Florida Search Engine Optimization Glossary - SEO - SEM - SMO

#

• 301 Redirect - A header response code that is returned to the browser when a URL has permanently moved locations.


• 302 Redirect - A header response code that is retuned to the browser when a URL has temporarily moved locations.


• 400 Bad File Request - Usually returned when there is a misspelling in the URL or incorrect punctuation.


• 401 Unauthorized - The server can not find the proper encryption key to allow entry in to the server.


• 403 Access Denied - Special permissions are needed to access the site.


• 404 File not Found - The server cannot find the file requested, the file may have been moved or deleted from the server.


• 408 Request Timed Out - May occur when the server is responding too slowly from client requests.


• 500 Internal Server Error - Server configuration problems.

• A/B Testing - A method of testing whereby a control sample is compared to several single test samples in order to determine the behaviors of visitors to a web site.


• Absolute URL - A full file path to a location from the root of a web site. For instance, http://www.edwardbeckett.com is the absolute URL.


• Acquisition Strategy - A method of researching and locating customers that have an active need to make a purchase on goods or services.


• Ad - An advertisement that is normally strategically located on a web page to promote engagement from an internet searcher.


• Affiliate Marketing - A process where sales are generated from advertisements on web sites belonging to another individual or organization than the merchant that is selling the product or service. Typically the merchant will offer an 80/20 split for sales from affiliate vendors.


• Algorithm - A set of steps that are used in a formula to solve a problem that will terminate at a predictable and finite time.


• Alt tag - An HTML tag that is used to define the attributes of an image. The alt image attribute is important to aid those with visual impairments to identify the representation of images on web pages.


• Anchor Text - The words that are linked in an HTML hyperlink to another pages or anchor within a web page; anchor text is an important consideration in search engine optimization since search engines consider the relevance of a web page due in part to the structure and organization of anchor text links.


• Ajax - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - A combination of the JavaScript programming language and manipulation of the Http Request method in order to transmit information from a server to a client browser with out a having to continually reload the web page and the connection to the server.


• API - Application Programming Interface - A set of protocols that are used as the basis for developing and building software applications.


• Arbitrage - Arbitrage is an investment strategy whereby an investment or brokerage firm will engage in the purchase of goods or services at a lesser rate than which they in turn sell them to generate a profit. In the Search Marketing Industry Affiliate arbitrage refers to the manipulation of the pricing of ad programs by bidding at a lower rate than what they are in turn generating from the clicks that are registered from an affiliate site.

• B2B - Business to Business.


• B2C - Business to Consumer.


• Backlink - The links that are pointing to a web page or a domain.


• Banned - Removal from a search engine for negative actions.


• Baseline Metrics - Calculations that are taken for a benchmarking period to provide comparisons from the past and current performance of a campaign. These metrics may be used to forecast the success or failure of a marketing campaign and are an essential part of a Key Performance Indicator. (KPI)


• Behavioral Targeting - The strategic creation of marketing campaigns to distribute advertisements to a specific group of persons that exhibit a pattern of consumer behaviors.


• Bid - The amount that an advertiser is willing to offer for a click from an internet searcher.


• Bid Management Software - Software that is used to automatically bid on PPC campaigns.


• Blacklist - A single or group of websites that are not trustworthy and are listed as being malicious, dangerous or harming to the internet community.


• Blog - A Web Log.


• Brand - A name, symbol, logo or image that identifies one seller from another.


• Brand Development Index - A measurement that is used to determine the success of sales for a product or service in a specific geographic location. The metrics involve calculating the national amount of the average user consumption for the product or service.


• Brand Equity - The inherent value of a brand; The positive attributes and consequence from the usage of the product or service by the consumer public.


• Brand Loyalty - The phenomenon of a customer repeatedly purchasing a product or service from the same manufacturer or supplier rather than seek alternative sources.


• Bucket - The grouping, organization and association of marketing terms, keywords, and phrases and characteristics which are associated to your companies products and services.


• Buying Power Index - The measurement of the three basic elements of a market. Population, Buying Income, and Sales.


• Buying Signal - A cue that is given by a prospective client that indicate that they are ready to make a purchase.


• Buzz Opportunities - A social media phenomenon of opportunities that are received through the press, news, blogs, video, and viral marketing. Many savvy internet marketing professionals are realizing fantastic success through researching and following visitor trending, and then capitalizing on new and emerging markets through their research.

• Cost of Acquisition - The amount to acquire a conversion for a specific goals or objective. Usually a sale, a purchase, or a lead.


• Cost Per Click - The amount that a customer must pay for a targeted click on an add that creates a visitor to the advertisers web site.


• CPM - Cost For Per One Thousand Impressions.


• CTR - Click Through Rate - The amount of times that an ad is clicked, divided by the number of times that the ad is rendered. IE. For an ad that has 1000 impressions and 80 clicks, the click through rate is 8%. The higher your rate, the higher the traffic to your site. Your web site quality score, is also factored in to the equation to determine the amount of your minimum keyword bid.


• Campaign Integration - The planned execution of a paid search marketing program with other concurrent marketing campaigns. Instead of focusing solely on the sales initiatives that are generated through the paid search marketing program, the campaign is a part of a larger marketing plan.


• Canonicalization - The order of a web site to point to a single URL structure in order to achieve consistent PageRank throughout the web site. For instance, there are four variations of URL's at the root level that may be used. I.E. edwardbeckett.com, edwardbeckett.com/index.cfm, www.edwardbeckett.com/, www.edwardbeckett.com/index.cfm If the search engines index multiple variations of the same URL, the PageRank may be distributed throughout the different URL's instead of a single URL.


• Client Side Tracking - A JavaScript code that can be placed on a web page that enables the administrators of a web site to determine the visitors to the site.


• Cloaking - A deceptive practice where a different versions of a website are displayed to the search engines than are to the internet users.


• Comments - A comment is a block where a code developer or programmer can insert instructions or notes regarding the history of code development, moves, adds, changes, or suggestions.




• Competitive Analysis - CA is the practice of reviewing strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats in order to determine marketing positioning.


• Consumer Generated Media - Is generated by the views, opinions, reviews, and distribution of content regarding a product or service. This may be a very strong form of viral marketing that can have far reaching results, with highly effective results.


• Content Network - A search industry network that serves up paid search ads.


• Conversion Action - An action that you want to elicit from a visitor to your web site.


• Conversion Rate - The amount of visitors to your site that take a desired action. For instance, if there were 100 searchers that came to your page, and 5% clicked on a call to action that converted in to a sale, the conversion rate would be 5%.

• Dead Links - Broken or inactive URL.


• Deep Link - A drill down linking structure whereby through a series of selections and choices, a searcher is directed to the specific data that they were searching for.


• Deep Link Ratio - The measure of the amount of links pointing the internal pages of a site in comparison to the amount of links pointing to the root domain.


• Description Tag - The meta information inside that portrays a small, description to the web page for which the tag is on.


• DHTML - Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language.


• DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act.


• De- Listed - When a web site is removed from the index of the search engine.


• Directory - A website that arranges web sites in the form of a categorical listing.


• DNS - Domain Name System - A naming convention that is used to determine the addressing of web site names.


• Domain - The name of a web site on the internet domain.


• Doorway page - A page that is created to persuade users to enter a site and move onward in to pages with solicitations or marketing advertisements.


• Duplicate Content - A web page that is either identical or too similar to one that is already on the internet.


• Dynamic Content - Web pages that are generated from a database to a web site. Generally, search engines have had difficulty indexing dynamic URL's.

• Error Page - A message page that is returned when a server cannot process a request for a web page.


• Editorial link - A link to a web site that was reviewed by a editor and accepted as being of quality.


• Everflux - The ever changing and updating of the Google index; Formerly known as the periodic Google Dance.


• External Link - A link that points to another website.

• Fair Usage - The legal extent of use of a document that is under copyright.


• Feed - Same as RSS or XML Feed, A component, gadget or a web service that is "called" from an external provider or resource.


• Feed Reader - A web or software application that is used to handle and manage feeds for subscribers.


• Fuzzy Search - A search query that will produce similar terms to misspelled words.

• GoogleBot - A search engine robot index pages throughout the internet.


• Google Bombing - The act of making a certain page rank for a specific term by having a large number of links all pointing to that term . For an example, take a look at the history of the search term "miserable failure" in Google.


• Google Bowling - Maliciously attacking a competitors web site by pointing many low quality links at the site.


• Google Dance - The previous method that Google used to readjust their index. Today, the index updates constantly.


• Google Sitemaps - An area in Google Webmaster Tools where a webmaster can manage sitemaps.


• Google Webmaster Central - An area that Google has created for webmasters to administer and maintain websites. Webmaster Central also has a very feature rich resource area covering many important issues for webmasters.


• Google Supplemental Index - An area in the Google database system where web pages that are too low in ranking, contain a large amount of duplicate content, or are classified as atypical from the rest of the index, will be placed.


• Google Trends - A search utility that allows a searcher to review historical data for a search term.

• Heading - Represents the HTML heading element on a web page. They are scaled from H1 being the largest, to H6, being the smallest.


• Hidden Text - The practice of masking text on a web page, by either blending the color of the font in with the background color of the web page, or some other similarly deceptive fashion to promote search engine rankings.


• Hilltop - An expert document level search engine.


• Hijack - Deceiving the search engines as if there was a different website IP address than what is actually there.


• Host - Domain Server or services.


• HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language<./li>
  
• HTTP - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, The most common form of data transfer on the internet, it is the standard by which most web services communicate today.

• Inbound Link - It is a link from a web site to a page or domain of another.


• Index - A large organization of web pages similar to a database in which a searcher may submit queries in to in order to retrieve data.


• Internal links - A link that goes from one page on a web site to another page of the same site.


• Information Architecture - The design, construction, and organization of data in to a logical and meaningful structure conducive for a search engines to index.


• Internet - The large communications network that spans the globe through the TCP/IP protocol.


• IP Address - Internet Protocol Address the addressing system which is implemented to assign a specific location and position on the internet.

• JavaScript - Dynamic Scripting language that is used to actions and extensibility to HTML and XML documents.

• Keyword - A word or phrase which may be valued based on internet search results for the term.


• Keyword Density - The amount of times that a given keyword or phrase appear on a web page.


• Keyword Funnel - The semantic relationship between related keywords .


• Keyword Research - The practice of researching and discovering keywords or phrases to effectively produce search terms that will promote visibility once they are implemented on a website.


• Keyword research tools - A tool that is used, usually as a web service, that offers a feature to determine which words are valuable to a given search query.


• Keyword Stuffing - The practice of putting an exorbitant amount of keywords in to a Meta Title, Meta Description, or Meta Keywords Tag, in an effort to elicit higher search engine rankings for the search terms.

• Landing Page - The page which attracted an internet searcher enough to come to the page.


• Link - a URL that is pointing to another destination URL.


• Link Baiting - The craft of generating content and promotions on the internet which interest users enough to link to the content.


• Link Building - A campaign or promotion to increase the amount and quality of inbound links to a web site in order to achieve a higher trust status.


• Link Churn - The phase in which a site loses the quality of links on a site.


• Link Equity - The quality that is assessed on a web site based on inbound link popularity and the perceived position of authority the site that is providing the link.


• Link Farm - A group of web pages or web sites that area adjoined by a network of web pages.


• Log Files - The historical transactional logs that are on a computer or server.


• Link Hoarding - Being selfish with links and not offering any external return for the PageRank that is gained from the links.


• Link Popularity - The number of links that a web site has pointed at it.


• Link Reputation - The metric between link equity and anchor text on a webpage


• Long Tail - A keyword phrase that may be a sub- prime search term yet is valued for it's indirect relation to a query.


• LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing is a method of determining relevance to a subject or topic by the contextual relationship of words in a lexical format.

• Manual Review - The review of a website for quality and consideration before being accepted in to a directory.


• Meta Description - A Meta Tag that is generally used to support the description of the Meta Title of a webpage.


• Meta Keywords - A highly overused Meta Tag that is used to promote the specific relevance of the major them of an HTML document. Due to major misuse of the Meta Keywords tag, many search engines have reduced the association of relevance for keywords that are.


• Meta Refresh - A tag that is used to reload a web page.


• Meta Search - A search engine which returns search results from several search engines at once.


• Meta Tags - Typically the three major Meta Tags are the Meta Title, Meta Description, and the Meta Keywords Tags.


• Mirror - A web site that has the same or similar content of another site.


• Multi Dimensional Scaling - a scientific approach to taking a sample of database content in order to determine the relevance.

• Natural link - A link that is given based on an editorial opinion.


• Navigation - An web site design layout architecture that is used to navigate a web site.


• Netscape - In the beginning of the company's existence Netscape was a web browser.


• No Follow - It is an attribute of a link that is used to specify to the search engine robots not to follow the link.

• Ontology - It is the pursuit of a complete and through breakdown of the structure and make up of a webs site, and is used to determine the quality factors of the site.


• Open Source - Software that may be remodeled with out consideration to copyright infringement.


• Organic Results - The natural occurring listing of a web site in the SERP of a search engine.


• Outbound Link - When a link is pointing to another domain.


• Overture - A company that sold Pay Per Click services prior to be purchased by Yahoo! Overture also offered free of charge the de- facto industry standard keyword research tool.

• PageRank - A formula that Google uses to determine the authority of a site based on the amount and quality of links that are pointing to that site; The formula for calculating the PageRank is PR(A) = (1-d) + d PR(T1)/C(T1) + ...+ PR(Tn)/C(Tn)). Which translates to ... PageRank = PR, d=dampening factor (~0.85), c=amount of links on the page, PR(T1)/C(T1) = PR of page 1 divided by the amount of links on page 1.


• Paid Inclusion - A way to gain immediate exposure to a web directory.


• A payment model that offers commission based salaries for performing a service


• Penalty - A negative mark that is given to a website in the even that the website is not


• Complying with certain rules and regulations.


• PHP is a server side scripting language.


• Poison Word - A poison word is generally considered to be a word that is associated with a low value.


• PPC - Pay Per Click A Google advertising program model for Google Adwords.


• Precision - The ability of a search engine to sort and return requested data.


• Profit Elasticity - The financial measurement of profits regarding the supply and demand curve.


• Proximity - The relevance of keywords and relation to another.

• Quality Link - The basic quality of a link with regards to the links value based on several factors

• Reciprocal links - Used to establish a relationship with other sites to build authority for the site.


• Redirect - An HTTP header response or a client side response that redirects a webpage to another location.


• Registrar - A business that provides domain name registration


• Re- inclusion - A request to a search engine to be allowed consideration to returned in to the index. Typically removal from the index of a search engine is due to improper or unacceptable practices.


• Referrer - The previous source from which an internet user came from.


• Relevancy - The rate of which how internet searchers locate given results.


• Reputation Management - The supporting of the keywords that are related to a brand.


• Robots.txt - A text file that should be placed in the root of a site to signal the search engines which files it should not address, which robots should not access the site, and the location of the xml sitemap on a web server.


• ROI - Return on Investment. The amount of return that is produced from engaging in an investment.


• RSS - Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a method where information, usually in the form of news may be parsed through feed software.

• Search History - The background information that is at times stored by search engines regarding user data.


• Search Engine - A system of directories or databases that are used to retrieve information upon request.


• SEM - Search Engine Marketing


• SEO Search Engine Optimization - The field of study, science and art form of marketing, advertising and publishing in a manner that is effective enough to produce top search engine ranking results for internet search queries. There are many other fields of practice which encompass the practice of SEO. Some skills which are also required to become effective maybe, keyword research, viral marketing, advertising, article promotion, web programming, database development, and marketing and analytical research. There are many other important factors that may be required to be an effective SEO.


• SEO Copywriting - Is the writing and formatting of web copy as to produce the most effective search query response targets from the copy, and to do so in a professional and productive way that does not impose on the quality of the content itself.


• SERP - Search Engine Results Pages.


• Search Marketing - The business of marketing a web site in the search engines.


• Server - A computer that is used to serve files to the world wide web.


• Server Logs - Files that show the information of visitor trending and history


• Siphon - A way to steal some one else's traffic from their web site.


• Sitemap - A page that provides a diagrammatical breakdown of the directory and tree structure of a web site.


• Social Media - Generally it is classified as web sites that contain user generated content, whom promote the topics through public opinion, popularity, controversy, and sensationalism.


• Spider - A robot crawler that goes throughout the World Wide Web indexing the pages of web sites.


• Splash Page - Typically a very attractive web page that has tasteful designs and aesthetic appeal to attract consumers yet generally has very low or poor quality content.


• Spyware - A program that is used to record private information of users.


• SSI - Server Side Include - A web programming technology used in several different dynamic languages that allows a user to include a file in to another file. An example may be a navigation file. The navigation include may be submitted in to a document one time and if ever there needs to be a change to elements of that file, the Static Content - Web pages that are not created dynamically through the use of a Server Side Scripting language such as .JSP, .ASP, PHP, .SHTML, or CFML, and database technologies.


• Stems - Keyword stem are used to identify all the related words to a keyword search.


• Stop Words - Words that do not need to be used in search queries, such as a, to, and is


• Submission - The process of submitting information regarding a web site to another web site or directory in order to gain inclusion.


• Supplemental Results - Web pages that are in the supplemental index are usually there since they do not have enough credibility to sustain a place in the Main Index. However, there may be several reasons that web sites are placed in to the supplemental results index.

• Taxonomy - A method of manipulating subjects in order to organize them.


• Technorati - A search engine that follows the postings from popular blog posts. And article submissions.


• Telnet - A service whereby one can access another computer remotely.


• Tern Vector Database - A database that offers that ability to measure the amount of times that a specific group of related terms appear in the index and returns relevant documents through a vector analysis formula.


• Text Link Ads - Ads that appear as hover images over text links on a web page.


• Title - In Search Engine Optimization it is considered to be one of the most important in- page optimization factors relating to the promotion of keywords.


• Toolbar - A product that may be added to a web browser to offer an enhanced browsing experience.


• Topical PageRank - A method of computing a PageRank for an entire group of Keywords on a site.


• Trackback URL - An alert program that may announce when someone has "tracked" your site back somewhere else.

• URL - A Uniform Resource Locator.


• URL Re- write - A method of parsing an URL through a regular expression or server technology to make the URL's of the web site easier to index in the search engines. Search Engines are known to having problem relating dynamically generated database URL's that contain special characters, such as non- alpha numerics.


• Usability - the ease of which a potential or returning customer may have access to products or services on a web site.


• Usage Data - Factors such as the amount of absolute unique visitors to a site for a given period, the Click-Through-Rate, and other pertinent user data are all considered part of web analytics and usage data.


• Usenet - A news board or bulleting type service that has been in operation since before the World Wide Web. The web owes it's popularity and meteoric rise in part to the way which was laid by the Usenet groups.

• Vertical Search - Directory style listing such as that of the DMOZ Open Directory Project or Yahoo! Directory.


• Viral Marketing - Also known in the Professional Marketing Circles as Rain Making. Viral Marketing is a method of proliferating information through highly focused, targeted, or intelligent articles, videos, blogging and Buzz channel Scooping in order to promote a something or someone.


• Virtual Server - A server that allows several different web sites to reside on the same computer with separate IP addresses.

• WhoIs - Domain Companies maintain the data of the domains owners in their own WhoIs service.


• White Hat SEO - Generally a SEO specialist, marketer , consultant or firm that does not practice SEO Marketing outside the boundaries of what is considered ethical standards by the search engines.


• Wikipedia - An Online user generated encyclopedia


• Wordnet- An English language database of words that can be down loaded as a software application.


• Wordpress- A software blogging platform.


• Wordtracker - A very powerful keyword research tool that offers many different options for manipulating keyword data.

• Xenu - link checking software. WARNING ... If not used correctly or too aggressively, it may crash the server of which you check links on.

• Yahoo! - Internet portal company


• Yahoo! Directory - A very respected and one of the first web directories.


• Yahoo! Site Explorer - A tool that allows web masters to administer their web sites.


• YouTube - A online video community where anyone can syndicate their videos.

I decided to put this SEO Glossary here for people that need to know more about SEO related terms. I may be referencing it quite a bit myself ... Just to note, the original material for this came from several different sources including that of my own. At certain points, I liked my definition better than what I read so, I simply edited it myself.

For the definitions that I used from other resources, I re-wrote very carefully so there would not be any problems with duplicate content or plagiarism. It's not too smart using duplicate content for any reason other than laziness, or greed. In this case, I think I re-wrote it well enough.