Glossary of Seo

Algorithm is a programming rule that tells how search engine indexes contents.

Alt Attribute is the alternative text description for images.

Anchor Text is the text part of the link. This is used by search engines as an important ranking factor.

Back links are inlinks, inbound links, incoming links (whatever you want to call it) pointing to a web page.

Banned this happens when search engine blocks your site from appearing in its SERP.

Black Hat SEO this is the optimizations that are against the guidelines of search engine.

Blog is a website also known as "weblog". It is an online diary with regular entries of commentary, description, events, or other materials. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

Bot short for robot.

Cache is the copies of webpages stored on internet user's hard drive or in search engines database. This is why web pages loads quickly when they hit the back button in their web browsers.

Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different than the content presented to visitors.

Cookie is the information stored on searchers computer by a web server while accessing a particular webpage.

Directory is where websites are group into categories with description by group of human editors.

Forum or message board is a place where discussions on related topics takes place. Forums are also used by search engine optimizers and webmasters for information exchange.

Google is the world's number one search engine founded by Standford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998.

Google bot is a search bot used by Google to collect documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.

Gray Hat SEO is an search engine optimization using both Black Hat and White hat techniques.

Heading tag is an HTML tag often used to denote a section heading of a web page. SE pays attention to text marked with a heading tag.

Home Page is the main page of a website also known as front page or web server directory index. Usually the home page accumulates the most page rank score since other sites usually links to it the most.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is a computer language used to create pages and content on the web.

Hyperlink is a text or graphics that, when clicked on takes the user to another web page location.

Inbound links are links that point to your site from other web pages, also inbound links are important asset that can improve your site's PR (Page Rank).

Inlinks another synonym for back links.

JavaScripts a programming language most commonly used to add interactive features to webpages.

Key phrase a search phrase composed of keywords.

Keyword is a word that search engine user use to find relevant web pages. It is also the term that captures the essence of the topic of a document.

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or key phrase appears on a web page.

Keyword popularity is the number of occurrences of searches done by internet users of a given keyword during a period of time.

Keyword research is used in search engine optimization to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines.

Keyword stuffing is the act of placing excessive amounts of keywords into a page for the purpose of boosting page's ranking in SERP. Its use is strongly discouraged.

Keyword rich is when a given page is full of good keywords rather than bunch of meaningless words.

Link bait or Link baiting is one of the great ways to get backlinks. This is something on your site that naturally attracts backlinks from other web pages.

Link farm is a group of websites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group for the purpose of inflating link popularity or Page Rank. Participating in a link farm could get your site banned by search engines.

Link Popularity is the number and the quality of the inbound links pointing to a given web page.

Links are text or graphics an internet user clicked to get to another web page location.

Meta description is a hidden HTML code that describes the content of a web page in search results. It should be relatively short; around 12 to 20 words is suggested.

Meta keywords is a hidden HTML code pertaining to the web page content. It is now ignored by most of the search engines because search engine spammers have abused this tag.

Nav bar stands for navigation bar. It is a web site's navigation icons usually arranged in row down the left hand side or along the top and plays crucial roles in getting site's visitor to go deeper in the site and also directing the spiders to the most important content of the site.

Outbound links are links from your web pages to another web page in different domain.

Page Rank(PR) is an algorithm use by Google search engine to measure the authority or relevant importance of a web page.

Reciprocal links is the practice of trading links between web sites.

Search Engine is a web site that offers its visitors to search for information on the World Wide Web.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are strategies and tactics that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of getting high search placement in organic or natural listing of search engines.

Search Engine Result Page (SERP)is a page where results of search query are listed.

Spam is a manipulation technique that violates search engine guidelines.

Spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalog websites on the internet. It is also known as a bot or crawler.

Tagging is a non hierarchical keyword assigned to a piece of information such as bookmark that helps describe an item and allows it to be found by searching or browsing.

Title tag is one of the most important bit of text on a web page as far as search engine is concerned. It can be found at the very top of the browser window, above "back", "forward", "refresh".

Traffic is the number of times a website is viewed by a unique visitor within a specified time.

Unethical SEO is a search engine optimization tactics which violates search engine TOS, term of service that can put a site at risk of being penalized or banned.

Unique visitors is a term used to describe the total number of visitors to a site over a certain period of time.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the address of a web page in the World Wide Web.

White hat SEO is the ethical SEO techniques approved by the search engines.

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML is a simple, very flexible text format used to syndicate or format information using technologies such as RSS.

Yahoo is one of the top 3 search engines. It is also one of the oldest and most established directories on the web.

If you know other SEO terminologies that are not included in the list, you may leave it in the comment section and I will be glad to add it in.

Outbound links

  Outbound links are a drain on a site's total PageRank. They leak PageRank. To counter the drain, try to ensure that the links are reciprocated. Because of the PageRank of the pages at each end of an external link, and the number of links out from those pages, reciprocal links can gain or lose PageRank. You need to take care when choosing where to exchange links.

Inbound links

  Inbound links (links comes from outside) are one way links to increase a site's total PageRank. The other is to add more pages. Where the links come from doesn't matter. Google recognizes that a webmaster has no control over other sites linking into a site, and so sites are not penalized because of where the links come from. There is an exception to this rule but it is rare and doesn't concern this article. It isn't something that a webmaster can accidentally do.

How is PageRank calculated?

To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.
  PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))
That's the equation that calculates a page's Rank. It's the original one that was published when rank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough.
In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.
We can think of it in a simpler way:-
a page's Page Rank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it)
"share" = the linking page's Rank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.
Step 1: Calculate page A's rank from the value of its inbound links
  Page A now has a new Page Rank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and its new value hasn't been worked out yet, so page A's new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can't be accurate.
Step 2: Calculate page B's Rank from the value of its inbound links
  Page B now has a new Page value, but it can't be accurate because the calculation used the new Page Rank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate.
It's a Catch 22 situation. We can't work out A's Rank until we know B's Page Rank, and we can't work out B's Rank until we know A's Page Rank.

What is Page Rank?

Page Rank is a numeric value that represents how important is a website or a webpage. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is in fact casting a vote for the other page. The importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Page Rank is Google's way of determining a page's importance. We may refer to PageRank as "PR".

Types of Directory Submissions

• Manual Submission
• Automated Submission
• Niche Submission
• Free Submission
• Paid Submission

What is Crawler?

A web crawler or web spider is a script which surf World Wide Web in a regular manner. A web crawler is one type of bot, other names are web spider, web robot, bot, crawler, and automatic indexer.

Most Important On-Page Optimization Techniques

Title Optimization:

A site’s title tag is the most important website optimization component. A title tag should be short but description enough for visitors to identify the website.

• Your Name/ Business Name / Site Name is very important for flouring suggest. If you feel that your customers may search you by your brand name than it’s also useful to put it somewhere in your title.
• If you want to rank for a particular keyword it is always good to place some in your title tag. A Title tag represents the whole flavor & content of your website.

Coding:

<TITLE>On Page Optimization</TITLE>

Meta Tags Optimization:

A site’s Meta description should contain a brief description of your website. This small text can be considered as a selling snippet, if a searcher finds it appealing he is likely to click and go inside your page to find out more information. But if your Meta Description is too generic and isn’t written too well then there is a good chance that your site will simply be ignored.

Coding:
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Optimizing On-Page Factors for Search Engine">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="separated by a comma,but not a space">

Keyword Optimization & Synonyms:

Your site’s content wants to be modify in intensive way that it will be suit both search engines & your readers. Filling your site with more keywords can make your site unreadable. So you will need to have some sort of balance between your keywords & your content.

• Keyword Research: Should take a reesearch before you decide on your keywords. Too many free tools are there that can help you to do keyword research. Some of my favorites are: SEO book Keyword Suggestion tool, Google Adwords Keyword Tool & Overture Keyword Tool.
• Keyword Density: Try to have a moderate keyword density so that it can help the search engine to determine that your page is indeed related & relevant to the keyword that you are targeting.
• Synonyms & Related Keywords: I personally like to use synonyms instead of having a high keyword density. This helps to make my content sound natural but still helps in SEO.
• Long Tail Keywords: It’s often good to target some long tail keywords as they are comparatively easier to rank for. During your keyword research you should be able to gather some good long tail keywords that you can optimize your site for. But you can also come up with your own long tail keywords; for example try adding some common words like – ‘best’, ‘free’, ‘cheap’, ‘top’ etc. along with your actual keyword and you might eventually get some good long tail keywords.

Link Optimization:

It is important to optimize your internal & external outbound links for search engines and also navigate your visitors.

• Try using good Anchor Text when you are linking to other people. Include the appropriate keyword in the anchor text which gives the outbound link a ‘proper meaning’ and value.
• A good & clean Internal Link Structure with proper use of anchor text will definitely useful.
• If you are using a CMS, then try using permalinks. This way your keywords/post title will be on the link itself and thus it will valued more by the search engines.

Image Optimization:

If your site has lot of images, you need to optimize them too as they can’t be read by the search engines. It’s very easy for a human reader to interpret the image into its meaning. However for a Web crawler the whole interpreting process is completely different. Search Engine spiders can only read text but not images. So you need to use some special tags for your images in order to give them some meaning.

• Alt text : ALT text or Alternate Text is the text to describe your image when your mouse moves over an image on your web page. The text should be meaningful but short. You can use your relevant keywords as ALT text. If your browser can’t display the image for some reason, the alt text is used in place of that particular image.
• File name : always use meaningful file name for your images, use names like “apple-iphone-cover.jpg” instead of meaningless “DSC24045.jpg”. Keep image file name same or similar to the ALT text.
• Image Title : always use the title tag in images which will show the title as tool tip when a user moves his mouse over the image. Example of an image with title tag: [img src=”http://imagelocation.jpg” alt=”Image description” title=”Title of the Image”]
• Image Linking : Whenever you want to link to your image, use the image keywords in your link text. Example: use “view an Apple iPhone”, instead of “Click here to view” as the anchor text.