Cog SEO Blog

Posted By Melanie Prough on April 23, 2009

When I first started doing my own SEO a great deal of my reading time was spent in Wikipedia chasing down the meaning to the SEO terms and acronyms. I was cleaning the other day and happened across my old “cheat sheet” of these terms and such. I have added some, updated some others, and today I will give you your own little secret decoder guide to SEO terms.

1. SEO – (a) Search engine optimization. (b) Search engine optimizer.
2. Algorithm – (for the purpose of search) takes a problem/query as input and returns a solution/result to the problem, usually after evaluating a number of possible solutions/results.
3. SERP – Search engine results position. This is number/rank you are in the results for a given keyword or phrase.
4. Agent – This identifies the type of access to a page or site depending on the query such as regular browser (Mozilla), Googlebot, Snapbot, etc.
5. Anchor Text – The words you click in a page to follow a link.
6. IBL or Backlink – These are the same thing, link(s) pointing back to your site from another.
7. Bait and Switch – A SPAM technique where you create an optimized page, do all your submissions…then after indexing replace it with a spam or junk page.
8. Cloaking – Generally refers to a page that displays different version of the page depending on the agent. Like one page for humans, and another for Googlebot. This is SPAM.
9. Crawl - When a scripted / automated robot visits the website.
10. Banner Blindness – When users become numb or indifferent to page banner advertisements.
11. Boolean search – A query using the Boolean operators, AND, OR, and NOT, and parentheses to construct a complex condition from simpler criteria. Keyword search.
12. FFA – Free For All. This is a site that accepts links without any intervention. Avoid using these.
13. Keyword – A word that occurs with unexpected frequency/density in a body of text.
14. Keyword Density – A term referring to the percentage of most often occurring words in a body of text.
15. Keyword Spamming / Stuffing – Unnaturally, or over using specific words in a body of text.
16. Broken or Dead Link – A hyperlink that does not function.
17. Browser Compatibility – Referring to how a page displays in a selection of browsers. IE Firefox, IE, Opera…
18. OBL – Out Bound Link. Refers to a hyperlink that is linking to a different page.
19. META – Metadata is the information contained between the head tags of a document intended for agents, and not displayed in browser view.
20. Reciprocal Link – A link that is traded in return for a link back.
21. Paid Link – A backlink that is purchased in some manner.
22. Captcha – Images or text used to verify a user is human and able to reproduce the image or text contents in a form for successful verification.
23. CSS – Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language.
24. Markup Language – For our purpose refers to the language used to compose a web document. Such as HTML, XML, and CSS.
25. CGI – Common Gateway Interface. The interface used to run some programs in your server.
26. Search Engine – is used to find information stored on the Internet, computer, or network. Generally search engines crawl for a great deal of the information they supply in results.
27. Directory – An organized collection of links to other websites. Does not crawl.
28. Vertical Search – Searching in a more narrow pool of possibilities, such as videos, or books.
29. Conversion Rate – The percentage of visitors to complete a desired action, such as sign up, or purchase a product.
30. Spider / Bot / Crawler – A program or script that searches the web for its specified criteria, such as links, email addresses, or web pages.
31. Cross Linking – The act of linking your own sites together with hyperlinks.
32. Frames – A html coding structure which presents different pages/addresses in different “frames” located in the same URL/page to display as one.
33. Gateway / Doorway Page / Entry Page – Pages generated to target a specific engine, or keyword one page for agents, and then regular visitors are displayed a different one.
34. Google Bomb – The act of using numerous links with specific keywords in the anchor text to attempt to force a page to gain SERP presence or position for those keywords.
35. Deep Linking – Linking to inner or deeper pages of a site, instead of just the main page.
36. Hidden Text – Text not visible to humans, but still picked up by spiders. Such as same color text and background. This is SPAM.
37. Hot Linking – Linking directly to a sites content, usually media content, using their URL and bandwidth.
38. IP Address – Internet Protocol. This is the address the agent is using to access the Internet.
39. Manual Submissions – The act of “manually” or by hand submitting a site to search engines and directories.
40. Automatic Submissions – Using an automated program/script to submit a site to search engines and directories.
41. Mirror Site – An exact duplicate of another site. Sometimes done illegally through the ill gotten gains of scraping.
42. Scraping – Using a bot/spider and automated programming to download entire websites, structure, system files and all. You will see these in your stats and IPs with huge bandwidth, files. and hits numbers…but only a few visits.
43. Organic Links – Sites that link to you because they decided to, and for no other reason.
44. Natural Links – Links that are for informational purposes and not evaluated in link scores. Such as a link to get a more detailed page on a subject.
45. “nofollow” – A META or REL command that tells spiders not to follow a link or links.
46. PageRank – How Google represents its measurement of link popularity.
47. Search Operator – Search commands specific to different engines for obtaining specific results, usually about a site…like indexed pages in Google is a site: operator. Here is a guide to some search operators.
48. TLD – Top level Domain. Such as SEOCog.com, not a sub domain.
49. Referrer – Term generally used to describe a site that a visit originated from.
50. WhoIs - The registration information for a Domain.
51. Relevance / Relevancy – The term used to score or describe an elements accuracy in relation to the page’s content. For example Title Tag Relevance Score if the score of the Title tag’s contents in relationship to the page’s content (usually keywords).
52. URL – Universal Resource Locator, a alphanumeric representation of an IP address, or network address.
53. Copy – Referring to the textual content of a document.
54. robots.txt – A web document accessed by spiders to get directions to your sitemap, and any special instructions you may have. Such as directories or files not to be crawled, of disallowing certain agents.
55. Code to Text Ratio – The percentage of copy/text versus the amount of code in a web document.
56. CMS – Content Management System. Generally a program assisting in content creation, implementation, and promotion.

There are many more, but I think I have covered some of the most popular. If you have something to add, just comment..if it’s relevant and helpful I will add it.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

Categories: SEO General
Tags: Anchor Text, Banner Advertisements, Dictionary Definitions, Googlebot, Keyword Spamming, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimizer, Search Engine Results, Text Keyword