SEO GLOSSARY

SEO GLOSSARY:

Anchor text
Anchor text is the actual text part of a link. Used by search engines as an important ranking factor

Back Link
A link that points to your page. Also called inbound or incoming links.

Bot
Short for robot (also called a Spider). Software programs that scan the web. Search engine bots index web pages. Other types of bots are not so benevolent, such as the bots that spammers use to collect email addresses.

Cloaking
Showing a highly optimized page to search engines while human visitors see a different page. Such practice is considered spam by many search engines. Most search engines ban cloaked sites.

Conversion
The amount of web traffic that performs an action when it gets to your web page. The action may be registering, buying a product, signing up for newsletter or any other action you wanted the visitor to perform when visiting your webpage.

CPC
Cost-Per-Click, an amount paid for a clickthrough to your web page.

CPM
Cost Per Thousand, the cost incurred or price paid for a thousand impressions

Crawl
This is the process by which a search engine indexes web pages into its database. See bots for more details.

CTR
Click Through Rate. The percent of clicks per impressions. For example, if you get 10 clicks for every 100 impressions, your CTR is 10%.

Dead Link
A link to a page that does not exist. Automated programs can be used to check your website to ensure such dead links do not exist. Dead links results in a ‘404 Page Not Found’ error.


Fresh Content
The term is use to refer to frequently changing home pages. When a search engine bot ascertains that a given page is changing frequently, the bot will revisit and reindex this page more often.

Gateway Page
Also called a Doorway Page. Usually optimized to target one specific keyword or key phrase without regard for readability, its sole purpose is to send traffic to another page. Usually created to capture high search engine rankings. This technique is consider as spam by major search engines and can result in a permanent ban.

Google Dance
The Google Dance refers to some noticeable changes in (SERP) search engine result positions during a Google update.

Keyword, Keyphrase
Words or phrases used in search engine queries.

Link building
Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your “link popularity”.

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

Mirror
An identical (or nearly identical) website or page.


PPC
Pay Per Click. Advertising sold by search engines that only displays ads when certain keywords are searched.

PR
Abbreviation for Google Page Rank. It measures the link popularity of web pages.

SEO
Search Engine Optimization. Refers to making web pages relevant for certain key phrases and spider-friendly for search engines.

SERP
Search Engine Results Page. The results displayed by a search engine for a given keyword. Does not include paid ads.

Spam
In SEO, this is a search engine manipulation strategy that violates the terms and conditions of a given search engine.

Spider
See Bot (or robot).

Term Frequency:
The number of times a term occurs in a document.

URL Rewrite
A process of making your web site URLs more user and search engine friendly

User Agent
The name of the bot/browser visiting a web page.