Since there is no standardized or universally accepted Search Engine Optimization (SEO) glossary, and with many businesses new to the field of Internet marketing, this SEO glossary was created as a quick reference guide to help define and explain the basic terms used in Internet marketing and SEO services.
If you are new to SEO and Internet marketing, one of the key principles to remember is that Internet marketing and SEO are based on the principles of common sense, which is what traditional marketing is all about. This SEO Glossary is designed to help demystify SEO and Internet marketing, and to bring a basic understanding of the terminology with a common language that should help us all communicate better.
AdWords
AdWords is Google’s online advertising tool for businesses wanting to display ads on Google and its advertising network. The AdWords program enables businesses to set a budget for advertising and only pay when people click on the ad. The ad service is largely focused on keywords. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution.
Algorithm
A search engine algorithm is an operational programming rule that determine how a search engine indexes content and displays the results to its users
Alt tags
The Alt tag attribute provides alternative information for an image if the image cannot be displayed because an error in the SRC attribute, slow connection speeds, or if the user uses a screen reader.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the actual visible text part of a link (usually underlined). This text 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.
Attribute title
Attribute title is text associated with a webpage’s graphic element that is displayed when computer mouse hovers over the graphic. Attribute title also makes webpages more accessible to the disabled. The value of Attribute title for SEO have been discounted over time by the search engines to the point that now it is of minimal value for SEO.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links on other webpages that point to your website page. Backlinks could be explained as links that are directed towards your website. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of your website. One of the factors that search engines use to judge the importance of your website is the number of backlinks pointing to your site. The search engine value of a backlink itself depends on where the backlink is coming from. If it is coming from a site with unrelated content, or a low page rank, then that backlink is considered less relevant to the search engine doing the ranking of your site.
Banned
When a search engine bans or blocks a site from appearing in its search results, the site will no longer be listed in search results.
Body copy
Body copy refers to text visible to users. It does not include graphical content, navigation, or information hidden in the HTML source code.
Cache
Copies of webpages stored locally on an Internet user’s hard drive or within a search engine’s database. A cache is the reason why webpages load so quickly when a user hits the Back button in their web browser. Since the page is not being re-downloaded from the Internet, each time a webpage is opened, it is sent to your browser’s temporary cache on your hard drive. If that page is accessed again and has not been modified, the browser will open the page from your cache instead of downloading the page again.
Content
Well-structured content can increase traffic to a website and boost search engine rankings by giving potential customers “easy to find” quality content. The value of your website for both customer and search engines can be measured by the quality of your content. Search engines will retrieve the most relevant webpages from their index and sort them based on several ranking factors, including the content made rich in specific keywords.
Tracked by search engines, keywords drive people toward certain websites. Usually, people type some keywords into the search engine to find or learn about something. The search engines show numerous hits related to those keywords. Basically, those keywords appear frequently in the search engines which are usually typed the most. Whenever someone looks for some content that matches those keywords, that site appears on the search engine results.
Google Keyword Tool
To write great SEO-friendly content, you must know your keywords. Use this free Google tool to identify high-volume, high-value keywords, plus helper words that make a single keyword into a multiple keyword phrase. Knowing good keywords is a must for writing good SEO content! https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Keyword Density Calculator
This simple but nifty tool will take a website (your website, a competitor’s website, any page that interests you on the Web) and analyze it for one, two, and three-word keyword density. It’s great for both reverse engineering a competitor and/or double-checking your own SEO work. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/keyword-density-tool.html
Metamend — Keyword Density Tool
Take a URL from your own site, or that of a competitor, and put it into this tool. Look at the tag cloud that is created for keyword ideas and a keyword checkup.
http://www.metamend.com/seo-tools/keyword-density-analyzer.html
Content Optimization
Reviewing a website’s content from the position of using target key phrases properly. When content is effectively optimized, it makes website rank higher for pertinent keywords, along with having visitors’ better engagement.
Cookie
A cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in the user’s web browser while a user is browsing a website. When the user browses the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie can be retrieved by the website to notify the website of the user’s previous activity. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember the state of the website or activity the user had taken in the past. This can include clicking particular buttons, logging in, or a record of which pages were visited by the user even months or years before.
CPA
CPA stands for Cost Per Action and it refers to a type of marketing that usually involves you generating leads for companies and in turn, those companies give you a small payment for each lead. The CPA’s cost is incurred 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.
CPC
CPC stands for Cost Per Click and it refers to the amount you earn each time a user clicks on your ad. The CPC for any ad is determined by the advertiser; some advertisers may be willing to pay more per click than others, depending on what they’re advertising.
CPL
CPL stands for Cost Per Lead, and is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for an explicit sign-up from a consumer interested in the advertiser offer. Pricing is based on the number of new leads generated.
CPO
CPO stands for Cost Per Order and its pricing is based on the number of orders received as a result of your ad placement.
CPS
CPS stands for Cost Per Sale and its pricing is 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.
CPM
CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand Impressions and its cost is incur for one thousand impressions
Crawling by Search Engine
A web crawler is an automated program which scans or “crawls” through Internet pages to create an index of the data, so search engines can provide webs surfers with relevant websites. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, recursively browsing the Web according to a set of policies.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheet is used to control the design of a website. CSS carries information such as layouts, colors and fonts. By using CSS, a website’s design can be changed without changing the HMTL itself.
CTR
CTR stands for Click Through Rate. CTR is the number of clicks received from the number of ad impressions delivered. CTR is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website, as well as the effectiveness of an email campaign by the number of users that clicked on a specific link.
Database-driven Website
The website is connected to a database and the webpage content is based in part on information extracted from the database. This technique is also known as a Content Management System (CMS).
Database-generated Webpage
The webpage is created dynamically ‘on-the-fly’ from content stored in a database. This method is in contrast with a static HTML page where all the content is hard-coded in HTML. This technique is also known as a Content Management System (CMS).
Flash
A technology developed by MacroMedia Corp., is a multimedia software platform used for authoring of vector graphics, animation, games, and applications, which can be viewed, played and executed in Adobe Flash Player. From the position of Search Engine Optimization, flash content is almost impossible to index by search engines. Flash content is fundamentally different from normal HTML used to build webpages, and search engines have trouble analyzing the links in the Flash code. It is best to avoid using flash for any content on a webpage you want indexed by search engines, and only use flash for the animated graphics on the webpage.
Floating Ads
A floating ad is an advertisement that appears within the main browser window on top of the page’s normal content.
Fresh Content
Fresh content is the term that Google uses to refer to frequently changing pages. Almost all search engines, not just Google, factor freshness of content into their search algorithms, making this an important component for SEO. Google has also launched several algorithm updates recently that have had a big impact on search engine optimization (SEO), and they now penalize for low-quality content.
Fresh content positively affects SEO results by the following points:
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Link building
Link building favors fresh quality content. Search engines like Google also look at the quality of links coming to a page to help determine its rank in search results. The best way to build high-value links online is to create fresh quality content that other websites, blogs, and readers want to link to.
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Social Search
Since social media is fed by fresh content, many search engines are including social signals into the way they rank content for search engine results.
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Local Search
Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against local businesses. Local search queries include not only information about what the visitor is searching for, but also where the information is located, such as a street address, city, or zip code. Google Places is an example of local search.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offering detailed visitor statistics by tracking all the usual site activities: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rates and average time on site etc. This web analytics tool provides results on any website traffic and marketing campaign effectiveness. http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Advertising Professional
This is a free program offered by Google, for professionals who need to manage multiple Google AdWords clients. http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwords/professionals/
Geo-Targeting
Advertising that is distributed based on geographic location. Online geo-targeting advertising allows for targeting of countries, states, cities and suburbs.
Heading tag
An HTML tag that is often used to denote a page or section heading on a webpage. Search engines pay special attention to text that is marked with a heading tag, because this text is designated from the rest of the page content as being more important from the SEO perspective. Be sure to include your page’s main keyword in the heading tag.
Hits
A hit is a term used to indicate a file download from a web server. Unfortunately, 1 hit can’t be correlated with 1 webpage visit, because any graphic on a webpage downloaded also counts as a hit. Thus, a single access of a webpage with 20 unique graphics on it registers as 21 hits – 20 hits for the graphics and 1 hit for the HTML page. Website’s traffic can’t be linked to the amount of hits in 1:1 ratio.
Homepage optimization
The homepage of your website is the first thing Google sees when crawling your website. A homepage is the main page of a website which offers an index of navigation that organizes content and leads to other parts of the website.
For a successful SEO campaign, the homepage needs to have quality textual content. If a website does not have enough relevant content on its homepage for the keyword it is trying to ranking for, Google might not rank the website as relevant for its keyword.
Here are a few tips on how to build a content-rich homepage:
1. Adding an FAQ area to your homepage presents a unique way to include a large amount of content on your homepage. This is useful to both users and search engines, and easily adds to the overall word count of your homepage.
2. Refresh your content with recent blog posts to help increase your overall homepage content, as well as keep it fresh and updated by simply keeping your blog updated.
HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. The programming language used to display web content in a web browser in a formatted manner. It’s up to the web browser software, e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox, to render the HTML source viewable by humans.
Impression
Each time a webpage containing your ad is downloaded from the server, it counts as an Impression, regardless of whether the section of the page containing the ad or link is actually ever viewed. Search engines count Impressions by the number of times your ad is served to users by the search engine. Impressions are tracked and tallied on the website servers.
If you pay for ads per Impression, you are paying for each time the ad is displayed, whether someone clicks on it or not. Pay per Impression ads are usually sold for a thousand impressions at a time, on a Cost Per Thousand (CPM) basis. The consequence with this is that a web visitor may not actually see each Impression if they need to scroll down to see the ad, particularly when viewing on small screens like phones.
Indexing
The term Indexing describes the process that search engines carry out on websites in their data collection process, and then analyzing the content of the site in order to “score” each page using their ranking algorithm. The result of the indexing processing results in a very large set of data stored by the search engine companies that are then used to base their search results rankings, which are presented to Internet users doing a search for relevant information on a specific topic.
Search engines will retrieve the most relevant webpages from their index and sort them based on several ranking factors, including content-rich specific keywords. The purpose of creating and storing an index is to optimize the speed and performance in finding relevant documents for a search query. Without an index, the search engine would need to scan every document at the time of doing the search, which would require considerable time and computing power.
IP Address
IP Address stands for Internet Protocol Address. It is expressed as a four-part series of numbers separated by periods that identifies every sender and receiver of network data. The numbers represent the domain, the network, the subnetwork and the host computer. An example is 127.0.0.10, with each number ranging from 0 through to 255. Each server or device connected to the Internet is assigned a unique permanent (static) or temporary (dynamic) IP address. The IP Address sometimes translates into a specific domain name.
Keyword or Key Phrase
Keyword is a word(s) that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). Information residing on the web is usually searched for through search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. People will type some keywords describing what they are looking for into the search engine, and then the search engine checks its database and returns the results listing pages that best meet the keywords submitted.
These words or phrases used by people searching can be called keywords or search terms. In other words, a keyword is an index entry that identifies a specific record or document by search engines. Make sure when you are creating your content, to use keywords people will actually be searching for. The search engines offer statistics around the keywords used in your type of business. Take advantage of these free tools, or ask for our help to determine the best keywords to include in your content. By using the right keywords in your content, you have a higher probability of your site being returned in the search engine results page (SERP) to your potential customers.
If a keyword doesn’t appear anywhere in the text of your webpage, it’s highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results.
Use Google’s keyword tool to identify high volume, high value keywords Click Here
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a webpage. The more times that a given word appears on your page (within reason), the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine, resulting in a higher ranking for that page when it matches in a keyword search.
Keyword Matching
Keyword matching is used to run a Google AdWords campaign that matches the user’s search query. Google allows ad controlling in which keyword searches may cause your ad to show and refers to the matching of a search listing or advertisement to selected keywords in any order.
There are four types of keyword matching:
1. Broad Match
A keyword set to broad match will display ads on a wide range of variations of the keyword. These variations include plural and singular forms, misspellings, abbreviations, acronyms, and related terms. For example, if you add the keyword ‘shoes’ to your ad group, your ad may display to someone searching for ‘sport shoes’ or ‘dress shoes’. Broad match terms are less targeted than exact or phrase matches.
2. Exact Match
Exact match will display ads with no variations and will show only for the exact term you specify. It works for targeting a specific audience, by showing ads only to those searching for the precise product or service you provide. Exact match can work particularly well when advertising specific product models or niche terms. The main disadvantage of exact match is you may be missing out on potentially valuable search traffic.
3. Phrase Match
With phrase match, your ads will display for keyword searches which match your keywords exactly or with words before or after it. Phrase match ads will be shown for very closely related terms, which decrease the field of variable searches.
4. Negative Match
This means that an advertiser can specify search terms that they do not want their ad to be shown for searches on particular keywords. This type keyword match can work particularly well when specific product models or niche terms are eliminated from the search field.
Landing Page
Landing page is the webpage a visitor reaches after clicking on a banner ad or a promotional link. It could be your home page, or any other page in your site. Usually, landing pages are designed to be highly relevant to the advertisement or search listing and encourage users to complete a “call to action”.
Links
Text or graphics that when clicked on, take the Internet user to another webpage location. There are two types of links:
1. Internal Links
An Internal Link is a hypertext link that points to another page within the same website. Internal links can be used as a form of navigation for people, directing them to pages within the website. Links assist with creating good information architecture within the site. Search engines also use internal text links to crawl pages within a website. The way internal links are structured will impact the way in which search engine bots spider and subsequently index pages.
2. External Links
An External Link is a hypertext link within your website that points to a page on a different website. An exception to this definition could be on a blog, where a link is typically considered external if it points to another blog post, even though both blog posts are hosted on the same blog site.
3. 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).
Important:
Broken links can be assigned a “redirect” to fix it.
Link building
You can think of links, another name for Uniform Resource Locator (URL) aka Universal Resource Locator, as pointers to content on your site or to content on other websites. Backlinks are links from other websites pointing to content on your website. Backlinks pointing to your site are an indication to the search engines that you have something valuable to share or even an expert in your field. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of your website. Search engines assume that when a website links to another website, it is effectively casting a vote for the other website. So it stands to reason the more votes that are cast for a website, the more important the website must be. This is one of the factors that search engines use to judge the importance of your website. The search engine value of a backlink itself depends on where the backlink is coming from. If it is coming from a site with unrelated content, or a low page rank, then that backlink is considered less relevant to the search engine doing the ranking of your site. The more quality backlinks pointing to your website, the better chance you have to move up in the rankings. There are other factors to website rankings, but backlinks play an important role.
To check how your site is doing on backlinks you can use free tools to get full information on a website backlinks and more.
http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/ (requires Firefox)
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Log file
A log file is a file that contains a list of events and keeps track of what is happening with the server. From the SEO stand point, log file is valuable because Web servers use it to record data about website visitors, which includes the IP address of each visitor, the time of the visit, and the pages visited.
Local SEO
Focusing on the particular geographic location (city, county, state, country) in internet searches is vital for many small businesses. In more than 95% of searches customers are requiring a certain mile radius or zip code. Being on the first page of local search results on Google, Bing, or Yahoo will deliver high-value customers to your business.
Search engines all choose results based on prominence, relevance, and proximity. The results are then organized by paid ads, places, and organic results. Developing a solid Local Search Optimization plan is critical to be successful in today’s competitive online search results business. Local search takes into account information that business owners put in their local profile, as well as information on the business’ website, and information it finds on other sites. While no one can control everything that appears on their local listing, business owners have to take steps to ensure that what gets listed is a good representation of the company.
1. Claim your profile
Create listing of your business at Google Places, Bing Local, and Yahoo Local. On your website, be sure to publish your local phone number and address on all pages of your website to reinforce your geographic location
2. Upload pictures
The local sites listing services like to provide their users with pictures of your business. To help ensure that they see good pictures, upload your own. They don’t have to be professional photos, but they will represent your business so make sure they are of good quality.
3. Ask for reviews
Many business owners are terrified with the possibility of negative reviews or complaints online. However, reviews are one of the most important parts of the decision making process when it comes to making a purchase. Besides that, reviews allow you to identify and reach out to unhappy consumers.
4. Multiple locations need multiple landing pages.
If the business has two locations, you should ensure that each location links back to a page on your website that is all about that location and what it has to offer.
5. Create a blog
Fresh content can greatly help your search engine rankings. Be sure to keep a regular weekly or monthly schedule to add new posts to your blog. Plus the feature of user comments on your blog posts also continually adds fresh content to your site. Search engines are sensitive to new user generated content, so the more your website has, the more likely it is your site will move up in the rankings.
Meta Description
Metadata is information about the data, and Meta tags are information about the webpage. Meta tags cannot be seen by visitors to your website, but web browsers and search engines use these meta tags in determining different characteristics about the page. Browsers use meta tags to determine how to display content or reload the page for example, and search engines can gather information such as the page title and description, as well as other web services. Webpages are developed using a language called HTML, and meta tags are located between the open and closing head tags in the HTML page code. Having meta tags is the keystone in a large algorithmic puzzle that major search engines respond to. Just simply adding Meta-tags won’t magically raise your website to the top, but it will make your site look relevant to search engines.
Meta tags definitely aren’t a magic solution to gaining rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo, but it will help search engines to collect what your site is about and connect you to the right users. Meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page’s content. That’s why when meta tags are implemented incorrectly, the result can be a negative effect.
Let’s look at which Meta tags matter
- The page Title, while technically not a meta tag, is often used together with the page “description” meta tag, and the contents of the “title” tag are usually shown as the title in the search results, and also used as the browser page title.
- The Description meta tag is basically a brief description of your site, which provides information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, and what the page is about. Google sometimes uses the “description” meta tag as the text for search results snippets.
- The Keyword meta tag represents the page’s keywords, but it’s important to note that Google and other search engines have not used the “keywords” meta tag for ranking decisions for many years because of “keyword stuffing” abuse. The search engines now use the page content to determine the keywords.
Here are step-by-step instructions on how to add Meta tags to your webpages
- Open your webpage in an editor. It doesn’t have to be an HTML editor, but HTML editors do help by auto-filling, formatting, and color coding the different HTML elements. My personal favorite is a free editor named Notepad++.
- Place your cursor between the <head> and </head> tags. You can place your Meta tags anywhere inside the <head> tags, but most people put them after the <TITLE> tag and before any CSS or scripts. Remember that Metadata is always passed as name/value pairs, where the name is the type of the Meta tag, and the value is the content of the Meta tag.
- Type: <meta name=”description” content=”
- Now type the description of this webpage up to 400 characters long. Ideally, your description should be no longer than 155 characters (including spaces).
- Close the line with “> symbol. If you are writing an XHTML page, you’ll need to close the line with ” />.
- Continue to add additional meta tags in the same way described in steps 3, 4 & 5, but start with the appropriate meta type opening <meta, indicate the type of tag it is: name=”” or http-eqiv=””, enclose the contents of the meta tag in quotes in the: content=””, and close the whole tag with: > or / >.
Search engines will correlate meta tags with page content, rejecting the meta tags that don’t match the words on the page. This just emphasizes the importance in having quality “keyword-optimized” content on your site.
This free tool will analyze the Meta Tags and also where the website’s keywords are positioned: http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html
Since the title tag should be less than 69 visible characters and the meta-description should be less than 155 characters here is a link to a free tool which allows you to input your text and count it automatically http://intinc.com/support/title-description-tag-free-counter-tool.htm
Niche Marketing
Niche marketing is focusing on a specific product. So the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that it is intended to impact. It is also considered a small market segment. Using the right niche in the sphere of your business and with targeting the right audience can be done on the web through creating a niche site.
You’re always competing with thousands (even millions) of websites, so the general topic in keyword search will place you far behind the big fishes dominating the market. The right Niche marketing can lead you to interested readers/viewers/buyers and avoiding just an audience in general.
Niche marketing is a strategy to guess what markets move faster. You might’ve noticed this already, marketing online is all about targeting!
Off Page and On Page Optimization
On-page optimization can be done on the pages of the website itself (e.g. good content & Meta tags) and off-page optimization covers activity that takes place elsewhere (e.g. backlink-building).
PageRank (PR)
PageRank is a number assigned by Google and is an indicator of an individual page’s value. The higher the number indicates to the search engine that this page has legitimate and useful content. Even though content is not part of the PageRank calculation itself. PageRank does not rank websites as a whole, but is determined for each individual page. PageRank is based on the number of links pointing to a website. These links are also called backlinks. Google assumes that when a page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. It stands to reason the more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. In addition to just the number of links pointing to a site, the importance of the page that is casting the vote is another factor in determining page rank. And the importance of the page casting the vote is determined by its page rank. Therefore it’s not just the number of links pointing to a website, but also the page rank of where the links are coming from. Each PageRank level is progressively harder to reach.
PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.
To check how your site is doing on PageRank you can use free tools to get full information on a website backlinks and more.
www.prchecker.info
www.opensiteexplorer.org
www.linkdiagnosis.com
Paid inclusion
Using this marketing model a website pays a fee to a search engine to be displayed in the returned search results for specifically named search terms.
Paid placement
Using this advertising model advertisers bid for the right to present an advertisement with specific search terms (i.e., keywords) in an open auction. When one of these keywords is entered into the search engine, the results of the auction on that keyword are presented, with higher-ranking bids appearing more prominently on the page.
Pay-for-performance (PFP)
An SEO pricing model based on delivering sales or something else that can be directly attributed to the bottom line. This enables you to see results for your website rankings in a set period of time without the upfront costs. The contract will normally guarantee your site will rank for an agreed upon goal within a certain time frame. A good faith deposit may initially be taken as a start-up fee to incentivize SEO firms to do well. What is generally nice about a Pay-For-Performance SEO contract is that the SEO firm’s goals must be in line with yours as they are investing time and money up front and if they don’t get results, they don’t get paid. Contrast this approach with traditional banner advertising which is based on impressions, where clicks can come from people you have no desire or ability to do business with.
Pay-per-click (PPC)
This pricing model allows advertisers to pay only when a user clicks on their ad and is directed to their desired website. This way the advertiser pays on the actual number of ad clicks, rather than impressions or other criteria. Google AdWords is an example where advertisers pay 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.
PHP
PHP is 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 websites (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. The letters PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but was renamed to PHP Hypertext Preprocessor when the language fell into common use on the web, at version 3.0.
Reciprocal linking
Link trading between websites.
Redirect
Internet user is automatically taken to another webpage address without 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.
Relevance
It stands for the popularity of a webpage that is given by search engine for a particular keyword search.
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.
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 redirects the user to other sites.
Search engine
Information residing on the web is usually searched for through search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. People will type some words describing what they are looking for into the search engine, and then the search engine checks its database and returns the results listing pages that best meet the words submitted. Search engines periodically explore all the pages of a website and add the text on those pages into a large database that users can then search.
Search engines crawl the web non-stop using software robots called spiders to read the web content, and then add additional information, such as the number of times the word appears on the page, and other weighing criteria to determine the ranking. They will then compress and store the information in an index that will be used for retrieval during a search. An index is like a library index card with the book’s title, author, and the location of where the book is located in the library. In a similar but much grander approach, the search engine’s index identifies where on the web the pages resides that best match the keywords being searching for. The amount of the page content and meta tag information to be stored in the index depends on the search engine. Some search engines only index the important words, while other search engines index every word on a page. But regardless of the technique used, an index has one purpose; it allows information to be found as quickly as possible. And to give you some idea of the volumes involved, a search engine like Google will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries every day. When you enter a search query, search engines retrieve the most relevant webpages from their index and sort them based on several ranking factors. Having your website rank high in the search results is where SEO comes into play.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to succeed online, you need Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to drive traffic to your website. An important fact to remember when considering if you need SEO, is that 90% of people only click on the links on the first page of their search results. So to connect with potential customers, you need to be on the first page of the search results, and to be successful, you need to be in the top 3 on page one. SEO is one of the most important techniques in today’s online business world. Search Engine Optimization involves the 3 steps of SEO, including technical optimization, content optimization and link building.
SEO Local
Search engines all choose results based on prominence, relevance, and proximity. The results are then organized by paid ads, places, and organic results. Developing a solid Local Search Optimization plan is critical to be successful in today’s competitive online search results business.
Local search takes into account information business owners input in their local profile, as well as information on the business’ website, and information it finds on other sites. While no one can control everything that appears on their local listing, business owners have to take steps to ensure that what gets listed is a good representation of the company.
Sitemap
For websites, two types of sitemaps are needed.
HTML Sitemap
HTML sitemap usually exists as a link at the bottom of all pages, and helps Google (and humans) quickly see the navigational structure of your website.
XML Sitemap
XML sitemap is a sitemap written in XML. You can submit this via Webmaster tools, and it tends to help Google find new HTML and image content on your site.
This tool will make both an HTML and an XML map for your website. Use the tool to generate your HTML sitemap. Upload and link to that map. Use the tool to generate your XML sitemap. Upload that site to your root directory. Login to Google Webmaster tools and tell Google the location of your XML sitemap. Repeat this process when you do major updates to your site http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Google Webmaster Tools
Google’s free Webmaster Tools allows you to communicate with Google about your site, including XML sitemaps at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
Spider
Spiders are programs used by a search engine to explore the World Wide Web in an automated manner and download the HTML content (not including graphics) from web sites, strip out whatever it considers superfluous and redundant out of the HTML, and store the rest in a database.
Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a website, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from webpages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).
Submitting
Submitting stands for the process when submitting your website to a search engine, so it will be included in the search engine database and then included in search engine results.
Manually submitting your site to the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing offers an advantage to be indexed faster than just waiting when the search engines will find your content.
Google: http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/website-owner
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Bing: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
Another and sometimes even better approach to get your site indexed is to write an article related to your site, and submit it to a high ranking free article site like EzineArticles.com, ArticleBase.com, and GoArticles.com. Be sure to include a link back to your site when completing the section about the author. Since it’s important to have backlinks to your site, this second approach will not only get you indexed, but will improve your page rank at the same time. Regardless of how you decide to get indexed, understand that it can take from a few days to even a few weeks.
Supplemental Pages
Pages which are indexed in Google but do not exist at this time. During searching for a particular subject, they are shown in the search result pages.
Technical Optimization
Technical optimization stands for the technical process to help the search engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users. Automated search bots crawl the web, follow links and index content in massive databases. They accomplish this with a type of dazzling artificial intelligence that is nothing short of amazing. Nevertheless, modern search technology is not all-powerful. There are technical limitations of all kinds that cause problems in both inclusion and rankings. Thus, good SEO technical optimization can aid search engines to deliver the desired results to your potential customers.
Title Tag
Title tag of an individual page is the most important “on page” factor as to whether a page shows up on a Google search result.
a) The page Title, while technically not a meta tag, is often used together with the page “description” meta tag, and the contents of the “title” tag are usually shown as the title in the search results, and also used as the browser page title.
b) The Description meta tag is basically a brief description of your site which provides information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, and what the page is about. Google sometimes uses the “description” meta tag as the text for search results snippets.
c) The Keyword meta tag represents the page’s keywords, but it’s important to note that Google has not used the “keywords” meta tag for ranking decisions for many years because of “keyword stuffing” abuse.
Here are step-by-step instructions on how to add Meta tags to your webpages
- Open your webpage in an editor. It doesn’t have to be an HTML editor, but HTML editors do help by auto-filling, formatting, and color coding the different HTML elements. My personal favorite is a free editor named Notepad++.
- Place your cursor between the <head> and </head> tags. You can place your Meta tags anywhere inside the <head> tags, but most people put them after the <TITLE> tag and before any CSS or scripts. And remember Metadata is always passed as name/value pairs, where the name is the type of the Meta tag, and the value is the content of the Meta tag.
- Type: <meta name=”description” content=”
- Now type the description of this webpage up to 400 characters long. Ideally, your description should be no longer than 155 characters (including spaces).
- Close the line with “> symbol. If you are writing an XHTML page, you’ll need to close the line with ” />.
- Continue to add additional meta tags in the same way described in steps 3, 4 & 5, but start with the appropriate meta type opening <meta, indicate the type of tag it is: name=”” or http-eqiv=””, enclose the contents of the meta tag in quotes in the: content=””, and close the whole tag with: > or / >
Search engines will correlate meta tags with page content, rejecting the meta tags that don’t match the words on the page. This just emphasizes the importance in having quality “keyword-optimized” content on your site.
This free tool will analyze the Meta Tags and also where website’s keywords are positioned: http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html
Since the title tag should be less than 69 visible characters and the meta-description should be less than 155 characters here is the link to free tool which allows you to input your text and count it automatically: http://intinc.com/support/title-description-tag-free-counter-tool.htm
TITLE Tag Relevancy Checker tool will evaluate how existing Title Tag relates to the content that is on page. The Title Creator Tool can also evaluate a new webpage title for you to compare to your existing title: http://int-seo.com/title_creator_tool.php
Trackback
A Trackback is a notification that someone has linked to a document on your site. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.
Traffic
Traffic is the amount of users that visit a website. A free Traffic Estimator tool is available at: https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
Web Crawler
Also known as a ‘web robot’ or ‘web spider’, is a program or automated script, which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner to collect data for search engines.
Webmaster Tools
- This free service by Google allows you to understand how many pages of your site are indexed by Google, as well as giving you important information on HTML tags, site health, and even site speed: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
- This free service by Bing provides link-building technology and monitoring of inbound links to your site over time: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/