SEO Glossary

SEO Glossary


Crawl-

What spiders do - they crawl the web by harvesting links leading from one web page to another in order to discover as many pages as they can.


Indexer-

Search engine Indexer processes the data collected by the spiders then stores it so that search engine query can be match against it for relevance.


Internal Links-

An Internal Link is a hypertext link that points to another page within the same website. Internal links can be used as a form of navigation for people, directing them to pages within the website. Links assist with creating good information architecture within the site.Search engines also use internal text links to crawl pages within a website. The way internal links are structured will impact the way in which search engine bots spider and subsequently index pages.


Link-

An image or text that, when clicked on, takes you to another page on the web.


Link building-

Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your
"link popularity" and/or "Page Rank."


Outbound links-

Links that direct "off-site" to another website.


Page Rank-

Google's measure of the relative value of a web page as compared to all of the other pages on the internet. Page Rank goes from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest.


Reciprocal linking-

The practice of trading links between websites.


Anchor Text-

Anchor text is the text for a hyperlink. For example: Search engine optimization
The phrase "Search engine optimization firm in Richmond, VA" would be the clickable link that would take you to http://seocrawls.blogspot.com/. The text other sites use to link to your site can make or break your site's success.


Header Tags-

Areas on a web page enclosed by heading tags. Example:

Page Heading

Heading tags vary in importance, with regard to SEO, depending on the number used in the headings or sub-headings (i.e. H1,2,3,4.). Title, heading tags and content should relate to the key phrase targeted by a web page.


‘Alt’ Attribute-

This is an attribute on the image tag that can be used in HTML (or XHTML) to specify the text that will be rendered if the browser cannot, or has chosen not to, display images. It should generally describe the image itself, rather than the meaning of the image, so that visually impaired readers who use screen readers can hear a description of the image itself.


Title attribute-

This is an attribute on the image tag that specifies the tool tip text that gets displayed when a user hovers their pointing device / mouse over an image on a web page.


Algorithm (algo)-

A program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given search query.Bounce rate The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.


FFA(Free For All)-

A page or site with many outgoing links to unrelated websites, containing little if any unique content. Link farms are only intended for spiders, and have little if any value to human users, and thus are ignored or penalized by the search engines.


Frames-

A web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within its own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to correctly navigate them. Additionally, most users dislike frames because it is almost like having two tiny monitors neither of which shows a full page of information at one time.


Google dance-

The change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.


Keyword spam-

(keyword stuffing)Inappropriately high keyword density.

Keyword stuffing-

(keyword spam) Inappropriately high keyword density.