200 - OK
Status - 200 means that the file request and transfer was successful. For instance an image or a requested page was successfully loaded to the browser.
301 Redirects - Moved Permanently
301 error indicates to the user that the site has been permanently moved to a different location. It is actually the most ideal way of redirecting for most websites. Now if you are planning to move your entire website to a different location, its better if you first test it by moving a single file or folder to see how that single page ranks; and if it does, you may well move the entire website. It may take a few days to a few months for 301 redirects to be picked up by search engines which depends very much on the bot crawl frequency on your website.
302 Redirects- Found
302 error indicates the user that though the requested file has been found but it has been temporarily located to a different URL. But SEO expert's prescription is to avoid using 302 redirects as some search engines struggle when it comes to handling 302 redirects. So to discourage 302 redirects some search engines even allow competing websites to hijack their listings.
304 - Not Modified
The server gives this status code when the user has sent a conditional GET request which allows him the access to the page but the page document has not been modified, it is said to be 304 status code.
307 - Temporary Redirect
Web Server responds with a 307 status code when the user requests for a resource that is temporarily residing under a different URL. Now since the redirection may vary time to time, it is advisable that the user should continue to use the same URL for his future requests. Since most users don't really understand this error status code the status page should display short hypertext note with a hyper link to the new URI.
400 - Bad Request
Web server displays this error code when it is not able to understand the user's request due to incorrect URL syntax
401 - Unauthorized
The web server responds with this code status when the request requires user authentication before getting access of the requested resource. The user is expected to include a www-authenticate header field containing a challenge applicable to the requested resource. But if the server respondes with 401 status code even when the user has included authorization credentials, then 401 code indicates that the authorization has been refused for the requested credentials.
402 - Payment Required
The webserver responds with this status code when the code has been reserved for future use.
403 - Forbidden
The server responds with the 403 status code when the server understood the request but refuses to fulfill it. It says that no authorization is required and the request should not be repeated at all. If the request method was not head and the server wants to tell every one that why the user request couldnt be fulfilled, it displays the possible reasons on the entity. But if the server doesnt intends to inform the reason to client it just displays the status code 404.
404 - Not Found
The browser displays this error when the server fails to locate the requested URL.l
408 - Request Timed Out
The server responds with this status code when the user doesn't responds to the responds within the specified time when the server was ready to wait. The client can well request for the resource at any later time.
410 - Gone
The server responds with 410 status code when the resource requested by the user is no longer present at the server and neither there is any redirect address available. This condition is mostly considered to be permanent. Ideally if the server is not aware whether if the condition is permanent, status 404 (not found) should be displayed instead.
500 - Internal Server Error
The server responds with status 500 code when it encounters an unexpected condition which has prevented the server from performing the request made by the user.
501 - Not Implemented
Server responds with 501 status code when it doesn't support the functionality required to perform the request made by the user.
A
A/B Testing
Talking about A/B testing in the most simple way is that it is a testing method in which visitor is randomly showed two versions of a page ie. A & B where A is the original design and B is the version containing a changed design to determine that which of the two drives the desired result more efficiently. Similarly in 50/50 split test, we are flipping a coin to determine which page to display. A/B testing usually applies to test clicked on ad copy, landing page, headlines, designs etc.
Accessibility
Accessibility in context to SEO is the practice of making a website easily accessible by search engines whose bots are blind to images, flash etc.
ACSS ( Aural Cascading Style Sheets)
Aural cascading style sheet allows to write CSS for your webpage to define how will it sound to users who are using audio browsers, specially who are physically challenged.
ACH - Automated Clearing House Network
ACH is a secured private network that connects bank to each other to facilitate services like electronic payment in a very secured environment.
AdPimp
Overdoing the number of ads on a webpage is called Adpimp. Its not a good practise as the visitors dont appreciate the distraction created by these ads while they are looking for useful content.
AdSense
Google adsense is a very unique and effective way of earning ad revenue for many small and big websites publishers by placing relevant google ads. The best part of the google adsense is that the ads are always related to the nature of the website.
AdSense Link Clicking Bots :
Adsense ad clicking bots can be considered as bad bots who run automatically while using hacked or random IP addresses to click on google AdSense advertisements on a particular website and thus generating google AdSense revenue for that website owner.
AdWords
Adwords is a cost per click process of Internet Advertising.
AERT - Techniques for Accessibility and Evaluation and Repair Tools
Agent Name
Agent name is the name of the search engine crawler or spider that is currently visiting a webpage.
Algorithm
Algorithms are the programing rules of Search engines which determine how they index the website content and display the content in the SERP.
Alt Tag
Alt tag is the alternate text associated with a graphic that gets displayed when a user hovers the mouse over that graphic. Alt tags not only helps a website to fetch traffic from image searches but also makes the website accessible by vision impaired people as their browser reads the text in the graphic for them.
Alt Text
Alt text refers to the text that appears when a user holds his mouse over a text link or any other graphical link. It is considered a very useful SEO tool as an alt text allows search engine bots to evaluate the relevancy of a link or an image to decide the PR of a website. The other reason why it is so important is that it allows the browsers with text reading capability to actually read out the alt text for the physically challenged users to explain them what the image or link is all about.
Alta Vista
Before the entry of Google, Alta vista was considered to be the number one search engine now has been acquired by yahoo!.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the actual text of the link that is usually underlined indicating the user that the text is hyper linking some where. Google gives a special importance to the key words in the text of the anchor text in terms of its relevance to the page being linked to.
Anchor Text Optimization
Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. Anchor text optimization can be deployed throughout your site to enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content.
AOL
AOL stands for America On Line, A corporate online service provider and Internet service provider. The AOL search engine uses google as a part of its search results.
Article / Content Syndication
Article syndication understands the power of compelling, relevant content and uses information in the form of write-ups and articles to link your online business with other relevant websites, consequently generating focused traffic. Apart from generating focused traffic, content syndication also helps viewers recognize you as a quality information provider, hence, enhancing your brand perception.
Applets
Applet is a program application (like web browser) that runs in context with another program.
API
API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is a set of routines and protocols for developing software applications. API determines how a particular service is called through the application.
ASCII
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Exchange which converts text into a language that is understandable by computers.
ASP
ASP stands for Active Sever Pages, that is a proprietary programming language invented by Microsoft for building dynamic websites
Automated Submitting
Automated Submitting is a process of submitting a website to various search engines by using automated softwares such as Web position Gold or Application Service Provider(ASP) like 'Microsoft B-Central's' 'Submit it' service. Search Engines like Alta Vista are currently following this practice by completely automating their website submission process.
B
Back Links
Back links are the links pointing to a different different webpage.
Banned/Delisting
A website is said to be banned when a search engine blocks a website from appearing in its search results.
Banner Advertising
A banner ad is a form of online advertising in which an advertisement is embedded into a web page and linked to the web site of the advertiser. The users who see these ads on websites click on them and reach to the advertiser’s website. The banner can be an image, JavaScript program or a multimedia object.
Banner Blindness
Banner Advertisement refers to the tendency of website visitors to overlook any information that is offered to them in form of banner ads even if its useful for them they consider it nothing more than an ad by a company to sell its products of services. To avoid this happening to your banner always try to make your banner as colorful, crisp and animated as possible.
Baseline Matrices
Time lagged calculations which serve as a basis for making comparisons of the past performance of a website to its current performance. It can also be taken as setting a goal and then evaluating whether the current trend show a likelihood of achievement of the goal.
Bid Management Tool
Bid Management tool is an application or a service provider that manages bids on pay-per-click search
engines such as Yahoo Search Marketing/Overture, Google Adwords, etc
Bidding
Bidding is a process of placing a bid price that an advertiser is willing to pay on a Search Engine's like Google. Google than provides the top spot to the highest bidder for that particular key word.
Black List
Black listed websites are the websites that are delisted from search engine being found culprit of spamming and other unethical internet practices
Black Hat SEO
The SEO specialists who use unethical Internet practices to optimize their website to get high rankings in SER's.
Blog
Blogs are mini websites that provide news on a particular subject such as science, politics, local news, products, services etc posted by individuals as they see it. Blogs normally comprise of text, images, web pages, links to other blogs and other media related to its content. It also empowers its readers to leave their comments in a very interactive format which is an important feature of many blogs as it serves as a means to perceive an unbiased public opinion on a topic, products or services.
Blog Comment Spam
Blog Comment spam is another type of Spamdexing in which a spammers leave a link to their own website in the form of a visitor comment. With such incoming links, the PR of the spammer's website jumps artificially.
Blogola
The new trend of offering free goodies to bloggers in return of a sympathetic comments and reviews.
BAP - Blog And Ping
BAP is a method used to get the content of a blog quickly indexed on major search engines.
Blook
This is way of presenting content in a serialized manner in form of online book on blog sites. New chapters are posted one by one as blog posts.
Book Mark
Book mark is an internet browser option that enables a user to tag or book mark his favorite page. There are many website too like del.icio.us (a yahoo owner bookmark site), who are providing this service where a user can bookmark and share his favorite page with his friends. Many websites refer to these websites to evaluate the page ranking of the bookmarked site. More the bookmarks, better the content is considered and higher goes the PR.
Bot
We use bot as a short form of robot. Also known as Search Engine Spiders.
Bread Crumb Navigation
Bread Crumb Navigation is a navigation format allows a visitor to understand the hierarchy of the website and all the pages he passed through to reach the page he is currently viewing. Foreg.
Home > SEM > RFP
Bridge Page
A bridge page or a doorway page is a website that is optimized for specific keywords to pull maximum traffic from the search engines to divert it to some other website.
Bumping / Necroing
It is a technique of posting replies to a forum just to bring it to the top of the list.
C
Cache
Cache is a local hard drive where the browser stores recently and frequently opened webpages to facilitate a quicker access of the pages to the user. So it is because of Cache, why the previous page opens so quickly when we press the back button on our browser because the browser doesn't have to download it from the internet every time; it just fetches it from the Computer's own cache.
Google cache facilitates its user to view the snapshot of a website if the original page is unavailable that was taken by the google crawlers when they last crawled that website.
Cookie
Cookie refers to the information that a website stores on the visitor's computer.
Catablog
Catablog is a blog that explains a product or services available on some e-commerce website.
CAPTCHA
Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart
Collabulary
Collabulary is collabrative and vocabulary synergized. Content users define tags that is inturn attributed to the tag.
Click Arbitrage
Click Arbitrage is a process when you purchase PPC ads in a hope that the traffic will click on these ads and generate revenue for your website..
Click Distance
Click distance refers to the number of clicks it takes for a user to reach to a webpage, file or a document.
Click Flipping
Click flipping refers to technique of making money out of the clicking done by a user as he visits a website. Cost Per Action is the most common form of click flipping.
Click Print
Click print is a measurement of how much average time a visitor spends and the number of pages viewed by him on a website.
Clustering
Clustering is a process of a limiting a website from appearing on SER more then specified number of times.
Cloaking
Cloaking a practice done by black hat SEO's to display key word stuffed pages to Search Engines and a different page to actual users.
Cold Fusion
Cold fusion is a scripting language introduced by Adobe which is used by webdesigning professionals for database interfacing, create general softwares and develop online applications.
Cold Fusion Markup Language(CFML) is used for scripting in Cold Fusion.
Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate refers to the number of users who perform a desired action on a website is called conversion rate. It can be a signing up a newsletter, user making a purchase etc.
Content Syndication
Content syndication understands the power of compelling, relevant content and uses information in the form of write-ups and articles to link your online business with other relevant websites, consequently generating focused traffic. Apart from generating focused traffic, content syndication also helps viewers recognize you as a quality information provider, hence, enhancing your brand perception.
Conversion Optimization
This is an optimization technique specific to e-commerce websites that converts your website into a selling tool by increasing the conversion rate. The user has to go through a logical sales cycle every time every time he visits the website.
Cost Per Action(CPA)
CPA is a form of affiliate marketing in which an advertiser pays only if the user performs a specified action on a website. The action may be any thing - from user buying a product, filling up a form or clicking on a link.
Cost Per Click(CPC)
CPC is an Adsense Ad format in which the advertiser is charged only when a user clicks on an ad.
Cost Per Thousand(CPM)
CPM is a measurement unit in the advertising industry. In refrence to Internet Marketing, it is a Google Adsense format which refers to how much will it cost for an advertiser to show his ad to 1000 people. In CPM, the advertiser specifies the type of websites on which he wants his ad to be displayed. A CPM ad can be a better revenue fetcher than a CPC ad because if an advertiser specifically wants to target your the traffic on your website, he will have to bid high enough to beat the already existing CPC ads on your page.
Counter
Counter is a field on a website which tells the visitor that how many times the website has been visited before. Please keep in mind that counter signifies number of visits and not the number of visitors. However a better way to keep track on website visits is maintaining log files.
Crawls Depth
Crawl depth refers to how deep a bot crawls and index a website.
Crawler
See bot
Cross Linking
Cross linking is when a webiste owner has a multiple websites linking to each other.
Cybrarian
Cyberian is a person who explores, collects and then manage content on world wide web.
CSS - Cascading Style Sheet
CSS is used to define look, feel and navigation aspect of your website.
Custom Error Page
When ever server fails to fulfill the user requestes the webserver displays an error page to inform the user what possibly has gone wrong. However these default error pages gererated by the webserver are not particularly user friendly. Therefore website owners can custom design there error page to give the user a more clear picture about the error. Not Found error is one of the most common error page.
Cybersquatting
Cybersquatting is a malpractice done by some people who use a domain name and website that is resembling to some one else's website with a bad intent to capitalize on his brand name and market value. Cybersquatter then offers the website for sale to the original website owner on an inflated price.
D
Dangling Link
Dangling links refers to the links that point to a page with no further out going links.
Database-Driven / Dynamic webpages
Database driven webpages also known as dynamic webpages or or server side programing are the action that allow webpages to connect to the database where execution is actually happening on the server. This is unlike javascript that runs on the browser.
Database-Generated
Data-base generated webpages are the pages that retrieve data from an attached database, each time a page is loaded. The website changes automatically as we change the database.
DHTML
DHTML stands for dynamic HTML and it is a fusion of HTML with Client side scripting language such as javascript, CSS (a language that defines presentation of the content) and DOM (Document Object Model). So keeping it simple, DHTML is a combination for scripting languages to create a webpage whose content changes with time, occurrence, user etc.
Dead Links:
A link is said to be a dead link if the page linking to either no longer exists, the page has been moved to a different location or even if the server is down. Dead links normally lead to a 404 error page.
Deep Link
Deep link refers to a link that points to the most internal page within a website.
Delisting
Search engines remove the websites from their index due to reasons like spamming, copied content etc.This is called Delisting.
Diggbait
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Directory
Directory is an online directory website used to categorize other websites into industry and relevance depending on user submissions. Yahoo is a good example of commercial directory however zeal is a pure non commercial directory.
DdoS Distributed Denial of Service (DdoS Attack)
Ddos attack is one in which multiple requests are sent to a server untill it breaks down to eventually make it unavailable for its intended users.
DMOZ
DMOZ is a large human made editable directory made and maintained by volunteers. Many websites use it as a content reference for their website.
DNS - Domain Name System
DNS is a system that translates Domain name into IP address which are inturn used to identify each host individually.
Dynamic Site
Dynamic website is website which is capable of changing itself with change in database.
E
Error Page
Please refer to Custom error page.
External Link
External links are nothing but links on your website that link to the other website.
E-Commerce
Ecommerce is nothing but the process of performing business and other financial transacrions over internet.
F
Free For All Links (FFA)
These are the websites where any one can post links to their website. Now the problem here is that most people are using automation tools like bulk submitters resulting that no ones link gets displayed for more then an hour. Therefore it is recommended that one must avoid these links as the only good they can do to your website is to harvest your mail box to bulk spams.
Findability
Findability is a term used to describe the easiness for a user to locate your website on a search engine page.
Flash
Flash is an application developed by Macromedia that facilitates the web designers to insert interactive multimedia into webpages to make the website more lively in form of flash introductions, animated navigations and even games. Too much use of flash is considered a threat to the website's PR as the search engine crawlers cannot understand the content embedded in flash.
Flog
Flog is the name given to the blogs which are fake in nature and have been made by public relation firms, media houses and professional political operatives solely to spread their particular point of view among masses.
Folksonomy
Folsonomy or collabrative tagging or social tagging is a technique that facilitates bookmarking where users tag their favourite web content to a central place where other users can also access it and create its metadata. del.icio.us and flickr are social tagging websites that work on the principle of folksonomy.
Forums
A Forum is a place where any one can exchange information on a particular topic in the form of threads. The information threads posted by a users are visible to one other. And a user can even post a reply to the information which is again taken as a part of that thread. SEO experts and Webmasters use forums as an integral part of their SEO strategy.
Frames
Frame is a HTML technique that facilitates designers to display two or more different webpages within a single browser window. Frames are not considered good from the SEO perspective as search engine bots find it quite problematic to crawl through the pages built with frames and as a result these pages don't get indexed to these search engines properly.
Frameset
A website that is composed of multiple frames.
Fresh
Google considers the websites to be 'fresh' who maintain a frequently changing homepage. When a bot find that there are frequent changes on the homepage it starts visiting and reindexing it on a daily basis.
Fresh Bot
Fresh bot can be considered as a brother of Google bot but it crawls only high rank websites very frequently.
Fresh Crawl
Fresh crawl is when bot visits your website more frequently i.e. almost daily for capturing updates as the bot knows that there are frequent updations on your website every now and then.
FTP - File Transfreer Protocol
FTP is a standard protocol which is used to transfer files between computer on a network. It is also used in file exchange between system accounts or even to access software archives on the internet.
G
GIF - Graphical Interchangeable Format
GIF graphics the oldest and the most website friendly graphical format supported by almost all web browsers and easily compressable but it doesnt supports more than 256 colors.
Geo Targeting
Geo targeting is a feature of Google Adwords that enables you to target your PPC campaign to users in specific countr, states etc. and ads are served according to the native language preferance of the user.
Google AdSense
Google Adsense is a contextual advertisement system by google in which google places relevant ads on websites, based on their content and if a user clicks on it, the ad revenue is shared by the google and website owner which comes from the party who has placed that ad.
Google Analytics
Google is a free tool made for webmasters to monitor their multiple websites for daily traffic and performance. It can be used to analyze the daily website activities like visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate etc.
Google Bowling
Google bowling is a strategy of black hat SEO experts targeted to knock out the other competitor websites our of the SERP's by pointing many doubtable links from bad websites to the victim website unless it is delisted by the Search Engine.
Google Everflux
Google Everflux is a strange situation in which the pages appear and then suddenly disappear from the Google Result Page Rankings. This usually happens to newly submitted webpages.
O f there is one thing Search Engine Marketers and website owners fear - it is a major algorithm update, especially by Google. Well, much as we may like it not to happen, its here. Google has recently done a major algorithm update, nick named "Jagger" update series.
Google Bot
Google bot is the name of crawlers of Google's search engine crawlers.
Google bombing / washing
Google bombing is an internet slang term used to describe any attempt to influence the ranking of a given website on Google SERP.
Google Guy
Google guy is a Google representative or employee who provides information to webmasters about the recent changes on google.
H
Header / Headings
Headers are standard HTML tags foreg. <h1> <h2> . Heading tags are an effective SEO tool as most Search Engine crawlers give importance to text within these tags. So it is considered good practice to include headings in your website.
Header tag
Header tag is a standard HTML tag denoted by <head> & <head/>. Now the content within these tag is used to identify page title, external file loads & meta tags.
Hidden Text / Keywords
It is an SEO Spam tactic by which black hat SEO's stuff the website with keywords that are only readable by the search engine bots and not by human eyes. They do it either by writing key words with font color that is same as the back ground color or by using CSS-P. But most of the bots can easily detect hidden text on your website and take evasive action against it.
Hits
Page hit is the number of item retrievals from a webserver. It doesn't gives an actual idea about traffic.
Hoax Marketing
Hoax Marketing is technique of viral marketing in which the website owner shoots a false video and posts it to his website to attract more traffic. Some people use hoaxes to scare people to buy their products and services but this method of marketing is considered unethical and can back fire in many cases.
Home Page
Home page refers to the main page of a website ie. The index page that opens when you enter the url name of a website on your browser.
Hotbot
Hotbot is one of the largest search engine on www.
htaccess .htac
htaccess is a default name of the directory that contains the information of who can or who cannot access a file on internet or intranet.
HTM
htm is nothing but a short form of HTML.
HTML
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language which is the most fundamental language used to make websites.
HTTP
HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is nothing but rules for exchanging files on world wide web.
HTTPS
HTTPS stands for HTTP over Secured Socket Layer - SSL that is a secured version of FTTP that enables secured transmission of webpages over internet.
Hyperlinks
Hyper link is link from one page to the other.
I
ICANN
ICANN stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is a non profit organization that takes care of the unique website url identifiers.
ICRA - Internet Content Rating Association
ICRA is another non profit organization which was founded to protect minor from potentially harmful content over internet.
Impression
Impression refers to the number of times an advertisement is shown to traffic by search engines.
Inbound Links
Inbound links are the links from other websites that are pointing towards your website. Inbound links are mostly a formation of link exchange with other websites. Quality inbound links are very important to improve rankings of a website.
Inlinks / Inbound links / Backlinks
These are number of links pointing to your own website.
Invisible Web
Also known as Deep web. There are the webpages that search engines either fail to index or they don't do it intently and hence depriving users from the web page.
Interstitials
Interstitials is a rich form of pop under advertisement in which an ad created in animated gif or flash gets loaded in the background of the actual page that user is viewing. User normally sees the interstitial only when he quits that page.
IPW - Inverted Pyramid Writing
It is a writing technique in which the first paragraph gives a precise idea about all the content present on the webpage
IP Address
IP address is a unique address given to a computer to identify it over Internet.
IP Spoofing
IP spoofing is technique of hiding your original IP address and then making it appear to be different one.
J
JPEG
JPEG an image compression format that decreases the size of an image on the cost of quality of the image.
Junk Pages
Junk Pages are meaningless key word stuffed web pages that are created only for adsense revenue.
JSP
JSP stands for Java Server Pages which is nothing but HTML with Java code units - (file.jsp).
K
Keyword
Keyword is a word that represents the whole class of the information, product or services that the user intends to search on the search engine.
Keyword Density
keyword density is the share ratio of keywords among the total words on a web page.
Keyword Effectiveness Index
It is just a measure of how effective a key word is for your website ranking.
Keyword Popularity
Check search term popularity.
Keyword Prominence
Keyword refers to the prominence of a keyword on a web page as in terms of position and density and also how close that key word is from the start of the webpage.
Keyword Stuffing/Spamming
Key word stuffing or spamming is a way of repeatably adding keywords or key phrases within the meta tags and the body text. But the bots are smart and can easily identify and penalize keyword spamming.
L
LAMP -
Its combination of - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python technologies.
Link Baiting
Link baiting is a process to get the visitors to link to your website through blogs, forums, social taggers etc.
Link Building
Link Farm
Link farm is a website which has unlimited number of links put together irrespective of industry relevance. Fetching links from link farms is just a waste of time as they can only get you quantity and not quality links.
Link
Link or hyperlink is the area on a text or a graphic clicking on which takes the user to the corresponding website. Links are the major means of navigation for Internet users.
Link Popularity
Link popularity in simple terms is how many websites are linking to your website.It is the number and quality of the back links to your website. Link Popularity is a major factor for search engines to rank your website.
Link Partner
Link Partners refers to the industry relevant websites who are exchanging links with your website. Most of the link partners are found to be reciprocally linked.
Link Text
Link text is the clickable area of text that navigates a user to a different website. Link text is also known as anchor text/link.
Linkerati
Linkeratis are the target people of link baiting websites.
Listings
Listings are the resultant list of websites shown by google from the search query entered by the user.
Log Files
Log files are the files generated and updated by the server. Log files contain all the daily analysis about the website and the overall behavior of the user on your website. You also get to know how much traffic is coming from which search engine and what key words did the user entered to arrive to your website which in turn helps the SEO in targeting those specific keywords only.
M
Made For Adsense
These are poor websites that are made from copied content specifically with Google Adsense keywords to attract traffic artificially.
Made for Digg
Made for digg are the websites that are exclusively designed to fetch traffic from digg.com by stuffing the entire website with similar funny images and posts.
Mashups
Mashups is nothing but a process of synergism of two or more sources.
Meta Description Tag / Meta data
A meta description tag contains the description of content that is there on the page.
Meta Jacking
Meta Jacking is a technique of copying the contents from some other website's HTML meta tags with high PR's in a hope of garness high PR for their own website too.
Meta Keywords
Meta Keyword tags facilitates us to put additional text which is crafted just to feed the search engines crawlers and is not visible to the actual visitor otherwise.
Meta Search
In a meta search a search query is sent to multiple search engines at the same time and the result is combination of all those search engine minus duplications.
Meta Tag Masking
Meta tag is a traditional trick to hide the meta tags from the Internet browsers by using CGI scripts and only allowing the bots to actually read those meta tags.
Micro Formats
Micro formats are application formats which are designed primarily from a human perspective and machine format is considered secondary while designing.
Mirror Sites
Mirror Sites are the multiple copies of the same website on different servers ie. Website duplication. Bots can easily catch mirror sites and penalize them for spamming.
Misspelling Optimization
Optimizing a website to target mistyped keywords by the users is called Misspelling optimization.
Mobisode
Mobisodes are the TV movie clips that are shot specifically for mobile hand sets.
MoBlog
Moblog is a part of new generation mobile blogging introduced by blogger.com that allows a user to create a new blog from his mobile.
Mod Rewrite
Though too complex to use but Mod rewrite is APACHE's module which is a powerful way to perform all types of url manipulations.
Mouse Over
Mouse over is a javascript element that results in some kind of change in a webpage item when mouse pointer passes over it.
MSN
Micro Soft Network. It is the third most popular search engine on world wide web.
Mowser
Short form from mobile browsers.
MySQL - Popular Open Source Database
My SQL is a multi threaded and multi user database management system.
N
Natural / Organic listings
The listing of a website on the algorithm based search engines is called natural listing. Paid inclusions help our website to get into natural listings, which we also call organic listing.
Narrow Casting
Narrow casting is a deviating trend of user's dependency for media content from professionally mass marketed sources like video stores to web based media content providers on internet.
Navigational Query
Navigational Query is a search engine query that returns only one satisfactory result.
Necroing
Necroing is a process of posting replies to old threads to bring them up on the forum listing.
Negative SEO
Niche Aggregators
Spam websites
NOFOLLOW
It is an attribute used to embed instruction for search engines to not to follow the particular link.
Non Disclosure Agreement
It is an agreement between two parties, normally the service provider and his client, to not to disclose the shared confidential information of either party to any third party.
Noframes Tag
Noframes tag is a special html tag meant specifically to help search engine crawlers to read and index the content inside frames as most search engines find it hard to index the content inside the frames otherwise.
O
Off-page SEO
Link building comes under off-page SEO when the website exchange links to improve their rankings on SERP's.
On-page SEO
Changes made to the structure of a website to make it more search engine friendly and hence to improve its SERP rankings is called On-page SEO factors.
Orphan Page
A web page is said to be an orphan page if it neither has a link to take the user back to its home page or its immediate back hierarchy nor does it has a link to take him to any other website.
Overture
Overture is a pay per click internet advertising program by yahoo.
Opt-in
A user is said to have opt-in if he has willingly subscribed to a newsletter or similar service on a website.
Organic Listing
See natural listings
Over Optimization Penality (OOP)
Delisting of a website from a search engine for using unethical SEO techniques that are against W3C standards is called over optimization penality. However there has been a constant debate about does OOP actually exists or not?
Open Directory Project
Open Directory project is mostly referred to DMOZ.
P
Page Title
Page title is an HTML tag that displays title of the content being displayed on the page at the top title line of the browser.
Page Jacking
Page jacking is unethical technique of copying or stealing content from a website to other mostly in the form of source code in a hope of getting the traffic from the source website to one's own.
Page Match
Its a page match when your website's ads are served on its related websites in a cost-per-click advertising campaign.
Page Rank
Page Rank is Google's measure of importance assigned to a web page on a scale of 1 to 10. You can check the Page Rank value of any page by downloading the Google Toolbar.
Page Rank Drain
This happens when a website has multiple inbound links but has no outbound links to pass its PR value to any other website.
Page Views
Page view is the number of requests from a web browser to a server. A page view might contain several page hits.
Paid Inclusion
Paid inclusion is a process of the paying search engines like Alta vista to get your website listed in their search engine listings.
Pay-for-inclusion(PFI)
PFI is a technique in which the website owner pays search engines for a sue placement in SERP's.
Pay-for-performance (PPF)
Pay-for-performance is a system in which the website owner pays only if a visitor on the website performs a desired action.
Pay-per-click(PPC)
PPC is an advertising model in which an advertiser pays only when user clicks on the advertiser's ad.
Pay-per-click Management
The process of making strategies regarding the placement, account setup,keyword research, Ad creation, Bid management, Landing page evaluation, A/B testing, Persistent monitoring to ensure the campaign gets the maximum ROI is called PPC management.
PDF
.pdf stands for Portable Document Format introduced by Adobe. Being a device and display independent format, it is a very handy format for document exchange on internet.
PERL - Practical Extraction & Report Language
Perl is an optimized interpreted language for the purpose of scanning and extracting arbitrary text files and generating reports on the fetched information.
PHP
PHP is a hyper text processor which is a scripting language that allows wed developers to create dynamic websites.
Podcatching
It is a process of subscribing to podcasts
Pop-under
Pop up window is less obstructive form of advertising window that opens up behind the browser; unlike pop up window that pops up right over the screen.
Pop-up
Pop up is a window containing content like advertisements which opens up right over the user screen when he performs a specific action on the page.
Portal
Portal is a term usually used to signify gateways of internet i.e the entry point of users to the world wide web. Yahoo, Netscape, google, AOL are few examples of web portals.
PPC Engine
PPC engine is a search engine that allows website owners to but their position in their SERPs based on the amount of money they are willing to pay per click on their link in the SERP list.
Pro-blogging
Pro-blogging stands for professional blogging when a person's income is fully dependent on blogging.
PSD
PSD is file format of file made in Adobe Photoshop(.psd).
Q
QA - Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance is a process of monitoring the website development process to make sure that the process is right ie. Are we doing it right? So QA is a preventive process.
QC - Quality Control
QC is a corrective process ie. QC maintains - Is the final product, what the client actually wanted? Its about testing a website to see if it meets the client's requirements.
Query
Refer Search Engine Query
R
Ranking
Ranking is a process in which the search engines list and sort websites according to specific algorithm so that the sites with the most relevant content appear on the top pages.
Reciprocal Linking
It is a type of linking in which two websites link to each other directly.
Redirects
301 error indicates to the user that the site has been permanently moved to a different location. It is actually the most ideal way of redirecting for most websites. Now if you are planning to move your entire website to a different location, its better if you first test it by moving a single file or folder to see how that single page ranks; and if it ranks well, you may well move the entire website. It may take a few days to a few months for 301 redirects to be picked up by search engines which depends on the bot crawl frequency on your website.
Referrer
Referrer is the website from which the user has actually arrived to your website by clicking on your link present on his page. Servers maintain a list of these referers. Now if the user has arrived from a search engine than the key words used by the users can be embedded in the referer url to evaluate the amount of traffic generated from each key phrase.
Refresh Tags
Meta Refresh Tags makes a webpage refresh after every specified period of time. It is used mainly in websites, where the content changes every minute for eg. in a score or share market website
Relevance
Relevance is the extent to which the content on a webpage relates to the key word that was entered by the user in the search engine to arrive to the page. In context to the link exchange relevance it is more about linking of the industry related websites.
Relevance Rank
It is process by which a search engine tries to rank a page according to the quality and type of websites that are linking to that page.
Request For Proposal - RFP
It is request send to a service provider to send the quotation explaing the service that he is offering and at what price ?
Result Page
The pages displayed by a search engine when a user enters a specific search query also known as SERP's.
Rich Internet Applications
Web applications with all the features of a stand alone application is called RIA. All that RIA needs is a browser to run.
Robot.txt
This is simple .txt file used by webmasters to control the crawling of search engine bots by allowing and disallowing the bots to index the pages according to your own wish. Thankfully all bots respect robot.txt file. However it is not mandatory to have a robots.txt file but is always recommended from SEO point of view.
ROC - Return On Customer
ROC is the monetary return from each customer.
ROI
ROI stands for Return on Investment that implies to the amount of money spend by a website owner in building and optimizing a website over the amount of revenue he generated out of the investment.
RSS feed- Rich Site Summary
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Rich Site Syndication is a technique by which users can actually keep track of their favorite websites for fresh blog posts, goodies, podcats etc by using automated softwares like aggregator. XML is a standard language used for creating these RSS data formats.
RTF- Rich Text Format (file.rtf)
RTF is a system by which any formatted text or graphical image is encoded to transfer it easily over network between applications like MS-word.
S
Scope Creep
Scope creep is a term used to describe a state when the scope of a project or required effort on a project increases due to change in client's requirements or technology advancements.
Scooter
Its the name of the Alta Vista's crawler.
SE
SE is a short form of search engines.
SEA
SEA stands for Self Extracting Archive (file.sea) that is a Macintosh File Compression Format
Search Engine Marketing(SEM)
SEM can be considered as a subset of Internet Marketing which includes tools like SEO, PPC campaigns, banner advertising to maximize the website's Return On Investment.
Search Engine Result Page(SERP)
SERP are the resultant pages that get lined up when a user enters his search query in a search engine.
Search Query/Term
Collection of words that a user enters to search his intended type of website is called search query or search term.
Search Term Popularity
Search term popularity is the measurement of how often do search engine users enter a given keyword to reach a website. It simply signifies the poplularity and competetiveness of a keyword.
SFO
SFO stands for Search Friendly Optimization.
Sitemap
Sitemap is the page of a website that contains all the actual links found on the website. A sitemap also works complementary for robots.txt file to guide the search engine bots what all pages on the website are available for crawling.
Slurp
It is the name of the Yahoo! search engine's spider / bot.
Snippet
Snippet is the smaller text below the title in search results after you enter a search query
Social Media Poisoning
Social Media Poisoning is a tactic used by black hat internet marketers who spreads a bad word about their competitor websites through spamming, articles, blogs, forums etc to not only destroy its market reputation but also degrade its page ranking in SERP's.
Spam
Spamming is a process of sending unsolicited mails or messages to the people in a lure of making them perform a specific action is called spamming. It abuses web applications by sending bulk messages. There are many types of spams, search engine spam, forum spams, blog spams, comment spams, mobile spams etc
Spam Cannon
Spam cannons are the websites that offer user sign ups in different ways to send them bulk mails in form of spams is called spam cannon.
Spamdexing / Spaming / Spoofing
Spamdexing is a technique to fool search engine bots that involves spamming practice of including information in a webpage that cause the search engines to rank the website higher on their SERP's but the content is irrelevant to the actual users.
Spamming
Refer Spam
Spamouflage
Spamouflage is process of making cosmetic changes to Search Engine Spamming to make it look legal to search engines.
Spider
Spider is an automated program that crawls over world wide web and analyzes the websites in its way and indexes them according to its search engine specific standards and algorithms.
Spidered
As soon as a search engine spider indexes a website it is said to be Spidered.
Spiderbaiting
Spiderbaiting is a process of making search engine bots to locate and index your website.
Spider Trap
The term spider trap refers to the websites on arriving on which, the search engine spiders get trapped in an infinite number of loops of code as the website code is not passing the input expected by the spider program. Some spider traps are intentional ones designed specifically to crash poorly coded crawlers and some spider traps are unintentional ones too.
Splash Page
Splash page is the actual search page of a search engine from which a user is arriving to the website.
Supplemental Index
Google supplemental index can be taken as a secondary index of google. Google retrieves the websites in the supplemental index only when it has no website matching the key word entered by the user in its primary index.
SWF - Shock Wave Flash (file.swf)
SWF file format refers to a vector based graphic format that is one of the versions of the Macromedia Flash Player launched in year 1997,
Standards Compliant
Standards compliant refers to the sites, bots or web browsers that operate in accordance to the set standards and protocols of W3C.
Static
A static webpage is page which doesn't changes untill the script of the page is altered.
Stickiness
Stickiness is the ability of a website in terms of its design and user friendliness to make a visitor stay on it and at least know what it is all about before quiting.
Stemming
Stemming is a method used by search engines, according to which it returns results by considering just the root of a word. Foreg if a
Steaming Media
Streaming media is the transmission of audio or visual file over a network to enable a user to start operating or playing(if it is a game) even before the entire file gets downloaded to the computer's virtual memory.
Syntax
The format of code used while building a website is called syntax.
Stop Words
Stop words are the most frequently used words (like - a, for, that, are) that the search engines tend to ignore so as to filter the search process to return the most precise websites relating to the search query.
Strategic Linking
Strategic linking is a process of customizing a link building campaign to exchange links with websites to get the highest ranking on the SERP's.
Submission Service / Registration
Submission service facilitates you to submit your website to search engines either manually or automatically. However there is no need for doing it if your website is properly optimized.
T
Tag Soup
Tag soup is an HTML code written without keeping rules and HTML syntax in mind.
Thin Affiliates
Thin affiliates are the featureless websites that are build and optimized to garner maximum internet traffic; with a sole intention to divert the generated traffic to affiliate merchant websites for profit making without actually contributing to anything to world wide web.
Top Level Domain (TLD)
Top Level Domain are the last letters domain of the second dot in a website rel address i.e. www.yahoo.TLD. TLD's are of generally of two types - Country specific domain foreg. .ca, .in, .au that tells about the country origin of the website etc and generic top level domains (foreg. .com, .org, .mil, .gov ) that explain the genre of the website, that weather it belongs to government, organization, military or a commercial one.
Title Tag
The Title Tag is an HTML code that shows the words that appear in the Title bar at the top of your web browser. These words do not appear anywhere else on your web page.
Traffic
As the name it self suggests, traffic is the number of visitors on a website in a specified period of time.
Trusted Feed
Trusted feed is a type of free inclusion which uses bulk XML feed to get the website content directly indexed by the search engine. It can later be optimized as required for better rankings and hence better traffic.
Typosquatting / URL hijacking
Typosquatting is a genre of cybersquatting, that relies on the typing mistakes done by a user while entering the url name of a website. He is served with a similar looking website which can even be house of viruses and trojans.
Trust Rank
Trust rank is a technique of analyzing technique that separates all the inbound links of a website into relevant ones and spams.
U
Unique Visitors
Unique visitor is the measurement of traffic on a website counting each visitor only once in specified duration of time. It gives information to the website owner about the reach of the website and also the actul number of users and not visits.
Universal Search
Universal Search System is a searching method by google under which it mixes the listings from google news search, video search, image search etc. with the lisitings it gets from it search engine crawlers resulting in a complete universal search.
URL
URL stands for uniform resource locator which refers to the address of a website or a resource on internet.
User Agent
User agent refers to any program, bots or web browsers that crawls into the web and at the same time requests and responds to the server. A search engine robot is an exmaple of a user agent.
User Session
User session is the amount of time a user with a particular IP address spends on a website. The number of user session is almost equal to amount of traffic on a website.
USP
USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition that refers to all the unique selling propositions of a product or service that gives it a cutting edge over others.
V
Visit
Each time a user arrives to a website directly or through a link is called a visit.
VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocol
VOIP is a system that breaks our voice into digital signal and passes it through the internet and then again converts it back into voice at the other end so that you can talk to a person with a regular phone.
W
Web browser
Web browser is the software that converts the HTML into formated webpages and allows a user to browse world wide web
Webneck
Webneck is a special slang name given to the people who are addicted to internet, most of their social circle comprises of chat friends only.
Web Saturation
Web saturation gives us an idea about how many pages of a website have been indexed by a search engine.
White Hat SEO
White hat seo refers to all the practices that are ethical in nature from the search engine's point of view.
White Paper
White paper refers to the documents that explain a solution to any given problem.
Who is Data
Who is data is a data collected from a website owner while registering his website such as name, address, telephone number etc.
WikiSoldiers
The term WikiSoldiers refers to the wikipedia soldiers who are fond of adding, editing and defending information on wikipedia.
WWW
www stands for world wide web. It is a system on web servers that supports HTML format documents in which a user has a navigation facility using hyper links.
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
W3C stands World Wide Web Consortium. W3C is an International body that comprises organization members, W3C employees, public representatives etc who work together to develop, implement and maintain standards & protocols to ensure fair internet practices and long term growth of world wide web.
X
XML
Extensible Markup Language. It is said to be extensible as it is flexible and it allows the user to define his own tags.
XAML : Extensible Application Markup Language (Microsoft Vista)
Y
Yahoo is one of the most popular web portals and a number 2 search engine for sure, Google ofcourse being the number one.
Z
Zeitgeist - Google Zeitgeist
This is a service provided by google that enables users to understand the trend of what people are searching on google.
