"Web Site Design, Development & Search Engine Optimization"

Web Site Construction ~ Search Engine Optimization

404

The “page not found” error code.

Above The Fold

The part of the web page that is visible without scrolling. Taken from newspaper jargon. Because the reader doesn’t have to move anything, it’s the most valuable part of any web page.

Adult Words

Words pertaining to adult or pornographic subjects that will trigger filters.

AdWords

The keyword-based, text-only ads shown by Google along with search results.

Affiliate

A web site that elects to provide ads for goods or services that are provided by another business. The web site providing the ad is paid a percentage of any sales deriving from the ad or paid each time the ad is clicked on.

Affiliate Program

An affiliate program is a form of web-based advertising pays an affiliate (see above) for driving traffic to an advertiser or pays a percentage of the transaction amount.

Algorithm

The logical process of steps used to solve a problem. In this context, the decision-making process used by a search engine to decide whether a web page should be shown for a search term and, if so, how relevant that page is compared to all other qualifying pages.

Apache Web Server

The program developed by the Apache organization that “serves” pages to your browser.

Authority Site

A web site deemed to be an authority because a large number of other sites link to it.

B2B

Business to Business.

B2C

Business to Consumer

Back Link or Backlink

A link from another site to your site. Contrasted with an “internal link” which is from one of your pages to another of your pages. A link from one of your pages to another site will count as one of that site’s “back links.”

Blog

A journal that is available on the web. Blog entries are usually arranged in chronological order.

CGI

“Common Gateway Interface” is a protocol that allows programs written in various languages (the most popular is Perl) to run on the server, receive data from the user and use that data to create new pages or to use the data in some way.

CGI-BIN

The directory on a server that is the usual location of CGI programs.

Click Through

When a click on an ad leads to another page, usually on another web site.

Click Tracking

Using specialized software to follow a user through the site. Very useful for finding bottlenecks and points of confusion.

Conversion Rate

The percentage of visitors to a site that make a purchase during the visit.

CPA or Cost Per Action.

The website only gets paid for advertising if the user purchases something at the advertisers site.

CPC or Cost Per Click

Some search engines such as Looksmart charge a fee for every referral.

CPL

Affiliate marketing in which the web site is paid for each referral whether a sale is made or not.

CPM

Cost Per Thousand (roman numeral M=1000). Common in the print industry and most often used for banner advertising on the web where banner views are purchased in blocks of 1000.

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets

A CSS sheet is attached to an HTML document. The CSS determines the appearance of the elements on the page and their positions.

CTR

The click through rate of an advertisement. A measure of the effectiveness of the ad and how well the ad matches the surfers expectation. Surfers looking for “mens shoes” are less likely to be interested in an ad for tractors.

Cyber Squatting

Obtaining domain names that resemble or match known brands. Usually for the purpose of selling the domain name to the highest bidder.

Dead Link

A link to a page that no longer exists.

Deep Linking

A link that goes to a secondary or tertiary page.

Directory

A collection of web sites sorted by category.

DNS Lookup

The process of determining the numerical address based on the URL.

Domain

Usually the last part of the URL + .com, .net, .org etc. ie. Yahoo.com is a domain.

Domain Name Registration

Placement of the domain name in the ICANN files, usually for a period of 1-5 years (renewable). Registration is handled by companies such as www.register.com and www.moniker.com.

Doorway Domain

A domain designed to feed visitors to another domain.

Doorway Page

A page designed to serve as an entrance to a web site. Often crafted to rank well in search engines.

Download

Transfer of a file from a server to one’s own machine (the client)

Dynamic Content

Web pages created “on-the-fly” to contain information specific for each visitor. Pages with a personalized greeting are created dynamically.

Dynamic IP Address

Often the case with Internet service providers, the IP address of the user’s computer is assigned each time the user dials up or logs onto the service.

Entry Page

A single page with a logo on it and, usually, a “click here to enter” link.

EPC

Earnings per click.

EPV

Earnings per visitor.

Favicon

Some browsers place a small image (icon) representing the web site being visited next to the address bar. For your site to show such an image, it must be stored in the root directory of your web site.

FFA (Free For All)

A site that allows anyone to place links on it.

Filter Words

Common, meaningless words such as “the, and, or) are removed from search engines databases to save space. Not to be confused with “Stop Words” that are usually adult terms and cause the search engine to stop acquiring the page.

Frames

HTML coding to produce a page that has two or more independent windows.

Hit

The server records a “hit” for every item that is requested of it. For example, a “visitor” may request a “page” consisting of the file of HTML code, 10 graphics files and a CSS stylesheet for a total of 12 “hits.” Regarding a search engine query, the number of web pages matching a query.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language. A programming language consisting of tag commands used in web pages.

HTTP

Acronym for HyperText Transfer Protocol-the agreed upon protocol for transfer of web page information.

Hubs and Authorities

First used by Kleinberg to describe the Internet as a network of communities identified by sites that link to many other sites (Hubs) and sites which are linked to by many other sites (Authorities).

Inbound Link

A link from another site. Also termed a “backlink.”

IP Address

The unique numerical address used by the web to determine where data goes. When you log onto your service, your IP address may be assigned dynamically by your provider or you may have a “static” IP address that is always the same.

IP Spoofing

An unethical and possibly illegal process of delivering an incorrect IP address when connecting to the Internet.

ISP

An Internet Service provider provides Internet access points.

Keyword

The term used to initiate a search. “Widgets,” when entered into a search engine would provide pages containing the keyword “widgets.”

Keyword Buys

Some search engines will sell keywords the result of which is the placement of that company’s listing at the top of the search results for the keyword.

Keyword Density

The number of times the keyword appears on the page versus the total number of indexable words on the page.

Keyword Phrase

Two or more keywords. “Blue widgets” or “blue fuzzy widgets” or “blue fuzzy free widgets” are all keyword phrases.

Keyword Research

The study of a single keyword or keyword phrase to find it's relatives and related keywords.

Keyword Stuffing

Loading a page or its metatags with a keyword used many times. Often results in barely readable text and may actually result in lowered search engine standings.

Link Farm

A group of inter-linking sites usually established to increase PageRank but as of 2004 often downgraded by search engines.

Link Popularity

A semi-quantitative measure of the number of backlinks a site receives.

LinkRot

A link that gives a “404" “file not found” result because the page has been moved or renamed.

Meta Tag

HTML tags that provide a description of the page, a list of keywords, and other data that are not displayed by a browser but are read and used by the browser and by search engines.

MirrorSite

A duplicate copy of a web site at a separate url.

Misspellings

Certain keywords are commonly misspelled or mistyped. Their inclusion in a page may bring traffic. Less important today as most search engines will correct common misspellings.

Multiple Keyword Tags

A form of “stuffing” using two or more keyword metatags to increase the number of keywords. Search engines will ban sites that do this.

Open Directory Project

The Open Directory Project (ODP) is a site directory run by over 60,000 volunteer editors and contains more than 4 million sites.

Open Source

Open source software is software that is released with source code. People are allowed to make derivative works from open source software as long as it is released under the same open source agreement. The Apache webserver is an open source project that often runs on a version of the Linux operating system-another open source project.

Opt-In

Usually referring to email newsletters that one must specifically request in order to receive.

Opt-Out

Usually referring to email newsletters that arrive unasked for and that one must specifically request removal. Often the removal request simply verifies that it is a “good” address and the spam intensifies.

Optimization

Creating a web site or web page that will place well in a search engine’s results.

Page View

A single rendering of a page, as opposed to “hits” which are the number of separate items requested from the server to produce the finished page. See Hits.

Perl

Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, a programming language frequently used for creating CGI programs on web servers.

PFI or Pay For Inclusion

Payment to be included in certain search engines such as Inktomi.

PopUnder

An ad that spawns a new browser window in the background.

Popup

An ad that spawns a new browser window on top.

Positioning

Another term for optimization.

PPC

Pay per click, usually referring to ads.

Pay Per Lead

A form of affiliate reimbursement where the referring site is paid for each lead as opposed to each sale.

PSA

A Public Service Announcement.

Query

The term you type into the search bar.

Ranking

Where on the search result page, your web site is found.

Rate Card

The list of advertising fees.

Recip Link or Reciprocal Link

Sites agree to exchange links.

Referrer

Found in the server’s log as the URL of the web page from which a visitor came. If the visitor came directly from a search engine listing, the query used to find the page will usually be encoded showing which keywords resulted in the visit.

Results Page

The page returned by the search engine when it is "queried."

Robot

In this context, a computer program that automatically "browses" web pages and downloads the content to the search engine's database for later use in producing search results.

robots.txt

A file placed in the root directory of your web site that tells the search engine robot what it should and should not download. Not always obeyed.

ROI

Return on investment.

Search Engine

The computer program that organizes the web information obtained by the robot and provides pages that (should) contain the information asked for in your query.

Search Term

A query.

Search Terms

A query consisting of two or more words.

SERP

Slang for the "search engine results page."

Server

A computer and program that “serves” pages or files in response to requests from a client.

Session ID

A server has no way of identifying a client unless it uses a “session ID” - a unique number/letter combination saved as a “cookie” on the client or appended to the URL if cookies are turned off. Two common uses are to personalize pages (“Hello Harry!”) or to retain shopping information until checkout.

Shopping Cart

Web site software that retains the items you are interested in purchasing until you are ready to "check out." So widely used that it is often depicted by a picture of a shopping cart.

Sky Scraper

A tall skinny ad like the one on the right side of this page.

Spamdexing or Spamming

In the context of web pages, various techniques to artificially raise the page's ranking. Can include repeating the same word or words hundreds of time but hiding the words from the human reader by making them the same color as the background. Many search engine algorithms are developed specifically to ignore spamming and may "punish" the web site by removing it from the database (banning).

Spider and Spidering

See robot.

Splash Page

The page first seen on entering some web sites. Often done using advanced techniques such as Flash and usually heavy on images rather than text. Not recommended because it gives the search engine nothing to index and is, therefore, a wasted opportunity. Often loads slowly as well which means many visitors will leave rather than wait.

SSI

Server Side Includes and a way of inserting a repetitive element (such as a footer) into a page rather. It makes maintaining the element easier.

Static IP Address

The IP address is the number used to find your web site. It should be constant or the search engines won't know where to find you. Most residential services, such as AOL, assign a new number every few days or whenever you log in.

Stemming

Finding a word's root and using the root as a search term is called "stemming." Stemming allows you to enter "automotive" and get back results containing the terms "truck," "car," and "auto."

Stop Words

Conjunctions, prepositions, articles and other words such as "and," "to" and "a" that are common and have little meaning.

Submission

Providing your web site's address to a search engine to be indexed. Less important today as most engines find sites through "incoming links" from other sites which is one reason that links are important.

Submission Service

Many web design and hosting firms will submit your site to "hundreds" of search engines. Not very important today and actually banned by many search engines.

Term Vectors

Documents and queries are modeled as vectors in a high-dimensional space of many thousands of terms. Documents are ranked by how closely their vector matches the query vector.

Throw Away Domain

A domain name of little value most often used to test search engine tactics that might result in being banned.

Title

The information contained in the top bar of a browser. Taken from the "title" meta tag and important for usability (it tells the user what the page is about) and also important in search engine ranking.

Toolbar

Most search engines provide a small program that adds a "bar," usually under the browser's address bar that provides and easy spot to type in queries and has other features as well.

Traffic

The number of visitors to your web site. This number should be broken down into "unique" visitors as well as total visitors so you know how many new people are seeing your site. Not the same as "hits" or "pages."

Upload

Transfer of a file from your machine to a remote machine.

Unique Visitor

A useful statistic provided by most web server log analysis programs based on a visitor’s IP address. That visitor may view a dozen pages requiring 200 hits but, using the IP address, we know it was a single person.

URL or Universal Resource Locator

An address specifying an internet resource. The beginning of the address indicates the type of resource - e.g. http: for web pages or ftp: for file transfers.

User Agent

The browser used to visit the site such as Internet Explorer, Gecko

Viral Marketing

Providing the means for visitors to spread the word about your site. For example, a “Tell a friend” link that sends an email with the web site URL to an address provided by the visitor.

Virtual Domain

The practice of placing several domains at the same IP address and using the server to "funnel" requests to the correct page.

Whois

A search that provides the company name, address, and contact information of a visitor to a site.