SEO Glossary

Absolute Link:

An Absolute link is an entire link to a specific page on a website that includes: the protocol used to get the document, the server to retrieve it, the directory where it is located and the actual name of the document in question.

Ad Groups:

An Ad Group is an element of a Google Adwords campaign and it contains a list of different keywords and placements. You can set up as many different ad groups within an Adwords campaign and there can be several variations within them. By structuring your Pay Per Click campaign in this manner you can manage it more efficiently and test the best variations for the campaign to ensure maximum effectiveness.

To find out more about Google AdWords visit the AdWords homepage: www.Google.co.uk/AdWords

AdWords:

Google AdWords is a form of sponsored advertising on Google that uses Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts to generate traffic to your website. When you open an AdWords account with Google, you can utilise a number of the AdWords tools so that your website appears on the sponsored adverts section on Google’s results page. AdWords allows you to select keywords, descriptions and even your own budget so that you can control your costs and therefore the level of exposure your website gets.

AdWords Campaign:

A group of AdWords AdGroups in your Pay Per Click (PPC) account. Several different campaigns can be created for a Google AdWords account and each can have different budgets and settings.

By adding more campaigns to the site it allows the owner of the account to diversify and customise the data on each campaign. For example, one campaign can be targeted at a major city and only appear on computers with IP addresses in those areas. This means that the keywords and budgets of the campaigns can be adjusted to depending on the customers and competition as the term local accounts will cost a great deal more per click for a company targeting London than it would for someone in rural Buckinghamshire. This is an effective method of preserving budgets on AdWords and getting the most clicks for your money.

Algorithm:

An Algorithm is an equation that the search engines robots use to analyze a website to help define its content and work out its ranking in the results page. Google has kept its Algorithm secret to avoid exploitation and cloning from less advanced competitors although certain elements of it are available on Google’s patent. Despite this there are many known criteria that the Algorithm looks for when crawling a site including, number of backlinks, keywords and relevant content to name very few.

Alt Tags:

Alt or Alternative Text Tags are a part of HTML coding that contains the descriptions of the image. These are both accessible for humans; accessibility programs and more importantly search engines.

Anchor Text:

Anchor text is the face of a link that is seen on the website and is a condensed view of the entire link. e.g. A link to http://www.search-engine-optimization-marketing.co.uk can have anchor text inserted into it to become Search Engine Optimization Marketing.

Automated Linking:

As search engines focus on the number of inbound links a website has, there has been a growth in the automatic link exchange services. Those who join these sites usually agree to have several links added to this service in order.

In order to take advantage of the need for inbound links to rank well in the search engines, a number of automatic link exchange services have been launched. Members of these schemes will typically agree to have several links added to all their web pages in return for getting similar links back from other sites.

Backwards Link:

Links from other relevant websites linking to your website with no return link having to be provided. There are numerous ways to gain these links, including Directory Submissions, Forum Marketing and Social Bookmarking. These are well known White hat Search Engine Optimisation techniques.

Behavioural Targeting:

This is where you segment and target you potential audience according to their behaviour in relation to the product or service. For example their usage rates of the product or readiness to buy a product or service.

Blog:

An online journal written and posted by humans on a on a wide range of thoughts, commentaries and news on a particular subjects, e.g. http://www.search-engine-optimisation-hampshire.com. These provide a valuable and unique insight into many different subjects.

Bounce Rate:

This can pertain to websites or E-mail Marketing. The percentage of emails that failed to deliver or open. (Emails Bounced / Emails Sent). In terms of a website, the bounce rate means the percentage of visitors who navigated away from the site without visiting another page.

Broad Match Keywords:

Broad match keywords are the standard type of keyword for a Pay Per Click campaign and they will automatically appear more often than other type of keyword. This is because the system will also pick up on several different variations of the keyword such as singular/plural, relevant variants and phrases that contain the keyword. For example if you ran a Pay Per Click campaign for a Peanut Butter seller the search engines may pick relegated keywords or different spellings such as:

• Peanutbutter
• Pea nut butter
• Peanuts
• Butter
• Peanut Butter Sandwich

This option can be more costly if the product is quite general and most search engines would recommend including some filtering on the keywords through Negative Keywords, Phrase Match Keywords and Exact Match Keywords.

To find out more about keyword matching types visit the AdWords homepage: www.Google.co.uk/AdWords

Cached page:

A search engines stored copy of your website pages. Google takes a snap shot of almost every page and returns a cached link as Google’s servers are usually faster. Cached pages are not affected by the amount of Internet traffic and by caching a page it can help to avoid crashes. It does this by helping to reduce bandwidth and the amount of information that is sent across the Internet.

Click Rate:

Total number of clicks on the email as a percentage of emails delivered (Total Clicks / Emails Delivered).

Click-Through Rate (CTR):

Click-through rate (CTR) is a method of measuring the results of a paid online advertising campaign. CTR is gathered by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was shown on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). For example, if a banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and ten people clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 10 percent.

Conversion Rate:

The percentage of traffic viewing your website that then leads to a sale or a desired action (e.g. signing up to a newsletter). This is a valuable statistic for ecommerce sites as it allows them to precisely determine what keywords lead to sales and makes Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques highly measurable. By use of metrics like Conversion Rates and Return On Investment (ROI) it can help monitor how effective a campaign has been.

Conversion rates depend on a number of factors and the bench marks of success differ greatly for different sites in different industries.

Cookies:

Web Cookies (HTTP Cookies, Tracking Cookies) are packets of text by a server to a web client and then they are sent back unchanged by the client each time the server is accessed. These are used to track browsing activities of the user via page information and other activities carried out online.

Because Cookies are used to track an individual’s online behaviour, they have raised concerns over the privacy of users and the European Union has implemented legislation to help regulate this.

One common misunderstanding surrounding Cookies is that they are programmes that run of the user’s computer but they are only pieces of data that change the operation of a web server. Although some anti-spyware programmes will say that cookies are spyware as they track the behaviour of the user.

Cost Per Action (CPA):

This method charges the user based on a type of action by them. This can take the form of a purchase of a product, signing up to a news letter, or requesting a sales brochure. This is widely regarded as being the cheapest method as the conversion rates are usually quite low for the percentage of traffic. This is also known as cost per acquisition.

Cost Per Click (CPC):

This is a very popular method of determining cost whereby a sum of money is paid by the advertiser when a user makes on click on their ad, in a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. The price can be determined by competition for the keyword or can be preset.

The Cost Per Click is a very useful method of measuring the success of a campaign.

To find out more about AdWords costs visit the AdWords homepage: www.Google.co.uk/AdWords

Cost Per Impression (CPM):

This is where a unit price is assigned per X amount of impressions that the ad is shown. The number of Impressions that incur a charge can be determined on the amount of traffic the site receives butis usually per thousand. This allows the advertiser to determine the predictedlevels of Reach and Frequency.

Cost Per Sale (CPS):

This method charges the user based on a sale occurring. This is a very cheap method of charging for an ad as the cost is only charged when a sale is made and the company makes money. This is also known as cost per acquisition.

Day Parting:

This is a process used to control the times that any advert is shown by defining what times the ads appear we can target only the precise customers we want to target and deliver high quality traffic.

Domain Name:

Domain names can be purchased off a number off Internet sources and this can optimised for relevant terms. There can be top level domain names like .com, .net, .info. These are known as generic domain names. Sponsored domain names examples include .Asia, .cat, .aero and .museum.

One of the biggest rivalries for a domain name was for the domain name www.polo.com. This was fought out between, Volkswagen, Ralph Lauren, The American Polo Association and Polo mints. To find out who won, click through to the link!

The age of the domain is one of the key components that search engines analyse when determining the rankings of any website and ideally, the older the better.

Exact Match Keywords:

By placing your key phrase in square brackets when setting up a Pay Per Click keyword list you can specify that it is only shown when users search for that specific keywords in the specific order and with no other terms in the search. For example if a company only sells Blue Dog Collars and they place them in exact match brackets ( [Blue Dog Collars] ) it would not appear if someone typed in Dog Collars Blue.

This can help increase relevant traffic and save on the budge as the Cost Per Click is generally cheaper for these types of keywords.

To find out more about keyword matching types visit the AdWords homepage: www.Google.co.uk/AdWords

External links:

Links used to link to other websites from your own website. Google uses the number of external links from one site to another to help determine the site Pagerank and search engine ranking.

An example of an external link is www.Atelier-studios.com.

Flash:

A technology developed by Adobe that uses a free plug-in to allow your browser to display animations and Flash movies as you navigate the web. Google has recently been updated to include Flash sites in its crawling and indexing, this means that many purely Flash based pages that were not ranking well before will now start moving up the rankings. Flash has been used extensively as both a design aid and as an interactive tool. For example many websites implement Flash games onto their site as a way of making it more entertaining.

For a tutorial on Flash then check out this Flash Tutorial An example of a website designed using Flash.

Frames:

Outdated technology used to create websites. These were largely replaced as technology moved forward and web design became more sophisticated and centred on DIV tags, CSS and Flash.

Froogle (Now Google product search):

This is Google’s price comparison service launched in 2002. When a user searches a particular product a list of products and vendors are returned and unlike Google’s main results page can be sorted by a number of fields including, relevance, price, product and seller rating. Google do not receive any revenue from posting a product nor do they gain any commission from sales of a product. However there are sponsored links on the side of unpaid listings.

For an example of a Google shopping Click Here

Header Tags:

Header tags provide the titles of each specific page and are stored in the meta tags. These can be optimised to include keywords, which the search engines look favourably upon as they help to increase the relevance of the site. However due to high amounts of spamming, there is a debate whether these are still as relevant as they once were as search engine may overlook them. However they are still useful for indicating to websites what the general subject of the site and its relevance.

<h1>Example Header 1 Tag</h1>
<h2>Example Header 2 Tag</h2>

Home Page:

The main page on your website also known as the index or default page. This is the centre of your online presence and your first and possibly only chance to make a good instant impression on the viewer. Therefore it should it be optimised to appear on the top of the rankings.

An example of the Atelier Studios Homepage

Internal Links:

Navigation aids that link pages on a website to other pages.

Internet Marketing/Online Marketing:

The use of the Internet to reach your target audience and market your product or services. The potential for Internet Marketing is seemingly endless due to the fact that you can potentially reach every individual in the world on a one to one basis with a message tailored to them. Some online marketing methods include:

• Online Advertising
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Email Marketing
• Social Network Marketing
• Online Affiliate Marketing

Keyword Competition:

The level of competition for a particular keyword or key phrase. General terms are more competitive than niche one. The competitiveness of keywords is a massive influence on the choice of keywords as they directly correspond to how well their site will rank. One of the ways we work out keyword competition is by working out the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI).

Keywords:

Keywords are a fundamental part of Search engine optimisation. Keywords act as indicators for search engine for what a website is about and are deployed across the site on the basis so that sites can increase their rankings for these individual words.

Keywords get stored search indexes, which Google have several of. Conjunctions (and, or, but) and Common phrases (and, if, a) are ignored by search engines so are not considered as being keywords, these were removed from Google’s index but reintroduced to increase the accuracy of the searches.

Ideal keywords are those that are well searched but not ridiculously competitive.

Landing Page Or Lead Capture Page:

This is the page that a browser clicks through on an advertisement or a Search Engines Results Page (SERP) link. This is usually an extension of the search result and will land on a relevant page that has been optimised depending on the search phrase. Latent Semantic indexing can help to determine words that are related to better help build up relevance

In Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page will also be customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements. By adding a parameter to the linking URL, marketers can measure advertisement effectiveness based on relative click-through rates.

Meta Description:

These are shown under the Title of the webpage on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). They act as a sales copy for the website and if written well can attract more traffic to a website. This can also be loaded with keywords and can help promote the relevance of a site to a particular user.

Off-Page Optimisation:

Off the page optimisation (Off-Page SEO) is what can be done off the pages of a website to maximise its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the On-Page content and keywords in Off-Page direct-links. This includes keyword research, building links and writing articles that are relevant.

Off-Page optimisation techniques are often overlooked by many businesses in favour of On-Page but are equally as important as the On-Page techniques if not more.

On-Page Optimisation:

On the page optimisation (On-Page SEO) consists of changing the content of the site so that it includes more keywords and phrases. This includes putting keywords in meta tags, header tags and image ALT tags. This increases the density of the keywords on the site, so when the search engines crawl them they will generally rank a website with a high yield of a particular keyword higher. Site maps are also a key feature of the On-Page strategies as search engines crawl these for information as well.

Organic Listings:

The results in Google where the free organic search results are displayed. These are what all Search Engine Optimisation Technicians work towards. These are generally more popular than the paid links in the eyes of searchers as they are considered to be more accurate and relevant as it is more competitive to reach the top of the organic results and websites have to be extremely relevant to the search terms to reach the top of these results.

Page Names (Titles):

The name given to a web page to identify it. If the title is optimised then it is a big bonus for a site as the page names are very powerful in determining the sites ranking.

Pay Per Click (PPC):

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a formof advertising where you pay for your results to appear on the sponsored listing section of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s). These can be managed through a Google AdWords account (Yahoo and MSN have similar tools). The user designs Campaigns that consists of AdWords groups and the user can set a budget so that when a particular phrase is typed in by a searcher you pay a certain amount (depending on the competition)

The results in Google used to display the paid listings.

Phrase Match Keywords:

Most Pay Per Click systems include the capacity to insert phrase match keywords into the list. This will help to increase conversion rates as traffic will be more relevant and it can be more cost effective as the Cost Per Click will generally be cheaper.

To create phrase match keywords you place a, “ symbol either end of the phrase so a company only sells red jumpers then the exact match key phrase would be “red jumpers”.

Redirect:

When one webpage or website is set up to direct its visitors straight to another website.

This can be done intentionally with the idea of re-directing the users to a domain that has changed or to a different site that is still relevant. However re-directs can be mistakenly put on the site and this is frowned upon by the search engines as it is seen by their robots as being duplicated content (humans know they are the same site but unfortunately the robots don’t) and can affect a sites ranking, so a technique called Canonicalisation is adopted to fix the problem.

Robots.txt File:

A robots.txt protocol is a file designed to prevent web spiders (or other web robots) from crawling and indexing a part or page of a website. These files communicate in a number of ways with the search engine robots to communicate exactly what they want to be scanned by the search engines and what they want to be exempt.

An example of a Robots.txt file that communicates for all search engine robots to scan the pages would be:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

In this case the asterisk symbol indicates that the information is available to all of the search engines and as the disallow section is left blank it is communicating that all pages are available to be scanned by all crawlers.

If you were to all crawlers to stay away from the site then you would simply place a forward slash in front of the disallow to indicate that all crawlers should not include it:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Root Folder:

The main folder on your web server. This will be where your homepage is located.

This is where website tools like sitemaps get loaded into.

RSS Feed:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a group of web feeds used to distribute regularly updated content like new articles or blog posts. Users can subscribe via RSS feeds to deliver any new content on the site via a number of methods.

Search Engine:

Internet Search engines help users find web pages related to their specified search term. Web search engines will crawl sites and mine data from a range of sources to determine results that their unique algorithms consider to be the most relevant and contain quality information.

The first search engine was Aliweb launched (miraculously) in 1993 and it was a very basic search that only scanned the titles of pages. Google rose to prominence in 2000 as it contained an innovation known as page rank. This centred on assessing the links into the site on the basis that the most relevant and quality sites will have more links than the lesser sites.

Google is by far the most powerful search engine on the web and is easily the most popular in the west. However Baidu is the most popular search engine in China and is growing year on year (however the Internet is heavily censored in China so this may not be down to the prominence of the search engine).

Search engines work initially on the basis of using its Robots crawling the site and places the content into its index (much like a library).

When the user types in a certain search query, the search engine will look through its index and then return the most relevant results to the search terms entered.

There are advanced features on the site such as proximity searches that define how far you are willing to have the keywords apart. Revenue in the web search portals industry is projected to grow in 2008 by 13.4 percent, with broadband connections expected to rise by 15.1 percent.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):

Search engine optimisation, the process of optimizing your website to appear higher for the natural search engine listings. Any search engine optimization is carried out with the long term aim of reaching the top of the search engine rankings results and therefore bringing more quality traffic to your website.

The main SEO strategies centre on modifying sites content to both increase its relevance for specific keywords and phrases. Another main strategy revolves around building links to a site as major search engines view sites with more links as being relevant and important and therefore rank it higher. This link building strategy can be carried out in a number of ways, such as submitting your site to directories, forum marketing and article writing.

The techniques listed above are examples of ‘White Hat’ techniques and are considered legal by Search engines and any website will not receive sanctions by the Search engines.

However there are some ‘Black Hat’ SEO techniques that are outlawed by the Search engines and they will ban any sites that are caught carrying out these Black Hat Techniques. These techniques usually involve deceiving the search engines or attempting to manipulate its rankings. This gives the illusion that the site is relevant to certain terms and is deemed of being linked to. Another technique is by adding text to a page that is the same as the background colour as to hide the text from the viewer. Also ‘keyword stuffing’ is another technique that will cause a ban as it is seen as spamming a page as it reduces its utility and can decieve the viewer.

One of the most famous cases of sites misleading its viewers is BMW and Rioch’s of Germany who were banned for a short while for adding mis-leading phrases to a site.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP):

The page displaying results of the websites with the most relevance to the search phrase queried. These are determined by the particular search engines unique algorithm and how they see your site. Google’s particular algorithm as always remained a secret as to keep the results as pure as possible and avoid exploitation.

Search Engine Spider (Web Crawler):

The robot that Google sends out to crawl the web by going from website to website via links. The Spider will then scan the data of a site and will then index the data that is contained on the site depending on the content and the numbers of times certain terms appear on the site.

By using Spiders; search engines can keep their sites up to date as they are continuously crawling sites for any changes to the content. It is also used to help maintain and check links. You can use robots on the site map to stop search engine spiders from crawling the site.

Sitemap.xml File:

A Sitemap.xml protocol is a file that informs the search engines about all of the URLs on the website that are available to be crawled by them. Although this may seem similar to a Robots.txt file, a sitemap allows for users to include extra information about each individual URL that a Robots file cannot supply. A site map file allows the user to include information about how often the site gets updated, how often it should be scanned and what priority the particular page has in relation to the rest of the pages on the site.

This means that sites can be crawled more efficiently and intelligently by search engines. For example you can specify for certain pages to be crawled every day, which is useful for news pages and other regularly, updated content.

Sitemaps are also particularly useful for sites that have a great deal Flash as many smaller search engines still cannot crawl sites that are rich with this.

Split Testing (A/B Testing):

The testing of ads or landing pages against each other to increase efficiency.

One of the main uses of split testing is on AdWords campaigns. One of the main uses of split testing is on AdWords campaigns. There are a number of variables on an AdWords campaign that can be subjected to split testing and can be compared on the benchmark of a number of statistics. By comparing different fields such as budgets, timings of the campaign, Ad placements etc you can incrementally develop the most efficient and effective Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign.

Title Tags:

The tag is shown in the search engines advert to describe your website and at the top of the page. These should be optimised as they are a particularly powerful way of building relevance for a site.

Traffic:

The number of visitors to your website over a certain period of time. Increased traffic is the ultimate goal of any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign, whether it comes, directly, through Search engines or through referral sites. Traffic of a website can be monitored and assessed via stats packages like Google Analytics. These packages are a goldmine of information and you can find out virtually everything about how people visitors got to your site, what they did and how they left. This data can then be used to build up profiles of the visitors and to better optimise the site because of this.