Here are simple explanations of some common Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Terms.
This is a standard message that will be displayed on your screen whenever you try to access a page that cannot be found. By default, this is a white HTML page with a 404 error message shown. You need to optimize your 404 error page for search engines and for your website’s visitors. Read more about this in the article “Optimizing Your 404 Error Page”.
The ALT attribute is used to display text as an alternative to images. It is shown when the image is not available or while it is still loading. Search engines can read the text you put inside these tags, so it helps tell the search engines what the image is of.
This is the process of rewriting an old article (or parts of an old article) to create a new one. Article spinning can be done manually or through the use of article spinning software (a.k.a. article spinner).
This is a link from another website that points to one of your web pages.
Please refer to Spider
This is the ratio of how many times web users click your advertisement versus how many times your ad was displayed (impressions). For example, if your ad is shown 1,000 times and 20 people clicked it, your click through rate is 2%. This is calculated as follows – divide 20 by 1,000, then multiplying it by 100.
Most people use this as an indicator of how the ad is doing because it gives an idea of whether an advertisement is effective. It is also one of the factors that Google looks at to determine your ad position in the paid search results. If you have a high CTR, Google will place your ad higher and/or reduce the cost per click.
Please refer to Spider
This is a command directed to search engine robots to follow the links. You can set it at the page level or just for specific links. By default, all links are dofollow. When building your own links, you should try to create dofollow links because you will get credit for them. Google sees a dofollow link as a vote. So having lots of dofollow links pointing to your website is good, as it makes you appear more credible in Google’s eyes. The opposite of this is nofollow.
These are program enhancements for the Firefox browser. There are some powerful, free addons, which can help your SEO efforts, such as SEO Quake and NoDoFollow.
HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. This programming language is used to create and display web pages. There are a lot of predefined HTML tags, which web developers use to handle data. When search engines visit a website they look at the HTML code.
When used as a verb, index simply means “to include in a list”. When used as a noun, it means the “list”. Google bots crawl the Internet by following hyperlinks and store (index) information about the web pages visited in Googles database (index). Whenever a user types in a term and Google thinks that your web page is relevant to that query, it will display information about your web page that it finds in its database (index).
This is the process of building backlinks to your web pages.
This contains the description of the web page.
These are tags placed in the <head> section of HTML document. These tags contain data that are useful information for search engines.
This is a free Firefox add-on that enables you to see which links are nofollow and which are dofollow. For more information about this topic read Free-Firefox Add-ons/Tools for SEO.
This is the opposite of dofollow. It tells the search engine robots not to follow links. The term is a little misleading as sometimes search engines will follow them to find new web pages. However, the main thing you need to remember for SEO is they don’t count them as a backlink and give any credit to the site being linked to.
Nofollow can be set at the page level or link level. If you put the nofollow command in your Meta Robots tag, the search engine bots will not follow any of the links on that web page. If you just want a specific link not to be followed, then applying a rel=”nofollow” command is recommended.
Although, you don’t get a vote from a nofollow link, it can still be a good idea to create links to your site, which are nofollow (especially on high ranking websites), because people are still able to click on them so can drive traffic to your website.
If you are posting links on someone’s website, you don’t have control over whether the link is dofollow or nofollow. Del.i.cious and YouTube are both nofollow.
Off-Page SEO focuses on building your website’s credibility in the eyes of search engines. Most people refer to this as link building.
Please, refer to On-Page SEO.
This is also known as On-site optimization. These are optimization that you do to your website. For example, optimizing content, images and Meta tags.
These are free-search results generated by search engines when a user searches Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engines.
These are paid advertisements displayed as part of the search engine result. See also Pay-per-click advertisements.
This is a type of Internet marketing campaign. It means the advertisers pay whenever the ad is clicked on, even if the website visitor doesn’t go on to make a purchase. So they pay for the click (i.e. the lead/referral), not the sale.
In Google, the paid search results are PPC advertisements. When a searcher clicks on an advertisement, the advertiser will pay Google.
A virtual file that contains permissions for search engine spiders. It basically tells search engines what files and directories they can access.
This is the process of optimizing web pages for search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to rank in the organic search results. There are two types of SEO, On-Page and Off-Page SEO.
This is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Refer to Search Engine Optimization.
This is a free Firefox add-on that you can use to help do SEO. For more information about this topic read Free-Firefox Add-ons/Tools for SEO.
This is the acronym for the Search Engine Results Pages. Whenever a user types in a keyword, search engines will display web pages that are relevant to the query. By default, search engines will usually display a maximum of 10 results per page. They will display the web page title, Meta description (or snippet) and URL.
A sitemap is a list of your posts and pages that can be accessed by users and search engines. It can be in XML or HTML format. You can organize your sitemap in any way you want. However, most people arranged it based on hierarchy to give users and search engines an idea of their website’s navigation.
A snippet is a short summary of your webpage. Google uses this information as your website description in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) if your Meta description is not optimized. Read more about this in ‘How to optimize Meta Description Tag for Google and other Search engines’.
This is the acronym for Uniform Resource Locater. Put simply, it is the web address of a webpage on the World Wide Web. You can easily identify the URL in a browser.
WordPress was originally created to be an open source blogging tool. But through the years it emerged into a powerful website platform. It has gained so much popularity that many small businesses are using it for their entire website. (Note, this website is built using WordPress)
This is the acronym for Extensive Markup Language. The main difference of XML with HTML is, XML was designed to transport and store data. XML is not an alternative to HTML. It will not work on its own because it needs HTML to display the data it is carrying.
If a term is not included above or the explanation is not clear, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to explain.
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