What follows is a continuation of the SEO glossary that we posted last month. We hope that this is helpful for our current clients, and will give them a better idea as to how all of this works.
Monetize- To extract income from a site. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetize a website.
Natural Search Results- The search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.
Nofollow- A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link. A form of link condom.
Noindex- A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link. A form of link condom.
Non Reciprocal Link- If site A links to site B, but site B does not link back to site A, then the link is considered non-reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of collusion between sites.
Organic Link- Organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.
Outlink (Outgoing link)
Pagerank (PR)- A value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors. No longer reported by Google, so it isn't a metric you care about.
Pay for Inclusion (PFI)- The practice of charging a fee to include a website in a search engine or directory. While quite common, usually what is technically paid for is a more rapid consideration to avoid Google's prohibition on paid links.
Portal- A web service which offers a wide array of features to entice users to make the portal their “home page” on the web. IGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN are portals.
PPA (Pay Per Action )- Very similar to Pay Per Click, except publishers only get paid when click-throughs result in conversions.
PPC (Pay Per Click)- A contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.
Proprietary Method- Sales term often used by SEO service providers to imply that they can do something unique to achieve “Top Ten Rankings”. There IS NO PROPRIETARY METHOD.
Reciprocal Link (link exchange, link partner)- Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see these as high-value links, because of the reciprocal and potentially incestuous nature.
Redirect- Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.
Regional Long Tail (RLT)- Coined by Chris Paston of onlinedevelopment.co.uk - a multi-word keyword term which contains a city or region name. Especially useful for the service industry.
RLT- see Regional Long Tail
Robots.txt- A file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behavior of search engine spiders.
ROI (Return On Investment)- One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify a return on investment, and thus cost/benefit of different schemes.
Sandbox- There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or exact behavior of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs.
Scrape- Copying content from a site, often facilitated by automated bots.
SE- (Search Engine)
Search Engine (SE)- a program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.
Search Engine Spam- Pages created to cause search engines to deliver inappropriate or less relevant results. Search Engine Optimizers are sometimes unfairly perceived as search engine Spammers. Of course in some cases they actually are.
SEM- Short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.
SEO- Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favorably ranked by the search engine.
SERP- Search Engine Results Page
Site Map- A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.
SMM (Social Media Marketing) Website or brand promotion through social media
SMP (Social Media Poisoning) A term coined by Rand Fishkin - any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques designed to implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example, blog comment spamming in the name/brand of a competitor
Sock Puppet- An online identity used to either hide a person's real identity or to establish multiple user profiles.
Social Bookmark- A form of Social Media where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.
Social Media- Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (Digg, Reddit) are all examples of Social Media.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)- Website or brand promotion through social media
Social Media Poisoning (SMP)- A term coined by Rand Fishkin - any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques designed to implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example blog comment spamming in the name/brand of a competitor
Spam Ad Page (SpamAd page)- A Made For Adsense/Advertisement page which uses scraped or machine-generated text for content, and has no real value to users other than the slight value of the adds. Spammers sometimes create sites with hundreds of these pages.
Spamdexing- Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deceptively modifying web pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner. - Wikipedia
Spammer- A person who uses spam to pursue a goal.
Spider- (bot, crawler) A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.
Spider Trap- An endless loop of automatically generated links which can “trap” a spider program. Sometimes intentionally used to prevent automated scraping or e-mail address harvesting.
Splash Page- Often animated, graphics pages without significant textual content. Splash pages are intended to look flashy to humans, but without attention to SEO may look like dead ends to search engine spiders, which can only navigate through text links.
Splog- Spam Blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or made up of scraped content.
Static Page- A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.
Stickiness- Mitigation of bounce rate. Website changes that entice users to stay on the site longer, and view more pages improve the sites “stickiness”.
Supplemental Index (supplemental results)- Pages with very low PageRank, which are still relevant to a search query, often appear in the SERPs with a label of Supplemental Result. Googles representative’s say that this is not indicative of a penalty, only low PageRank.
Text Link- A plain HTML link that does not involve graphics or a special code such as flash or javascript.
Time On Page- The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of quality and relevance.
Toolbar Pagerank (PR)- A value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies page importance and is not the same as PageRank. Toolbar Pagerank is only updated a few times a year and is not a reliable indicator of current status.
Trust Rank- A method of differentiating between valuable pages and spam by quantifying link relationships from trusted human evaluated seed pages.
URL- Uniform Resource Locator - AKA Web Address