Help us in extending this glossary by adding a term and its explanation by either leaving a Comment or sending an email to: evaluation@topsitemakeover.com.
We will make sure to credit you for your contribution by linking to your site.
Alt tag
HTML coding providing an alternate text to images.
Analytics / Site statistics
Website statistics providing information to site owner about number of visitors and related data.
Anchor link
A form of internal link that will be directed to a specific place within a specific page of a site.
Black-hat SEO
Unethical SEO strategies like keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden inputs, meta tag spam. This type of conduct may result in disqualification from core engines.
Content Management System “CMS”
A system allowing site owners or other authorized personnel to change website content without knowledge of HTML or FTP issues.
Crawler
A type of Search Engine that crawls from one site to another through the sites’ links.
Cloaking
Keyword cloaking is a technique to hide strategic keywords in the source code to trick / cheat the indexing engine.
Hybrid directory / engine
An engine or directory which gathers data and displays results from both a directory and an engine.
Inbound / Referral / Back links
Links to the site from other URL’s.
Internal links
Links within the site.
Keyphrase
Keyword combination. A cluster of keywords.
Keyword
A word describing what a given page is about / offering.
Keyword density / saturation
Placement and incidence of a strategic keyword or keyphrase on a webpage compared to other words. It is usually measured by a percentage.
Organic SEO
SEO campaign which will improve the site’s SERP rating without any financial contribution to the primary / core engines. Your listing will appear within the left result sector along with other non-paid organic results.
Pay Per Click “PPC”
A non-organic SEO campaign which will potentially improve the site’s traffic through financial contribution to the primary / core engines. This is also called “Search Engine advertising”. The listing will appear within the right result bar along with other paid advertising.
Payed Inclusion “PI”
A paid, non-organic marketing tool that insures the site’s inclusion within the engine or engine cluster in question. This form of marketing is not considered an SEO tool, since it will not affect the site’s SERP.
Primary / Core search engine
Major engines driving the majority of web traffic on the Web. At the moment the major players are: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. GYM.
Robots
Site indexing programs which function using links or other algorithm settings.
RSS feed
“Really Simple Syndication” which gathers new content such as blogs, news, site changes.
Search algorithm
Indexing method set by the engine to provide the best possible search results.
Search Engine Result Position / Placement “SERP”
A website’s numbered ranking in a related keyword or keyphrase search.
Site map
A .xml coded page listing all pages of the site to be indexed by the applicable search engine. After an RSS feed has been established, this page will automatically inform the core engine in question of any updates or changes made within the indexed pages.
Stop words
Commonly used words which are ignored by engines, and therefore should not be used in meta tags. Examples: a, the, and, but ….
Social Media Marketing “SMM”
A new and alternate form of marketing exposing your services or products through your own social networking, using Blogs and other types of Web 2.0 environments and Social Media Networks like YouTube etc…
Social Media Network
The actual platform you are using for Social Media Marketing “SMM”.
Social Media Optimization “SMO”
Establishing your participation within Social Media Networks and creating content appropriate to such platforms.
Spider
Coming soon
Usability
A site’s ability to achieve its purpose through the following means: design platform and coding language, navigation, content, image use, loading time, site identification, purchase path, site structure, layout and design based on fundamental guidelines for Web Usability. Once visitors arrive to the site they should be converted into customers.
Website Makeover
An improvement process to change the “look and feel” of a site to make it better suited to its targeted-market.
Website Optimization “WSO”
An improvement process, usually involving a website makeover and dealing with usability issues to increase a site’s effectiveness in preparation for an SEO campaign.
