Search Engine Optimization Compiled Glossry
SEO / Search Engine Optimization: SEO is the practice to develop a website in such a way that it acquires high ranking for particular keyword.
SERP / Search Engine Ranking Position: Rank of website in search results for particular keywords.
Alt Tag: Provided text to images. It is displayed when visitor is not willing to see images or visitor’s brower is configured not to show images.
Bridge Page: These are the pages which plays the role of ‘bridge’ (with the help of Java or PHP script ) between search engine and your home-page. Lets say you have created a page which is fully loaded with keywords blended with special script. When search engine visits that page it can only see page with lots of keywords but when human visitors will immediately be redirected to original home-page with the help of script.
This trick was used in early days because search engines were not following java or php script.
[It is highly recommended not to use this trick, or your site will be banned forever; because search engines have became smart enough to make out this trick]
Click Popularity: A statistic which depicts which site is getting more clicks and the time spent by visitors on that particular website.
Cloaking: Cloaking is a trick to display a website in different situation. For example, ( for same domain name ) you can show your keyword-stuffed or highly optimized page to search-engine spider and different page to human-visitors i.e creating two home-pages for single domain one is for Search Engine spider and another one is for human visitors.
Comment Tag: This is the text used in tag within web pages. You can comment images, table, rows and column of table. Now a days most of the search engines avoid this tag.
Crawler: This is nothing but a software or program used buy search engines to index your website in their database and build their database with new websites.
Directory: A website which is specially developed for listing of website in hundreds of categories. Yahoo!, Open Directory, LookSmart, NBCi are some prestigiuos directories. Being listed in such directories is extremely beneficial.
Doorway Page: Same as Bridge page.
Dynamic Content: Content or information on websites which changes according to user queries. If ‘?’ mark is not there in URL, Search engines will be treating Dynamic content as static content. Since numbers of websites and webpages have increased drastically over the past few years some search engines ignores such URLs.
Entry Page: See Doorway Page.
Frames: This is the technique in HTML language, which enables website developers to display more than one pages in the same browser window. There is no recommendation for whether this technique should be used, as it doesn’t harm your site, only thing is your page will not be crawled.
Gateway Page: See Doorway Page.
Hallway Page: Hallway pages contains links of one or more Doorway pages.
Heading Tags: A style of paragraph, displayed large and bold typeface. Below are the coding syntaxex of declaring heading tag.
<h2>Search Engine Optimization</h2>
<h2>Search Engine Optimization</h2>
<h3>Search Engine Optimization</h3>
<h4>Search Engine Optimization</h4>
This method of keyword declaration is very useful from SEO point of view.
Hidden Text: These are text which are visually hidden to human but can be found in soucrce code ( Intended for search engines). This is usually done by giving same color to text and background. Intention of this is to make webpages stuffed with unnecessary keywords without disturbing the meaning of content. Don’t do this or you will definitely be penalized for doing so.
Inktomi: Compiled websites database used by many search engines. see http://www.inktomi.com . Google uses its own database to crawl.
JavaScript: JAVA scripting is a language usually used to give dynamic effect to websites and webpages. Earlier, search engines were not able to index Java or PHP scripts properly. BUT my observation of last couple of months says that, now they can.
Java or any scripts can be used to do unusual things legally. Most recent and excellent example is http://www.fulltiltpoker.com
Keyword: A word or phrase that is used to find particular information. e.g If you want information about Car dealer on internet, you would probably be log on to any search engine and type ‘car dealers’ in search bar, this phrase is nothing but keyword.
Keyword Frequency: A statistic which shows how many time a particular keyword appears in a webpage. More keywords appears in webpage more importance will be given to your website by search engines. But a word of caution- unnecessary use of keywords can also get penalty for website, this is also called keyword-spamming.
Keyword Prominence: It shows how your main keyword is closed to the start of the webpage.I personally recommend to place your main keyword as close to start of page as possible. If search engine encounters your main keyword first, your website will improve in SERP.
Keyword Density / Keyword Weight: It is the percentage of appearance of your main keyword as compare to other keywords. Higher the percentage will lead you to better ranking.
Link Popularity: Number of sites votes to your site. In simple words number of websites contains link of your website. Link Popularity is extremely important factor for link-O-Centric search engines link Google and Yahoo. It is the prime factor being considered while calculating SERP.
Meta Description Tag: A short description to describe your website. It is present in Head section. Most of the search engines uses this piece of information to describe your website in search result.
Meta Keywords Tag: List of keywords which best describes your websites and you want search engines to list your website for those keywords.
Meta Refresh Tag: A tag present in the header section of a website or webpages which displays different pages for few seconds. This is not something which is recommended to do.
Pay Per Click Search Engine: A method of giving higher ranking to ads. Placement of your ad is determine by the bid amount you are willing to pay per click. Higher the Bid higher your ad placement.
Robot: An automated software or program to collect information automatically from Internet. it is also called spider. It can also be used for malicious thing like collecting Email address on websites and then to spam.
Robots.txt: A txt file on server which guides spider, Crawler or SE robots for what to crawl and what not to. Like you can specify which folders you want not to crawl.
Search Engine: A software or program which works according to preciesly designed algorithm to index and search for most relevant information. Yahoo, MSN, Google and Askjives are some popular search engines.
Search Engine Placement: See SEO/Search Engine Optimization.
Spamdexing: A process of using tricks to manipulate Search results of search engines, rather than genuinely updating website with unique constant. Also called Spamming
Spider: See Crawler
Title Tag: A sentence which describes your website the best. Title tag is defined in header section only, and is displayed at the top of the browser. Very crucial factor from SEO point of view, as the title is to as link by all search engines in their search results.