Above the Fold – Traditionally, above the fold was always used to refer to the top half of a newspaper, however in SEM terms it is used to describe the section of a web page that can be seen without scrolling.
Accessibility - An approach taken in to consideration when designing a website, to take into consideration whether all viewers and all browsers can view the content.
AJAX – An acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. AJAX is a web technology that increases usability and gives designers a bigger toolset to work with when designing a site. It allows portions of a website to update without having the full page reload.
ALT Attribute – Modifier for the IMG tag. It primarily provides accessibility and usability; however it has numerous benefits for search engine optimisation.
Authority – The ability for a webpage to rank well in SERP’s is dependent on the page and domain authority.
Back Links – Used to refer to the amount of links coming into the particular page or domain.
Banner Advertising – An advertising method which is shown in the form of an image on a webpage, which generally conform to a set of standardized sizes.
Below the Fold – Opposite to above the fold, below the fold describes any data that cannot be seen on a web page without scrolling.
Blacklist – Delisting, usually in response to spam activity. It can apply to both IP’s and URLs.
Blog – An online shared journal where individuals and companies can post information, and the public have the capability to comment.
Body Copy – Text that is written for a page, usually referred to as content. Usually it is of one font face and size.
Cache – A copy of webpages stored by each search engine, used to index pages in SERPs.
Canonical – Used to help the search engine reduce duplicate content. If the same content can be accessed via two or more different URLs, to avoid penalization, the canonical (preferred) URL will be indexed.
CMS – Content Management System – A tool used to manage all content appearing on a website usually served from at least one database. CMS’s generally also manage themes, settings and plugins also on a site.
Cookies – A text file saved on the client machine from a web server via a browser. Each time a page from the domain is requested, the cookie will be sent. Cookies are used for authenticating, session tracking and identifying users.
Crawl Depth – Crawl Depth is used for SEO on Google, and other major search engines. Depth in this case refers to the amount of subfolders in the URL that the Google Bot will search and index.
Crawl Frequency – Simply the amount of times per month or time frame that a search engine spider will crawl your website.
CSS – Cascading Style Sheet – A website programming language that enables website designers to attach style to their raw design, such as spacing, font and colour. CSS provides the possibility to hide text from the viewer, but not the search spider, however doing this will likely result in your site being delisted.
Dead Link – A link that points to a page that can no longer be found is referred to as a dead link. Either the page does not exist, or the page has moved and a 301 redirect has not been put in place.
Deep Page – A page that is not the home page generally is given by a deep link. Deep links often refer to links that contain many subdomains or folders.
Del.icio.us – Delicious is a social bookmarking website, which allows users to share websites.
Digg.com – Similar to Delicious, Digg is a social bookmarking site, but users can vote up or down stories that they like.
Directory – A website that links to another website via a system of contextual pages. Some directory listings are free, whereas others are paid. Generally only the poorest listings are free.
Doorway Page – A page created for the purpose of keyword stuffing to reach high listings in SERPs for popular keywords. Usually, the doorway pages automatically redirect to another website. These websites are delisted from Google.
Duplicate Content – Where two webpages contain exactly the same content. Generally search engines will display only one of these pages, and ignore the other.
External Linking – External Linking is the act of building relevant, contextual links from third party websites towards your own, with the aim of achieving higher traffic and SERP rankings.
Firefox – A popular standards compliant browser, which I use to get full usage out of some handy free SEO Plugins.
Forums – An online discussion area, which is generally discussing one or a small number of common themes. Most of the public can participate in these discussions.
Gateway Page – Another term for Doorway Pages, a risky method of driving relevant traffic to your website.
Geo-Targeting – By taking a user’s IP address, you can view their location. Geo-targeting is the use of that information to serve up content relevant to the user.
Google – Simply, the most popular search engine on the web, accounting for 80% of searches.
Google Adwords – Paid search advertising shown as ‘Sponsored Listing’ in SERPs. Relevant links are served because of the use of keywords.
Google Analytics – An extremely useful free Google tool to analyse visitor statistics to your website. Analytics is very useful for pinpointing poorly performing pages, as well as checking traffic referrers. The package is aimed at webmasters.
Google Bombing – Google Bombing is the attempt to influence the ranking or a given site in search results shown on SERPs via external linking.