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Glossary of search engine optimization (SEO) terms

ALT Tags - Used to display a short text description of an image when you hover your mouse over it. The ALT description is also displayed in place of the image if the user is browsing with image display turned off.

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="blue-widget.jpg" width="156" height="175"

    ALT="Photo of blue widget">

Apache Web Server - The web server software that is most used on the internet today. 

Bad Neighborhood - A web page that has been penalized by a search engine (most notably Google) for using shady SEO tactics, such as hidden text or link farms .

Backlinks - Links from another web page to your web page. Most search engines provide an easy way to get a list of all of the backlinks to a specific page. Also referred to as Incoming Links . 

Broken Link - A link that no longer takes the user to the destination page when it is clicked on. This is usually the result of the destination page having been renamed or deleted from the server. Also referred to as a Dead Link .

Click-Through - The action of clicking on a link to visit a web page.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) - The number of times a link is clicked on divided by the number of times that same link is displayed (called an impression ).

Example:

   A link is displayed 100 times (100 impressions) and clicked

   on 5 times. The CTR is 5% (5/100=.05).

Cloaking - Serving one version of a page to a human visitor and a different version of the same page to the search engines. This is usually done to "fool" the search engines into giving the page a higher rank than it would normally receive while making sure the human visitor sees a useful and attractive page.

Note: Cloaking is discouraged by most major search engines, including Google.

Comment Tags - Used in a web page's HTML source code to indicate certain information about a section of the page code. Some search engines will consider keywords contained in comment tags for keyword density purposes, others (including Google) will not.

Example:

    <!--This is a comment-->

Content - The information located on a web page. This includes text, images, and any other types of information that a webmaster places on the page.

Counter - A script that counts the number of hits, unique visitors, and/or page views that a web page (or an entire site) receives. These "stats" provide very useful information for the webmaster.

Crawler - A program used by search engines to "crawl" the web by following links from page to page. This is how most search engines "find" the web pages that they place in their index. Also referred to as a spider or robot.

Crawling The Web - Search engines use crawlers to move from web page to web page by following the links on the pages. The pages "found" are then ranked using an algorithm and indexed into the search engine database.

Cross Linking - This is where the owner of two or more websites interlink the sites in order to boost their search engine rankings . If detected, cross linking often results in a search engine penalty .

Dead Link - See Broken Link .

Deep Linking - Linking to a page that is one or more levels removed from the home directory . Deep linking is often desirable to build PageRank to a specific page on a website.

Example:

     http://www.yoursite.com/tutorials/diy-seo.html

Description - A short sentence or paragraph that describes a web page's content, usually used as part of a link to describe the page being linked to. See also link anchor text .

Description Meta Tag - A meta tag that describes the content of the web page in which it is found. Used by some search engines for keyword density purposes. Also, some SE's will use the description meta tag for the description provided to a user when the page is returned in a listing of search results. It is recommended that you use a couple of your targeted keywords in the description meta tag.

Example:

     <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="This sentence

      describes the content on this page.">

Directory - A categorized list of websites that is maintained by human editors instead of crawlers . Yahoo.com is the most widely recognized directory on the web, but there are literally thousands of others.

Domain - The human-friendly "address, or URL" of a website. When a user types a URL into a web browser, a dedicated computer somewhere on the web known as a Domain Name Server , or DNS translates the URL into a discrete IP address which is then used to find the actual website being requested.

Domain Name Servers (DNS) - These are special computers that translate human-friendly URLs into computer-friendly IP addresses . This process takes place every time a user requests a page from a website.

DNS Propagation - Every time a new domain name is registered (or an existing one is transferred to a new DNS), the information about the domain and the DNS that hosts it must make its way around the entire internet. This process usually takes around 24 hours, during which time the domain will be inaccessible to users.

Doorway Page - A page that is usually optimized for a particular search engine and search term. Multiple doorway pages are often used to help ensure that the same basic content is ranked well on several different search engines. The use of doorway pages for this purpose is frowned upon by most larger search engines, including Google.

Duplicate Content - Two or more separate web pages that contain substantially the same content are said to contain duplicate content.

Google and other top search engines have set up filters to detect duplicate content when their crawlers are active on the web. When pages containing duplicate content are detected, they are often assessed a duplicate content penalty which means a lowering of the page's ranking from what it would have received naturally .

Dynamic Content (dynamic pages) - Web pages that are often generated from database information based upon queries initiated by users. Dynamic pages often include the ? character in the URL.

The URLs of dynamic pages often use these extensions: .asp, .cgm, or .cgi. Most search engines don't index dynamic content very well (or at all). Google has recently been doing a better job at indexing them however.

Dynamic IP Address - An IP address that changes every time a computer logs on to the internet. See also Static IP Address .

Filters - A filter is a software routine that examines web pages during a robot's crawl looking for search engine spam . If the filter detects the use of spam on the page, a ranking penalty is assessed.

Common filters look for hidden text , links to bad neighborhoods , and many other SEO techniques that the search engine doesn't like.

Google.com - The leading search engine on the internet today with approximately 80% of all search traffic . When people speak of search engine optimization (SEO) , they're often referring specifically to Google.