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| Backlinks | | Backlinks are links from other sites to your web site. Typically the higher number of backlinks your site has, the better you will rank in the search engines. |
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| Blacklist | | Blacklists are lists that either search engines or vigilante users compile of search engine spammers, which may be used to ban those spammers from search engines or to boycott them. |
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| Clickthrough rate | | The rate at which people click on a link such as a search engine listing or a banner ad. Studies show that clickthrough rates are six times higher for search engine listings than banner ads. |
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| CPC | | CPC stands for Cost Per Click and refers to advertising where you are charged when a person clicks on your advertisement. |
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| Crawler | | A crawler is an automated process (i.e. Bot) by which a search engine reviews your web pages for inclusion in a search engine. A popular crawler is the Yahoo! Slurp crawler. |
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| FAQ | | Frequently Asked Questions - There is no need for an additional "s" to indicate plural in this case since the Q is already in the plural form. |
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| Heading Tag | | An HTML tag that is often used to denote a page or section heading on a web page. Search engines pay special attention to text that is marked with a heading tag, as such text is set off from the rest of the page content as being more important. |
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| Hidden Keywords | | Keywords that are placed in the HTML source in such a way that these words are not viewable by human visitors looking at the rendered web page. The keywords will not be seen in the website. This is considered negative for SEO. |
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| Hidden Text | | Hidden Text was a practice used in the mid-90s whereby keywords and phrases would be placed on a web page in the same color as the background of the page. These goal was to increase search engine rankings. This technique is considered illegal by the search engines today and is a deceptive practice and should be avoided. |
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| Keyword | | A word that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn't appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it's highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine). |
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| Keyword Research | | Determining the words and phrases that people use to find something, then compiling them into a list for use on web pages, etc. |
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| Keyword Rich | | When a given page or bit of text is chock full of good keywords rather than a bunch of meaningless words (e.g. "welcome", "click here") or irrelevant words (e.g. "solution"). |
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| Keywords | | Keywords are the words and phrases you want to have your web site rank high within the search engines. |
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| Link Building | | Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your "link popularity" and/or "PageRank."
Considerations for link building can include directory submissions and press release syndication. |
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| Link Popularity | | When other web sites link to your site, your site will rank better in certain search engines. The more web pages that link to you, the better your link popularity. |
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| Logfile | | All accesses to a web site can be logged by the web server. Data that is usually logged includes date and time, filename accessed, user's IP address, referring web page, user's browser software and version, and cookie data. |
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| Meta Tags | | Meta Tags are basically a way to describe a page. Mostly used within search engines, the two most popular meta tags are description and keywords. |
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| Organic SEO | | Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process to update the web pages within a site to reach the best possible ranking in the search engines. This is typically the first step in any search engine optimization campaign. |
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| OrganicStats | | A firm helping small businesses with analytics, optimization and usability. |
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| Outbound Links | | Links that direct "off-site" to another website |
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| Page Jacking | | Stealing high-ranking web page content from another site and placing it on your site in the hopes of increasing your own site's search engine rankings. Pagejacking is yet another shady way of gaming the search engines and, as such, its use should be strongly discouraged. |
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| Pay per click | | Pay per click refers to online advertising where payment is received for each click a person makes on an advertisement (banner ad, text ad, etc.) |
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| Query | | A keyword, or phrase inquiry entered into a search engine. |
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| Relevance | | The likelihood that a given web page will be of interest or useful to a search engine user for a keyword search. |
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| Search Engine Optimization | | Strategies and tactics undertaken to improve web pages so they gain a higher ranking in the search engines. |
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| SEM | | Acronym for Search Engine Marketing |
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| SERP | | Acronym for Search Engine Results Page |
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| Title tag | | The text displayed in the blue bar at the very top of the browser window, above "Back," "Forward," "Refresh," "Print," etc. Although inconspicuous to the user, the title tag is the most important bit of text on a web page as far as the search engines are concerned. Search engines not only assign the words in the title tag more weight, they also typically display the title tag in the search results, making the title tag an important potential call-to-action as well. Thus, the wording of each page's title tag should be thought through carefully. Also see "keyword prominence." |
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| Unique Visitor | | A unique visitor refers to a person who visits a Web site more than once within a specified period of time. This person may log multiple visits, but will show in the analytical reports as one unique visitor. |
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| Usability | | Usability in its most basic definition is the ability to effectively use a web site. |
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| User Session | | An instance of an Internet user accessing your web site for a length of time, then leaving. During a user session any number of pages may be accessed. A user session is considered finished once an arbitrarily chosen period of inactivity - typically 30 minutes - is exceeded. |
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| Visit | | An instance of an Internet user accessing your web site for a length of time, then leaving. During a user session any number of pages may be accessed. A user session is considered finished once an arbitrarily chosen period of inactivity - typically 30 minutes - is exceeded. |
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