Gateway Page

Gateway Page - A web page optimized for certain keyphrase/s with the specific purpose of leading you to another page i.e. they offer nothing of value in themselves. Can be penalised by the search engines for this practice, so don't do it.

Google AdWords - PPC (pay-per-click) advertising program offered by Google.

Google Bombing - A technique where using the same text anchor links, many people link to a certain page - thus affecting SERPs.

Google Cache - Copies of web pages stored on the Google search engine database.

Googlebot - The Google spider which deep crawls web sites monthly.

Googlebowling - To nudge a competitor from the SERPs.

Google PageRank - is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web.

Googol - The term that inspired the name of Google - it means: 10100 = 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Google toolbar - The Google toolbar can be installed on to Internet Explorer. Once installed it can let you search from the toolbar, check the backlinks of a site, how many pages are indexed in Google from a site. You can also quickly navigate to the Google News site and many other Google resources. It can be installed from: http://toolbar.google.com

Heading Tag - An HTML tag that is often used to denote a page or section heading on a web page. Search engines pay special attention to text that is marked with a heading tag, as such text is set off from the rest of the page content as being more important.

Header tags - are HTML tags that help outline a web page or draw attention to important information. Keywords located inside header tags can provide a rankings boost in the search engines. Keywords in header tags are much like the head lines on a news paper.

Hidden Keywords - Keywords placed in the HTML source in such a way that they are not viewable by human visitors.

Hits - A hit takes place every time a file is accessed on your website. This page will show up in my log files as 4 hits, one for the webpage, one for the logo, one for the CSS file and the last for the JavaScript to display the Ads. A hits do not represent actual, or unique web page visits.

HTML - Stands for HyperText Markup Language - the programming language used to mark up web content and display it in a formatted manner.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) - A generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for many tasks.

HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) - Same as HTTP, but has security features enabled to protect sensitive data.

Hub - A central, industry-specific and well-known point for information; usually has many outbound links rather than inbounds.

Hyperlinks - Links that take a visitor or a spider to another location; can be either images or text.

SEO Basic Terminology

301 Redirect- Method of redirecting an old webpage to a new location. More simply, to display another web page for the web address that you are trying to visit.

Adwords - This is the Pay Per Click advertising program offered by Google.

Adsense - Contextual advertising by Google. Website publishers earn a portion of the advertising revenue for placing Google sponsored links on their site.

Algorithm - The search engine program that ranks sites based on certain criteria. It is an operational programming rule which is used to determine how a search engine indexes content and exhibits the results to its users. Google has over 100 different ranking criteria that sites need to meet.

Affiliate Marketing- A marketing program in which an advertiser pays an affiliate for driving event-driven traffic to their site. An event is primarily completing an order on the advertisers site but could simply be some sort of lead generation. Affiliate gets paid a commission based on order or lead.

AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. A way to design web pages that are more end-user friendly and respond more quickly when the user requests data. A good example of AJAX in practice is Google Maps.

Alt Tag - An HTML attribute typically used within the IMG tag to provide alternate text when images cannot be displayed. Example:

Anchor Tag - An HTML tag that allows you to create a link to another document or web page or to a bookmark within the current web page. It is very extremely important what anchor text appears in links pointing to your web site e.g. if your web site is about cake recipes the anchor text 'Delicious Cake Recipes' will help your rankings more than the anchor text 'Donkeys like Carrots'.

Backlink - Links originating from one website and pointing to another website or web page.

Black Hat SEO - The use of unaccepted or frowned upon SEO practices in order to get higher rankings and more traffic. Use at the risk of being dropped from the engines or at least being removed from high rankings.

Bot - Programs written to scour the web automatically for various reasons (to index web pages, for spamming purposes, etc.) aka web robots, web crawlers, internet bots, spiders.

Bounce rate - This defines the percentage of visitors who arrive at your website, then leave the site without visiting other pages, that is, not going any farther into the site, thus they "bounce."

Cloaking - Showing a different web page to a search engine spider than what is normally seen. Method typically used by spammers.

Conversion - Ability to convert a website visitor into a customer, or at least taking that visitor a step closer to customer acquisition.

CPC - (Cost Per Click). Typical rate of measuring the expense involved with acquiring web traffic.

Crawler - A bot from a search engine that reads the text found on a website in order to determine what the website is about.

CSS - (Cascading Style Sheets) Used to define the look and navigation of a website. Used to control font styles, graphical layouts, color, etc.

CTR - Click Through Rate. Standard method of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. Calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of times the ad was shown (also known as an impression). (Wikipedia)

Dead Link - A hyperlink pointing to a non-existent URL.

Description Meta Tag - Special HTML tag in the Head of an HTML document. Contains a brief description of the content found on the page.

Directory - Usually human edited, a directory contains sites that are sorted by categories.

Doorway Page
Any page created for the sole purpose of driving website traffic from the search engines and not a functional part of the website.

Downtime - Refers to a period of time or a percentage of a timespan that a machine or system (usually a computer server) is offline or not functioning.

Dynamic Site - A site that uses a database to store content and is delivered based on the variable passed to the page.

Dynamic Rotation - is delivering ads on a rotating, random basis.

Everflux - A term associated with the constant updating of the Google algorithm between major updates.

External Link - A link that points to another website.

Frequency - The average number of times an advertisement is run.

FreshBot
A sister to GoogleBot, this spider crawls highly ranked sites on a very frequent basis.