SEO Glossary

Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example:< a href="http://www.seo-help.com/" >This is the anchor text< /a >

Back Link
Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Also called inbound links or IBL’s.

Cloaking
Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Conversion
Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.).

CPC
Abbreviation for Cost Per Click. It is the base unit of cost for a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign.

CTR
Abbreviation for Click Through Rate. It is a ratio of clicks per impressions in a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign.

Doorway Page
Also called a gateway page. A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page.  They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Gateway Page

Also called a doorway page. see Doorway page

IBL

Abbreviation for In Bound Link. Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Also called a back link.

Keyword/Keyphrase

Keywords are words which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are multi-word phrases used in search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and keyphrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the 'benefit' of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors.  There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.

Link Farm

A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (or Google Page Rank). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms off Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Mirror

In SEO a mirror is a near identical duplicate website (or page). Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to target different keywords/keyphrases. Using mirrors is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Portal

Designation for websites that are either authoritative hubs for a given subject or popular content driven sites (like Yahoo) that people use as their homepage. Most portals offer significant content and offer advertising opportunities for relevant sites.

PPC

Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads.

PR

Abbreviation for Page Rank - Google's proprietary measure of link popularity for web pages. Google offers a PR viewer on their toolbar.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.

SEM

Abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing. SEM encompasses SEO and search engine paid advertising options (banners, Pay-Per-Click), etc. and also distribution of articles and press releases online.

SEO

Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO covers the process of

• making web pages spider friendly (so search engines can read them)
• making web pages relevant to desired keyphrases

SERP

Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page/Positioning. This refers to the organic (excluding paid listings) search results for a given query.

Spam

This refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Spam could be grounds for website banning.

Spamdexing

Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine's index. Spamdexing is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Spider

Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

Spider Trap

A spider trap refers to either a continuous loop where spiders are requesting pages and the server is requesting data to render the page or an intentional scheme designed to identify (and "ban") spiders that do not respect robots.txt.

Splash Page

Splash pages are introduction pages to a web site that are heavy on graphics (or flash video) with no textual content. They are designed to either impress a visitor or complement some corporate branding.

Stop Word

Stop words are words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries. Common words such as the.