SEO Glossary

SEO Glossary for Vacation Rental Owners

written in plain English

AdWords is an advertising product from Google. Adwords are mainly meant for Pay Per Click Advertising and Specific Website Targeted Advertising in terms of Text Ads and Banner Ads. It is one of the high revenue earning products for Google. AdWords are displayed on areas where customers of Google see it more prominently and will give them an assurance that, the ads come from Google and are reliable and trustworthy.

Adsense is another advertising program run by Google.  Web site owners can join in this program to enable text and image advertisements on their websites.  These ads are managed by Google and generate a revenue for website owners who display it in their Website on a Pay Per Click basis.

Algorithm is a search engine ranking program, which runs on a unique combination of hardware and software and scripts. It is mainly used for to develop the Page Rank of the websites. In general Algorithm means a distinct list of defined instructions and process chart used to accomplish a certain task.

Automated Submissions is a terminology used to denote a task in which advertisements or posts are submitted to directories or blogs by means of an automated software tool. If you provide the content of the ad and the destination where it has to be posted, the software or tool can automate the task and can post the same content to different destinations automatically on a single click.

Bid for Clickis an advertisement Program, under which advertisements will be posted under the keywords you mention and when a visitor clicks on that particular key word, he or she will be redirected to your website.

Code in general means the source code or language which is used to write the website. Some codes are HTML, ASP, Java Script, and PHP. It is a colloquial form used to denote the programming language in which the website is written.

Click popularityis a measuring method to determine how often a particular link is clicked which is displayed for public to click. Through that you can determine how many times your site has been clicked.

Cloaking is the act of creating a specific page for the search engine spiders to crawl and a different page for visitors to view. These are termed as Black Hat methods or spamming which will result in the website getting black listed if found guilty. By cloaking a website can be crawled by a search engine spider efficiently, without having real visitors or
traffic to website.

Comment Tag is a tag used in HTML that has comments or contents which will not display in the browser. Generally they are used to mention the meaning of the code used or to indicate few things which make reading the source code easier for common man. They are written in between <! And !> and will not display in the resulting page.

Dead link is an URL to a particular page or website which does not lead to that particular page or website it is meant for. It may be due to problems with server, or the page or website would have been moved or deleted from that particular location which it is meant for.

Domain or Domain Name is the thing that comes after the at sign (@) in an email address, like aol.com or arc.nasa.gov. The domain names have different words, separated by periods that indicate different levels of organization.  In General a Domain name is a unique name which identifies a particular website or a web page assigned to it.

Directory is a repository of websites sorted or arranged in various categories and groups. A directory is built from submissions made by webmasters. The websites are grouped under their respective categories and listed hierarchically accordingly to period of submissions.

Doorway Pages are web pages that are generally created for spamming purposes. Its main aim is to insert particular keywords or search phrases in the pages with the purpose of sending the visitor to a different page unknowingly. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, or zebra pages.

Dynamic htmlor DHTML is a collection of technologies used together to create animated web pages by using combined techniques from HTML and Client Side Scripting Languages like Java Script and a presentation language like CSS.

FFA Site or Free for All Link Page is a web page created with a hidden idea to improve the Search Engine ranking of a particular Website.  Webmasters typically will use software to place a link to their site on hundreds of FFA sites hoping that the resulting incoming links will increase the ranking of their site in search engines. But there is a higher risk of spamming involved in it.

Frames is a HTML element which is used to separate the web page into different parts typically the links will be on a frame and when you click on them the navigation will be seen on a separate frame with the frame containing the links remaining static. Generally use of Frames in website results in poor search engine rankings.

Hand Submissions is antonym to Automated Submission. Instead of making the submission or post to directories automatically, Hand submission is a process of doing the same manually by using the correct titles and descriptions for submitting to search engines and
directories. Here the error chance is low and the efficiency and accuracy levels are very high.

Hidden text are those text which are visible to only search engine spiders but not to the viewers of the web page. It is a spamming method generally used to stuff more keywords so that spiders crawl the site easily. Generally it is done by writing the text with the same color of the background, so that it is not visible evidently. Search Engines will black list
the website if found guilty for using hidden text in their web pages.

Hit means the single request which is given by the visitor of the webpage to display the text or graphic of the website which is viewed by him or her. In General a hit in Search Engine point of view is no of times a unique person views a webpage.

Home page is the first page or the welcome page of a website. It is the page which is displayed immediately when you type the websites URL in the browser most of the times.

HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language is the Markup language used predominantly for creating web pages. It basically consists of Mark up tags. The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page.

A Hyperlink is a link or a navigation element in a document or page to another document or section or a page, which brings up the requested thing to the user when the navigation element or the link is selected by the user.  Hyperlinks may be used in almost any electronic media.

Impression: A single display of an online advertisement.

Inbound links are hyperlinks which direct a person from one web page to another web page. If you arrive at any particular website by clicking a link on some other website, then they are known as Inbound Link to that particular website where you have arrived.

Informational Pageis a webpage which has useful information and content filled in them by means of search phrases and keywords. It differs entirely from a door way page. Door Way pages are mainly aimed for search engine spiders where as Informational page is useful for human visitors.

Invisible text: See Hidden Text.

IP delivery or IP-based delivery can be considered a more benign variation of cloaking, where different content is served based upon the requester’s IP address. With cloaking, search engines and people never see the other’s pages, whereas, with other uses of IP delivery, both search engines and people can see the same pages.

Keyword or Search Phrase are the words used by people to search the required websites while searching in search engines.

Keywords is one of the attributes of the meta tag in HTML. The “keywords” attribute lists key words and phrases that are relevant to the dataset. Its use is highly
recommended. The values in the list may be taken from a controlled list of keywords (e.g., the AGU Index list or the GCMD Science Keywords).

Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

Keyword phrase is nothing but Search Phrase or Keywords.  Look KEYWORD for more.

Keyword Frequency denotes the number of times a particular keyword is occurring in a given website or web page. Normally your keyword has to be repeated more than once in order for search engine spiders to crawl your website easily.

Keyword prominence denotes how prominently your keyword is displayed in the given webpage. To get higher search engine rankings your main keyword has to be displayed earlier and first on top of other words or search phrases that are normally used. You can make use of <h1> and <b> tags to display your main key word prominently.

Keyword Research involves the process of researching the best keyword or search phrase which is ideally suited for the given website or the website under observation.

Keyword Spamming is the act of using the same keywords more than the required times and also displaying them in hidden text and very tiny text size to increase the keyword popularity and keyword density to gain upper hand in search engine listing. It is a black hat method and if a search engine identifies it, the website will be black listed for ever.

Link popularity is the term to denote the measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the Internet. Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a web site among the top of the search results.

Link analysis is the analysis of the quality and relevance of the group of
links pointing to a given site. Link analysis is a subset of network analysis, exploring associations between objects found among the websites.

Link Farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. Link Farm is a form of spamming technique used to index the website in search engines. A link farm can be created manually though most of them are created using automated services or programs.

META refresh tag is a meta http-equiv tag which, when inserted into the header of an HTML document, will cause the visitor’s browser to load a new web page after a specified number of seconds have passed after the initial document has loaded, basically redirecting the visitor to the new page.

Meta Tag is an HTML element used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.

Mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site. Mirror sites are most commonly used to provide multiple sources of the same information, and are of particular value as a way of providing reliable access to large downloads. Mirroring of sites is a well known spam technique and will be black listed by search engines.

Open Directory Projector ODP or DMOZ is a multilingual open content directory of hyperlinks owned by Netscape which is managed by a community of volunteer editors. ODP uses a hierarchical data model to list the websites.

Organic Search is list of websites found while using a search engine in the unpaid section of results. Opposed to Pay Per Click search results.

Outbound Links are links to other websites originating from your website. It is contrast to Inbound Links.

Page Rank is a Link Analysis algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, which assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents or pages, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

PPC or Pay Per Click is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website.

PFI or Pay for Inclusion is a search engine marketing product where the search engine company charges fees related to inclusion of websites in their
search index. Most of the search engines offer this service except Google.

Reciprocal linkis a mutual link commonly between two websites to ensure mutual traffic is gained.  Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines.

Relevancy means how closely related is that particular page is to the search term requested or searched in the search engines.

Re-Index means how often a search engine updates its index. Google updates its index once a month.

Search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information which must be consulted, akin to other techniques for managing information overload.

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a form of Internet Marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine results pages (SERPs). SEM is also the practice of buying paid search listings with the goal of obtaining better free search listings.

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical
search engines.

Search engine positioning is the process of managing a page or site’s positioning in the search engines.

SERP stands for search engine results page which is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page.

Spam when comes to SEO is any of various methods to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Many search engines check for instances of spamdexing and will remove suspect pages from their indexes.

Spider or Bot is a tool or software used by search engines to index web pages for the relevant key words and search phrases. The result of this spider software will be the indexing of your site in search engines and eventually the web page or website crawled will get listed on the search engines.

Stop Word is the name given to words which are filtered out prior to, or after, processing of natural language data or text. Those words are left by the search engines from indexing. Examples are And, The and so on…

Traffic is the total amount of visitors who visit your website. It is a general term denoted to describe the actual number of humans or bots visiting your site.

Unique Visitori s a unit of traffic to a Web site, counting each visitor only once in the time frame of the report. Unique Visitors can be determined by means of monitoring the IP address of each visitor who visits the site. An IP address is unique one and a visitor from that IP will also be unique.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator is a web term used to denote the website name in general. Only specific and unique information or content can be found under a URL. Example for URL is http://www.vacationrentalseo.com.

Word Stemming is a process used by some of the search engines to display multiple results attached to the stem word of the search phrase. Say for example if a search is made for “web designing” the search engine may display results for “web design software”, “web design company” and so on.