SEO Glossary and Common SEO Terminology

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text used in a normal hyperlink. This is the text that you see when you click on a link. This is especialy important to search engines.

Back Link

Bot

A Bot or Robot is a search engine utility program, also refered to as a search engine spider, that visits your web site and lists it in a search engines index.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a method of presenting different content to a search engine spider or robot (or bot) than is shown to the user. The primary purpose of this is to trick search engines and get higher rankings whilst presenting a different sales type site to a user. This is a strict violation of most search engines terms of service.

CPC

CPC stands for Cost Per Click and is a metric used in PPC or sponsored search. The CPC of a particular search term is how much is charged per click on that particular keyword when clicked from a sponsored search advert.

CTR

CTR stands for Click Through Rate and is another common metric used in PPC or sponsored search. The CTR of a given page is the number of times an ad is shown v the number of times someone clicks on it through to the page in the ad. This is expressed as a percentage. For example if an add was displayed 100 times and 4 of those times the ad was clicked the CTR would be 4 clicks in 100 impressions and thus 100 / 4 or 4%. The CTR would be 4%. This is a useful metric to determine how effective an ad is.

Doorway Page

Doorway pages, sometimes called gateway pages, are designed with search engines in mind and are targeted to one particular keyword.

FFA

FFA is an anacronym for Free For All. FFA sites are a collection of links to lots of different sites about any particular subject. They are not specific or related to anything in particular. They are not easily readable and have very little content. Search engines used to value the links from them which is why they became popular but now they are highly devalued. Placing a link to an FFA site will very likely have a negative impact on your site too.

Gateway Page

Google Dance

HyperLink

A hyperlink is a normal web link. It holds more benefit and effect in SEO than normal text.

IBL

In Bound Links are the connections to your site from other sites. It is good to get In Bound Links to your site, as this helps get better search engine results. It should be noted that searching a search engine for link:http://www.yourdomain.com does not always display all of your results. Notably, Google only displays a selection of them!

Index

Keyword / Keyphrase

Keyword Stuffing

Link Farm

LSI

Latent Semantic Indexing is the method of determine which keywords are related to each other on a page despite them not being grouped together in a keyphrase.

Mirror

OBL

Out Bound Links are just like In Bound Links but go the opposite way. Out Bound Links are links from your web site to other web sites. Some people try to void linking to other sites as they feel it will lose them PR (Page Rank). You should not be afraid to link if you feel it is required.

PFI

PPC

PR or Page Rank

Google Page Rank is a measure of the linking popularity of a site. The google basis of PR is a link from site A to site B is a vote for site B by site A. So if lots of sites link to you, you will get more PR. Page Rank is measured from 1 - 10. 10 being the highest.

Robots.txt

SEM

SEO

SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is the process of taking a web site and modifying the code and links to it so that it ranks higher in search engines.

SMO

Spam

Spider

Splash Page

Stop Word

Tip of the Day