Search Engine Optimisation Glossary

Algorithm - A complex mathematical formula used by a search engine to rank the web pages that it finds by crawling the web.

ALT Tags - Used to display a short text description of an image when you hover your mouse over it. The ALT description is also displayed in place of the image if the user is browsing with image display turned off.

Apache Web Server - The web server software that is most used on the internet today.

Visit more at :: http://www.linksbuilding.com/seo-glossary-a.htm

Bad Neighborhood - A web page that has been penalized by a search engine (most notably Google) for using shady SEO tactics, such as hidden text or link farms.

Backlinks - Links from another web page to your web page. Most search engines provide an easy way to get a list of all of the backlinks to a specific page. Also referred to as Incoming Links.

Broken Link - A link that no longer takes the user to the destination page when it is clicked on. This is usually the result of the destination page having been renamed or deleted from the server. Also referred to as a Dead Link.

Visit more at :: http://www.linksbuilding.com/seo-glossary-b.htm

Click-Through - The action of clicking on a link to visit a web page.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) - The number of times a link is clicked on divided by the number of times that same link is displayed (called an impression).

Example:
A link is displayed 100 times (100 impressions) and clicked
on 5 times. The CTR is 5% (5/100=.05).

Cloaking - Serving one version of a page to a human visitor and a different version of the same page to the search engines. This is usually done to "fool" the search engines into giving the page a higher rank than it would normally receive while making sure the human visitor sees a useful and attractive page.

Visit more at :: http://www.linksbuilding.com/seo-glossary-c.htm

Deep Linking - Linking to a page that is one or more levels removed from the home directory. Deep linking is often desirable to build PageRank to a specific page on a website.

Description - A short sentence or paragraph that describes a web page's content, usually used as part of a link to describe the page being linked to.

Directory - A categorized list of websites that is maintained by human editors instead of crawlers. Yahoo.com is the most widely recognized directory on the web, but there are literally thousands of others.

Doorway Page - A page that is usually optimized for a particular search engine and search term. Multiple doorway pages are often used to help ensure that the same basic content is ranked well on several different search engines. The use of doorway pages for this purpose is frowned upon by most larger search engines, including Google.

Visit more at :: http://www.linksbuilding.com/seo-glossary-d.htm

Filters - A filter is a software routine that examines web pages during a robot's crawl looking for search engine spam. If the filter detects the use of spam on the page, a ranking penalty is assessed.

Visit more at :: http://www.linksbuilding.com/seo-glossary-f.htm

Google.com - The leading search engine on the internet today with approximately 80% of all search traffic. When people speak of search engine optimization (SEO), they're often referring specifically to Google.

Googlebot - The crawler that Google uses on a daily basis to find and index new web pages.

Google Toolbar - A downloadable toolbar for Internet Explorer that allows a user to do a Google search without visiting the Google website. The toolbar also displays the Google PageRank (PR) of the page currently displayed in the browser. The latest version also includes a very good popup-blocker. The Google Toolbar is a must have for every serious webmaster.

The Google Toolbar can be downloaded here:
http://toolbar.google.com

Visit more at :: http://www.linksbuilding.com/seo-glossary-g.htm

Home Directory - The main directory where your site's main index page is located. The index page in your home directory can be accessed like this: http://www.yoursite.com

Visit more at :: http://www.linksbuilding.com/seo-glossary-h.htm

Image Map - Placing separate hyperlinks on different areas of the same image. Clicking on different parts of the image will take the user to different web pages. Not very search engine friendly.

Visit more at :: http://www.linksbuilding.com/seo-glossary-i.htm