SEO Terms and Definitions

Lets Check it out some basic SEO Terms and Definitions that could be help to some who  have just starting out .

SE 
 
Search Engine
 
A SE is a database that is an index of millions of web pages.  Web pages are added to the index either by a submission or by the Search Engine Spider finding the website and crawling it.

SEO 
 
Search Engine Optimization

Search Engines each use their individual algorithm to order their indexed pages.  SEO is a method of taking all reasonable steps to get your particular page returned first when someone does a SE Search.


Splash Page

Typically an introductory web page (first page seen by a web surfer) that is graphics heavy. Intended for attention grabbing purposes only. Not rich in content (if any). 

Static Website

A website or web page whose content is fixed (does not change or has to be manually changed).

Dynamic Website
 
A website whose content is not fixed. What is shown on a page is based on user selected activities and/or programmatically driven.

Landing Page
 
A content rich web page geared around a particular topic, product or conversion goal. Typically a main navigation item of a website.


Supplemental Results
 
Google's secondary index of web pages it doesn't consider worthy of being in the main index. This concept has been done away with by Google publicly, but I do feel it actually still exists in a notasreadilyidentifiable way.

TLD
 
 Top Level Domain. 
 
The three main domain extensions: .com, .net, .org

SERP
 
Search Engine Results Pages
 
Search Engines return their results in pages.  Each page usually has 10 results.  Most people searching only ever look at the first 3 pages of results, so your SEO strategey should be to get your site into the top 30 results.

PR 
 
PageRank
 
PR or PageRank is a Google "measure" of link popularity.  PR is a number from 010.  A lot of Webmasters place an emphasis on getting a high PR and don't focus on more important strategies.  The PR is calculated based on the number of incoming links a PAGE on a website has to it.  A link to a page is a "PR Vote" for the page it is linking to.
PR is the least important measure of your SEO success.

Keywords
 
Words that are used by search engines to determine the topic of a given web page.
Keywords should be thought of as Search words.  When doing a search with a SE for a particular Keyword, you wan't your site to feature high in the SERPs

Meta Tags

Web page specific, descriptive information that helps a search engine identify the purpose and topic of a given web page. Common meta data include a web page's description and keyword listing.

Keyword Density 
 
How often a keyword or keyword phrase is used on a given web page.

Link Popularity 
 
This is a measure of how many sites link back to you.  Incoming links are a very important part of your SEO strategy.  The more incoming links the more likely you are to get traffic to your site.

Indexed Pages 

Count of how many internal pages of your website are in the Search Engines.  The aim is to get ALL of your pages indexed otherwise you are potentially loosing site visitors.

Bot

Programs written to scour the web automatically for various reasons (to index web pages, for spamming purposes, etc.) aka web robots, web crawlers, internet bots and spiders.

CSS
 
Cascading Style Sheet
 
CSS is the method used to separate the content from the presentation in an html document.  CSS is specifically for the presentation.

URL

Uniform Resource Location or simply the web address

Title Tag

A meta data element that determines the actual "title" of a given webpage. The title is what shows up in the top bar of your browser. It is also the hyperlink that shows in search engine results listings.

Alt Tag

An HTML attribute typically used within the IMG tag to provide alternate text when images cannot be displayed.

Anchor Tag

An HTML tag that allows you to create a link to another document or web page or to a bookmark within the current web page.

B2B

Business To Business
 
Marketing strategy which involves the transaction of goods or services between businesses. (Wikipedia)

B2C

Business To Consumer

Transaction of goods or services directly to the end consumer.

Back link

Links originating from one website and pointing to another website or web page.

Affiliate Marketing

A marketing program in which an advertiser pays an affiliate for driving eventdriven traffic to their site. An event is primarily completing an order on the advertiser’s site but could simply be some sort of lead generation. Affiliate gets paid a commission based on order or lead

Cloaking

Showing a different web page to a search engine spider than what is normally seen. Method typically used by spammers.

301 Redirect

Method of redirecting an old webpage to a new location. More simply, to display another web page for the web address that you are trying to visit. 301 implies that the move is permanent (as opposed to temporary, etc.)

AJAX

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. 
 
A way to design web pages that are more enduser friendly and respond more quickly when the user requests data. A good example of AJAX in practice is Google Maps.

Blog

"Web Log". An online journal of sorts.
 
Conversion

Web traffic that fulfills a pre established   goal, such as purchasing of a specific product or filling out a registration form, etc.

CPA

 Cost Per Acquisition
 
 Fee paid to an affiliate marketer for driving a particular action or event on your site (either a sale or lead generation, etc.).

CPC

Cost Per Click.
 
Typical rate of measuring the expense involved with acquiring web traffic.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets.
A language used to describe how a given page or web site will look. Used to control font styles, graphical layouts, color, etc.

CTR

Click Through Rate.
 
Standard method of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. Calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of times the ad was shown (also known as an impression). (Wikipedia)

LSI
 
Latent Semantic Indexing

LSI for short, is an algorithm used by Google (and possibly other search engines) to determine how words are related to each other in the context of a web page. An article about "cookies" might contain words such as chocolate, sugar, flour or dough for example.

Paid Link Building

Websites who are willing to link back to your site for a fee in order to boost your rankings/weight in the search engines.

PPC

 Pay Per Click. 

Advertising method where an advertiser pays for their ads (which are displayed on a given website) if and only if someone actually clicks on the ad.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing. 
 
The act of marketing a website via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search enginerelated activities.

W3C

 World Wide Web Consortium.

Organic Search
 
Search results in a search engine that are not paid advertisements. The results that come up naturally based on their indexing within a search engine. Organic search results are good. We all want to come up on top for organic searches using keywords we are optimized for..

White Hat SEO

  The use of accepted SEO practices in order to get higher rankings, more traffic, etc.

Black Hat SEO

The use of unaccepted or frowned upon SEO practices in order to get higher rankings and more traffic. Use at the risk of being dropped from the engines or at least being removed from high rankings

Reciprocal Link

The practice of placing a link from website A to website B strictly because website B is linking to website A. I scratch your back, you scratch my back.

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