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.