Above the Fold: A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email newsletters or web ma
Absolute Link: A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked to. Some links only show relative link path
Active Server Pages (ASP): A common programming language used before the inception of PHP written by Microsoft. ASP can be used
AdCenter: Microsoft's cost per click ad network similar to Google's AdWords. While it has a few advanced featu
AdSense: Google's contextual advertising network. Publishers large and small may automatically publish releva
AdWords: Google's advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google's ads are keyword targeted and sold
Affiliate: An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business
Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying i
Age: Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related hi
AJAX: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which allows a web page to request additional data fr
Alexa: Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic. Alexa is heavily biased toward sites
Algorithm: A program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given search query.
AllTheWeb: Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo m
Alt Attribute: Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. U
Alt Text: A description of a graphic, which usually isn?€™t displayed to the end user, unless the graphic
AltaVista: Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early
Analytics: Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon
Anchor Text: The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image the image alt
API: Application Program Interface - a series of conventions or routines used to access software function
Arbitrage: Exploiting market inefficiencies by buying and reselling a commodity for a profit. As it relates to
Ask: Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they du
Astroturfing: Attempting to advance a commercial or political agenda while pretending to be an impartial grassroot
Authorities: Topical authorities are sites which are well trusted and well cited by experts within their topical
Authority Site: A website which has many incoming links from other related expert/hub sites. Because of this simulta
Automated Bid Management Software: Pay per click search engines are growing increasingly complex in their offerings. To help large adve
Back Link: (inlink, incoming link) Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.
Bait and Switch: Marketing technique where you make something look overtly pure or as though it has another purpose t
Banner Blindness: During the first web boom many businesses were based on eyeballs more than actually building real va
Behavioral Targeting: Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or implied intent. For example, if I recently searc
Bias: A prejudice based on experiences or a particular worldview. Any media channel, publishing format, or
Black Hat SEO: Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the w
Block Level Analysis: A method used to break a page down into multiple points on the web graph by breaking its pages down
Blog: A periodically updated journal, typically formatted in reverse chronological order. Many blogs not o
Blog Comment Spam: Either manually or automatically (via a software program) adding low value or no value comments to o
Blogger: Blogger is a free blog platform owned by Google. It allows you to publish sites on a sub domain off
Blogroll: Link list on a blog, usually linking to other blogs owned by the same company or friends of that blo
Bold: A way to make words appear in a bolder font. Words that appear in a bolder font are more likely to b
Bookmarks: Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have al
Boolean Search: Many search engines allow you to perform searches that contain mathematical formulas such as AND, OR
Bot: (robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines u
Bounce Rate: The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.
Brand: The emotional response associated with your company and/or products. A brand is built through contro
Branded Keywords: Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand. Typically branded keywords occur late in the bu
Breadcrumb Navigation: Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship bet
Broken Link: A hyperlink which is not functioning. A link which does not lead to the desired location. Links may
Browser: Client used to view the world wide web. The most popular browsers are Microsoft's Internet Explorer,
Cache: Copy of a web page stored by a search engine. When you search the web you are not actively searching
Canonical Issues: (duplicate content) canon = legitimate or official version - It is often nearly impossible to avoid
Canonical URL: Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally si
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): Cascading Style Sheets is a method for adding styles to web documents. Note: Using external CSS file
Catch All Listing: A listing used by pay per click search engines to monetize long tail terms that are not yet targeted
Click Fraud: Improper clicks on a PPC advertisement usually by the publisher or his minions for the purpose of un
Click through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to measure h
Client: A program, computer, or process which makes information requests to another computer, process, or pr
Cloaking: Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display
Clustering: In search results the listings from any individual site are typically limited to a certain number an
Co-citation: In topical authority based search algorithms links which appear near one another on a page may be de
Code 200: OK - The request has succeeded. The information returned with the response is dependent on the metho
Code 302: Found - The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection migh
Code 304: Not Modified - If the client has performed a conditional GET request and access is allowed, but the
Code 307: Temporary Redirect - The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the red
Code Swapping: Changing the content after high rankings are achieved. Also known as Bait and Switch.
Comment Spam: Posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an inlink to another site. The reason many blogs
Comments: Many blogs and other content management systems allow readers to leave user feedback. Leaving enligh
Comments Tag: Some web developers place comments in the source code of their work to help make it easy for people
Common Gateway Interface (CGI): Interface software between a web server and other machines or software running on that server. Many
Compacted Information: Information which is generally and widely associated with a product. For example, most published boo
Concept Search: A search which attempts to conceptually match results with the query, not necessarily with those wor
Conceptual Links: Links which search engines attempt to understand beyond just the words in them. Some rather advanced
Content Management System (CMS): Programs such as Wordpress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation
Context: The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertisin
Contextual Advertising: Advertising programs which generate relevant advertisements based on the content of a webpage.
Conversion: Many forms of online advertising are easy to track. A conversion is reached when a desired goal is c
Conversion Rate: Percentage of users who convert to a desired action. Many forms of online advertising are easy to tr
Cookie: Small data file written to a user's local machine to track them. Cookies are used to help websites c
Cost Per Action (CPA): Cost per action. The effectiveness of many other forms of online advertising have their effectivenes
Cost Per Click (CPC): The rate that is paid per click for a Pay Per Click Advertiser.
Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM): A statistical metric used to quantify the average value / cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M -
Crawl Depth: How deeply a website is crawled and indexed. Since searches which are longer in nature tend to be mo
Crawl Frequency: How frequently a website is crawled. Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawl
Crawler: (robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines u
Crawler: A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather
Cybersquatting: Registering domains related to other trademarks or brands in an attempt to cash in on the value crea
Dayparting: Turning ad campaigns on or off, changing ad bid price, or budget constraints based on bidding more w
Dead Link: A link which is no longer functional. Most large high quality websites have at least a few dead link
Dedicated Server: Server which is limited to serving one website or a small collection of websites owned by a single p
Deep Link: A link which points to an internal page within a website. When links grow naturally typically most h
Deep Link Ratio: The ratio of links pointing to internal pages to overall links pointing at a website. A high deep li
Demographics: Statistical data or characteristics which define segments of a population. Some internet marketing p
Digg: Social news site where users vote on which stories get the most exposure and become the most popular
Directory: A categorized catalog of websites, typically manually organized by topical editorial experts. Some d
DMOZ: The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL,
Domain: Scheme used for logical or location organization of the web. Many people also use the word domain to
Domain Name Server (DNS): A naming scheme mechanism used to help resolve a domain name / host name to a specific TCP/IP Addres
Doorway Pages: Pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers
Dreamweaver: Popular web development and editing software offering a what you see is what you get interface.
Duplicate Content: Content which is duplicate or near duplicate in nature. Search engines do not want to index multiple
Dynamic Content: Content which changes over time or uses a dynamic language such as PHP to help render the page. In t
Dynamic Languages: Programming languages such as PHP or ASP which build web pages on the fly upon request.
E-Commerce Site: A website devoted to retail sales.
Earnings Per Click (EPC): Many contextual advertising publishers estimate their potential earnings based on how much they make
Editorial Link: Search engines count links as votes of quality. They primarily want to count editorial links that we
Emphasis: An HTML tag used to emphasize text. Please note that it is more important that copy reads well to hu
Entry Page: The page which a user enters your site. If you are buying pay per click ads it is important to send
Error 301: Moved Permanently - The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URl and any future refe
Error 400: Bad Request - The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The client
Error 401: Unauthorized - The request requires user authentication. The response MUST include a WWW-Authenticat
Error 403: Forbidden - The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not
Error 404: Not Found - The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of wh
Error 410: Gone - The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is know
Error 500: Internal Server Error - The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfi
Error 501: Not Implemented - The server does not support the functionality required to fulfill the request. Thi
Ethical SEO: Search engines like to paint SEO services which manipulate their relevancy algorithms as being uneth
Everflux: Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux.
Expert Document: Quality page which links to many non-affiliated topical resources.
Fair Use: The stated exceptions of allowed usage of work under copyright without requiring permission of the o
Favicon: Favorites Icon is a small icon which appears next to URLs in a web browser. Upload an image named fa
Feed: Many content management, systems such as blogs, allow readers to subscribe to content update notific
Feed Reader: Software or website used to subscribe to feed update notifications.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP): File Transfer Protocol is a protocol for transferring data between computers. Many content managemen
Filter: Certain activities or signatures which make a page or site appear unnatural might make search engine
Firefox: Popular extensible open source web browser.
Flash: Vector graphics-based animation software which makes it easier to make websites look rich and intera
Frames: A technique created by Netscape used to display multiple smaller pages on a single display. This web
Free For All (FFA): Free for all pages are pages which allow anyone to add a link to them. Generally these links do not
Fresh Content: Content which is dynamic in nature and gives people a reason to keep paying attention to your websit
Fuzzy Search: Search which will find matching terms when terms are misspelled (or fuzzy). Fuzzy search technology
Gateway Page: A web page that is designed to attract traffic from a search engine and then redirect it to another
Gizmo: A small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP add
Google: The world's leading search engine in terms of reach. Google pioneered search by analyzing linkage da
Google Advertising Professional (GAP): Google Advertising Professional is a program which qualifies marketers as being proficient AdWords m
Google Base: Free database of semantically structured information created by Google. Google Base may also help Go
Google Bomb: The combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually for humorous
Google Bowling: Maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from the ?€?bad neighborhood?€? - K
Google Checkout: Payment service provided by Google which helps Google better understand merchant conversion rates an
Google Dance: In the past Google updated their index roughly once a month. Those updates were named Google Dances,
Google Juice: Trust or authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.
Google Keyword Tool: Keyword research tool provided by Google which estimates the competition for a keyword, recommends r
Google OneBox: Portion of the search results page above the organic search results which Google sometimes uses to d
Google Sitelinks: On some search results where Google thinks one result is far more relevant than other results (like
Google Sitemaps: Program which webmasters can use to help Google index their contents. Please note that the best way
Google Supplemental Index: Index where pages with lower trust scores are stored. Pages may be placed in Google's Supplemental I
Google Traffic Estimator: Tool which estimates bid prices and how many Google searchers will click on an ad for a particular k
Google Trends: Tool which allows you to see how Google search volumes for a particular keyword change over time.
Google Website Optimizer: Free multi variable testing platform used to help AdWords advertisers improve their conversion rates
GoogleBot: Google's search engine spider. Google has a shared crawl cache between their various spiders, includ
Guestbook Spam: A type of low quality automated link which search engines do not want to place much trust on.
GYM: Google - Yahoo - Microsoft, the big three of search
Headings: The heading element briefly describes the subject of the section it introduces. Heading elements go
Hidden Text: SEO technique used to show search engine spiders text that human visitors do not see. While some sit
Hijacking: Making a search engine believe that another website exists at your URL. Typically done using techniq
Hilltop: Algorithm which ranks results largely based on unaffiliated expert citations.
Hit: Once the standard by which web traffic was often judged, but now a largely meaningless term replaced
Home Page: The main page on your website, which is largely responsible for helping develop your brand and setti
htaccess: Apache directory-level configuration file which can be used to password protect or redirect files. A
Hubs: Topical hubs are sites which link to well trusted within their topical community. A topical authorit
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML): Directives or 'markup' which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP): HyperText Transfer Protocol is the foremost used protocol to communicate between servers and web bro
Impression: The event where a user views a webpage one time.
Inbound Link: Link pointing to one website from another website. Most search engines allow you to see a sample of
Index: Collection of data used as bank to search through to find a match to a user fed query. The larger se
Indexed Pages: The pages on a site which have been indexed.
Information Retrieval: The field of science based on sorting or searching through large data sets to find relevant informat
Inktomi: Search engine which pioneered the paid inclusion business model. Inktomi was bought by Yahoo! at the
Inlink: Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
Internal Link: Link from one page on a site to another page on the same site. It is preferential to use descriptive
Internet Service Provider (ISP): Internet Service Providers sell end users access to the web. Some of these companies also sell usage
Inverse Document Frequency (IDF): Inverse Document Frequency is a term used to help determine the position of a term in a vector space
Invisible Web: Portions of the web which are not easily accessible to crawlers due to search technology limitations
IP Address: Internet Protocol Address. Every computer connected to the internet has an IP address. Some websites
JavaScript: A client-side scripting language that can be embedded into HTML documents to add dynamic features. S
Key Phrase: A word or phrase which implies a certain mindset or demand that targeted prospects are likely to sea
Keyword: A word or phrase which implies a certain mindset or demand that targeted prospects are likely to sea
Keyword Cannibalization: The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice ma
Keyword Density: An old measure of search engine relevancy based on how prominent keywords appeared within the conten
Keyword Funnel: The relationship between various related keywords that searchers search for. Some searches are parti
Keyword Research: The process of discovering relevant keywords and keyword phrases to focus your SEO and PPC marketing
Keyword Research Tools: Tools which help you discover potential keywords based on past search volumes, search trends, bid pr
Keyword Stuffing: Writing copy that uses excessive amounts of the core keyword. When people use keyword stuffed copy i
Landing Page: The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.
Landing Page Quality Scores: A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of their AdWords program. When Google AdWords
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a docu
Link: A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document. M
Link Baiting: The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to poin
Link Building: The process of building high quality linkage data that search engines will evaluate to trust your we
Link Bursts: A rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing at a website. When links occur naturally they gen
Link Churn: The rate at which a site loses links.
Link Condom: Any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrime
Link Equity: A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity and the authority of the site
Link Exchange: a reciprocal linking scheme often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges u
Link Farm: Website or group of websites which exercises little to no editorial control when linking to other si
Link Hoarding: A method of trying to keep all your link popularity by not linking out to other sites, or linking ou
Link Love: An outgoing link, which passes trust, unencumbered by any kind of link hiding.
Link Partner: Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don?€™t see these as high value links
Link Popularity: The number of links pointing at a website. For competitive search queries link quality counts much m
Link Reputation: The combination of your link equity and anchor text.
Link Rot: A measure of how many and what percent of a website's links are broken. Links may be broken for a nu
Link Text: The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the ref
Linkerati: Internet users who are the most productive targets of linkbait. The Linkerati includes - social tagg
Live.com: Newer search platform provided by Microsoft.
Log Files: Server files which show you what your leading sources of traffic are and what people are search for
Long Tail: Phrase describing how for any category of product being sold there is much more aggregate demand for
Looksmart: Company originally launched as a directory service which later morphed into a paid search provider a
Made For Advertisements (MFA): websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for advertisements. This is usually, but no
Manual Review: All major search engines combine a manual review process with their automated relevancy algorithms t
Mashup: A web page which consists primarily of single purpose software and other small programs (gizmos and
Mechanical Turk: Amazon.com program which allows you to hire humans to perform easy tasks that computers are bad at.
Meta Description: The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of th
Meta Keywords: The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to highlight keywords and keyword phrases which the
Meta Refresh: A meta tag used to make a browser refresh to another URL location. Generally in most cases it is pre
Meta Search: A search engine which pulls top ranked results from multiple other search engines and rearranges the
META Tags: Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META
Mindshare: A measure of the amount of people who think of you or your product when thinking of products in your
Mirror Site: Site which mirrors (or duplicates) the contents of another website. Generally search engines prefer
Monetize: To extract income from a site. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetize a website.
Movable Type: For sale blogging software which allows you to host a blog on your website. Movable Type is typicall
MSN Search: Search engine built by Microsoft. MSN is the default search provider in Internet Explorer.
Multi Dimensional Scaling: The process of taking shapshots of documents in a database to discover topical clusters through the
Natural Language Processing: Algorithms which attempt to understand the true intent of a search query rather than just matching r
Natural Search Results: The search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.
Navigation: Scheme to help website users understand where they are, where they have been, and how that relates t
Netscape: Originally a company that created a popular web browser by the same name, Netscape is now a social n
Niche: A topic or subject which a website is focused on. Search is a broad field, but as you drill down eac
Nofollow: Attribute used to prevent a link from passing link authority. Commonly used on sites with user gener
Noindex: A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instr
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
Ontology: In philosophy it is the study of being. As it relates to search, it is the attempt to create an exha
Open Source: Software which is distributed with its source code such that developers can modify it as they see fi
Opera: A fast standards based web browser.
Organic Link: Links that are those published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.
Organic Search Results: Most major search engines have results that consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. The unpaid / al
Outbound Link: A link from one website pointing at another external website. Some webmasters believe in link hoardi
Overture: The company which pioneered search marketing by selling targeted searches on a pay per click basis.
Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Popular keyword research tool, based largely on Yahoo! search statistics. Heavily skewed toward comm
PageRank: A logarithmic scale based on link equity which estimates the importance of web documents. Since Page
Paid Inclusion: A method of allowing websites which pass editorial quality guidelines to buy relevant exposure.
Pay For Inclusion (PFI): The practice of charging a fee to include a website in a search engine or directory. While quite com
Pay For Performance (PFP): Payment structure where affiliated sales workers are paid commission for getting consumers to perfor
Pay Per Action (PPA): Very similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversi
Pay Per Click (PPC): a contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a use
Penalty: Search engines prevent some websites suspected of spamming from ranking highly in the results by ban
Personalization: Altering the search results based on a person's location, search history, content they recently view
PHP: PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side scripting language used to render web pages
Poison Word: Words which were traditionally associated with low quality content that caused search engines to wan
Portable Document Format (PDF): Portable Document Format is a universal file format developed by Adobe Systems that allows files to
Portal: A web service which offers a wide array of features to entice users to make the portal their ?€?ho
Precision: The ability of a search engine to list results that satisfy the query, usually measured in percentag
Profit Elasticity: A measure of the profit potential of different economic conditions based on adjusting price, supply,
Proprietary Method: sales term often used by SEO service providers to imply that they can do something unique to achieve
Proximity: A measure of how close words are to one another. A page which has words near one another may be deem
Quality Content: Content which is linkworthy in nature.
Quality Link: Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links. There ar
Query: The actual 'search string' a searcher enters into a search engine.
Query Refinement: Some searchers may refine their search query if they deemed the results as being irrelevant. Some se
Real Simple Syndication (RSS): Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication is a method of syndicating information to a feed reader
Recall: The portion of relevant documents that were retrieved when compared to all relevant documents.
Reciprocal Link: Nepotistic link exchanges where websites try to build false authority by trading links, using three
Redirect: A method of alerting browsers and search engines that a page location moved. 301 redirects are for p
Referrer: The source from which a website visitor came from.
Registrar: A company which allows you to register domain names.
Reinclusion: If a site has been penalized for spamming they may fix the infraction and ask for reinclusion. Depen
Relative Link: A link which shows the relation of the current URL to the URL of the page being linked at. Some link
Relevancy: A measure of how useful searchers find search results. Many search engines may also bias organic sea
Reputation Management: Ensuring your brand related keywords display results which reinforce your brand. Many hate sites ten
Resubmission: Much like search engine submission, resubmission is generally a useless program which is offered by
Return On Investment (ROI): One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment, and thus cost / benef
Reverse Index: An index of keywords which stores records of matching documents that contain those keywords.
Rich Site Summary (RSS): Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication is a method of syndicating information to a feed reader
Robot: (robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines u
Robots.txt: A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search engines which files not to crawl. Some sear
Safari: A popular Apple browser.
Sandbox: There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a ?€?sandbox,?€? preve
Scrape: Copying content from a site, often facilitated by automated bots.
Scumware: Intrusive software and programs which usually target ads, violate privacy, and are often installed w
Search Engine (SE): a program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a users keyword p
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The process of increasing the number of visitors to a web site by achieving high rank in the search
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): Search Engine Results Page is the page on which the search engines show the results for a search que
Search Engine Spam: Pages created to cause search engines to deliver inappropriate or less relevant results. Search Engi
Search History: Many search engines store user search history information. This data can be used for better ad targe
Search Marketing (SEM): Short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, s
Server: Computer used to host files and serve them to the WWW. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $5
Server Logs: Files hosted on servers which display website traffic trends and sources. Server logs typically do n
Server Side Include (SSI): Server Side Includes are a way to call portions of a page in from another page. SSI makes it easier
Siphoning: Techniques used to steal another web sites traffic, including the use of spyware or cybersquatting.
Site Map: Page which can be used to help give search engines a secondary route to navigate through your site.
Slashdot: Central editorially driven community news site focusing on technology and nerd related topics create
Social Bookmark: A form of Social Media where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.
Social Media: Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are
Social Media Marketing (SMM): Website or brand promotion through social media
Social Media Poisoning (SMP): AAny of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques designed to implicate a competitor as a spam
Sock Puppet: an online identity used to either hide a persons real identity or to establish multiple user profile
Spam: Unsolicited email messages. Search engines also like to outsource their relevancy issues by calling
SpamAd Page: A Made For Adsense/Advertisement page which uses scraped or machine generated text for content, and
Spamdexing: Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deceptively modifying web pages to increase
Spammer: A person who uses spam to pursue a goal.
Spamming: The act of creating and distributing spam.
Spider: Search engine crawlers which search or 'spider' the web for pages to include in the index. Many non-
Spider Trap: an endless loop of automatically generated links which can ?€?trap?€? a spider program. Sometime
Splash Page: Often animated, graphics pages without significant textual content. Splash pages are intended to loo
Splog: Spam Blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or ma
Spyware: Software programs which spy on web users, often used to collect consumer research and to behaviorall
Static Content: Content which does not change frequently. May also refer to content that does not have any social el
Static Page: A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are goo
Stemming: Using the stem of a word to help satisfy search relevancy requirements. EX: searching for swimming c
Stickiness: Mitigation of bounce rate. Website changes that entice users to stay on the site longer, and view mo
Stop Words: Common words (ex: a, to, and, is ...) which add little relevancy to a search query, and are thus are
Submission: The act of making information systems and related websites aware of your website. In most cases you
Supplemental Index: Pages with very low pagerank, which are still relevant to a search query, often appear in the SERPs
Supplemental Results: Documents which generally are trusted less and rank lower than documents in the main search index. S
Taxonomy: Classification system of controlled vocabulary used to organize topical subjects, usually hierarchic
Technorati: Blog search engine which tracks popular stories and link relationships.
Telnet: Internet service allowing a remote computer to log into a local one for projects such as script init
Teoma: Topical community based search engine largely reliant upon Kleinberg's concept of hubs and authoriti
Term Frequency: A measure of how frequently a keyword appears amongst a collection of documents.
Term Vector Database: A weighted index of documents which aims to understand the topic of documents based on how similar t
Text Link: A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.
Text Link Ads: Advertisements which are formatted as text links. Since the web was originally based on text and lin
Thesaurus: Synonym directory search engines use to help increase return relevancy. Thesaurus tools can also be
Time On Page: The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of quality and
Title: The title element is used to describe the contents of a document. The title is one of the most impor
Toolbar: Many major search companies aim to gain marketshare by distributing search toolbars. Some of these t
Topic-Sensitive PageRank: Method of computing PageRank which instead of producing a single global score creates topic related
Trackback: Automated notification that another website mentioned your site which is baked into most popular blo
TrustRank: Search relevancy algorithm which places additional weighting on links from trusted seed websites tha
Typepad: Hosted blogging platform provided by SixApart, who also makes Movable Type. It allows you to publish
Unethical SEO: Some search engine marketers lacking in creativity try to market their services as being ethical, wh
Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract
Uniform Resource Locator (URL): Uniform Resource Locator is the unique address of any web document.
Update: Search engines frequently update their algorithms and data sets to help keep their search results fr
URL Rewrite: A technique used to help make URLs more unique and descriptive to help facilitate better sitewide in
Usability: How easy it is for customers to perform the desired actions. The structure and formatting of text an
Usage Data: Things like a large stream of traffic, repeat visitors, multiple page views per visitor, a high clic
Usenet: A search service which is focused on a particular field, a particular type of information, or a part
User Generated Content (UGC): Social Media, wikis, Folksonomies, and some blogs rely heavily on User Generated Content. One could
Vertical Search: A search service which is focused on a particular field, a particular type of information, or a part
Viral Marketing: Self propagating marketing techniques. Common modes of transmission are email, blogging, and word of
Virtual Server: A server which allows multiple top level domains to be hosted from a single computer. Using a virtua
Walled Garden: a group of pages which link to each other, but are not linked to by any other pages. A walled garden
Wdget: 1) (gadget, gizmo) small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit
Web 2.0: Is characterized by websites, which encourage user interaction.
White Hat SEO: Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the w
Whois: Each domain has an owner of record. Ownership data is stored in the Whois record for that domain. So
Wiki: Software which allows information to be published using collaborative editing.
Wordnet: A lexical database of English words which can be used to help search engines understand word relatio
Wordpress: Popular open source blogging software platform, offering both a downloadable blogging program and a
Wordtracker: Feature rich paid keyword research tool which collects data from a couple popular meta search engine
XHTML: Extensible HyperText Markup Language is a class of specifications designed to move HTML to conform t
XML: Extensible Markup Language is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML, used to make it
Yahoo!: Internet portal company which was started with the popular Yahoo! Directory.
Yahoo! Answers: Free question asking and answering service which allows Yahoo! to leverage social structures to crea
Yahoo! Directory: One of the original, most popular, and most authoritative web directories, started by David Filo and
Yahoo! Search Marketing: Yahoo!'s paid search platform, formerly known as Overture.
Yahoo! Site Explorer: Research tool which webmasters can use to see what pages Yahoo! has indexed from a website, and what
YouTube: Feature rich amateur video upload and syndication website owned by Google.
Zeal: Non-commercial directory which was bought by Looksmart for $20 million, then abruptly shut down with
