Say What?
Search engine optimization and online marketing are filled with techie jargon, acronyms, and other insider language that can be confusing at the least and overwhelming if you’re not careful.
Once you’ve been introduced to the terminology though, you’ll find that it’s not that difficult to understand after all. Soon, you’ll be impressing (or boring) your friends with fancy phrases.
Online Marketing and SEO Glossary of Terminology
Search engine optimization (SEO)
verb
“The process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.[1]”
Search engine
“A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files.”[2]
Real Time Search
“Real-time-search was introduced in late 2009 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs the leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results. This new approach to search places importance on current, fresh and unique content.” [3]
Search Engine Market Share
The percent of searches being performed through one search engine (ie Google) instead of that search engine’s competitors (ie Yahoo!, Bing, Ask). As of 2010, there are essentially five major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, and AOL. Most other search engines are either niche or draw their results from the main four. As of January 2010, the market share of searches performed in the US was 65% Google, 17% Yahoo!, 11% Bing, 4% Ask, and 4% AOL.[4]
Search Engine Volume
| Search Queries (Millions)[5] | ||
| Dec-2009 | Jan-2010 | |
| Total Core Search | 14,737 | 15,167 |
| Google Sites | 9,688 | 9,920 |
| Yahoo! Sites | 2,544 | 2,583 |
| Microsoft Sites | 1,576 | 1,715 |
| Ask Network | 545 | 574 |
| AOL LLC | 383 | 375 |
The total number of searches performed by users on a search engine over some period of time, usually measured in months. For example, in January 2010, the main five search engines performed a total of about 14.7 billion searches. That means people visited these search engines, typed in keywords, and hit submit to see what results came up over 14 billion times, in just one month. That’s about 5,500 searches per second.
Keyword
A word or phrase that a potential customer types into a search engine to find what they’re looking for.
Keyword Analysis
A breakdown of possible keywords that pertain to your website, how your website currently ranks for those keywords, and which keywords may give you the best opportunity for improvement.
Keyword Profile
The competition, popularity, and keyword efficiency index for a set of keywords.
Word Length
The count of words in a keyword phrase. This will be 1 or more. Usually, the higher the word length, the less the competition. For example, the length of keyword phrase “test phrase” is 2.
KEI
Keyword Efficiency Index. A ratio between the number of websites competitng for a keyword and the keyword search popularity. A higher KEI indicates a possible better return on investment. KEI is calculated by dividing the average number of searches, squared, by the competition.
Competition
The number of websites that come up in the search engine results page for a keyword.
Avg # of Phrase Searches (Keyword Popularity)
The approximate monthly average number of Google users who searched for a keyword phrase just as it looks. For example: “google search” or “google search stats” or “funny google search” would all count for the keyword phrase “google search,” while “google stats search” would not.
HTML
“HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items.”[6]
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World</title>
</head>
<body>
The body of my html example. This would show in a browser.
</body>
</html>
Web Page
“A webpage or web page is a document or resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a computer screen.”[7]
Meta Tag
“Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.”[8]
<meta name=”keywords” content=”some keyword,another keyword” />
Meta Description
although not used for “rankings” by any of the major engines, the meta description is an important place to use the target term/phrase due to the “bolding” that occurs in the visual snippet of the search results. Usage has also been shown to help boost click-through rate, thus increasing the traffic derived from any ranking position.[9]
Meta Keywords
Yahoo! is unique among the search engines in recording and utilizing the meta keyword tag for discovery, though not technically for rankings. However, with Microsoft’s Bing set to take over Yahoo! Search, the last remaining reason to employ the tag is now gone. That, combined with the danger of using keywords there for competitive research means that at SEOmoz, we never recommend employing the tag. [10]
Meta Robots
although not necessary, this tag should be sure NOT to contain any directives that could potentially disallow access by the engines.[11]
Rel=”Canonical”
the larger and more complex a site (and the larger/more complex the organization working on it), the more we advise employing the canonical URL tag to prevent any potential duplicates or unintentional, appended URL strings from creating a problem for the engines and splitting up potential link juice. [12]
Other Meta Tags
meta tags like those offered by the DCMI or FGDC seem compelling, but currently provide no benefit for SEO with the major engines and thus, add unnecessary complexity and download time. [13]
Alexa Traffic Rank
The Alexa Traffic Rank shows how popular your website is compared to other websites on the Internet. It is one of the best tools available to gauge how much website traffic you get compared to your competitors.
“Alexa.com gathers Site Stats from a variety of sources to provide key statistics about each site on the web. These include: Traffic Rank and Speed which are derived from Web usage information, and Other sites that link to this site, and Online Since, both of which come from Web content.” [15]
PageRank
A Google created score between 0 and 10 given to any site on the web that assesses that site’s relative “importance” or authority. The higher the score, the better for your website.
Compete Rank
Similar to the Alexa Traffic Rank, the compete rank is a traffic-based ranking that shows how your website compares, or ranks, to all other websites that Compete.com has measured. The lower the number, the better your rank. The better your rank, the more traffic you likely have coming to your website.
Backlinks (Inlink)
Backlinks (also called inlinks) are hyperlinks (also called links) that link to a page on your website. If you have a friend who has linked from his blog to your website, we’d say that you have a backlink from his site.
In terms of SEO and online marketing, the more backlinks you have from good websites, the better. You can think of each link pointing to your website as a sort of vote saying that your site has some authority.
Sitemap
“Sitemaps are a way to tell [search engines] about pages on your site [they] might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that [search engines] know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by normal crawling processes.” [14]
Internal Linking Structure
Your website’s internal linking structure is composed of all the links on your website and how they link to each other. Your internal linking structure is decided by you (or the website software you’re using) and is simply the “road map” of how a visitor gets from one page to the next.
Having a good internal linking structure means that your website’s visitors never get lost or stuck at a dead end. It also means that search engines can easily navigate your site and understand which parts you think are most important.
Keyword Mapping
The process of selecting specific keywords as link anchor text in order to let both visitors and search engines understand what pages to expect and how important you think each page is.
For example, if you run a bait shop and one of your keywords is “night crawlers” then you’d want to use that phrase as a link pointing to your night crawlers page from several other pages on your site.
In the background code, it would look something like: <a href=”night-crawlers.htm”>night crawlers</a>.
[1], [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine
[4] http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/2/comScore_Releases_January_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
[5] comScore Core Search Report, January 2010 vs. December 2009, Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations, Source: comScore qSearch
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webpage
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_tags
[9] – [13] http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization
[14] http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184
[15] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
