Affiliate Marketing: a system of marketing on the web that rewards affiliates for visits that are trafficked from their website. They are also rewarded for every customer, sale, or subscriber that makes a purchase after clicking the affiliate link.

Affiliate Program: an affiliate program is a symbiotic relationship between the seller of a product and some other website, where the company pays the other website for various actions generated by the affiliates program.

Alexa Traffic Rank: an index that can reliably rank a website’s popularity. Google offers Alexa as a service. It has been actively collecting data for a while now for all kinds of traffic between websites through a tool built into a web surfing tool bar and sends back the information anonymously.

ALT tag: an abbreviation for “alternative”. ALT tags are instructions within the HTML tags, which describe graphics. If there is an ALT text included, whenever you hover over a certain location, a description box will pop-up. Having alternative text is a great idea and important to make your site more easy to navigate around for those with disabilities.

Altavista: A powerful and popular search engine with one of the largest databases on the Internet.

Anchor Text: This is the text you will see that is clickable, which is a link to a website. They are a link that appears to be clickable text. You should place keywords and a link tag within the anchor text.

Backlink: this is a link from an external site which will point back to a web page. This variation of links are key to getting higher rankings with search engines. Google has become famous for the methods they use to judge links. Google views each site as a contest of popularity, the more sites that have links going back to yours, the higher your ranking will be. While having many links going back to your site can greatly change how high you are within the rankings, it is usually better to only have links going back to your site from other sites that have a similar theme. Doing so will assist Google and Yahoo to recognize the type of theme you are a part of and then relate your site with with larger clusters of themes.

Bad Neighborhood: The term referring to websites or a group of websites that use various unethical methods to get high in the rankings such as using host materials and spamming techniques. You can really hurt your rankings and reputation by associating yourself with sites that use these methods. You really need to make sure the site is ethical before you go to bed with them.

Banned: Some sites even end up getting black listed from search engines for life for using unethical tactics to get higher on the rankings such as spam.

Banner Advertising: This is a method of advertising on the internet using web banners. A web banner will be implanted into a website that when clinked will lead back to the site the banner is advertising.

Blacklisted: This is an SEO term which stems from being banned to submit your site to a certain search engine.

Blind Traffic: Traffic that is gathered by using misleading tactics to get people to click advertisement links they otherwise would not have.

Blog: A web log. A blog is simply an online journal that is embedded into a site. The various activities within the process of updating a Blog is called “blogging.”

And the person who updates a blog is referred to as a “Blogger.” Blogs are usually updated at least once a day through the use of programs that allow even technically inept people to maintain and keep their blog current. Nearly in every case a blog is arranged in a fashion that shows the latest posts in chronological order. Most of the time you can access blogs through RSS feeds.

Blogosphere: The current iteration of all the various bits of information that are on blogs, and all of the subcultures who have created and utilize the various blogs.

Bounce: an automatic email reply to to inform you that the mail you tried to send to someone could not be successfully delivered. Basically the message bounced back after being sent and will be called an undeliverable message.

Bounce Rate: The process by which Google does not count website traffic for their ratings if it enters then leaves within the same page. You lower you keep your bounce rate, the higher quality your site will be.

Broad Match: Your ad will appear when your keywords are inside the query, even though other words are also within the search. An example of a broad match keyword usage would be: “tennis shoes” would also be “shoes for tennis.”

Broken Link: a link that no longer functions correctly or guides you to its intended site when clicked. This problem usually stems from a website having it’s name changed or it has been removed from the server. People also can call these “Dead Links.”

Call to Action: an advert that asks users to make a certain action. These are more commonly seen as adds that say “Buy This!” “Click me!” “You have won! Please click this link to claim your prize!” and all the other variations.

Call-to-Action Link: Also called a hyperlink. Call-To-Action links on the world wide web’s various marketing ploys will guide the customer to take a new step. Call-to-action links usually will guide people who were interested into to click the links strait to a page with a shopping cart or email order form. Properly written call to action links can raise micro-conversation rates and boost keyphrase relevancy.

Click Popularity: rates the relevance of of the search data by seeing how a user behaves with the search results they are given. If someone clicks on one of the given results then quickly backtracks to the SERP, the site will have it’s relevance lowered which leads to lower rankings. Also, in a similar fashion, if people skip the first few pages of results then fine what they are looking for on the 2nd or 3rd page, the rankings can be reordered that way as well.

Click Fraud: happens when a pay per click advertising link or banner is clicked many times using a computer program or script to trick the advertising in producing the wrong charge per click.

Clickthrough: where a link found through a search engine output is clicked in order to visit the indexed site. This process is important for getting visitors to come to your site through the search engine. Even though you have good rankings, it will not help if the visitors do not click the link to lead to your indexed site. You have to give a very clear and well written description and title that will catch their interest.

Clickthrough rate: CTR is the amount of clickthroughs which is then divided by the impression numbers, then it is multiplied by a hundred to represent a percentage. Basically if a 100 people visit your site and only one of them clicks through, your CTR is 1%. CTR’s are are usually around 0.5 for banner ads, and near 3% for text style links.

Cloaking: this is the process of giving various bits of content by using the user’s ip address or by their user-agent string. You can find various uses for cloaking, like targeting certain countries with a certain product.

Comment: an HTML tag that hides text from browsers. There are some search engines which will ignore the text between certain symbols while others may index the text if the comment tags weren’t there. Comments usually are used to cover up JavaScript code from browsers who do not accept them, and sometimes on those like Excite, to insert invisible keywords to search engines.

Comment Tag: This tag is invisible to most users who view a site but can be seen by search engines.

Competition: The amount of websites out there who are also competing for the same type of keywords and key phrases that you are using with all the major search engines.

Google has one of the largest competition bases due to the massive index they boast.

Content: The information found on a particular website. This ranges from images, text, and all other kinds of information that has been placed on the website.

CMS or Content Management System: Software that helps a user manage the the content throughout their webpage. CMS allows the webmaster of a site to easily organize their site, control the contents, and swiftly publish all forms of documents, images, and other forms of media. CMS also can assist in a collaboration of documents. These type of web content management systems allow easier methods to manage and control all the tasks that are involved in publishing websites.

Conversion: A definite response to one of your ad’s call to action. A conversion could be one of many actions made by the customer such as a registration, a download, or an entry into your database.

Conversion Rate: The number of people who visit through your ad divided by the impresions, it is then multiplied by a hundred for a percentage. Basically if 100 people see your add and then 5 click through, then one buys, you have a one percent conversation rate. Conversion rates measure the amount of people who actually go through with your call to action.

Cookie: Usually cookie refers to pieces of data sent by a server to a user’s web browse, this information is saved and sends information back to the server when people return. There are different cookies, and some may be blocked depending on the browse and the browsers setting. It may save the cookie for a long time or a very short time. Cookies usually contain things like shopping cart info, preferences, and registration info. When a server receives a user cookie, the server will be able to put the information stored in the cookie to use.

Cost Per action: CPA is a pricing system that is based on the number of actions people take regarding your ad. These actions may include but are not limited to a purchase, a click, or some other transaction. This can also be called “cost per transaction” CPA can also mean Cost Per Acquisition.

Cost per Click: or CPC is a pricing system that is based upon how many clicks your add gets. The usual range is anywhere from 5 cents to a dollar per click. This can also be called pay per click. CPC can also mean cost-per-customer.

Cost per lead, CPL is a pricing system based upon the number of new leads that click your ad. Or in the sense that, you pay for each visitor who clicks you ad and then completes a form on your site.

Cost-per-order: CPO pricing system is based upon how many orders you receive through your ad placement. This can also be called cost per transaction.

Cost-Per-Sale: CPS pricing system is based upon the number of sales you get from your ad. Because users an visit your site a few times before they buy anything, cookies can be used to track the visits they make until they actually buy something.

This can also be called cost per acquisition or pay per sale.

CPM: This is cost per 1,000 impressions.

Crawler: Another way to refer to a search engine spider. This basically is a program that will go to sites and download the web pages then place them in storage so they may be inspected by the search engines.

Crawling the Web: This is the task a search engine crawler preforms. It will visit a list of pre-specified links that are worth investigating.

Cross Linking: When an owner of multiple sites can link them between each other so increase link popularity. This is called cross linking. Because search engines do not usually recognize this, many people tend to cross link to boost their rankings on the search engines.

CSS or Cascading Style Sheet: the standard way to specify how text looks and other bits of a document.

CTR

This is the Click Through Rate

Customer Life Cycle: CLC, the cycle of a customer first buying from you to the point they stop coming back for more.

Daily World Searches: an estimation of how many times a keyword may be searched for through major search engines. WebCEO tries to keep a clean database by eliminating terms older than 90 days old.

Dead Link: A link that no longer functions or exists. The page has either been moved or the server is down.

Deep Linking: a link to a page that takes you to another page far connected from the home directory. Deep linking can be used to charge Page rank to a certain page on a internet site. This is an example: http://www.mysite.com/features/demo/flash/seo.html.

Description Meta Tag: A hidden elemental in html within the head of a document to pass on information about a page. This block of text will be used by Google and will be shown under the title tag text by search engines.

Directory: a large collective of websites that are reviewed by human editors then organized into various categories much like the Yellow Pages. Various examples would be: about.com Yahoo, and Open Directory project.

DMOZ: Directory Mozilla is a great free link which can take up to 6 months before you are listed.

Domain: internet address subset. Domains can be seen as hierarchical, domains on the lower end will refer to certain web sites that are in top level domains. The major part of the address will come at the very end of the line, usually this is .com .gov .edu .org .net etc…

Domain Name: This is the name that is chosen by the owner of the site to be used as a URL address instead of the numeric IP address. A domain name registrar will assist in that being completed.

Duplicate Content: More than one page that contains nearly exactly the same content. Most major search engines can detect sites and will block them that contain duplicate content, the crawlers assist in preventing this. If a site is recognized as having duplicate content, the search engine will exact a penalty upon them and lower their ranking to a number below that of what they would have naturally.

Dynamic Page: A page that contains information that will change either by action or automatically based on the user information. You can recognize when this type of method is being used by noticing what the URL ends with. Usually it will contain .asp .php .cfm .cgi or .shtml. It can be possible to have dynamic content on pages like htm or html which are usually static. Search engines treat those with dynamic content the same as they do with pages that use static content, but if there are too many parameters after the ?, it will not index them.

External And Internal Links: Form a web page’s view point, outbound links on a certain page can either be internal or external. Internal links will have other sites point toward yous. Externals links will show you to other sites.

Flash: Flash cartoons and animations are films made by using Abobe Flash animator, these usually come in the form of a .swf file.

Forum: an internet board used for having discussion or placing up user created content, web application software can provide this service. It can also be an online community where users will share their interests.

Geo Targeting: The act of sending out adds to other areas around the world. An example would be placing a locations name in your keyword such as “London museum” or “Kiev symphony orchestra.” There are some search engines which will let you send them off to certain countries or language bases without using a keyword to do so.

Google: The top search engine available on the internet current, near 80% of all search engine traffic goes through this. When people talk about SEO, or search engine optimization, they usually are talking about improving their ranking with Google.

Google Bot: Name of the Google spider that looks for web pages. It will be recognized by a user-agent string that contains Googlebot.

Google Toolbar: A toolbar that is downloaded and installed into a user’s Internet Explorer, which allows them to search without going to Google’s website.

This toolbar can also show the Google PageRank or PR, on the currently viewed page. The Google Toolbar can be found at http://toolbar.google.com

HEAD Area: Every HTML document will probably have a HEAD tag at the start of it’s coding. Usually the info inside a head tag will describe what the document is about using This does not appear on the browser’s page display. Both the title tag and Meta tag can be found within the head tag.

Heading: Search engines usually will give more priority to text that is located within the HTML heading area. It is in your best interest to place your keywords within your headings while making your web page.

Headings H1-H6 Syntax:

Place Keyword here.

, < H3>Place Keyword here., etc. There are rules for how you should structure your HTML page. They are usually in a document type design: You first have the title, then the main heading which describes the intent of this area. Subheadings can bring more notice to key points in each section. Search engines tend to prioritize the words inside your heading rather than the ones within text. There are a few search engines which inspect info on keywords that are found in the headings together.

Hit: One request from a browse for one part of a web server.

This request can be any type of file such as an imagine, an animation, a bit of audio, video, pdf, execel, word, RTF document, downloads, etc. For each thing a site site loads for a visitor inside an HTML file, such as graphics, Java scripts, and a CSS file, they will all be counted as separate hits for one individual. Many will claim that this is the number of visitors coming to their site as a promotional method. The number of hits will always be a larger number than that of the actual number of visitors due to the various elements that can trigger a hit.

Home Page: Homepage has many definitions. This originally meant the page on which your browser brings up when you start the browser. The now more common meaning is the main web page that a business, organization, or main page of various other connected sites, such as “Come visit our home page!”

Hyperlink: Content that is clickable on a website that on most occasions leads to another web page. This can also bring up other parts of the same page. This clickable content is then referred to as a link to another website or part of the page. Spiders or Crawlers tend to use links to change between pages.

Impression: an ad that is displayed on a user’s browser. The amount of impressions will determine the cost of an internet ad using the CPM pricing system. This is also known as exposure.

Indexing: This is the method in which a search engine gathers data to place within their search result database. This involves gathering text that a machine can read from various webpages then placing it in a form that can be searched easier. Engine spiders or crawlers are used to index websites.

Internal and External pages: Internal pages are in a website that you scanned. If a page is on any other domain name, then it is considered an external page.

Internet Marketing: Basically refers to the act of advertising merchandise and servers on the internet. The various forms of internet marketing include but are not limited to: affiliate marketing, interactive advertising, search engine marketing, (including search engine optimization), blog marketing, banner ads, e-mail marketing, pay per click advertising, affiliate marketing, and interactive advertising.

IP Address: Internet Protocol Address, a number unique to your site or computer that is connected on the internet. IP Addresses can be dynamic(they change every time you connect) or static(they don’t change.) An IP address allows services on the internet to find you, this way you can view webpages, emails and other online activities.

JavaScript: This is what the Netscape Communications Corp. or more recently the Mozilla Corp. ECMAScropt standard. Based upon the concept of protype-based progaming, itt is a powerful scripting language. This language is best known for it’s various utilizations on websites, but it can also be used to access scripting that is embedded on other types of applications.

KEI: This measures how valued your keyword is based on Daily World Searches versus the amount of competing web pages that put it to use.

Key Performance Indicator: KPI assist an internet business set goals and measure how far they are from reaching them. KPI is a measurement that is quantifiable. It shows just how much you have improved your site’s activity. This information is vital to any online business’s success.

Key Word Phrase: A combination of keywords which can appear in a site’s content. For a search engine to place your webpage on it’s list of results, it is necessary that it contains terms within it that will be queried by users on the search engine to meet up with your site. It must be set up correctly so the search engine will recognize you as a correct match. A practiced SEO specialist will have the ability to make sure your page is optimized in a way that places you high in the rankings while still being useful to customers. The term “key phrase” is frequently used false in place of “search term.”

Key Phrase Search: A search that browses documents that contain the same sentence or phrase that a user has specified within an engines search box.

Keyword: a certain word or words that is typed into a search engine. After being submitted the engine will then turn up a page of results for the user to browse. The content of a search engine query is a called a “keyword.”

Keyword Domain Name: The method of using your URL website’s name as a keyword. Rankings can be increased on some search engines when the keyword is also used within it’s URL.

Keyword Frequency: This is how frequently a keyword will show up on a page or part of a page. In most cases, higher frequency of keywords will raise the rankings of that page within a search engine querying that keyword. But, if a keyword is used too much within a single page, it can be penalized for spamming the keyword.

Keyword Monitoring: If there is a need to monitor a keyword, a monitoring center can download your page up to 200 kb through the use of a GET/Page-name.html command. Web CEO can then search through your site for the keywords and tell you if the page has been changed in anyway. Basically, if a hacker attacks your page and changes something, or there is an error, you will be informed.

Keyword Nesting: Putting a keyword or phrase inside a broader keyword.

Keyword Phrase: A term consisting of two or more word which can give a keyword more detail. This is used by many users that query to locate a product.

Keyword Research: This is basically research done during an SEO to locate keywords or keyword phrased that customers will use to locate your service or product.

Keyword Search: A searched preformed to locate documents that have one or more keywords that are specified by a user through a search engine search box.

Keyword Spamming: a method of spamming keywords inside a meta tag or body of text. Most search engines will see this as spam when keyword density is over 50%.

Keyword Stuffing: the act of stuffing keywords to the point that they overflow on a web page. These are words that are added to make search engines find you easier and does not benefit live users. These words might be visible to human users, and they might not be. This is not really a violation of a search engine TOS, well at least not when the words are invisible to human visitors, it can make the page look like spam.

Keyword Theme: this is a the group of keywords and phrase that can be found in a site’s content. For a search engine to display your results in conjunction with the correct keywords, your keywords need to placed throughout the website copy so it can be ranked correctly. This way the search engine can match you to your targeted audience. A skilled SEO can make sure that your website copy is optimized correctly with the right search terms while still making the site user friendly.

Keywords: A word or phrase which those who use search engines place in the search boxes to locate a certain type of web site. If your page has the correct keywords, it has a chance of being placed in the results list of your site, which can garner traffic. Keywords can either be a single word or a phrase. Keyphrase is the term used when a keyword has two or more words within it. Most top search engines will rank your page on the basis of your keyword placement within the various parts of your site. HTML, your tile, and body text will all be tags that are used to inspect it. This leads to keywords being a key aspect of a good SEO. Optimizing keywords is the act of placing your best keywords through out the web page at the correct intervals and frequency so that search engines will recognize them. The best keywords are ones that are searched for frequently but not a lot of other websites use them.

Keyword Meta Tag: HTML meta tag that will list all the top keywords and key phrases which are inside your web pages content. A few search engines will use the meta tag in your HTML to rank your web page. But Google does not share in this practice. This is an example:

Landing Page: This is most of the time referred to as a splash page or jump page. But this is basically where users will land after clicking your ad. This landing page does not always have to be your homepage. Actually ROI can improve if your landing page is related to your ad, and can also give you a chance for a conversion through downloading software, buying a product, or signing up for some type of newletter.

Link: Either a text or image which will connect two web pages. There are all kinds of different terms for links such as: internal links, backlinks, external links or inbound links.

Link Anchor text: Part of a link that is actually clickable. If you use keywords within the anchor text of your link, it will improve your ranking with those certain keywords. And example would be: Anchor Text For link

Link Exchange: a form of internet marketing where you trade links with another website that is related to your product/service some how. An example would be when a PR agency will link to a search engine position form article on “PR and SEO Marketing”. The SEO will probably then link itself back to the PR company. A quality link exchange vendor will greatly increase a companies Page rank as well as increase the amount of visitors from their target audience. You can actually hard your site’s PageRank by going to link farms which promise thousands of links. These sites should be avoided.

Link Farm: A site that is set up for one purpose: Boosting another site’s link popularity to increase the visitors that go to that site. But usually your link will end up lost among other unrelated links. These link farms can also be made as networks that contain many links to each other. This link farms can also be called free for all link pages. Most if not all link farms are removed from search engines when discovered and they will penalize those who link to them. It is a bad idea to link with a link farm if you need organic searches for your page views.

Link Popularity: A very vital factor when you are going through SEO as well as site positioning. A website will use link popularity to determine just how important your site is to them. This is the reason Google has become so successful as it is. Popular websites will have more links from other websites and that means they should be ranked better. Also, it is much harder to falsify link popularity than it is to mess around with on page facets, which mean it is more protected from abuse.

Link Quality: the quality of the content within the sites which are linked to your website, also how much relevance you have to the sites which are linked.

Link Reputation: This is the way a search engine will refer to a link through inspecting it’s text.

Link Strategy: A method that a certain site owner comes up with to boost the number of people linking to his site thus increasing popularity.

Link Text: The text on a link or anchor tag which gives the user info or instruction.

Linking: Putting a link to another website or page on your web page.

Links: A short way of saying “hypertext link.” A link can point to anything from a document to some other resource. It could be part of the document, or in another document all together. Most of the type hyper linked text is highlighted by some method. The main default is a blue underlined text, but it can change. If you had no links, you would not be able to navigate the different pages. Basically, you follow a link when you click it.

META Description: the syntax: This gives a small description of a webpage. It is necessary that the description if to the point when it comes to the webpage. But as time has gone ont he description tag has dropped in value for ranking purposes quite a bit. But many search engines will still put it to use.

Most of the time the descriptions are shown under the title in search results.

META Keywords: Syntax: This is a list of Meta Tags that relate to the web pages content. It gives crawler style search engines more text to inspect. But due to the fact a good portion of people try to abuse this, most search engines will not use this tag. You should realize that most top crawler search engines except for inktomi do not recognize meta tags.

Misspelling: A lot of people end up misspelling what they are searching for when they use search engines. When pages use misspellings for keywords, they might get extra hits, so another technique might be to include very common misspellings in your alt tags, keywords and other things like titles and page names. Also this can happen when two words are placed together or there is an accidental space. A smart marketer will optimize their site to include misspellings to get this type of traffic.

Keyword Negative: allows you to remove searches that are not relevant to your message. Like if you add the negative keyword “vacation to a keyword that is focusing on Hawaii climate changes, your ad will not pop up to anyone searching for a Hawaiian vacation. But you should definitely be cautious when using negative keywords, they can really cut down on the amount of people who might actually respond to your add.

New Visitor: A person who has come to your site for the first time.

Off Page Factors: The number of pages that are linking to you, text in other links that point to you, your presence in various directories, and all other ways your link’s popularity score can be effected.

Off Page Optimization: A way to increase the frequency of your visits through external means that do not have to do with your actual website. This is the hardest factor to manipulate artificially. The biggest off page factor is link popularity. There are others as well like click popularity, link community and link text. Off page optimization makes sure that all these elements are working together correctly to give your relevance a large boost toward target keywords.

On page factors: These are the design elements of your website, such as your page title and body text which can contribute to a search engines judgment of your website. The programs used by search engines will look over your HTML code and score you based on your keyword frequency, weight, prominence, and many other factors.

On and off Page Factors: Things that influence your rankings. Search engines scan your page and judge it based on various factors and rules. These rules are called ranking algorithms. There are two main things a search engine uses to decide your relevance: Is your page’s content related to the search query? Also it asks if your page is important enough to query through the other pages linking to it. This will force search engines to look at keywords on a cached page. After that, they will look at pages that are linked to yours and analyze that page and count them after seeing how they link up.

On Page Optimization: Thanks to the fact that search engines have several ways of ranking your page, you can be sure that one is on page factors. These are the elements on your actual website that will improve your websites ranking on search results. This includes headings and body text. On page optimization is basically making sure these factors are lined up to what the search engine wants.

Optimization: Making changes to a web page to ensure higher rankings on the search engines. This is a way of helping a potential customer or service seeker find your website. This optimization entails various changes to all factors such as: new text for the title-tags, meta-tags, alt- attributes, headings, and changes to the first large chunk of the main text. A big image map at the top of your web page needs to be moved down further on your site. You should avoid frames unless you have links inside of the frames.

Optimized Pages: These pages are optimized with targeted key phrases that are placed within the main website. They have content inside of them that the user was searching for as well as remain consistent with the rest of the page. Optimized pages can be seen as pages that users land in when they come from search engines.

Organic Listings: There are many search engines that will place a site at the top of the list, they either payed to be there or were popular enough to be placed there.

Orphaned Files: These are files on a website that have no link that will point to them. This makes these files useless. You can search for these orphaned files by either looking on your server FTP or searching directly. Usually you need to restore their links or remove them.

Outbound link: A link that leaves your website.

Page popularity: A way to measure the amount and quality of links to a certain page. Quite a few search engines have been using this method to rank various web pages. The quality and overall number of inbound links is one of the more important factors of optimizing a page’s content.

PageRank: The rank against all over websites on how high you are on Google’s search index. The PR is measured by Google using a complex algorithm that determines number and quality(Google has it’s own way to judge this quality) of inbound links. PageRank is a big asset to Google, it’s an exponential based value which gives a level of importance to a web page. PR will be a number out of 10 that will appear on the Google Toolbar when you visit a website, it will be on a green bar.

Page View: a statistical measurement of how many times your page was viewed rather than the amount of hits you got. Many server hits can come from one person accessing one page, this can make many log entries. There is software out there that will analyze the types of server hits and will see when a single user visited a page, it will them group them together to find out just how many visitors there have been from the groups of hits.

Paid Inclusion: Allows you a guaranteed spot on a search engine’s top results for monetary payment, but it will not guarantee how high it will be on the list. These paid inclusions will look like an editorial listing instead of a normal link. The pricing is usually based on a index or flat fee.

Pay for Performance: PFP this is the new pay per click or pay for inclusion and paid paid sponsorship style. Differing from organic search results, more search engines will now give a pay for performance option for your site. This allows you to get your site higher up on the list through payment, instead of using organic listings or SEO.

Paid for Performance allows you a guaranteed spot on a search engine’s top results for monetary payment, but it will not guarantee how high it will be on the list. These paid for performance searches will look like an editorial listing instead of a normal link. This pricing will be based on either a flat or index fee.

Pay Per Click: A marketing method where advertisers pay for each click on one of their ads you are supporting. There are some search engines out there such as Yahoo which specialize in pay per click mediums. But these engines are not limited to pay per click methods. Like Looksmart, this directory has gone to a pay per click method. There are trusted XML feeds that Inktomi and Fast which are sold using pay per click.

Pay Per Click Advertising: The utilization of search engine listings to bring traffic to a certain web page. Basically all the advertisers seeking a certain keyword will bid for it on an auction to gain higher rankings over competitors. PPC is a short advertisement which usually will pop up next to search engine results on the page to bring visitors to the site.

PPC is a short advertisement which usually will pop up next to search engine results on the page to bring visitors to the site.

Penalty: A punishment placed on a website which tried to abuse methods of faul SEO tactics that it deems unworthy. Hidden text, sneaky redirects, and bad neighborhood linking are all negative tactics. This penalty is usually a drop in rankings on the Google PageRank system. Also your page can be buried very deep with SERPS where it can never be found through the search engine again.

Position: the rank on a search engine of your web site. This is the positron you are on a search engines result list.

PR: Or PageRank: A way that Google uses to rank your websites position. You can see the PR through Google’s Toolbar.

Ranking: You position on the search results that comes from the engine’s database which is relevant to what a user is looking for. Every search engine has different means of locating pages. The top search engines have ranking algorithms which look at keywords and page popularity.

Ranking Algorithm: This is the way a search engine will figure your position on the results. Ranking algorithms can be affected by many factors such as the domain’s name, content that a crawler can inspect, the way the site submits its content, and it’s HTML code as well as its current popularity. These search engine ranking algorithms are protected greatly and updated quite consistently so it filters out factors that try to change it’s results.

Re-Submission: Registering with a search engine more than once with the same website. Search engines find this suspicious and can be seen as a spamming attempt. Many search engines will remove sites from their results for resubmitting content.

Other websites have a 24 hour wait period before they allow you to resubmit. Most of the time not a huge issue to resubmit your website now and then.

Reciprocal Links: giving links to another site so they will link to yours, this is not considered good practice anymore. This can be a way to gaining popularity on your site which in turn builds your search engine ranking. Basically you give your site to another site in exchange for linking their site on yours. This is why it is referred to as a Reciprocal link.

Redirects: This is when a server tells a browser to load another website and not the one that was originally asked for. There are many ways to initiate a redirect. An auditor will analyze a redirecting URL if it comes form a server reponse 3xx as well as meta refresh.

If you wish to turn this check either off or on you need to go to ‘Check Rules’ in ‘Options’ on the ‘Scan’ button menu.

Repeat Visitor: a visitor who has visit your site before has returned again more than once over a certain time frame.

Repeat visits: a visitor who has visit your site before has returned again more than once over a certain time frame. Basically these are all the visits from a certain visitor minus the very first visits over a certain period of time. The percentage of how many repeat visits vs all the visits you get can give you a good idea just how well your site is attracting people with it’s content.

Robot: a program which preforms its tasks automatically with out any assistance from humans. Usually a robot will have some form of AI, it will be able to adapt to certain situations. The main two robots are spiders and agents. These can also be called bots.

ROBOTS tag: this is a meta info tag which can tell engine robots how they should be have when archiving the site.

Robots.txt: A text file which controls spiders on your website. Only spiders which allow robot exclusion standard will listen to commons from a robots.txt file. This type of file allows you to give a robot exclusive access to various folders and files that are present on your website that others may not access.

This is not a very important file for your site. You can learn more at: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

RSS: A Rich Site Summary: This is a RDF site summary or other wise known as a Real Simple Syndication. It’s a fairly common protocol for sharing various pieces of content. It was made at first to easier access news articles, but not it is used for all sorts of blogs. RSS used XML content on a website, and is for the purpose of content sharing. There are also RSS feeds, which gives RSS information to visitors about a website. You can also access RSS feeds with RSS readers to show users content.

RSS Feeds: Abbreviation for Rich Site Summary or Rich Site Syndication. RSS feeds uses XML documents to send out news headlines. Documents such as these are submitted to sites that can either choose to show this info or program an aggregator to parse this info.

Sandbox: This is a term for a Google algorithm which looks at how old your page is and how long ago it was updated. Pages with stale content that does not update frequently tend to slide down the list of results, while new pages that tend to be updated more earn much higher positions on PageRank. But some sites that are rocketing up in positions may be removed from the top place in a search results until Google finds out if this site was really being updated or if it was made simply artificially boosted to garner high rankings over a small period of time.

A period that a website is removed from the top list while being evaluated is called “being in the sandbox.” This can usually last as long as six months to a year, but after that your position will graduate be restored. But there are a lot of brand new sites which don’t see this sand box, so some have began to debate if this sand box is a myth or not.

Search Engine: An online database of various internet resources that is searchable. There are many components to a search engine: It’s software, its spider bots, it’s main index, and it’s various relevancy algorithms. Search engine software usually is made up of a server or many collections of server that stores indexing data on the internet. It stores results and then categorizes and ranks them.

The spider bots go all over the web and collect data on webpages for the index. The index is the main database where all the collected data is stored. The algorithm a search engine uses finds out just how to rank a webpage for the resulting queries.

All the main search engines are Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, and Lycos. The big directories are Yahoo!, LookSmart, as well as ODP.

Search Engine Friendly: This is a webpage which has been optimized to be recognized by a search engine. This friendly page will make it easier for search engines to link to their page.

Search Engine optimization: SEO is making a website much more relevant to the content you are providing, making people who search for your type of content more likely to find you. SEO means making sure the content in your web page contains the right amount and frequency of keywords as well as relative quality content to make sure your page gets ranked higher. A good SEO will make sure that the content is user friendly as well. SEO cannot be successful without good content and end up being rejected by search engines. You should also look at the term: ranking algorithms.

SEO copy: a copywriting that weaves keyword and phrase into an informational or marketing copy. SEO copywriting is made to garner a major position for the your chosen key phrases and increase your conversion rate.

Search Engine Result Pages: SERPS is the ranking list of web sites which are given to those who query the keywords involved with them.

Search Engine Spammers: These people optimize their site with the intent of using unethical tactics to gain ranks on search engines.

Search Engine Spider: This bot goes over all relative websites and indexes its pages for the database. This spider is an automated program which collects data from web pages.

This is how the search engine get’s its index. It uses links to find new pages. You can see spider activity within your server logs. You can even see which files they asked for. They usually identify themselves when they access your site, Google’s spider is called Googlebot, and Yahoo’s is called Yahoo! Slurp.

Search Engine Submission: This is the process of submitting your site to a search engine to make it aware of you and index your web page. Spiders from search engines go over the whole web on a normal schedule, so usually a spider will find your page when it is linked through another website already in the index.

Search engine Visibility: This is the summary of the positions of your website in the search results that are made from various keywords that people type inside the search box. You should not be interested in every search engine on the web, but focus on one that might bring you visitors.

Search Marketing, or Search Engine Marketing: This is the marketing that a business uses to increase the number of visitors to their website through use of search engines and their conversions. SEM Strategies include: Pay pe click advertising, paid inclusion, and SEO.

Search Term: A phrase or word which is placed in a search engine so it can search for related websites. The search engine then puts to use an algorithm which looks through it’s database to find a site matching the phrases you entered. You can enter wide terms such as “software” or even more focused terms like “web promotion software.” Correctly focused terms in the search is the basis of all good search engine position strategies. It’s important to make sure that the content in your website is quality as well. Search engine promotions which end up targeting popular and relevant search terms will push targeted traffic to your site, which can give you high conversion rates. You can really increase search engine promotions by watching all the habits and trends of searchers as well as having the correct experience in dealing with search selection terms.

SEO Copywriting: A special copywriting method which places keywords and phrase into a information or marketing copy. SEO copywriting is made to garner a major position for the your chosen key phrases and increase your conversion rate.

SERP: search engine results page. This is the list of sites you see after querying a search engine. Because SERP is the beginning of the conversion, you need good call to action methods which draw the customer into your ad.

Site Map: A page on your site which links to all pages on your website in a well formed manner. This is a great way to get search engine spiders to go all through your page.

Site Stickiness:

Visits are grouped by how long they stay after coming. This is a way to see how well a site holds onto visitors.

Site Submission The process by which you submit your site to a search engine to get into their database. There are some search engines which allow you guaranteed spots on their index for a payment.

Slow Pages: These are pages which have a long download times. If a page has a big file, it will take a while for it to load. Web CEO Auditor can list the files on your page and their sizes so you can see which file is too big.

Social Media Marketing:

This is how a site promotes itself. The company uses social media channels by getting involved with potential and existing customers. These channels are made up of photo and video sharing sites, blogging systems, social bookmarking sites, as well as other social mediums within the web.

Spam: A SEO method which a search sees as unethical. Some claim that Spam is a word that search engines made up to cover their inability to see sites using tactics they do not like.

Splash Page: A doorway page which is more artistic granting a grand entrance to a website. A splash page is a bad idea for most designs, and search engines do not like them.

Stop Word: A word that will be ignored by a query due to the frequency of it’s use, or the fact it does not contribute to the search. These words are those such as: I, me, the, you, and, as, of, and etc

Submitting Your URL: Informing a search engine of your web pages existence. When you submit a URL it is placed within a queue for the crawler to get to eventually. If you have many backlinks that come back to your page, usually a crawler will have already found it by searching through links. The crawler may already have located it.

While you may submit your URL to a directory, they actually use humans instead of bots to search the sites which you submit.

Syndication: A way to distribute your ads by having them pop up on a partner site.

Target Audience: The audience you wish to pull in to your site. Targets could be a certain demographic such as age, gender, income, etc.

Target Traffic: The visitors that are interested in the product/service your site has available.

Text ad: An advertisement which is made through a text delivery, that has a well written and and good action driving copy with a link to your web page. Due to the fact they do not have graphics, they are easy to make and also lower download time for your page. These can also be called sponsored links.

Title: The text within the HTML tag of the exact same name. This text is closely related to the web page’s context and the tags that come along with it. It is usually displayed in a prime position, such as the top of your web browser. The title text can be vital do to the fact it forms not only a link to the page from various search engines but also because the search engine uses it to rank the page in it’s indexes. You should not mix up this text with things such as heading texts on a page. Sometimes headings look like titles. This usually comes in large font sizes and rendered using HTML heading tags.

TITLE Tag: Syntax: , This HTML tag is in the head tag will specify what the title of a web page is. This content will be displayed at the title bar on the top of the browser. This text is what search engines use to make a link for your site. This text is actually one of the more vital parts of getting noticed by a search engine algorithm. Never use more than one title tag, search engines really frown upon this and will penalize you for it.

Titles With Keywords: The number of sites with the same keywords in their title. It allows you to estimate just how many web pages were optimized to have the same target keyword as you due to the fact this is important to SEO. You have a large advantage if your site has a low number for it’s Titles with Keywords.

Unique Visitor: a human visitor that comes to a web page. Web servers will record the IP address of every visitor who browses the site, it uses this to decide the number of human visitors to come to your page. Like if a person comes to your site 20 different times, it will only count him once due to the fact his IP address has visited multiple times.

URL: Abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator. An address to target a certain internet resource. The first part of the address shows what type of resource it is, such as ftp for file transfers or telnet. Or things such as mailto: to make use of email addresses. These file urls have informations on how they are accessed via path of the file.

Viral Marketing: Word of mouth marketing. The rapid sharing of a product through friends and family. These viral marketing campaigns pushes people to pass on the marketed message to everyone who they think needs to be a part of it.

Visibility: a websites popularity with a search engine results on the internet. Link building and good on page SEO will give you good search engine visibility. Other strategies like pay per click campaigns as well as making sure the site is inside the right directories and databases.

Web Analytics: A measurement of how visitors behave when on your website. In a commercial way of looking at things, when it comes to measuring aspects of a website, it focuses on business examples like landing pages that push people to make a purchase.

Web Marketing: A way of marketing that comes with garnering popularity on the internet. As the whole world surfs around the web, various businesses discover that they will be able to reach an audience much cheaper than a normal media method.

Web Page: A singular document on the internet which is reached by a URL address and can contain text, graphics, and hyper links. A web page is a group of hypertext documents that will form a website. They are usually made through HTML. A web page is reached by the server responding to a requested URL.

Website: Various web pages that are found connected by a certain domain or subdomain name, on the world wide web. A website is identified by it’s domain name.