Other Search Engine Terms

[Jackie]

I was thinking that prior to delving in SEO deeper, I might as well give you additional search engine terms which, more often than not will be used in the discussions. These are as follows:

• Non-indexed Spiders: These are small indexes which contain background information of each page - such as titles, descriptions, and keywords. Usually, this information comes from the meta tags pulled off the pages in the index.
• Search site: A Web site at which you can search through some kind of index or directory of Web sites, or perhaps both an index and directory. (In some cases, search sites allow you to search through multiple indices.) Google.com, AOL.com, and EarthLink.com are all search sites.
• Search system: An organization that possesses a combination of software, hardware, and people that is used to index or categorize Web sites — they build the index or directory you search through at a search site. Google is a search system, but AOL.com and EarthLink.com are not. In fact, if you go to AOL.com or EarthLink.com and search, you actually get Google search results.
• Search results: The information returned to you (the results of your search) when you go to a search site and search for something. Remember that in many cases, the search results don’t come from the search site you’re using, but from some other search system.

[Thesa]

More terms:

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink.
For example :< a href="http://www.searchbliss.com/" >This is the anchor text< /a >

Back Link

Any link on another page that point to the subject page. Also called inbound links or IBLs.

Bot

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.

Cloaking

Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Conversion

Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitor’s actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose.

CPC

Abbreviation for Cost Per Click. It is the base unit of cost for a PPC campaign.

CTA

Abbreviation for Content Targeted Ad (vertising). It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.

CTR

Abbreviation for Click Through Rate. It is a ratio of clicks per impressions in a PPC campaign.

Doorway Page

Also called a gateway page. A doorway page exists solely for driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific key phrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and with the hope to drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

[Thesa]

More terms:

FFA

Abbreviation for Free For All. FFA sites post large lists of unrelated links to anyone and everyone. FFA sites and the links they provide are basically useless. Humans do not use them and search engines minimize their importance in ranking formulas.

Gateway Page

Also called a doorway page. See definition as in Doorway Page.

IBL

Abbreviation for In Bound Link. Also called a back link. See definition as in Back Link.

Keyword/Key phrase

Keywords are words that are used in search engine queries. Key phrases are multi-word phrases used in search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and key phrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the 'benefit' of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (ie. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.

Link Farm

A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (or PR). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Mirror

In SEO parlance, a mirror is a near identical duplicate website (or page). Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to target different keywords/key phrases. Using mirrors is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

PFI

Abbreviation for Pay For Inclusion. Many search engines offer a PFI program to assure frequent spidering / indexing of a site (or page). PFI does not guarantee that a site will be ranked highly (or at all) for a given search term. It offers the webmasters an opportunity to incorporate changes quickly to a site into a search engine's index. This can be useful for experimenting with tweaking a site and judging the resultant effects on the rankings.

Portal

Designation for websites, which either are authoritative hubs for a given subject or popular content driven sites (like Yahoo) that people use as their homepage. Most portals offer significant content and offer advertising opportunities for relevant sites.

PPC

Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads.

PR

Abbreviation for Page Rank - Google's trademark for their proprietary measure of link popularity for web pages. Google offers a PR viewer on their Toolbar.

[Thesa]

More Terms:

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file, which well-behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.

SEM


Abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing. SEM encompasses SEO and search engine paid advertising options (banners, PPC, etc.)

SEO

Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO covers the process of making web pages spider friendly (so search engines can read them) making web pages relevant to desired keyphrases

SERP

Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page/Positioning. This refers to the organic (excluding paid listings) search results for a given query.

Spam

In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques, which violate the search engines’ Terms of Service. They are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds for banning.

Spamdexing

Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine's index. Spamdexing is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Spider

Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

Spider Trap

A spider trap refers to either a continuous loop where spiders are requesting pages and the server is requesting data to render the page or an intentional scheme designed to identify (and "ban") spiders that do not respect robots.txt.

Stop Word

Stop words are words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries. Common words such as "the".