

  Natural search contrasts with paid search, in which web masters can pay for the highest rankings..

• Page Popularity
  

  Page popularity is proportional to the quality and amount of incoming links to a specific website or web page. This information is used by the search engine algorithm to determine the ranking for a website in its search engine results.

• Pay-Per-Click
  

  Pay-Per-Click is an advertising model, in which the advertiser pays only when their advertisement is clicked. In other words, the advertiser pays for visitors rather than per advertisement impression. The term CPC (Cost-Per-Click) is the cost unit. Toptimised provides a Pay-Per-Click advertising management service.

• Phrase
  

  A phrase is a search term within a search query consisting of multiple keywords in double quotation marks, indicating to the search engine that those keywords be found as a phrase. If keywords are not enclosed in double quotes, they are searched for as individual keywords rather than as a phrase.

• Qualified Traffic
  

  Qualified traffic describes traffic that is more pre-disposed to making a transaction within a particular product or service.
  

  Such traffic comprises the users that find a website by searching for keywords related to a product or service on the website in question. These visitors are more likely to interact with, or purchase from, your website and are therefore of higher quality than other visitors.

• Ranking
  

  Ranking refers to the placement of a website within a particular search engine's results pages. Also, the ranking algorithm are the rules by which a search engine orders the matches to produce a set of search results. The most popular ranking rule is relevance. The software code that decides exactly how the ranking is performed is called the algorithm, and is a trade secret for each search engine.

• Search Engine
  

  A search engine is the searchable index of websites that is traditionally compiled by a spider that visits web pages and stores the information from each page in a database.

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
  

  SEM increases the traffic to a website using either organic or Pay-Per-Click advertising, and is also known as website marketing. Toptimised provides Search Engine Marketing services.
  

• Title Tag
  

  Title tag is part of an HTML document that stores the main heading of the entire page. The tag is used on the title bar or bookmarks for its page. Search engines pay more attention to what is in the title tag than to any other tag on the page.

• Traffic
  

  Traffic, also known as visitors, describes activity on a web site – be it hits, page views or unique visitors.

• URL - Universal Resource Locator
  

  The URL is the address that defines the route to a website, page or any other resource on the Internet. URLs are typed into a web browser to access web pages and files, and URLs are embedded within the pages themselves as hypertext links. The URL contains the protocol prefix, port number, domain name, subdirectory names and file name.

  Example: http://www.toptimised.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation-seo-glossary

  Friendly URLs
  URL addresses are known as friendly when they are easily read by human visitors. Search engines favour friendly URLs because they lack long parameters and session IDs. Toptimmised provides a search engine friendly URL solution for sites which have dynamic URL problems.

• Visitor
  

  Visitor rates record the number of times the site in question is visited. A unique visitor will be recorded as making several visits when they view the site repeatedly.
  
  This is not the same as a unique visitor rate, which measures the number of visitors, rather than visits – in this case, when a unique visitor makes repeated visits to a web site it will show up on the site’s log file as many different visitors.

• Web Analytics
  

  Web analytics examines and correlates web users’ behaviour within any website in question. E-commerce sites use web analytics software to collate data of user behaviour; i.e. visitors, unique visitors, origin of visitor traffic, which keywords are most frequently used to find the search engine, length of visit etc.

  A more comprehensive view includes the assessment of a wider variety of data, including web traffic, web transactions, usability studies, user submitted information, and related sources to create a more comprehensive understanding of the customer experience and behaviour.

  Web analytic software is used to monitor website conversion and click-through rates, i.e. whether pages are working properly. With this information, webmasters determine how to improve the site. Toptimised provides a web analytics service.