SEO Glossary A – G

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.

SEO Glossary

This is your reference for search optimisation key words and phrases. Definitions and explanations are provided alphabetically.

This glossary is by no means a final piece, as when new terms begin to be commonly used I will add them here. Also, as I find new terms I may not have come across, I will add them!

Due to the size of the post, I have broken it down into sections, as shown below:

Paying for Links

As beginner or intermediate Search Engine Optimisers you’re probably going to be exposed to a lot of ‘paid links’. If you’ve been following the series of blogs, you’ll probably be a little apprehensive to pay for anything – and you still should be.

If you see a blog post or an article that has content similar to that of your page, and you decided to approach the webmaster, they will probably ask for a small fee. Be careful, this could be either for a year, or the life of the website. The amount that you should pay for one of these links will depend on the quality of the website, and to an extent the amount that you are willing to pay. For a very good link, you shouldn’t have to pay more than £150 per year, although the average (£50) is much lower than this. Continue reading ‘Paying for Links’

So, you want to get that link?

But is it up to scratch? To tie the first few posts all together, I’m going to do a quick checklist for making sure you’re choosing a good link that’s going to benefit your site.

  • Moz Rank – Look at the Moz Rank of the domain, as well as the page that the link is on. Inlinks from a highly ranked domain will pass on much more ‘link juice’ than links from a poorly ranked domain.
  • Moz Trust - Similar to above, look at both the domain and the page scores. Trusted sites will obviously pass on more trust than untrusted sites. Seed sites, such as the BBC, academic institutions and .gov domains all have very high levels of trust, so getting your Press Release released onto one of those outlets is invaluable.
  • Continue reading ‘So, you want to get that link?’

Link Types and Strategy

Links can appear in a number of areas of a site. Search spiders can now differentiate content from ad boxes, sidebars and footers, so it’s now more important than ever to choose where you get your links. I’m not saying that if a site with PR 7 decides to give you an ad in the sidebar that you shouldn’t take it – you should, because clearly you will benefit from that link, however there are a few things to consider: Continue reading ‘Link Types and Strategy’

The Aims of Successful Link Building

To make your website or weblog successful, you need in-links, and the more the merrier as far as you should be concerned. Getting just a few well-chosen links from a wide spread of domains is better than having mass directory submissions, or a handful of site-wide footer links. Continue reading ‘The Aims of Successful Link Building’

Link Building: A Brief Introduction

The aim of link building is to ultimately increase traffic to your website. Link building achieves this by placing links to your website on other web pages. Simple? No. The following may be common sense for many of you; however so many people go about this the wrong way far too often.

Google search spiders are now pretty advanced. They have a whole write-up on how they work (at least what they want you to know), and as a budding Search Optimiser I’d recommend you give them a read.

Links that come from relevant sites hold more worth to you for two reasons. Continue reading ‘Link Building: A Brief Introduction’

A Roundup of the Top 5 Link Building Plugins

Link Building is the act of obtaining links from other websites with high page rank and/or authority to your own website to improve search engine ranking.

Mozilla Firefox is by far one of the best browsers at present. It’s open source, free and has the option to include literally thousands of plugins. Continue reading ‘A Roundup of the Top 5 Link Building Plugins’

CubicWeb: A very brief introduction

So this is the first post on the site. CubicWeb has almost served many roles, but now I’m a University student with plenty of time and contacts in Leeds, it’s time to start serving businesses with what truly is cost effective Search Engine Optimisation.

CubicWeb’s main goal for the short term is to provide as much free information as possible on SEO. I’ll be blogging fairly regularly on the tools and methods that optimisers use day in and day out.

The first ideas I’d really like to talk about is Firefox plugins; some of the most useful things I’ve ever come across!

So read on It’ll be the next post!