Glossary:
0 -
9
Status OK - The file request
was successful. For example, a page or image was found and loaded properly in
a browser. Some poorly developed content management systems return
200 status codes even when a file does not exist. The proper response for
file not found is a 404. See also: W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions Moved Permanently - The file has been
moved permanently to a new location. This is the preferred method of redirecting for most
pages or websites. If you are going to move an entire site to a new location
you may want to test moving a file or folder first, and then if that ranks
well you may want to proceed with moving the entire site. Depending on your
site authority and crawl frequency it may take anywhere from a
few days to a month or so for the 301 redirect to be picked up. See also:
W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions On Apache
servers you can redirect URLs in a .htaccess file or via in the headers of some
dynamic pages. Most web hosts run on Apache. On IIS servers
you can redirect using ASP or ASP.net, or from within the internet manager. Found - The file has been found, but is
temporarily located at another URI. Generally, as it relates to SEO, it is typically best to
avoid using 302 redirects. Some search engines struggle with redirect
handling. Due to poor processing of 302 redirects some search engines have
allowed competing businesses to hijack the listings of competitors. See also: W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions Not Found - The server was
unable to locate the URL. Some content management systems send 404 status codes
when documents do exist. Ensure files that exist do give a 200
status code and requests for files that do not exist give a 404 status code.
You may also want to check with your host to see if you can set up a custom
404 error page which makes it easy for site visitors to view your most
popular and / or most relevant navigational options report navigational
problems within your site Search engines request a robots.txt file to see what portions of your
site they are allowed to crawl. Many browsers request a favicon.ico file when loading your site. While
neither of these files are necessary, creating them will help keep your log files clean so you can focus on whatever
other errors your site might have. See also: W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions A
A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of
a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable
prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location
at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not
perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look
like content they typically perform much better. See also: Google AdSense heat map - shows ad
clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning. A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked
at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire
reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically
preferred to use absolute links over relative links. Example absolute link <a href="http://seobook.com/folder/filename.html">Cool
Stuff</a> Example relative link <a href="../folder/filename.html">Cool
Stuff</a> Microsoft's cost per click ad network. While it has a few cool features (including dayparting
and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared
to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft's limited
marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present
a great arbitrage opportunity. See also: AdCenter
- sign up for an account Microsoft AdLabs
- view many of the free search marketing tools Microsoft offers. Google's contextual advertising network. Publishers
large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their
content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google. AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue
stream which will help some publishers establish a baseline for the value of
their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is
the trade off for automating ad sales. AdSense ad auction formats include cost per click - advertisers are only charged
when ads are clicked on CPM
- advertisers are charged a certain amount per ad impression. Advertisers can
target sites based on keyword, category, or demographic information. AdSense ad formats include text graphic animated graphics videos In some cases I have seen ads which got a 2 or 3% click
through rate (CTR), while sites that are optimized for
maximum CTR (through aggressive ad integration) can obtain as high as a 50 or
60% CTR depending on how niche their site
is how commercially
oriented their site is the relevancy and
depth of advertisers in their vertical It is also worth pointing out that if you are too
aggressive in monetizing your site before it has built up adequate authority
your site may never gain enough authority to become highly profitable. Depending on your vertical your most efficient
monetization model may be any of the following AdSense direct ad sales selling your own
products and services a mixture of the
above See also: Google
AdSense program - sign up as an ad publisher Google AdSense heat map - shows ad
clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning. Google
AdWords - buy ads on Google search and / or contextually relevant
web pages. Google's advertisement and link auction network. Most of
Google's ads are keyword targeted and sold on a cost
per click basis in an auction which factors in ad clickthrough
rate as well as max bid. Google is looking into expanding their ad
network to include video ads, demographic targeting, affiliate ads, radio ads, and traditional
print ads. AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One
could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords. Rather than doing that
here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources. See also: Google
AdWords - sign up for an advertiser account Google Advertising Professional Program -
program for qualifying as an AdWords expert Google
AdWords Learning Center - text and multimedia educational modules.
Contains quizzes related to each section. AdWords Keyword Tool - shows related keywords,
advertiser competition, and relative search volume estimates. Google Traffic Estimator - estimates bid
prices and search volumes for keywords. Free
PPC tips [PDF] - my ebook offering free pay per click advice. Andrew Goodman's Google AdWords Handbook -
costs roughly $75, but is well worth it Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand
their market reach and mindshare by paying independent agents on a cost per
action (CPA) basis. Affiliates only get paid if
visitors complete an action. Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are
not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for wasting money on
instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage
via other's affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value. Some power affiliates make hundreds of thousands or
millions of dollars per year because they are heavily focused on automation
and/or tap large traffic streams. Typically niche affiliate sites make more
per unit effort than overtly broad ones because they are easier to focus (and
thus have a higher conversion rate). Selling a conversion is typically harder than selling a
click (like AdSense does, for instance). Search engines
are increasingly looking to remove the noise low quality thin affiliate sites
ad to the search results through the use of algorithms which
detect thin affiliate sites and duplicate content; manual review; and, implementation of landing page quality scores on their paid ads. See also: Commission Junction
- probably the large affiliate network Linkshare
- another large affiliate network Performics
- another large affiliate network Azoogle Ads
- ad offer network focused on high margin / high profit verticals CPA Empire
- similar to AzoogleAds Amazon Associates - Amazon's affiliate program Clickbank -
an affiliate network for selling electronic products and information Some social networks or search systems may take site
age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account
when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some
specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the
relevancy of new documents. Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels
(like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than you
might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will
cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more
content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are
typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home
pages. Some search engines may also try to classify sites to
understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites or reference sites
that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages
and try to classify them based on how frequently they change. See also: Google Patent 20050071741: Information retrieval based on
historical data - mentions that document age, link age, link bursts, and link churn may be used to help score the
relevancy of a document. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which
allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring
a new page to load. Amazon.com owned search service which measures
website traffic. Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on
marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is
free. See also Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo.
Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and
features. See also: Blind people and most major search engines are not able
to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute
allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function
of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object. Example usage <img
src="http://www.seobook.com/images/whammy.gif"
height="140" width="120" alt="Press Your Luck Whammy." /> See also Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo.
AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did
a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites.
Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward
irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare. See also: The largest internet retailing website. Amazon.com is
rich in consumer generated media. Amazon also owns a number of other popular
websites, including IMDB and Alexa. See also: Amazon.com
- official site Software which allows you to track your page views, user
paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or
through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site. Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track
user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not. See also: Google
Analytics - Google's free analytics program Conversion
Ruler - a simple and cheap web based analytic tool ClickTracks
- downloadable and web based analytics software The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In
the case the link is an image the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor
text. Search engines assume that your page is authoritative
for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links
occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations.
Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and
thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you
control that you try to mix up your anchor text. Example of anchor text: <a href="http://www.seobook.com/">Search Engine Optimization Blog</a> Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting
Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text
to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text
profile of other top ranked competing sites. See also: Backlink
Analyzer - free tool to analyze your link anchor text Popular web portal which merged with Time Warner. Application Program Interface - a series of
conventions or routines used to access software functions. Most major search
products have an API program. Exploiting market inefficiencies by buying and reselling
a commodity for a profit. As it relates to the search market, many thin
content sites laced with an Overture feed or AdSense ads buy traffic from the major search
engines and hope to send some percent of that traffic clicking out on a
higher priced ad. Shopping search engines generally draw most of their
traffic through arbitrage. See also: Wolf-Howl: AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets [audio] Jeremy Shoemaker interviews Kris Jones and part 2 Active Server Pages - a dynamic
Microsoft programming language. See also: Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They
were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they dumped Jeeves in early 2006. Their
search engine is powered by the Teoma
search technology, which is largely reliant upon Kleinberg's concept of hubs
and authorities. See also: Ask Sponsored Listings - Ask syndicates
AdWords ads, but also sells internal pay
per click ads as well The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search
engines. Five large factors associated with site and page authority are link equity, site age,
traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content. Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try
to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall
authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities
or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ
are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical
authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority. Topical authorities are sites which are well trusted and
well cited by experts within their topical community. A topical authority is
a page which is referenced from many topical experts and hub
sites. A topical hub is page which references many authorities. Example potential topical authorities: the largest brands in
your field the top blogger
talking about your subject the Wikipedia or DMOZ
page about your topic See also: Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF] Jon Klienberg's Authoritative sources in a
hyperlinked environment [PDF] Automated Bid Management Software Pay per click search engines are growing increasingly
complex in their offerings. To help large advertisers cope with the
increasing sophistication and complexity of these offerings some search
engines and third party software developers have created software which makes
it easier to control your ad spend. Some of the more advanced tools can
integrate with your analytics programs and help you focus on conversion, ROI,
and earnings elasticity instead of just looking at
cost per click. See also: If you want to program internal bid management software
you can get a developer token to use the Google
AdWords API. A few popular bid management tools are Atlas OnePoint
(formerly known as GoToast) B
Backlink (see Inbound Link) Marketing technique where you make something look overtly
pure or as though it has another purpose to get people to believe in it or
vote for it (by linking at it or sharing it with friends), then switch the
intent or purpose of the website after you gain authority. It is generally easier to get links to informational
websites than commercial sites. Some new sites might gain authority much
quicker if they tried looking noncommercial and gaining influence before
trying to monetize their market position. During the first web boom many businesses were based on
eyeballs more than actually building real value. Many ads were typically
quite irrelevant and web users learned to ignore the most common ad types. In many ways text ads are successful because they are
more relevant and look more like content, but with the recent surge in the
popularity of text ads some have speculated that in time people may
eventually become text ad blind as well. Nick Denton stated: Imagine a web in which Google and Overture
text ads are everywhere . Not only beside search results, but next to every
article and weblog post. Ubiquity breeds contempt. Text ads, coupled with
content targeting, are more effective than graphic ads for many advertisers;
but they too, like banners, will suffer reader burnout. Popular search and media blogger who co-founded The Industry Standard and Wired, and authored a popular book on
search called The Search. See also: Searchblog
- blog about the intersection of search, media, and technology. The Search - John's
book about the history and future of search. The
Database of Intentions - post about how search engines store many
of our thoughts Web 2.0 Conference
- conference run by John Battelle. Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or
implied intent. For example, if I recently searched for mortgages then am
later reading a book review the page may still show me mortgage ads. A prejudice based on experiences or a particular
worldview. Any media channel, publishing format, organization, or
person is biased by how and why they were
created and their own experiences the current set of
social standards in which they exist other markets they
operate in the need for self
preservation how they interface
with the world around them their capital,
knowledge, status, or technological advantages and limitations Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they
also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of
the largest search engines may bias their organic search results toward informational
(ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward
information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is
heavily cited. Search personalization biases our search
results based on our own media consumption and searching habits. Large news organizations tend to aim for widely
acceptable neutrality rather than objectivity. Some of the most popular
individual web authors / publishers tend to be quite biased in nature. Rather
than bias hurting one's exposure The known / learned
bias of a specific author may make their news more appealing than news from
an organization that aimed to seem arbitrarily neutral. I believe biased
channels most likely typically have a larger readership than unbiased
channels. Most people prefer to
subscribe to media which matches their own biases worldview. If more people read what
you write and passionately agree with it then they are more likely to link at
it. Things which are
biased in nature are typically easier to be cited than things which are
unbiased. See also: Alejandro M. Diaz's Through the Google Goggles [PDF] -
thesis paper on Google's biases A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History - looks at economic,
biological, and linguistic history Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky DVD
and book about mainstream media bias toward
business interests Comparison
of the major search algorithms Bid Management Software (see Automated Bid Management Software) Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract
billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the
attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search
engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label
them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are
called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set
of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered
deceptive the next. Search engines are not without flaws in their business
models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search
algorithms to understand how search engines work. People who have extensively tested search algorithms are
probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those
who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat
SEOs. When making large investments in processes that are not
entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not
work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would
like to work with. See also: Black Hat
SEO.com - parody site about black hat SEO White Hat
SEO.com - parody site about white hat SEO Honest SEO
- site offering tips on hiring an SEO SEOConsultants.com
- reviewed directory of SEO professionals SEO Black Hat
- blog about black hat SEO techniques A method used to break a page down into multiple points
on the web graph by breaking its pages down into smaller blocks. Block level link analysis can be used to help determine
if content is page specific or part of a navigational system. It also can
help determine if a link is a natural editorial link, what other links that link
should be associated with, and/or if it is an advertisement. Search engines
generally do not want to count advertisements as votes. See also Microsoft Research: Block-level Link Analysis A periodically updated journal, typically formatted in
reverse chronological order. Many blogs not only archive and categorize
information, but also provide a feed
and allow simple user interaction like leaving comments on the posts. Most blogs tend to be personal in nature. Blogs are
generally quite authoritative with heavy link equity because they give people
a reason to frequently come back to their site, read their content, and link
to whatever they think is interesting. The most popular blogging platforms are Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type, and Typepad. Either manually or automatically (via a software
program) adding low value or no value comments to other sites. Automated blog spam: Nice post! Manual blog spam: I just wrote about this on my site. I don't
know you, but I thought I would add no value to your site other than linking
through to mine. Check it out!!!!! As time passes both manual and automated blog comment
spam systems are evolving to look more like legitimate comments. I have seen
some automated blog comment spam systems that have multiple fake personas
that converse with one another. Blogger is a free blog
platform owned by Google. It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of
Blogspot.com, or to FTP content to your own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or
making money online you should publish your content to your own domain
because it can be hard to reclaim a website's link equity and age
related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone
else's website. Blogger is probably the easiest blogging software tool
to use, but it lacks many some features present in other blog platforms. See also: Link list on a blog, usually linking to other blogs
owned by the same company or friends of that blogger. A way to make words appear in a bolder font. Words that
appear in a bolder font are more likely to be read by humans that are
scanning a page. A search engine may also place slightly greater weighting on
these words than regular text, but if you write natural page copy and a word
or phrase appears on a page many times it probably does not make sense or
look natural if you bold ever occurrence. Example use: <b>words</b> <strong>words</strong> Either would appear as words. Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark
your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow
you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a
document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage
data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may
eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy. Social bookmarking sites are often called tagging sites.
Del.icio.us is the most popular social
bookmarking site. Yahoo! MyWeb also allows you to tag results. Google allows
you to share feeds and / or tag pages. They also have a program called Google
Notebook which allows you to write mini guides of related links and
information. There are also a couple meta news sites that allow you
to tag interesting pages. If enough people vote for your story then your
story gets featured on the homepage. Slashdot is a tech news site primarily driven
by central editors. Digg created a site covering the same type of
news, but is a bottoms up news site which allows readers to vote for what
they think is interesting. Netscape cloned the Digg business model and
content model. Sites like Digg and Netscape are easy sources of links if you
can create content that would appeal to those audiences. Many forms of vertical search, like Google Video or YouTube, allow you to tag content. See also: Del.icio.us -
Yahoo! owned social bookmarking site Yahoo! MyWeb
- similar to Del.icio.us, but more integrated into Yahoo! Google
Notebook - allows you to note documents Slashdot -
tech news site where stories are approved by central editors Digg -
decentralized news site Netscape
- Digg clone Google Video
- Google's video hosting, tagging, and search site YouTube -
popular decentralized video site Many search engines allow you to perform searches that
contain mathematical formulas such as AND, OR, or NOT. By default most search
engines include AND with your query, requiring results to be relevant for all
the words in your query. Examples: A Google search for SEO Book will return results for SEO AND Book. A Google search for "SEO
Book" will return results for the phrase SEO Book. A Google search for SEO Book -Jorge will return results containing SEO AND Book but NOT Jorge. A Google search for ~SEO
-SEO will find results with words related to SEO that do not contain SEO. Some search engines also allow you to search for other
unique patterns or filtering ideas. Examples: A numerical range: 12...18
would search for numbers between 12 and 18. Recently updated: seo {frsh=100} would find recently updated
documents. MSN search also lets you place more weight on local documents Related documents: related:www.threadwatch.org would find
documents related to Threadwatch. Filetype: AdWords filetype:PDF would search for PDFs
that mentioned AdWords. Domain Extension: SEO inurl:.edu IP Address: IP:64.111.97.133 See also: Search
Engine Showdown Features Chart - Greg R.Notess's comparison of
features at major search engines. The emotional response associated with your company
and/or products. A brand is built through controlling customer
expectations and the social interactions between customers. Building a brand
is what allows you to move away from commodity based pricing and move toward
higher margin value based pricing. See also: Rob Frankel
- branding expert who provides free branding question answers every Monday.
He also offers Frankel's Laws of Big Time Branding™,
blogs,
and wrote the branding book titled The Revenge of Brand X. Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand.
Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle, and are some of the highest
value and highest converting keywords. Some affiliate marketing programs prevent affiliates
from bidding on the core brand related keywords, while others actively
encourage it. Either way can work depending on your business model and
marketing savvy, but it is important to ensure there is synergy between
internal marketing and affiliate marketing programs. 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 down through the site structure. Co-founder of Google. See also: A hyperlink which is not functioning. A link which does
not lead to the desired location. Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the
most common reasons are a website going
offline linking to content
which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons) moving a page's
location changing a domain's
content management system Most large websites have some broken links, but if too
many of a site's links are broken it may be an indication of outdated
content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both
of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant. Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program
which crawls websites to find broken links. Client used to view the world wide web. The most popular browsers are Microsoft's
Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Safari, and Opera. WWII scientist who wrote a seminal research paper on the
concepts of hypertext and a memory extension device titled As We May Think. A well trusted directory of business websites and
information. Business.com is also a large pay per click arbitrage player. See also: Before making large purchases consumers typically
research what brands and products fit their needs and wants. Keyword based search marketing allows you to
reach consumers at any point in the buying cycle. In many markets branded keywords tend to have high search
volumes and high conversion rates. The buying cycle may consist of the following stages Problem Discovery: prospect discovers a
need or want. Search: after discovering a
problem look for ways to solve the need or want. These searches may contain
words which revolve around the core problem the prospect is trying to solve
or words associated with their identity. Evaluate: may do comparison
searches to compare different models, and also search for negative
information like product sucks,
etc. Decide: look for information
which reinforces your view of product or service you decided upon Purchase: may search for
shipping related information or other price related searches. purchases may
also occur offline Reevaluate: some people leave
feedback on their purchases . If a person is enthusiastic about your brand
they may cut your marketing costs by providing free highly trusted word of
mouth marketing. See also: Waiting
for Your Cat to Bark? - book by Brian & Jeffrey Eisenberg
about the buying cycle and Persuading
Customers When They Ignore Marketing. C
Copy of a web page stored by a search engine. When you
search the web you are not actively searching the whole web, but are
searching files in the search engine index. Some search engines provide links to cached versions of
pages in their search results, and allow you to strip some of the formatting
from cached copies of pages. Founder of Weblogs, Inc. Also pushed AOL
to turn Netscape into a Digg
clone. See also: Calacanis.com
- Jason's blog Many content management systems are configured with
errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed
under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures
throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under
multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most
authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines
typically use PageRank or a similar measure to determine
which version of a URL is the canonical URL. Webmasters should use consistent linking structures
throughout their sites to ensure that they funnel the maximum amount of
PageRank at the URLs they want indexed. When linking to the root level of a
site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of
placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL. Examples of URLs which may contain the same information
in spite of being at different web addresses: http://www.seobook.com/ http://www.seobook.com/index.shtml http://seobook.com/ http://seobook.com/index.shtml http://www.seobook.com/?tracking-code Catalog (see Index) A listing used by pay per click search engines to
monetize long tail terms that are not yet targeted by
marketers. This technique may be valuable if you have very competitive key
words, but is not ideal since most major search engines have editorial
guidelines that prevent bulk untargeted advertising, and most of the places
that allow catch all listings have low traffic quality. Catch all listings
may be an attractive idea on theme specific search engines and directories
though, as they are already pre qualified clicks. Common Gateway Interface - interface software
between a web server and other machines or software running on that server.
Many cgi programs are used to add interactivity to a web site. A program, computer, or process which makes information
requests to another computer, process, or program. Displaying different content to search engines and
searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the
strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered
reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine. Cloaking has many legitimate uses which are within
search guidelines. For example, changing user experience based on location is
common on many popular websites. See also:
Book about how the web is a marketplace, and how it is
different from traditional offline business. See also: The Cluetrain
Manifesto website - offers the book for free online. In search results the listings from any individual site
are typically limited to a certain number and grouped together to make the
search results appear neat and organized and to ensure diversity amongst the
top ranked results. Clustering can also refer to a technique which allows
search engines to group hubs and authorities on a specific topic together to
further enhance their value by showing their relationships. See also Google Touchgraph - interesting web application that shows
the relationship between sites Google returns as being related to a site you
enter. Content Management System. Tool used to help
make it easy to update and add information to a website. Blog software programs are some of the most
popular content management systems currently used on the web. Many content
management systems have errors associated with them which make it hard for
search engines to index content due to issues such as duplicate content. In topical authority based search algorithms links which
appear near one another on a page may be deemed to be related to one another.
In algorithms like latent semantic indexing words which appear
near one another often are frequently deemed to be related. Many blogs and other content management systems allow
readers to leave user feedback. Leaving enlightening and thoughtful comments on someone
else's related website is one way to help get them to notice you. See also: blog comment spam - the addition of low value
or no value comments to other's websites Some web developers also place comments in the source
code of their work to help make it easy for people to understand the code. HTML comments in the source code of a document appear as
<!-- your comment here -->.
They can be viewed if someone types views the source code of a document, but
do not appear in the regular formatted HTML rendered version of a document. In the past some SEOs would stuff keywords in comment
tags to help increase the page keyword density, but search has evolved beyond
that stage, and at this point using comments to stuff keywords into a page
adds to your risk profile and presents little ranking upside potential. Information which is generally and widely associated
with a product. For example, most published books have an ISBN. As the number of product databases online increases and
duplicate content filters are forced to get more aggressive the keys to
getting your information indexed are to have a site with enough authority to
be considered the most important document on that topic, or to have enough
non compacted information (for example, user reviews) on your product level
pages to make them be seen as unique documents. Links which search engines attempt to understand beyond
just the words in them. Some rather advanced search engines are attempting to
find out the concept links versus just matching the words of the text to that
specific word set. Some search algorithms may even look at co-citation and words near the link instead of
just focusing on anchor text. A search which attempts to conceptually match results
with the query, not necessarily with those words, rather their concept. For example, if a search engine understands a phrase to
be related to another word or phrase it may return results relevant to that
other word or phrase even if the words you searched for are not directly
associated with a result. In addition, some search engines will place various
types of vertical search results at the top of the
search results based on implied query related intent or prior search patterns
by you or other searchers. Advertising programs which generate relevant
advertisements based on the content of a webpage. See also: Google AdSense is the most popular contextual
advertising program. 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. Here are a few common example desired goals a product sale completing a lead
form a phone call capturing an email filling out a survey getting a person to
pay attention to you getting feedback having a site visitor
share your website with a friend having a site visitor
link at your site Bid management, affiliate tracking, and analytics programs make it easy to track
conversion sources. See also: Google Conversion University - free conversion
tracking information Google
Website Optimizer - free multi variable testing product offered by
Google. The legal rights to publish and reproduce a particular
piece of work. See also: Small data file written to a user's local machine to
track them. Cookies are used to help websites customize your user experience
and help affiliate program managers track conversions. Cost per action. The effectiveness of
many other forms of online advertising have their effectiveness measured on a
cost per action basis. Many affiliate marketing programs and contextual ads are structured on a cost per
action basis. An action may be anything from an ad click, to filling out a
lead form, to buying a product. Cost per click. Many search ads and
contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is
charged a certain price per click. See also: Google AdWords - Google's pay per click ad
program which allows you to buy search and contextual ads. Google AdSense - Google's contextual ad
program. Microsoft AdCenter - Microsoft's pay per click
ad platform. Yahoo!
Search Marketing - Yahoo!'s pay per click ad platform Cost per thousand ad impressions. Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a
website is or has the potential of becoming. How deeply a website is crawled and indexed. Since searches which are longer in nature tend to be
more targeted in nature it is important to try to get most or all of a site
indexed such that the deeper pages have the ability to rank for relevant long
tail keywords. A large site needs adequate link equity to get deeply indexed. Another
thing which may prevent a site from being fully indexed is duplicate content issues. 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 as affiliate feed sites) may be crawled less
frequently than sites with unique content which are well integrated into the
web. See also: Google's Matt Cutts video on Google Crawling Patterns Matt Cutts post Indexing Timeline - mentions
sites with unnatural link profiles may not be crawled as frequently or deeply Cascading Style Sheets is a method for
adding styles to web documents. Note: Using external CSS files makes it easy to change
the design of many pages by editing a single file. You can link to an
external CSS file using code similar to the following in the head of your
HTML documents <link rel="stylesheet"
href="http://www.seobook.com/style.css" type="text/css"
/> See also W3C: CSS
- official guidelines for CSS CSS Zen Garden
- examples of various CSS layouts Glish.com
- examples of various CSS layouts, links to other CSS resources Clickthrough rate - the percentage of
people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to
measure how relevant a traffic source or keyword is. Search ads typically
have a higher clickthrough rate than traditional banner ads due to being
highly relevant to implied searcher demand. Google's head of search quality. See also: Registering domains related to other trademarks or
brands in an attempt to cash in on the value created by said trademark or
brand. D
Turning ad campaigns on or off, changing ad bid price,
or budget constraints based on bidding more when your target audience is
available and less when they are less likely to be available. A link which is no longer functional. Most large high quality websites have at least a few
dead links in them, but the ratio of good links to dead links can be seen as
a sign of information quality. A link which points to an internal page within a
website. When links grow naturally typically most high quality
websites have many links pointing at interior pages. When you request links
from other websites it makes sense to request a link from their most targeted
relevant page to your most targeted relevant page. Some webmasters even create
content based on easy linking opportunities they think up. Server which is limited to serving one website or a
small collection of websites owned by a single person. Dedicated servers tend to be more reliable than shared
(or virtual) servers. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a
month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50
per month. The ratio of links pointing to internal pages to overall
links pointing at a website. A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a
legitimate natural link profile. Temporarily or permanently becoming de-indexed from a
directory or search engine. De-indexing may be due to any of the following: Pages on new websites
(or sites with limited link authority relative to their size) may be
temporarily de-indexed until the search engine does a deep spidering and
re-cache of the web. During some updates
search engines readjust crawl priorities. You need a
significant number of high quality links to get a large website well indexed
and keep it well indexed. Duplicate content filters, inbound and
outbound link quality, or other information quality related issues may also
relate to re-adjusted crawl priorities. Pages which have
changed location and are not properly redirected, or pages which are down
when a search engine tries to crawl them may be temporarily de-indexed. Search Spam: If a website tripped
an automatic spam filter it may return to the search index anywhere from a
few days to a few months after the problem has been fixed. If a website is
editorially removed by a human you may need to contact the search engine
directly to request reinclusion. Popular social bookmarking website. See also: Statistical data or characteristics which define
segments of a population. Some internet marketing platforms, such as AdCenter and AdWords, allow you to target ads at websites
or searchers who fit amongst a specific demographic. Some common demographic
data points are gender, age, income, education, location, etc. Publisher of Gawker, a popular ring of topical weblogs,
which are typically focused on controversy. See also: Nick Denton.org
- official blog, where Nick often talks about business and his various blogs. Directories and search engines provide a short
description near each listing which aims to add context to the title. High quality directories typically prefer the
description describes what the site is about rather than something that is
overtly promotional in nature. Search engines typically use a description
from a trusted directory (such as DMOZ
or the Yahoo! Directory) for homepages of sites
listed in those directories use the page meta description (especially if it is relevant
to the search query and has the words from the search query in it) attempt to extract a
description from the page content which is relevant for the particular search
query and ranking page (this is called a snippet) or some combination
of the above Social news site where users vote on which stories get
the most exposure and become the most popular. See also: A categorized catalog of websites, typically manually
organized by topical editorial experts. Some directories cater to specific niche
topics, while others are more comprehensive in nature. Major search engines
likely place significant weight on links from DMOZ
and the Yahoo! Directory. Smaller and less established
general directories likely pull less weight. If a directory does not exercise
editorial control over listings search engines will not be likely to trust
their links at all. The Open Directory Project is the largest human
edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL, and is primarily ran by
volunteer editors. See also: Submitting a Site
to the Open Directory Project Domain Name Server or Domain Name System. A naming
scheme mechanism used to help resolve a domain name / host name to a specific
TCP/IP Address. Scheme used for logical or location organization of the
web. Many people also use the word domain to refer to a specific website. Pages designed to rank for highly targeted search
queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other
advertisements. Some webmasters cloak thousands of doorway pages on trusted
domains, and rake in a boatload of cash until they are caught and de-listed. If the page would have a unique
purpose outside of search then search engines are generally fine with it, but
if the page only exists because search engines exist then search engines are
more likely to frown on the behavior. Popular web development and editing software offering a
what you see is what you get interface. See also: Content which is duplicate or near duplicate in nature. Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of
similar content. For example, printer friendly pages may be search engine
unfriendly duplicates. Also, many automated content generation techniques
rely on recycling content, so some search engines are somewhat strict in
filtering out content they deem to be similar or nearly duplicate in nature. See also: Duplicate Content Detection - video where Matt
Cutts talks about the process of duplicate content detection Identifying and filtering near-duplicate documents Search Engine Patents On Duplicated Content and
Re-Ranking Methods Stuntdubl: How to Remedy Duplicate Content Content which changes over time or uses a dynamic
language such as PHP to help render the page. In the past search engines were less aggressive at
indexing dynamic content than they currently are. While they have greatly
improved their ability to index dynamic content it is still preferable to use
URL rewriting to help make dynamic content
look static in nature. Programming languages such as PHP
or ASP which build web pages on the fly upon request. E
Many contextual advertising publishers estimate
their potential earnings based on how much they make from each click. Search engines count links as votes of quality. They
primarily want to count editorial links that were earned over links that were
bought or bartered. Many paid links, such as those from quality directories, still count as signs of votes as
long as they are also associated with editorial quality standards. If they
are from sites without editorial control, like link farms, they are not likely to help you
rank well. Using an algorithm similar to TrustRank, some search engines may place more
trust on well known sites with strong editorial guidelines. An HTML tag used to emphasize text. Please note that it is more important that copy reads
well to humans than any boost you may think you will get by tweaking it for
bots. If every occurrence of a keyword on a page is in emphasis that will
make the page hard to read, convert poorly, and may look weird to search
engines and users alike. <em>emphasis</em> would appear as emphasis The page which a user enters your site. If you are buying pay per click ads it is important to
send visitors to the most appropriate and targeted page associated with the
keyword they searched for. If you are doing link building it is important to
point links at your most appropriate page when possible such that if anyone clicks the
link they are sent to the most appropriate and relevant page you help search
engines understand what the pages on your site are associated with Search engines like to paint SEO services which
manipulate their relevancy algorithms as being unethical. Any particular
technique is generally not typically associated with ethics, but is either
effective or ineffective. Some search marketers lacking in creativity tend to
describe services sold by others as being unethical while their own services
are ethical. Any particular technique is generally not typically associated
with ethics, but is either effective or ineffective. The only ethics issues associated with SEO are generally
business ethics related issues. Two of the bigger frauds are Not disclosing risks:
Some
SEOs may use high risk techniques when they are not needed. Some may make
that situation even worse by not disclosing potential risks to clients. Taking money &
doing nothing: Since selling SEO services has almost no start up costs many of
the people selling services may not actually know how to competently provide
them. Some shady people claim to be SEOs and bilk money out of unsuspecting
small businesses. As long as the client is aware of potential risks there
is nothing unethical about being aggressive. Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google
refers to this continuous refresh as everflux. In the past Google updated their index roughly once a
month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a
constantly updating index Google no longer does what was traditionally called
a Google Dance. See also
Matt Cutts Google Terminology Video - Matt
talks about the history of Google Updates and the shift from Google Dances to
everflux. Quality page which links to many non-affiliated topical
resources. See also: Hilltop:
A Search Engine based on Expert Documents Link which references another domain. Some people believe in link hoarding, but linking out to other
related resources is a good way to help search engines understand what your
site is about. If you link out to lots of low quality sites or primarily rely
on low quality reciprocal links some search engines may not rank your site
very well. Search engines are more likely to trust high quality editorial links (both to and from your site). F
The stated exceptions of allowed usage of work under copyright without requiring permission of the
original copyright holder. Fair use is covered in section 107 of the
Copyright code. See also: US Copyright Office Section 107 Favorites Icon is a small icon
which appears next to URLs in a web browser. Upload an image named favicon.ico in the root of your
site to have your site associated with a favicon. See also: HTML
Kit - generate a favicon from a picture Favicon.co.uk
- create a favicon online painting one pixel at a time. Favorites (see bookmarks) Many content management, systems such as blogs, allow
readers to subscribe to content update notifications via RSS
or XML feeds. Feeds can also refer to pay per click syndicated
feeds, or merchant product feeds. Merchant product feeds have become less
effective as a means of content generation due to improving duplicate content filters. Software or website used to subscribe to feed update
notifications. See also: Bloglines
- popular web based feed reader Google Reader
- popular web based feed reader My Yahoo! -
allows you to subscribe to feed updates FeedDemon
- desktop based feed reader Free for all pages are pages
which allow anyone to add a link to them. Generally these links do not pull
much weight in search relevancy algorithms because many automated programs
fill these pages with links pointing at low quality websites. Certain activities or signatures which make a page or
site appear unnatural might make search engines inclined to filter / remove
them out of the search results. For example, if a site publishes significant duplicate content it may get a reduced crawl
priority and get filtered out of the search results. Some search engines also
have filters based on link quality, link growth rate, and anchor text. Some pages are also penalized for spamming. Popular extensible open source web browser. See also: Vector graphics-based animation software which makes it
easier to make websites look rich and interactive in nature. Search engines tend to struggle indexing and ranking
flash websites because flash typically contains so little relevant content.
If you use flash ensure: you embed flash files
within HTML pages you use a noembed
element to describe what is in the flash you publish your
flash content in multiple separate files such that you can embed appropriate
flash files in relevant pages Forward Links (see Outbound Links) A technique created by Netscape used to display multiple smaller
pages on a single display. This web design technique allows for consistent
site navigation, but makes it hard to deep link at relevant content. Given the popularity of server
side includes, content management systems, and dynamic languages there really is no legitimate
reason to use frames to build a content site today. Content which is dynamic in nature and gives people a
reason to keep paying attention to your website. Many SEOs talk up fresh content, but fresh content does
not generally mean re-editing old content. It more often refers to creating
new content. The primary advantages to fresh content are: Maintain and grow
mindshare: If you keep giving people a reason to pay attention to you more
and more people will pay attention to you, and link to your site. Faster idea
spreading: If many people pay attention to your site, when you come out
with good ideas they will spread quickly. Growing archives: If you are a content
producer then owning more content means you have more chances to rank. If you
keep building additional fresh content eventually that gives you a large
catalog of relevant content. Frequent crawling: Frequently updated
websites are more likely to be crawled frequently. File Transfer Protocol is a protocol for
transferring data between computers. Many content management systems (such as blogging
platforms) include FTP capabilities. Web development software such as
Dreamweaver also comes with FTP capabilities. There are also a number of free
or cheap FTP programs such as Cute FTP, Core FTP, and Leech FTP. Search which will find matching terms when terms are
misspelled (or fuzzy). Fuzzy search technology is similar to stemming technology, with the exception that
fuzzy search corrects the misspellings at the users end and stemming searches
for other versions of the same core word within the index. G
Google Advertising Professional is a program which
qualifies marketers as being proficient AdWords marketers. See also: Google Advertising Professional program Popular author who wrote the book titled The Tipping Point. See also: The
Tipping Point - book about how ideas spread via a network of
influencers (Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen) Popular blogger, author, viral marketer and business
consultant. See also: Seth's blog
- Seth talks about marketing Purple Cow
- Probably Seth's most popular book. It is about how to be remarkable. Links
are citations or remarks. This book is a highly recommended for any SEO. All
Marketers Are Liars - Book about creating and marketing authentic
brand related stories in a low trust world. The Big Red
Fez - Small quick book about usability errors common to many
websites. Google speech - see Seth's speech at Google. Squidoo -
community driven topical lens site created by Seth Godin The world's leading search engine in terms of reach.
Google pioneered search by analyzing linkage data via PageRank. Google was created by Stanford
students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. See also Google labs
- new products Google is testing Google
papers - research papers by Googlers Google's search engine spider. Google has a shared crawl cache between their various
spiders, including vertical search spiders and spiders associated with ad
targeting. See also: Google AdSense (see AdSense) Google AdWords (see AdWords) Free database of semantically structured information
created by Google. Google Base may also help Google better understand what
types of information are commercial in nature, and how they should structure
different vertical search products. See also: Making a pank rank well for a specific search query by
pointing hundreds or thousands of links at it with the keywords in the anchor text. See also: Google search: miserable failure - shows pages
people tried ranking for that search query Knocking a competitor out of the search results by
pointing hundreds or thousands of low trust low quality links at their
website. Typically it is easier to bowl new sites out of the
results. Older established sites are much harder to knock out of the search
results. Payment service provided by Google which helps Google
better understand merchant conversion rates and the value of different
keywords and markets. See also: In the past Google updated their index roughly once a
month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a
constantly updating index, Google no longer does what was traditionally
called a Google Dance. Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google
refers to this continuous refresh as everflux. The second meaning of Google Dance is a yearly party at
Google's corporate headquarters which Google holds for search engine
marketers. This party coincides with the San Jose Search Engine Strategies
conference. See also: Matt Cutts Google Terminology Video - Matt
talks about the history of Google Updates and the shift from Google Dances to
everflux. 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. See also: Google Keyword Tool - tool offering all the
above mentioned features Portion of the search results page above the organic search results which Google sometimes
uses to display vertical search results from Google News, Google Base, and other Google owned vertical
search services. Program which webmasters can use to help Google index
their contents. Please note that the best way to submit your site to
search engines and to keep it in their search indexes is to build high
quality editorial links. See also: Google
Webmaster Central - access to Google Sitemaps and other webmaster
related tools. On some search results where Google thinks one result is
far more relevant than other results (like navigational or brand
related searches) they may list numerous deep links to that site at the top
of the search results. Index where pages with lower trust scores are stored.
Pages may be placed in Google's Supplemental Index if they consist largely of
duplicate content, if the URLs are excessively complex in nature, or the site
which hosts them lacks significant trust. Tool which estimates bid prices and how many Google
searchers will click on an ad for a particular keyword. If you do not submit a bid price the tool will return an
estimated bid price necessary to rank #1 for 85% of Google's queries for a
particular keyword. See also: Tool which allows you to see how Google search volumes
for a particular keyword change over time. See also: Free multi variable testing platform used to help AdWords advertisers improve their conversion
rates. See also: A type of low quality automated link which search
engines do not want to place much trust on. H
The heading element briefly describes the subject of the
section it introduces. Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower
numbered headings being most important. You should only use a single H1
element on each page, and may want to use multiple other heading elements to
structure a document. An H1 element source would look like: <h1>Your Topic</h1> Heading elements may be styled using CSS.
Many content management systems place the same
content in the main page heading and the page title,
although in many cases it may be preferential to mix them up if possible. See also: The title of an article or story. SEO technique used to show search engine spiders text
that human visitors do not see. While some sites may get away with it for a while,
generally the risk to reward ratio is inadequate for most legitimate sites to
consider using hidden text. Algorithm which ranks results largely based on
unaffiliated expert citations. See also: Hilltop:
A Search Engine based on Expert Documents Link based algorithm which ranks relevancy scores based
on citations from topical authorities. See also: Jon Klienberg's Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment [PDF] Making a search engine believe that another website
exists at your URL. Typically done using techniques such as a 302
redirect or meta refresh. The main page on your website, which is largely
responsible for helping develop your brand and setting up the navigational
schemes that will be used to help users and search engines navigate your
website. As far as SEO goes, a home page is typically going to be
one of the easier pages to rank for some of your more competitive terms,
largely because it is easy to build links at a home page. You should ensure
your homepage stays focused and reinforces your brand though, and do not
assume that most of your visitors will come to your site via the home page.
If your site is well structured many pages on your site will likely be far
more popular and rank better than your home page for relevant queries. Host (see Server) Apache directory-level configuration file which can be
used to password protect or redirect files. As a note of caution, make sure you copy your current
.htaccess file before editing it, and do not edit it on a site that you can't
afford to have go down unless you know what you are doing. See also: .htaccess,
301 Redirects & SEO HyperText Markup Language is the language in
which pages on the World Wide Web are created. Some newer web pages are also formatted in XHTML. See also: HyperText Transfer Protocol is the foremost used
protocol to communicate between servers and web browsers. Hypertext transfer
protocol is the means by which data is transferred from its residing location
on a server to an active browser. Topical hubs are sites which link to well trusted within their
topical community. A topical authority is a page which is
referenced from many topical hub sites. A topical hub is a page which
references many authorities. See also: Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF] Jon Klienberg's Authoritative sources in a
hyperlinked environment [PDF] I
Inverse Document Frequency is a term used to
help determine the position of a term in a vector space model. IDF = log ( total documents in database / documents
containing the term ) Link pointing to one website from another website. Most search engines allow you to see a sample of links
pointing to a document by searching using the link: function. For example,
using link:www.seobook.com would show pages linking to the homepage of this
site (both internal links and inbound links). Due to canonical URL issues www.site.com and site.com
may show different linkage data. Google typically shows a much smaller sample
of linkage data than competing engines do, but Google still knows of and
counts many of the links that do not show up when you use their link: function. Collection of data used as bank to search through to
find a match to a user fed query. The larger search engines have billions of
documents in their catalogs. When search engines search they search via reverse indexes by words and return results
based on matching relevancy vectors. Stemming and semantic analysis allow
search engines to return near matches. Index may also refer to the root of a
folder on a web server. 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.
Use consistent navigational anchor text for each section of your site,
emphasizing other pages within that section. Place links to relevant related
pages within the content area of your site to help further show the
relationship between pages and improve the usability of your website. Designing, categorizing, organizing, and structuring
content in a useful and meaningful way. Good information architecture considers both how humans
and search spiders access a website. Information architecture suggestions: focus each page on a
specific topic use descriptive page
titles and meta descriptions which describe the content
of the page use clean (few or no
variables) descriptive file names and folder names use headings to help break up text and
semantically structure a document use breadcrumb navigation to show page
relationships use descriptive link anchor text link to related
information from within the content area of your web pages improve conversion rates by making it easy for people
to take desired actions avoid feeding search
engines duplicate or near-duplicate content The field of science based on sorting or searching
through large data sets to find relevant information. Search engine which pioneered the paid inclusion business model. Inktomi was
bought by Yahoo! at the end of 2002. Internal Navigation (see Navigation) Vast worldwide network of computers connected via
TCP/IP. Microsoft's web browser. After they beat out Netscape's
browser on the marketshare front they failed to innovate on any level for
about 5 years, until Firefox forced them to. See also: Inverted File (see Reverse Index) Portions of the web which are not easily accessible to
crawlers due to search technology limitations, copyright issues, or information architecture issues. Internet Protocol Address. Every computer
connected to the internet has an IP address. Some websites and servers have
unique IP addresses, but most web hosts host multiple websites on a single
host. IP delivery (see cloaking) Internet Service Providers sell end users
access to the web. Some of these companies also sell usage data to web
analytics companies. Italics (see emphasis) J
A client-side scripting language that can be embedded
into HTML documents to add dynamic features. Search engines do not index most content in JavaScript.
In AJAX, JavaScript has been combined with other
technologies to make web pages even more interactive. K
A word or phrase which implies a certain mindset or
demand that targeted prospects are likely to search for. Long tail and brand
related keywords are typically worth more than shorter and vague keywords
because they typically occur later in the buying cycle and are associated with a greater
level of implied intent. An old measure of search engine relevancy based on how
prominent keywords appeared within the content of a page. Keyword density is
no longer a valid measure of relevancy over a broad open search index though. When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read
mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus
some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack
semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and
that causes the pages to rank poorly as well). See also: The Keyword Density of Non Sense Search
Engine Friendly Copywriting - What Does 'Write Naturally' Mean for SEO? The relationship between various related keywords that
searchers search for. Some searches are particularly well aligned with others
due to spelling errors, poor search relevancy, and automated or manual query refinement. See also: MSN
Search Funnels - shows keywords people search for before or after
they search for another keyword The process of discovering relevant keywords and keyword
phrases to focus your SEO and PPC
marketing campaigns on. Example keyword discovery methods: using keyword research tools looking at analytics data or your server logs looking at page copy
on competing sites reading customer
feedback placing a search box
on your site and seeing what people are looking for talking to customers
to ask how and why they found and chose your business Tools which help you discover potential keywords based
on past search volumes, search trends, bid prices, and page content from
related websites. Short list of the most popular keyword research tools: SEO
Book Keyword Research Tool - free, driven by Overture, this tool
cross references all of my favorite keyword research tools. In addition to
linking to traditional keyword research tools, it also links to tools such as
Google Suggest, Buzz related tools, vertical databases, social bookmarking
and tagging sites, and latent semantic indexing related tools. Overture - free, powered from Yahoo! search
data. Heavily biased toward over representing commercial queries, combines
singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single data point. Google - free, powered from Google search
data. Wordtracker
- paid, powered from Dogpile and MetaCrawler. Due to small sample size their
keyword database may be easy to spam. Please note that most keyword research tools used alone
are going to be highly inaccurate at giving exact quantitative search
volumes. The tools are better for qualitative measurements. To test the exact
volume for a keyword it may make sense to set up a test Google AdWords campaign. Writing copy that uses excessive amounts of the core
keyword. When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read
mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus
some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack
semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that
causes the pages to rank poorly as well). See also: Search
Engine Friendly Copywriting - What Does 'Write Naturally' Mean for SEO? Keyword Suggestion Tools (see Keyword Research Tools) Scientist largely responsible for much of the research
that went into hubs and authorities based search relevancy algorithms. See also: Jon Klienberg's Authoritative sources in a
hyperlinked environment [PDF] L
The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a
link or advertisement. A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of
their AdWords program. When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage
players made up a large portion of their ad market, but as more mainstream
companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to
try to keep their ads relevant. A citation from one web document to another web document
or another position in the same document. Most major search engines consider links as a vote of
trust. 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. See also: The process of building high quality linkage data that
search engines will evaluate to trust your website is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy. A few general link building tips: build conceptually unique linkworthy high quality content create viral marketing ideas that want to spread and
make people talk about you mix your anchor text get deep links try to build at least
a few quality links before actively obtaining any low
quality links register your site in
relevant high quality directories such as DMOZ,
the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com when possible try to
focus your efforts mainly on getting high quality editorial links create link bait try to get bloggers
to mention you on their blogs It takes a while to
catch up with the competition, but if you work at it long enough and hard
enough eventually you can enjoy a self-reinforcing market position See also: 101
Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 - 101 ways you should and
should not build links Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] - Mike Grehan article about how top
rankings are self reinforcing A rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing at a
website. When links occur naturally they generally develop over
time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral articles receive
many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of
quality as well, such as: increased usage data increase in brand
related search queries traffic from the link
sources to the site being linked at many of the new links
coming from new pages on trusted domains See also: Information retrieval based on historical data The rate at which a site loses links. See also: Information retrieval based on historical data A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity and the authority of the sites providing those links. Website or group of websites which exercises little to
no editorial control when linking to other sites.
FFA
pages, for example, are link farms. Server files which show you what your leading sources of
traffic are and what people are search for to find your website. Log files do not typically show as much data as analytics programs would, and if they do, it
is generally not in a format that is as useful beyond seeing the top few
stats. 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 you are unwilling
to link out to other sites people are going to be less likely to link to your
site outbound links to
relevant resources may improve your credibility and boost your overall
relevancy scores "Of course, folks never know when we're going to
adjust our scoring. It's pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding
PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard
to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like
score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in
mind." - Quote from Google's Matt Cutts See also: Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (Or Understanding Value In A
Post-Madonna World) - article about how being a platform (ie:
someone who freely links out) makes it easier to become an authority. The number of links pointing at a website. For competitive search queries link quality counts much more than link
quantity. Google typically shows a smaller sample of known linkage data than
the other engines do, even though Google still counts many of the links they
do not show when you do a link: search. The combination of your link equity and anchor text. A measure of how many and what percent of a website's
links are broken. Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the
most common reasons are: a website going
offline linking to content
which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons) moving a page's
location changing a domain's
content management system Most large websites have some broken links, but if too
many of a site's links are broken it may be an indication of outdated
content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both
of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant. See also: Xenu
Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to
find broken links. New search platform provided by Microsoft. See also: Phrase describing how for any category of product being
sold there is much more aggregate demand for the non-hits than there is for
the hits. How does the long tail applies to keywords? Long Tail
keywords are more precise and specific, thus have a higher value. As of
writing this definition in the middle of October 2006 my leading keywords for
this month are as follows:
Notice how the nearly 10,000 unlisted terms account for
roughly 10 times as much traffic as I got from my core brand related term
(and this site only has a couple thousand pages and has a rather strong
brand). See also: The Long Tail
- official blog The Long Tail - the book Company originally launched as a directory service which
later morphed into a paid search provider and vertical content play. See also: Latent Semantic Indexing is a way for search
systems to mathematically understanding and representing language based on
the similarity of pages and keyword co-occurance. A relevant result may not
even have the search term in it. It may be returned based solely on the fact
that it contains many similar words to those appearing in relevant pages
which contain the search words. See also: Quintura
Search - free LSI type keyword research tool. Patterns in Unstructured Data - free
paper describing how LSI works SEO Book articles on
LSI: #1 & #2
(Google may not be using LSI, but they are certainly using technologies with
similar functions and purpose.) Johnon Go Words - article about how adding certain relevant
words to a page can drastically improve its relevancy for other keywords M
Founder of Slashdot.org, a popular editorially driven
technology news forum. All major search engines combine a manual review process
with their automated relevancy algorithms to help catch search spam and train
their relevancy algorithms. Abnormal usage data or link growth patterns may
also flag sites for manual review. See also: Inktomi Spam Database Left Open to Public -
article about Inktomi's spam database from 2001 Search Bistro - links
to Google's General Guidelines on Random
Query Evaluation [PDF] and
Google's Spam Guide for Raters Google
Image Labeler - example of how humans can be used to review
content Amazon.com program which allows you to hire humans to
perform easy tasks that computers are bad at. See also: Google
Image Labeler - image labeling game Human Computation Speech Video at Google In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins
defines a meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of
imitation." Many people use the word meme to refer to self spreading or
viral ideas. See also: Techmeme
- meme tracker which shows technology ideas that are currently spreading on
popular technology blogs The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two
of content which describes the content of the page. A good meta description tag should: be relevant and
unique to the page; reinforce the page
title; and focus on including
offers and secondary keywords and phrases to help add context to the page
title. Relevant meta description tags may appear in search
results as part of the page description below the page title. The code for a meta description tag looks like this <meta name="Description" content="Your
meta description here. " / > See also: Free
meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on
creating meta description tags. The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to
highlight keywords and keyword phrases which the page is
targeting. The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this <meta name="Keywords" content="keyword
phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more "> Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers
typically never see the tag, so most search engines do not place much (if
any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags. See also: Free
meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on
creating meta description tags. A meta tag used to make a browser refresh to another URL
location. A meta refresh looks like this <meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="10;url=http://www.site.com/folder/page.htm"> Generally in most cases it is preferred to use a 301
or 302 redirect over a meta refresh. A search engine which pulls top ranked results from
multiple other search engines and rearranges them into a new result set. See also: Myriad Search
- an ad free meta search engine People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta
keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the page title in with these. The page title
is highly important. The meta description tag is somewhat important. The meta keywords tag is not that important. Maker of the popular Windows operating system and
Internet Explorer browser. A measure of the amount of people who think of you or
your product when thinking of products in your category. Sites with strong mindshare, top rankings, or a strong
memorable brand are far more likely to be linked at than
sites which are less memorable and have less search exposure. The link
quality of mindshare related links most likely exceeds the quality of the
average link on the web. If you sell non-commodities, personal
recommendations also typically carry far greater weight than search rankings
alone. See also: Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] - Mike Grehan article about how top
rankings are self reinforcing Site which mirrors (or duplicates) the contents of
another website. Generally search engines prefer not to index duplicate content. The one exception to this
is that if you are a hosting company it might make sense to offer free
hosting or a free mirror site to a popular open source software site to build significant
link equity. For sale blogging software which allows you to host a blog
on your website. Movable Type is typically much harder to install that Wordpress is. See also: Search engine built by Microsoft. MSN is the default
search provider in Internet Explorer. See also: MSN Search Features,
Documentation, & Guidelines The process of taking shapshots of documents in a
database to discover topical clusters through the use of latent
semantic indexing. Multi dimensional scaling is more efficient
than singular vector decomposition since only a
rough approximation of relevance is necessary when combined with other
ranking criteria. One of the most popular social networking sites, largely
revolving around connecting musicians to fans and having an easy to use
blogging platform. See also: N
Algorithms which attempt to understand the true intent
of a search query rather than just matching results to keywords. Natural Link (see Editorial Link) Natrual Search (see Organic Search Results) Scheme to help website users understand where they are,
where they have been, and how that relates to the rest of your website. It is best to use regular HTML
navigation rather than coding your navigation in JavaScript, Flash, or some
other type of navigation which search engines may not be able to easily
index. Originally a company that created a popular web browser
by the same name, Netscape is now a social news site similar to Digg.com. See also: A topic or subject which a website is focused on. Search is a broad field, but as you drill down each
niche consists of many smaller niches. An example of drilling down to a niche
market search search marketing,
privacy considerations, legal issues, history of, future of, different types
of vertical search, etc. search engine
optimization, search engine advertising link building,
keyword research, reputation monitoring and management, viral marketing, SEO
copywriting, Google AdWords, information architecture, etc. Generally it is easier to compete in small, new, or
underdeveloped niches than trying to dominate large verticals. As your brand
and authority grow you can go after bigger
markets. Attribute used to prevent a link from passing link
authority. Commonly used on sites with user generated content, like in blog
comments. The code to use nofollow on a link appears like <a
href="http://wwwseobook.com.com" rel="nofollow">anchor
text </a> Nofollow can also be used in a robots meta tag to
prevent a search engine from counting any outbound links on a page. This code
would look like this <META NAME="ROBOTS"
CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW"> Google's Matt
Cutts also pushes webmasters to use nofollow on any paid links,
but since Google is the world's largest link broker, their advice on how
other people should buy or sell links should be taken with a grain of salt.
Please note that it is generally not advised to practice link hoarding as that may look quite
unnatural. Outbound links may also boost your relevancy
scores in some search engines. O
In philosophy it is the study of being. As it relates to
search, it is the attempt to create an exhaustive and rigorous conceptual
schema about a domain. An ontology is typically a hierarchical data structure
containing all the relevant entities and their relationships and rules within
that domain. See also: Open Directory Project, The (see DMOZ) Software which is distributed with its source code such
that developers can modify it as they see fit. On the web open source is a great strategy for quickly
building immense exposure and mindshare. A fast standards based web browser. See also: Most major search engines have results that consist of
paid ads and unpaid listings. The unpaid / algorithmic listings are called
the organic search results. Organic search results are organized by
relevancy, which is largely determined based on linkage data, page content,
usage data, and historical domain and trust related data. Most clicks on search results are on the organic search
results. Some studies have shown that 60 to 80% + of clicks are on the
organic search results. A link from one website pointing at another external
website. Some webmasters believe in link hoarding, but linking out to useful
relevant related documents is an easy way to help search engines understand
what your website is about. If you reference other resources it also helps
you build credibility and leverage the work of others without having to do
everything yourself. Some webmasters track where their traffic comes from, so
if you link to related websites they may be more likely to link back to your
site. See also: Live Search: LinkFromDomain:SEOBook.com -
shows pages that my site links at. The company which pioneered search marketing by selling
targeted searches on a pay per click basis. Originally named GoTo,
they were eventually bought out by Yahoo! and branded as Yahoo!
Search Marketing. See also: Overture Keyword Selector Tool Popular keyword research tool, based largely on Yahoo!
search statistics. Heavily skewed toward commercially oriented searches, also
combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single version. See also: Overture
Keyword Selector Tool P
Co-founder of Google. A logarithmic scale based on link equity which estimates
the importance of web documents. Since PageRank is widely bartered Google's relevancy
algorithms had to move away from relying on PageRank and place more emphasis
on trusted links via algorithms such as TrustRank. The PageRank formula is: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) PR= PageRank In text: for any given page A the PageRank PR(A) is
equal to the sum of the parsed partial PageRank given from each page pointing
at it multiplied by the dampening factor plus one minus the dampening factor. See also: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search
Engine The
PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web Page Title (see Title) A method of allowing websites which pass editorial
quality guidelines to buy relevant exposure. See also: Directories such as
the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com allow websites to be listed for a
flat yearly cost. Yahoo! Search allows
webmasters to pay for inclusion for a flat review fee and a
category based cost per click. Paid Link (see Text Link Ads) Payment structure where affiliated sales workers are
paid commission for getting consumers to perform certain actions. Publishers publishing contextual ads are typically paid per ad
click. Affiliate marketing programs pay affiliates
for conversions - leads, downloads, or sales. 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 a site is penalized manually the penalty may last an
exceptionally long time or require contacting the search engine with a reinclusion request to remedy. Some sites are also filtered for various reasons. See also: Google -30
rank penalty - an example of a penalty Altering the search results based on a person's
location, search history, content they recently viewed, or other factors
relevant to them on a personal level. PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side
scripting language used to render web pages or add interactivity to them. See also: Words which were traditionally associated with low
quality content that caused search engines to want to demote the rankings of
a page. See also: What
Are Poison Words? Do They Matter? Portable Document Format is a universal file
format developed by Adobe Systems that allows files to be stored and viewed
in the original printer friendly context. Web site offering common consumer services such as news,
email, other content, and search. Pay Per Click is a pricing model
which most search ads and many contextual ad programs are sold through. PPC
ads only charge advertisers if a potential customer clicks on an ad. See also: AdWords - Google's PPC ad platform AdCenter - Microsoft's PPC ad platform Yahoo!
Search Marketing - Yahoo!'s PPC ad platform The ability of a search engine to list results that
satisfy the query, usually measured in percentage. (if 20 of the 50 results
match the query the precision is 40%) Search spam
and the complexity of language challenge the precision of search engines. A measure of the profit potential of different economic
conditions based on adjusting price, supply, or other variables to create a
different profit potential where the supply and demand curves cross. 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 it may also be a sign of unnatural (and
thus potentially low quality) content. Q
Content which is linkworthy in nature. See also: When Unique Content is Not "Unique" Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links
count more than low quality links. There are a variety of ways to define what a quality
link is, but the following are characteristics of a high quality link: Trusted Source: If a link is from a
page or website which seems like it is trustworthy then it is more likely to
count more than a link from an obscure, rarely used, and rarely cited
website. See TrustRank for one example of a way to find
highly trusted websites. Hard to Get: The harder a link is
to acquire the more likely a search engine will be to want to trust it and
the more work a competitor will need to do to try to gain that link. Aged: Some search engines
may trust links from older resources or links that have existed for a length
of time more than they trust brand new links or links from newer resources. Co-citation: Pages that link at
competing sites which also link to your site make it easy for search engines
to understand what community your website belongs to. See Hilltop for an example of an algorithm which
looks for co-citation from expert sources. Related: Links from related
pages or related websites may count more than links from unrelated sites. In Content: Links which are in
the content area of a page are typically going to be more likely to be editorial links than links that are not
included within the editorial portion of a page. While appropriate anchor text may also help you rank even better than a link which lacks
appropriate anchor text, it is worth noting that for competitive queries
Google is more likely to place weight on a high quality link where the anchor
text does not match than trusting low quality links where the anchor text
matches. The actual "search string" a searcher enters
into a search engine. Some searchers may refine their search query if they
deemed the results as being irrelevant. Some search engines may aim to
promote certain verticals or suggest other search queries if they deem other
search queries or vertical databases as being relevant to the goals of the
searcher. 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 vertical
search database near the top of the search result. For example, if image
search is relevant to your search query images may be placed near the top of
the search results. Spell Correction: offers a did you mean link with the correct
spelling near the top of the results. Inline Suggest: offers related
search results in the search results. Some engines also suggest a variety of
related search queries. Some search toolbars also aim to help searchers auto
complete their search queries by offering a list of most popular queries
which match the starting letters that a searcher enters into the search box. R
The portion of relevant documents that were retrieved
when compared to all relevant documents. Nepotistic link exchanges where websites try to build
false authority by trading links, using three way
link trades, or other low quality link schemes. When sites link naturally there is going to be some
amount of cross linking within a community, but if most or all of your links
are reciprocal in nature it may be a sign of ranking manipulation. Also sites
that trade links off topic or on links pages that are stashed away deep
within their sites probably do not pass much link authority, and may add more
risk than reward. 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
to rank for relevant queries, and some search engines may look at inlink and
outlink ratios as well as link quality when determining how natural a site's
link profile is. See also: Indexing Timeline - Matt Cutts states that
sites which have many low quality inbound links and / or outbound links may
struggle to rank or even get deeply indexed by Google. Live Search: Linkdomain:SEOBook.com
LinkFromDomain:SEOBook.com - shows SEOBook.com's reciprocal links What a Links Page Should Not Look Like -
article by Jim Boykin A method of alerting browsers and search engines that a
page location moved. 301 redirects are for permanent change of
location and 302 redirects are used for a temporary change
of location. A company which allows you to register domain names. 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. See also: Google Reinclusion -
sign up for Google Sitemaps, and request reinclusion from
within Google Sitemaps Yahoo! Reinclusion -
request a review here Yahoo! Search: URL Status - Second Review Request The source from which a website visitor came from. A link which shows the relation of the current URL to
the URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths
instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically
preferred to use absolute links over relative links. Example relative link <a href="../folder/filename.html">Cool
Stuff</a> Example absolute link <a href="http://seobook.com/folder/filename.html">Cool
Stuff</a> A measure of how useful searchers find search results. Many search engines may also bias organic search results to informational
resources since commercial ads also show in the search results. See also: Google vs
Yahoo! vs MSN - compares the relevancy algorithms of the three
major search engines Search Engine Relevancy Challenge - survey of
search relevancy based on user voting Ensuring your brand
related keywords display results which reinforce your brand. Many hate sites
tend to rank highly for brand related queries. 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. Rewrite (see URL Rewrite) An index of keywords which stores records of matching
documents that contain those keywords. See also: Google: a Behind the Scenes Look - video where
Jeff Dean talks about Google's architecture FantomNews - archived newsletter featuring a
Chris Ridings article about stop words and reverse indexes A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search
engines which files not to crawl. Some search engines will still list your
URLs as URL only listings even if you block them using a robots.txt file. Do not put files on a public server if you do not want
search engines to index them! See also: Return on Investment is a measure of how
much return you receive from each marketing dollar. While ROI is a somewhat sophisticated measurement, some
search marketers prefer to account for their marketing using more
sophisticate profit elasticity calculations. Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication is a
method of syndicating information to a feed reader or other software which allows
people to subscribe to a channel they are interested in. S
A popular Apple browser. Scientist who pioneered the information retrieval field. See also: A Theory of Indexing
- 1975 book by Gerard Salton Intrusive software and programs which usually target
ads, violate privacy, and are often installed without the computer owner
knowing what the software does. Many search engines store user search history
information. This data can be used for better ad targeting or to make old
information more findable. Search engines may also determine what a document is
about and how much they trust a domain based on aggregate usage data. Many brand
related search queries is a strong signal of quality. A tool or device used to find relevant information.
Search engines consist of a spider, index,
relevancy algorithms and search
results. Search engine marketing. Also known as: Search engine optimization is the art and
science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps
search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search
queries. SEO consists largely of keyword research, SEO copywriting, information architecture, link building, brand building, building |
