Ad Copy
The main text of a clickable search or context-served ad. It usually makes up the second and third lines of a displayed ad, between the Ad Title and the Display URL.
Category : Intermediate
Ad Title
The first line of text displayed in a clickable search or context-served ad. Ad Titles serve as ad headlines. The ad title is displayed in a clickable search or context served advertisement. Ad titles are what visitors searching for particular keywords see first when search engine results pages load for them. Most often, ad [...]
Alt Text
The text that appears in place, when and where an image cannot be displayed. Image ALT tags are useful to your page’s visitors. Equally as important, they can help with your search engine rankings by increasing the keyword density (if you use your keywords in your ALT tags). Example: <img src=”picture_logo.jpg” width=”156″ height=”175″ ALT=”Four historically [...]
Authority
The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search engines. Five factors associated with site and largely contributing to the page authority are link equity, site age, traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content.
Bid
The maximum amount of money that an advertiser is willing to pay each time a searcher clicks on an ad. Bid prices can vary widely depending on competition from other advertisers and keyword popularity. Define Bid on SEO Terms Glossary
Breadcrumb Navigation
Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between pages. Example breadcrumb navigation: Home > SEO Tools > SEO for Firefox Whatever page the user is on is unlinked, but the pages above it within the site structure are linked to, and organized starting with the home page, right on [...]
Click Bot
A program generally used to artificially click on paid listings within the engines in order to artificially inflate click amounts.
Click Popularity
A measure of the relevance of sites obtained by noting which sites are clicked on most and how much time users spend in each site.
Content Network
Also called Contextual Network Ads, content networks include Google and Yahoo! Contextual Search networks that serve paid search ads triggered by keywords related to the page content a user is viewing.
Contextual Advertising
Advertising that is automatically served or placed on a web page based on the page’s content, keywords and phrases. Contrast to a SERP (search engine result page) ad display. For example, contextual ads for digital cameras would be shown on a page with an article about photography, not because the user entered “digital cameras” in [...]
Contextual Search
A search that analyzes the page being viewed by a user and gives a list of related search results. Offered by Yahoo! and Google.
Contextual Search Campaign
A paid placement search campaign that takes a search ad listing beyond search engine results pages and onto the sites of matched content web partners. See contextual advertising and / or contextual network ads.
Conversion
Many forms of online advertising are easy to track. A conversion is reached when a desired goal is completed. Most offline ads have generally been much harder to track than online ads. Some marketers use custom phone numbers or coupon codes to tie offline activity to online marketing. A few common example desired goals – [...]
Crawl Depth
How deeply a website is crawled and indexed. Define Crawl Depth in SEO Terms Glossary In the above image, crawl depth refers to the depth to which the search spider crawls. It refers that the website has been spidered to level 4. The above image is just an indicative of the depth. The levels and [...]
Crawl Frequency
How frequently a website is crawled. Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority. Sites with highly artificial link authority scores (ie: mostly low quality spammy links) or sites which are heavy in duplicate content or near duplicate content (such [...]
Filter Words
Words such as is, am, were, was, the, for, do, etc., that search engines deem irrelevant for indexing purposes. The term is often confused with ‘stop words’. As might be obvious, removing these words from search saves search engines enormous amount of database space.
Fuzzy Search
Search which will find matching terms when terms are misspelled (or fuzzy). A fuzzy search is a process that locates Web pages that are likely to be relevant to a search argument even when the argument does not exactly correspond to the desired information. A fuzzy search is done by means of a fuzzy matching [...]
Google Full Page Preview
Also called ‘Google Thumbnail’, ‘Google Snaphot’ and ‘Google Preview Window’, Google’s full page preview began appearing in limited tests in early October. The feature allows users to click anywhere on an organic search result (with the exception of the page title) and see a thumbnail image of the entire page.
Google Instant Alphabet
Shortly after Google Instant was launched, users were interested to see what Google would predict/suggest given every letter of the alphabet. For example: a: amazon b: best buy c: craiglist d: duke energy e: ebay f: facebook g: gmail h: hulu … Mashable, The Wall Street Journal, Advertising Age and ZDNet all ran tests. Google [...]
Google Keyword Tool
Keyword research tool provided by Google which estimates the competition for a keyword, recommends related keywords, and will tell you what keywords Google thinks are relevant to your site or a page on your site.
Google Website Optimizer
Free multi variable testing platform used to help AdWords advertisers improve their conversion rates.
Hit
The request or retrieval of any item located within a web page. For example, if a user enters a web page with 5 pictures on it, it would be counted as 6 “hits.” One hit is counted for the web page itself, and another 5 hits count for the pictures.
Image Search Ad
Sponsored ad placement through AdWords that appears above Google Image search results and incorporates text with a thumbnail image.
Indexability
Also known as crawlability and spiderability. Indexability refers to the potential of a web site or its contents to be crawled or “indexed” by a search engine. If a site is not “indexable,” or if a site has reduced indexability, it has difficulties getting its URLs included.
Internal Link
Link from one page on a site to another page on the same site. It is preferential to use descriptive internal linking to make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is about.
IP Address
Dedicated and shared IPs. –(An IP address is) an identifier for a computer or device on a TCP/IP network. Networks using the TCP/IP protocol route messages based on the IP address of the destination. The format of an IP address is a 32-bit numeric address, written as four numbers separated by periods. Each number can [...]
Keyword Frequency
Denotes how often a keyword appears in a page or in an area of a page. In general, higher the number of times a keyword appears in a page, higher its search engine ranking. However, repeating a keyword too often in a page can lead to that page being penalized for spamming.
Keyword Stuffing
The act of adding way too many keywords to a page in either the text or meta information. Generally refers to the act of adding an inordinate number of keyword terms into the HTML or tags of a web page. The words are added for the ‘benefit’ of search engines and not human visitors. The [...]
Lead Generation
Web sites that generate leads for products or services offered by another company. On a lead generation site, the visitor is unable to make a purchase but will fill out a contact form in order to get more information about the product or service presented. A submitted contact form is considered a lead. It contains [...]
Link Baiting
The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media and bloggers.
Link Hoarding
A method of trying to keep all your link popularity by not linking out to other sites, or linking out using JavaScript or through cheesy redirects. Generally link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons: many authority sites were at one point hub sites that freely linked out to other relevant resources if [...]
Link Popularity / Link Cardinality
The act of a search engine counting the number of inbound links to a web site. It is a statistic used by some search engines that counts the number of times a web page is linked to by other web pages. Many search engines now use this information as part of their ranking system. Link [...]
Long Tail
Keyword phrases with at least three, sometimes four or five, words in them. These long tail keywords are usually highly specific and draw lower traffic than shorter, more competitive keyword phrases, which is why they are also cheaper. Oftentimes, long tail keywords, in aggregate, have good conversion ratios for the low number of click-throughs they [...]
Meta Description Tag
The tag present in the header of a web page that is used to provide a short description of the contents of the page. Some search engines will display the text present in the Meta Description Tag when the page appears in the results of a search. Including keywords in the Meta Description Tag can [...]
Minimum Bid
The least amount that an advertiser can bid for a keyword or keyword phrase and still be active on the search ad network. This amount can range from $0.01 to $100 (or more for highly competitive keywords), and are set by the search engine.
Naked Links
A posted and visible link in the text of a web page that directs to a web site. The link has no anchor text.
Optimization
The changes that are made to the content and code of a web site in order to increase it’s rankings in the results pages of search engines and directories. These changes may involve rewriting body copy, altering Title or Meta tags, removal of Frames or Flash content, and the seeking of incoming links.
Pay per Phone
A model of paid advertising similar to Pay Per Click (PPC), except advertisers pay for every phone call that comes to them from a search ad, rather than for every click-through to their web site landing page for the ad. Often higher cost than PPC advertising; but valued by advertisers for higher conversion rates from [...]
Penalty
Search engines prevent some websites suspected of spamming from ranking highly in the results by banning or penalizing them. These penalties may be automated algorithmically or manually applied. If a site is penalized algorithmically the site may start ranking again after a certain period of time after the reason for being penalized is fixed. If [...]
Position
In PPC advertising, position is the placement on a search engine results page where your ad appears relative to other paid ads and to organic search results. Top ranking paid ads (high ranking 10 to 15 results, depending on the engine) usually appear at the top of the SERP and on the “right rail” (right-side [...]
Proximity
A measure of how close words are to one another. A page which has words near one another may be deemed to be more likely to satisfy a search query containing both terms. If keyword phrases are repeated an excessive number of times, and the proximity is close on all the occurrences of both words [...]
Qualified Visitors
This term describes traffic that is produced by users that find a web site by searching for a product of concept that is offered on that web site. These visitors are thought to be more likely to interact with or purchase from your web site and are therefore of higher quality than other visitors.
Query Refinement
Some searchers may refine their search query if they deemed the results as being irrelevant. Query refinement is both a manual and an automated process. If searchers do not find their search results as being relevant they may search again. Search engines may also automatically refine queries using the following techniques: Google OneBox: promotes a [...]
Reciprocal Link
Two different sites that link out to each other. Also referred to as Cross Linking. Quality reciprocal link exchanges in and of themselves are not a bad thing, but most reciprocal link offers are of low quality. If too many of your links are of low quality it may make it harder for your site [...]
Referrer
The URL address of the web page a user came from before entering another web page. Each time a user clicks a hyperlink, most browsers send a HTTP-REFERRER header to the new web server so that the servers can record the information in log files. The search terms a user typed into a search engine [...]
Reinclusion
If a site has been penalized for spamming they may fix the infraction and ask for reinclusion. Depending on the severity of the infraction and the brand strength of the site they may or may not be added to the search index.
Resubmission
Much like search engine submission, resubmission is generally a useless program which is offered by businesses bilking naive consumers out of their money for a worthless service.
Right Rail
The common name for the right-side column of a web page. On a SERP, right rail is usually where sponsored listings appear
Saturation (Search Engine Saturation)
A term relating to the number of URLs included from a specific web site in any given search engine. The higher the saturation level or number of pages indexed into a search engine, the higher the potential traffic levels and rankings.
SEO Copywriting
Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries. There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content [...]
Spamming
The act of creating and distributing spam to “trick” the search engines. These tactics generally are against the guidelines put forth by the search engines. Tactics such as Hidden text, Doorway Pages, Content Duplication and Link Farming are but a few of many spam techniques employed over the years.
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.
Sponsored Listing
A term used as a title or column head on SERPs to identify paid advertisers and distinguish between paid and organic listings. Alternate names are Paid Listings or Paid Sponsors. Separating paid listings from organic results enables searchers to make their own purchase and site trust decisions and, in fact, resulted from an FTC complaint [...]
Static Content
Content which does not change frequently. May also refer to content that does not have any social elements to it and does not use dynamic programming languages. Many static sites do well, but the reasons fresh content works great for SEO are: If you keep building content every day you eventually build a huge archive [...]
Stop Words
With regard to search engines, a stop word is any word which causes the spider to stop indexing a web page, such as any words that may be offensive, prohibited or otherwise censored.
Tag Line
The closing line of an advertisement. The tag line should include a memorable phrase that summarizes the product and/or brand’s USP.
Text Link Ads
Advertisements which are formatted as text links. Since the web was originally based on text and links people are typically more inclined to pay attention to text links than some other ad formats which are typically less relevant and more annoying. However, search engines primarily want to count editorial links as votes, so links that [...]
Title
This is the name of the webpage. The title is one of the most important aspects to doing SEO on a web page. Each page title should be: Unique to that page: Not the same for every page of a site! Descriptive: What important ideas does that page cover? Not excessively long: Typically page titles [...]
Title Tag
An HTML tag appearing in the <head> tag of a web page that contains the page title. The page title should be determined by the relevant contents of that specific web page. The contents of a title tag for a web page is generally displayed in a search engine result as a bold blue underlined [...]
Toolbar
Many major search companies aim to gain marketshare by distributing search toolbars. Some of these toolbars have useful features such as pop-up blockers, spell checkers, and form autofill. These toolbars also help search engines track usage data.
Traffic Analysis
The process of analyzing traffic to a web site to understand what visitors are searching for and what is driving traffic to a site.
Trickle Submission
Search Engine Commando’s unique technology that automatically submits large lists of URL’s over an appropriate number of days according to the acceptance policies of individual search engines, rather than submitting them all at once. Trickle Submission reduces the risk of rejection by search engines while increasing the chances of achieving good placement.
TrustRank
Search relevancy algorithm which places additional weighting on links from trusted seed websites that are controlled by major corporations, educational institutions, or governmental institutions.
URL Rewrite
A technique used to help make URLs more unique and descriptive to help facilitate better site-wide indexing by major search engines. Also refer URL.
User Agent
This is the identity of a web site visitor, spider, browser, etc. The most common user agents are Mozilla and Internet Explorer.
