algorithm: A program that search engines use to determine what pages to use for a given search query.
alt text: is used to describe a graphic, this usually won’t be displayed to an end user, unless the graphic is missing, or the browser used doesn’t display graphics. Visually challenged people also rely on the alt text to describe the graphic using special internet browsers. Search engines can’t read images so they use the alt text to tell one picture from another.
analytics: reporting tools used to analyze the traffic for a website. Google Analytics is a popular free online web reporting tool that is widely used and feature rich.
anchor text: The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.
back link: Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.
bot: A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.
bounce rate: The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.
bread crumbs: Web site navigation in a horizontal bar above the main content which helps the user to understand where they are on the site and how to get back to the root areas.
click fraud: clicks on a PPC advertisement usually by the publisher to earn revenue unethically.
CMS: Content Management System – technology like WordPress or Blogger that allow users to update web content without knowing html or web developement techniques.
content: The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.
conversion: Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, account creation, newsletter sign ups and sales are examples of conversions.
conversion rate: Percentage of users who convert – see conversion.
Cost-per-click (CPC): An advertising term used to describe the cost for a single click-through of an ad to a client’s Web site.
Cost per lead (CPL): Similar to CPA (cost per action), the CPL pricing model pays web publishers for every banner click resulting in a lead for the advertiser. Meaning, advertisers pay publishers only when a visitor performs a desired action on their site (such as sign up for information or create an online account).
Cost per Thousand (CPM): Cost per thousand banner displays. A $12/cpm rate means that an advertiser will pay $12 for every 1,000 times their banner is shown. Note – the “M” in CPM stands for mille which is Latin for one thousand.
crawler: A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.
directory: a website that provides links and information to other website sorted by categories. DMOZ, Google Directory and Yahoo Directory are a few examples
directory page: A page with links to other WebPages.
duplicate content: Content which is identical to that found on another webpage. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any trust from the search engines compared to the content considered to be original
e-commerce site: A website devoted to retail sales.
feed: Content which is delivered to the user via special websites or programs such as news aggregators.
frames: a web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within it’s 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.
Googlebot: Google’s spider program
hit: Once the standard by which web traffic was often judged, but now a largely meaningless term replaced by pageviews AKA impressions. A hit happens each time that a server sends an object – documents, graphics, include files, etc. Thus one pageview could generate many hits.
HTML: directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.
impression: The event where a user views a webpage one time.
in bound link: Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
index: a database of WebPages and their content used by the search engines.
indexed Pages: The pages on a site which have been indexed.
inlink:Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
keyword: The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.
keyword density: The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.
keyword research: The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.
landing page: the page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP
link building: actively cultivating incoming links to a site.
link exchange: a reciprocal linking scheme often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves. Quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.
link popularity: a measure of the value of a site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it
link text: The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.
META tags: Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.
metric: A standard of measurement used by analytics programs.
monetize: To extract income from a site. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetize a website.
natural search results: The search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.
nofollow: A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link. A form of link condom.
noindex: A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link. A form of link condom.
non reciprocal link: if site A links to site B, but site B does not link back to site A, then the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of collusion between sites.
organic link: organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.
pagerank 
PR) a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors.
portal: A web service which offers a wide array of features to entice users to make the portal their “home page” on the web. IGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN are portals.
PPA (Pay Per Action ): Very similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversions.
PPC (Pay Per Click): a contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.
reciprocal link: Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal and potentially incestuous nature.
redirect: Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.
robots.txt: a file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behavior of search engine spiders.
sandbox: There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or exact behavior of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs.
scrape: copying content from a site, often facilitated by automated bots.
SEM: Short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.
SEO: Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favorably ranked by the search engine.
site map: A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.
SMM: (Social Media Marketing) Website or brand promotion through social media
social bookmark A form of Social Media where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.
social media: Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.
social media marketing (SMM): Website or brand promotion through social media
spider (bot, crawler): A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.
static page: A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders
text link: A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.
URL: Uniform Resource Locator – Web Address
user generated content: (UGC) Social Media, wikis, Folksonomies, and some blogs rely heavily on User Generated Content.
web 2.0: Is characterized by websites, which encourage user interaction.
widget: small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP address display. These programs can make good link bait. 2) a term borrowed from economics which means “any product or commodity.”
