Glossary

Table of Contents

Adwords

Google's advertising network, where advertisers can pay a certain amount for each click (see CPC). You can setup how much you want to spend per day on advertising, and create several custom text ads, which will rotate through the search engine results and/or content pages as well (see Adsense).

Adsense

Google's money making program for webmasters, where you can show targeted, relevant ads on your web sites. Commission is paid out at 50% of the total revenue for a click. Signup is free, and only requires a tax payer id, or social security number. Google will then write you a check each month, or as soon as you earn over $100. See Google Adsense (http://www.google.com/adsense).

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink.
For example: < a href="http://www.seoonline.com/" >Free SEO Tool Online < /a >.
The Blue Text is the the anchor text in the above link.

Apache

One of the most popular open source web servers on the internet. More info at apache.org (http://www.apache.org)

API

API stands for Application Program Interface. In it's simplest definition, an API is a means by which one program can exchange information with another program via it's API.

API Key

An API key is typically a unique id given upon registration for usage of an API, such as Google's API. The key identifies the user, and in Google's case, serves as a means of tracking the user, as well as limiting the user to 1,000 queries per day.

Backlink

Backlink (also referred to as an "incoming link" or "reciprocal link") refers to the number of web pages in Google (and other engines), that have a link to your site. For example, you can use the Link Popularity Tool to determine how many pages link to your site, which inturn will have a direct effect on your ranking in the SERPs.

Blog

Simply put, a blog (or weblog) is an online diary or journal. There are many options out there for bloggers, including blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com) and others, that allow for a user to update their blog on a daily basis. Blogs usually revolve around a topic or interest that is held by the owner, although they can also be rants or other informative postings. Because of the dynamic nature of blogs, Googlebot tends to visit these sites more often since the content is updated regularly.

Clickthrough

A clickthrough (or clickthru) refers to the act of a visitor actually clicking on an advertisement and following through to the advertiser's web site.

CPA

CPA is short for "Cost Per Acquisition". Simply put, it means you get paid for every sale you generate promoting a product. So you would advertise a product whichever way you would choose: banner, text ad, link, etc. For every sale that your marketing generates, you earn a percentage, typically 40-50%. In theory, this allows for you to make more money then charging a flat CPM rate for advertising.

CPC

CPC (Cost Per Click) refers to the amount of money an advertiser will pay each time someone clicks on their ad. For example, the word "casino" in Google Adwords may cost an advertiser upwards of $12 per click.

CPM

CPM stands for Cost Per Million, which used to be used to describe the amount of money paid for 1 million page impressions. However, since it was determined in the dotcom days that impressions could easily be faked, the industry opted to use CPM to refer to Cost Per Thousand clickthroughs.

Critical Mass

Critical mass is used to describe the state of an interactive site, in which it's users start to really contribute and visit the site on a regular basis. It's often used to describe the early stage of an online forum or community.

CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and is used to seperate content from presentation in a web page. Typically contained within a seperate external file (ie - style.css), you can control the look of a page, from font sizes and colors, to positioning of elements on the web page. For more info, see W3 Schools (http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp)

Deep Crawl

A deep crawl is when a spider, such as Googlebot crawls the entire web site. Typically, Googlebot will index only the first page (or home page) the first time it encounters a new site not already in it's index. It can take up to 1 month for Googlebot to return and do a deep crawl, following all the interlinked pages on a particular web site.

Directory

A directory is simply a web site, which maintains a collection of other web sites that are submitted by people, categorized by content. A listing in a directory usually contains a link, with a descriptive title, and a brief description of the web site listed. The most well known free directory is Dmoz (http://www.dmoz.org). There are many, many directories on the web which are big and small alike, some are broad in classification, like Dmoz, while others are dedicated to specific topics, for example a "business directory". Your best bet is to submit your site to these directories, rather than search engines.

Google

The world's most successful search engine, Google (http://www.google.com) has grown by leaps and bounds in the last several years, doubling their number of indexed pages to over 8 billion. It's the most sought after search engine for placement by SEO masters.

Googlebot

One of the more well known spiders owned and operating by Google (http://www.google.com), which crawl the web, indexing pages.

Googlism

Google offers several little known tricks or functions you can type into the search field, also known as "googlisms" for retrieving information about a web site. Ranging from the number of backlinks, to the number of pages indexed.

HTML

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is the standardized way of laying out the content in a web page. More recently, XHTML has been gaining ground over HTML as a more structured markup language.

Inbound Links

See Backlink .

Index

This refers to the database of a search engine company that stores all the content on the web it's spiders have crawled. The spider's actions are commonly refered to as "indexing the web".

IP Address

The IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique number every computer on a network has. Think of it as a phone number for your computer, used to identify your ISP and your computer. People engauging is malicious activities have often been traced by their IP number.

ISP

ISP stnnds for Internet Service Provider. An ISP can be the means you use to connect to the Internet (examples include Comcast, SBC Dsl, or AOL), or even the company from which your purchase your web server or hosting provider.

Link Popularity

Link Popularity is how many other sites link back to yours. The more web pages that link to you, the better your link popularity ranking. Check any site Link Popularity or try this Mluti sites Link Popularity tool now.

Log

A log file refers the a file that is created by a program as a means of tracking what is happening during the usage of that program. For SEO, your most important tool is your web server's log file. It will provide you with information about your visitors, ranging from pages accessed and times, to which search phrases and search engines they are using.

PageRank

Google PageRank refers to the number between 1 and 10 (10 being the highest) that Google assigns a page.

Proxy Server

A proxy server is a server connected to the internet that will forward a request for you to the final destination, usually HTTP . The reason people use a proxy server is to cover up the originator's IP address. You can send your request through a second proxy server, or even a third server, and the results of the request are forwarded back through the servers to you. Thus querying google.com would make it look like you were coming from the proxy server's ip address, not your own. Nefarious tools use proxy servers, as well as people who want to remain anonymous. Typical uses are for scraping web sites.

Reciprocal Links

See Backlinks

robots.txt

The robots.txt is a text file which you can place anywhere on your server (within htdocs), to limit access by spiders to a particular directory. robots.txt is only used by spiders that support it. Screen scraping commonly does not look for a robots.txt file.

Root

Root describes the "superuser" on a Linux or Unix-based systems. Usually only the administrators of the server have access to this account. It allows full control of everything on the server. Sometimes it comes up in SEO because certain tweaks are necessary on the server, for example URL rewriting in Apache.

Saturation

Search Engine Saturation is how many pages from your site have been indexed by the major engines.

SEO

SEO is an acronym commonly used to abbreviate "Search Engine Optimization". The process of optimizing a web site for higher rankings in search engines.

Search Engine

A search engine refers to a web site that is dedicated to indexing the web via spiders, providing it's users with a searchable database of content from the web. Search engines of note are Google (http://www.google.com), Yahoo! (http://search.yahoo.com/), and MSN (http://search.msn.com).

SERPs

Search Engine Result Placements (SERPs) is commonly used to describe how well you're doing in the search engines for a particular phrase. For example, one might say "I'm ranking #2 for the phrase 'seo wiki' in Google and Yahoo SERPs."

Session ID

A session id is a unique identifier assigned to a visitor, usually as a parameter in the url ("/index.php?sid=234jiod08ekjd08pje") or as a cookie. Spiders tend to get caught up in sites with session ids, and are now actively weeding out sites that use session ids in the url.

Scraping

Scraping refers to the act of parsing results from a web site in an automated process. Typically, this can be a Perl script using LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Request modules to grab the content from a server. It's a somewhat questionable practice to scrape web sites, unless you have permission from the copyright owner beforehand.

Spam

Most people think of spam as unsolicited email. Spam can also be used as unsolicited postings on blogs, forums and guestbooks. This is quite common if you have a free link section on your web site, or a forum in which people can register and post links on a web site. Counter measures include visual confirmation in order to post, so as to keep people from writing automated scripts (non-organic methods) that will look for exploitable software.

Spider

Also known as "robots", "bots", or "crawlers". These are programs search engines use to index the web. They typically start at a location, or many, and follow all the links on a page it's indexing. As they go about their crawling, they undoubtedly find new pages and web sites, and continue to follow all those links as well. Eventually building up a huge database that contains all the pages and sites indexed by the spider. Googlebot is one example of a spider, which crawls the web 24/7 indexing the internet for the Google search engine.

Visual Confirmation

Visual confirmation refers to a counter measure that can be implemented on a submission form to discourage automated spam submissions. Typically it consists of an image with a set of multi-case letters or word. The person then needs to enter the letter/number sequence from the image into a form field in order to continue. This is common practice on forums and blogs, which would stop automated scripts from submitting and getting a free link.

Web Server

A web server is a computer that is set up to serve web pages to clients (your visitors). In other words, it's the computer (including it's web serving software, like Apache), that is hosted at your ISP's location and handles all requests for your web site.

WWW

World Wide Web.

XHTML

XHTML refers to eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language, and is a more strict form of it's predecessor, HTML.

XML

XML is short for eXtensible Markup Language. In layman's terms, XML is a language used to describe data or content. XML is advantageous because it serves as a parsable structured form of markup, unlike HTML. XML is only considered "valid" when the tags are nested and closed properly.