SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION GLOSSARY
SEO GLOSSARY
As marketers, SEO professionals, and link builders, industry jargon has become second nature to us. However, we understand that not everyone is versed in these terms. That's why we've made it our mission to compile a comprehensive SEO glossary of commonly used SEO and link-building terms for those who are unfamiliar with them. We'll keep updating this list too. If you're unsure about any terms or have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're always happy to lend a hand.
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301: A 301 status code is used for permanent redirection. It sends a web user from an old (usually vacant, outdated, or otherwise unused) page to its new, permanent address. Search engines claim that 90 percent of link equity flows through a 301 redirect.
404: A 404 error code is a response code that denotes that a web page is unavailable. The web page could have been deleted, moved, or simply is not working.
3Ps: This term refers to the three primary kinds of risqué online content: pills, poker, and porn. These terms are highly competitive and sometimes highly lucrative. They’re also risky web neighborhoods to be associated with, and are often riddled with spam, scams, and malware.
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Abandoned Domains: An abandoned domain is a web address that may have links pointing to it, but has not been renewed for various reasons and is available for purchase. The process of buying an abandoned domain and then using a 301 redirect to automatically point to another website is a common link-building strategy.
Above the Fold: Content that appears on a website before the user scrolls. In 2012, Google's Page Layout Algorithm lowered the rankings of websites featuring too many ads in this area.
AC Rank: A site’s AC rank (which stands for A Citation Rank) is the ranking its pages achieve on a 0-15 scale based on the number of root domains that have referred to that site. This term is associated with Majestic SEO.
Affiliate Marketing: A performance-based marketing method that allows merchants to expand their market reach by rewarding independent agents (affiliates) for promoting a product, service, or site.
Aging Content: Content that has lost its timeliness and relevance. Unlike evergreen content, aging content can drag the entire site down.
Algorithm: An algorithm is a series of steps used by a computer or program to solve a problem. The major search engines use proprietary algorithms to measure, rank, and display web pages in their SERPs. Google claims its search algorithms rely on over 200 measurable factors, some of which are thought to be keywords and inbound links.
ALT Attribute: The ALT attribute is the text that accompanies an image link in HTML. Because search engines don’t understand images as humans do, it’s important to use the alt text attribute to textually describe an image. The alt text is also displayed if the image cannot be loaded. eg, If you have a picture of a 1991 black Ferrari, the alt text should be: 1991 black Ferrari.
ALT Tag: An ALT tag is the text that appears over an image on a webpage when the mouse hovers over it.
AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source HTML framework that enables desktop-first pages to load faster on mobile. A Core Web Vitals to measure faster delivery and page loading.
Anchor Text: Anchor text refers to the visible, clickable text portion of a hyperlink. Anchor text should usually describe the site or content on the other side of the link. For example, a link with the anchor text “cat beds” linking to a page about cat beds has greater value than a link with the anchor text “cool stuff” linking to that same page about cat beds. (See also Kiss of Death.)
Article Marketing: Article marketing involves a business writing content about its area of expertise and submitting it to various article directory sites.
Article Directories: An article directory is a website that hosts an archive of online articles. Businesses submit articles about their brand, business, or field of expertise to these directories to earn links. This involves a business writing content about its area of expertise and submitting it to increase traffic. Once a widely accepted link-building activity, it has recently diminished in prominence.
Article Spinning: Article spinning is the practice of using a computer program to take an existing article and “rewrite” it. This is done by replacing certain nouns, verbs, and descriptors with synonyms. Webmasters then repost the “new” article to various sites to build links. This type of content is considered highly dubious, and search engines penalize sites that use spun articles.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): The science of making computers perform tasks that require human intelligence. Rather than following a set of programmed rules (like an algorithm), an AI computer system is a digital brain that learns. AI can also make and carry out decisions without human intervention.
Associations: In SEO terms, an association refers to an organization of people who are more likely to post content from or link back to one of its members’ websites.
Automated Submitting: A site that uses an automated submitting program that has its web pages automatically submitted to search engines, social media sites, and directories. The risk in using such automated programs is that your website may be listed in places that are not relevant or appropriate for your purposes.
Authority (website): A site’s authority is comprised of its domain’s age, its content, its inbound link profile (quality and quantity), and its search ranking based on a search query.
Authority Linking: Authority linking is the practice of linking to a website that is considered an authority (or at least authoritative) in its respective field. A site about dental chairs that hosts a link to the American Dental Association is an example of authority linking.
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Backlink: A backlink is an inbound link from an external, independent site. The amount and quality of backlinks a site has will increase or decrease its search ranking accordingly.
Better Business Bureau: The Better Business Bureau, or BBB, is an organization that determines if a business is reputable or not. A listing by the BBB is highly valuable, and the link that goes with it is considered high-quality and authoritative.
Black Blogs: A term coined by Zach Ball, founder of the link-building firm Page One Power. A black blog is a weblog dedicated solely to selling links and possesses no truly valuable content.
Black Hat SEO: a set of SEO tactics, including cloaking, keyword stuffing, and robot-driven link building. These practices attempt to manipulate the rankings of target sites. These tactics aim to “game” the system by using doorway pages, spamming search engines, and other methods. It is generally frowned upon in SEO, and search engines have started penalizing websites that use (or abuse) this practice. Jokingly referred to as the dark arts, Black Hat SEO had massive positive effects on its target sites in the recent past. Many search engines have tried to limit the practice. Most notably, Google has punished and penalized spammy links with its algorithm updates, Panda and Penguin. Practitioners of White Hat SEO tend to view it as a shady practice, but such techniques often yield results, albeit temporary.
Blog: Short for “weblog,” a blog is a popular form of communication. A blog is a sort of online journal with ongoing posts. Blogs are an integral part of an overall strategy to create an online presence, have a stake in the online community, and attract people to your site. Great blog posts encourage links to your content and increase your perceived authority on the subject you are blogging about.
Blog Comment: A blog comment is a reader’s written response to the content on a blog post. Blog commenting can and does happen naturally, but because links can often be included with comments, it has also been severely abused by spammers.
Blog Directories: An online archive of links to blogs. A blogger submits their weblog to the directory to expand the blog’s link profile and readership. Most blog directories, however, are too general and therefore contribute little to a blog’s marketing strategy.
Body Copy: The body copy of a webpage is the primary text on a site. Anchor text links in the body copy pass the highest link equity.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of website visitors who leave without visiting another page on that website.
Bots: Also known as spiders, web crawlers, etc. Bots are programs designed to crawl and copy web pages for later processing and indexing by search engines. They generally begin with a list of URLs to crawl, and while crawling, the bot identifies all the hyperlinks it finds, and then adds those URLs to the list of sites to be crawled next.
Brand Mentions: The natural or organic mention of a company’s brand online. Brand mentions often include a link, and business owners should monitor not only their brand mentions, but those of their competitors.
Brand Awareness: The degree to which consumers are acquainted with or knowledgeable of the qualities or image of a particular brand. Brand awareness is managed through social media, content marketing, and other channels that increase public awareness and knowledge of a company’s presence.
Broken Links: A broken link is a link on a website that no longer takes users to its intended destination. Broken links are bad for user experience, and having many of them makes a website less trustworthy.
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Cache Copy: Cache copy is the search engine’s copy of your website on its server. Every time the search engine crawls and indexes your site, it replaces its cached copy of your website.
Call to Action: A marketing tactic that prompts consumers to take a specific action as recommended by the marketer. “Click here for your free guide!” is an example.
Case Study: A form of qualitative descriptive research used to illustrate a thesis or principle. For example, if your thesis was that a certain number of links will get a website to the top of the search results page, then you would design an illustrative case study to explore that.
Canonical: A canon is the official, codified version of a text or document. Canonical helps the search engine credit the original sources of various documents.
Canonical Issues: A canonical issue occurs when search engines cannot determine which site is the official one. Consider the URLs:
- website.com
- www.website.com
The two URLs display the same web page, but search engines would consider them different. Webmasters hoping to avoid this can use a 301 permanent redirect or tag one of the URLs with the Canonical URL Tag, which informs search engines that one of the pages is a copy of the canonical or official page and should be treated as such.
Citation Links: A citation is a mention of a business name and address on other web pages. A citation link is the mention of a non-hyperlinked business on other web pages. For example, www.website.com would be a citation link. While it is not an active link, it is still crawled and indexed by web spiders such as Googlebot.
Cloaking: A site that engages in cloaking uses a black hat SEO strategy that makes a web page appear different to a search engine than it does to a site visitor.
Company Directory Submissions: Many companies will publish directories of relevant sites, and submitting your site to these directories is another link-building practice. See Resource pages.
Competitive Research: Competitive research is a crucial element to any marketing strategy. In terms of link building, researching a competitor’s backlink profile, for instance, can reveal a wealth of information, such as market reach, SEO strategy, and more.
Content: Term used to describe the available information on a website; is comprised of all forms of online media such as text, links, images, .gifs, graphics, videos, etc. The quality of the content is also a factor in a website’s rank in a SERP.
Content Acquisition: The process of obtaining content for a website. Because web content comes in many forms, the ways content is acquired can vary widely. One of the most common forms of content acquisition is guest posting.
Content Gap: A content gap is crucial information about an industry or market that should be covered but was somehow overlooked. If discovered, creating content to fill the gap can be a powerful way to build relevant links.
Content Marketing: Content that is used to market a company's website; such content is created and used across a broad network of sites, social media outlets, forums, etc., to increase sales and brand awareness.
Content Link Building: Developing content can be used as a link-building strategy. Compelling content generates interest, backlinks, responses, and other forms of engagement across the web, and greatly increases the likelihood that a web page will have higher rankings in the search engine results.
Conversion: The number of site visitors who respond to a call to action by signing up or making a purchase.
Content Link Segmentation: Content link segmentation refers to the location of a link on a page. Pages are broken into several segments, such as the header, body, footer, and navigation bar. It is believed that links in the header and body areas of a page are worth more than links in other parts of the page.
Contests: Contests are used as a link-building strategy by offering attractive prizes and hosting the content on your site. The intent is that interested parties will link to your contest.
Contrary Hook: A post that tackles a polarizing issue in your industry or market. The idea is to draw users who are already interested in the topic to your site, where they can read and hopefully link to your polemical article.
CPA: CPA stands for cost per acquisition, the business expense of acquiring a new customer.
CPC: CPC—cost per click—refers to one of the ways to make money by accepting ads on your website. With CPC, an advertiser pays a fee when someone clicks its link on your site, and you get a portion of that fee.
CSS: The term CSS stands for cascading style sheets. A site’s CSS controls the style and appearance of a website.
CTR: Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of times a link in an advertisement has been clicked, and it indicates how effective the ad is.
Custom Error Page: A custom error page is displayed when technical issues occur on your site. Instead of the standard “page not found” message, a custom error page is displayed. Along with the custom error message, a search box, site map, and other elements can be included to help keep visitors on the site and reduce the impact of the error.
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Dead Content: A link-building strategy that consists of finding broken links on a site and discovering the content that once existed using a tool like archive.org. Once the content is discovered, the process involves rewriting, reviving, and offering replacement content to the site owner for a link.
Debunking Myths: A popular link-building strategy that includes posting facts that contradict site-relevant misinformation on the web, with the express goal of debunking a myth. Used as a linking tactic, debunking myths about a controversial topic, an industry, or a product adds to the authority of your site and increases link juice.
Deep Links: Are links that point not to a site’s homepage, but to a page deeper in the website. These links are often very natural because they point to a page directly relevant to the content of the page on which the link is embedded. An example of a deep link would be: www.samplesite.com/page/information.
Deep Link Ratio: The deep link ratio is the relation between the number of deep links and home page links on your site.
Deindex: Although de-indexing is reserved for the most flagrant offenders, a site removed from a search index is de-indexed. You’ll know your site is de-indexed when it's no longer included in SERPs. De-indexing is different than a site penalty, which means that the site has only lost rankings.
Directory: A website that lists products, services, or resources, usually organized into categories or subcategories. Directories can be human-edited, or submissions can be automatic. There are free directories and paid directories. The most famous directory is DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project.
Dofollow Links: A “nofollow link” includes specific HTML code to stop link equity from flowing through the link. In contrast, a “dofollow link” allows link equity to flow to the linked URL.
Domain Authority: Domain Authority, or DA, is a metric developed by (SEO) Moz that predicts how a website will perform in search engine rankings. DA is scored on a logarithmic scale ranging from 0 to 100 points. The higher the score, the greater the (predicted) authority.
Duplicate Content: Duplicate content refers to content (usually text) on one site that matches the content on another site identically. Having duplicate content can adversely affect the trust a site receives from search engines. Sites with canonical issues can also be affected by duplicate content.
Drain Rank: Drain rank is the collateral damage from linking out from your site. Theoretically, search engines divide the amount of authority present on a page between all of the links on a page. If this theory is true, too many links on a page can drain the rank from that page.
Dynamic Website: A site that is considered dynamic is one that is frequently updated and may change based on a user’s unique interaction with it.
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Education-based Content: Content generated to educate or tutor an audience. This content can be used to gain authoritative links from .edu sites or other educational sites.
Educational Links: An educational link is a backlink from a site with a .edu domain. The .edu domain, much like the .gov domain, is so tightly controlled that education backlinks are always authoritative and pass significant link equity.
E-E-A-T: Google recently added an extra “E” to the search quality standards of E-A-T to ensure content is helpful and relevant. The extra “E” stands for “experience” and precedes the original E-A-T concept – expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Ego Bait: Ego bait is a tactic that involves posting flattering content about an individual to get them to link to your site or content.
Embed Code: HTML code that allows users to obtain the content for inclusion on their site. YouTube, for instance, includes embed code for most of the videos on its site.
Embedded Link: An embedded link is a hyperlink embedded in the existing text of an article or website, most commonly found on blog posts and built in by the post writer using HTML code.
Equity (link): Link equity refers to the amount of value a link has to the page it links to. Link equity can be measured by PageRank (Google’s algorithm), the site’s domain authority (from Moz), and the relevance of the two pages.
Evergreen Content: Evergreen content is information and data that are timeless and ever useful. Evergreen content is not tied to current events or trends, so there is less chance that an audience will lose interest in it. Evergreen content can be added to your site frequently to promote natural link-building.
Exact Match: In a search query, an exact match means that the searched keywords must exactly match the keywords on a web page to be included in the search results.
External Links: An external link that links out from your site to another.
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Fresh: A descriptor used by Google to label sites that are frequently updated.
Findability: The findability of a site is how easy or difficult it is to find the site in search results.
First Crawled: The first crawled date indicates when a website or page was first crawled by a web bot, such as Googlebot.
Forum: An online discussion site where people can have conversations through posted messages. Depending on the forum’s settings, users can be anonymous or must register and log in to post messages.
Forum Posting: The act of writing or posting comments on a web forum dedicated to a specific group or topic. As a link-building strategy, use caution, as forum users can often spot someone on the forum solely for links and flag them as a spammer.
Footer: Footer denotes the section of web content located at the bottom (or foot) of the page. Web page footer content most often conveys technical information, such as the website's copyright, the name of the website’s author, the business name and address (if applicable), and the date of the most recent update. The footer is also treated as a separate section of the web page, distinct from the header, content, and sidebars.
FTBOM: FTBOM is an acronym for “For The Betterment Of Mankind.” FTBOM is part of a foundational link-building philosophy created by Jon Ball, co-owner of Page One Power. It implies that a successful link-building strategy must develop links and content for the betterment of mankind, rather than content created solely for search engines or purely promotional.
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Google Algorithm: A formula employed by the Google search engine to determine which pages are most relevant to a user’s search query.
Google Analytics: A tool offered by the search engine that allows site owners to view all of the available statistics regarding site traffic, page rank, unique site views, and other demographic data.
Green Content: Content that is generated to attract interest, links, etc., from green-friendly web users, or from the environmentally conscious.
Grey Hat: Grey hat refers to link-building tactics that are neither perfectly white nor obviously black hat. They’re grey. The term grey is similar to a “grey area” where exceptions to the rule reside. For example, if you find an excellent blog for a guest post and offer good content with an embedded link, but the webmaster wants $25, that could be considered a grey-hat link.
Guest Posting: A guest post is an article on a website or blog from a writer who does not regularly contribute to the site. Blog owners often find it difficult to produce new content regularly, so they solicit material from their readers. Guest posting on a blog or other website is a great way to earn relevant backlinks. Guest posts can also increase traffic to your site.
Guide: A guide is a resource for a given industry. When a guide is posted on a site, it increases the site’s content, increases the site’s authority, adds to the site’s link juice (through relevant backlinks), and serves as a strong way to generate long-term interest in a site. For example: The complete guide to tying woolly bugger flies for fly fishing.
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How-tos: A relevant, instructional piece of content posted to your website. If the information in that how-to is good enough, it can potentially rake in links to your site. It serves as a great tool for a targeted link-building strategy.
HTML-ready content: content that already has link code embedded. When the provided content is already HTML-ready, a site owner is more likely to keep the link in place when using the content.
Hyperlink: A hyperlink is any bit of text on a website that contains HTML code. When that text is clicked, it directs the user to the linked target or website.
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Images: An image is any graphic, photo, or piece of visual content on the web. Offering the use of images, such as high-quality photos, in exchange for a link is a common link-building tactic.
Inbound Link: An inbound link is a link to your site from another site.
Inbound Marketing: Inbound marketing refers to “earning” leads for your site through high-quality content, social shares, and other strategies. With inbound marketing, potential conversions come to you, not the other way around.
Industry Experts: Industry Experts are those whose special knowledge, experience, or skill in a particular field causes them to be regarded as authorities.
Infographic: Short for information graphic, an infographic is a graphic visualization of data or other information. Infographics with embedded links can be used as a link-building strategy.
Interlink: Links between web pages on an internal site or between a series of related websites. Interlinking can also be used as a link-building strategy.
Interactive Content: Web content that responds to a user’s input, such as playing a song, game, or video on a site. Compelling interactive content can earn quality backlinks.
Internet Protocol (IP): The primary procedure for relaying and routing data across networks. It has been used since its development in the 1970s, and it essentially makes the internet possible.
IP Address: An IP address is a numeric representation of a computer’s “location” when it is connected to the Internet. IP addresses are part of the overall way computers network and interact with one another.
IP Diversity: IP diversity refers to the number of backlinks your site has from unique IP addresses. To a search engine, a wide range of IP addresses indicates that your site is valuable to many people. Multiple sites linking from the same IP may signal to search engines that some form of manipulation is at work, as site owners can host dozens of sites from the same IP address and repeatedly link to the same site.
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Juice: Juice, commonly referred to as link juice, refers to the quality and authority of the links in your backlink portfolio. Links from authoritative and relevant websites pass more value to your website, potentially increasing your site’s position in search engine rankings. For example, a link from Cat Fancy’s website with the anchor text ‘kitten beds’ pointing to a page all about kitten beds on your website carries a significant amount of link juice. A similar link from a low-traffic blog page or a spam site carries little to no link juice.
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Keyword: A keyword is a word or phrase (often called a keyword phrase) that is used to help search engines index content on webpages. Keywords help Google categorize and deliver webpages more effectively when people search.
Keyword Density: Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears on a given webpage. Having too many keywords can prompt a search engine penalty, and too few can cause ranking problems.
Keyword Popularity: A keyword’s popularity refers to how many times that keyword was searched for during a set amount of time. This is similar to “trending” terms on social media sites such as Twitter.
Keyword Prominence: The prominence of a keyword refers to a keyword’s location, the number of times it appears, and its overall use on a given website or page. The way the keyword is used or placed in a site’s text indicates the keyword’s value to a search engine.
Keyword Research: The investigation of a search term’s popularity. Keyword research is used to determine the best search terms and anchor text to increase a given website’s search engine visibility.
Keyword Stuffing: A spam or Black Hat SEO technique that entails loading pages with keywords that are related to the user’s search query. Examples of what you might see:
- keywords repeated many times on the page
- words that are related to keywords repeated many times on the page
- multiple misspellings of keywords on the page
Spammers also sometimes load pages with irrelevant keywords on topics unrelated to the query, such as mortgages, cell phones, ringtones, gambling, and weather. Whether the keywords are related or unrelated to the query, the intent is to draw search engines and users to the page.
Kiss of Death: In the search marketing world, Kiss of Death refers to the penalty or de-indexing that accompanies anchor text abuse. When a site uses the same anchor text too many times in a given period, it can lead to search engine penalties or downright de-indexation.
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Landing Page: A landing page refers to the destination of a given hyperlink. That hyperlink might be embedded in text, an image, an advertisement, a flash game, or a video.
Last Crawled: The last time a website or page was crawled by a search engine bot. This information used to be available in Google’s Webmaster Tools, but it has since been removed. To check your site’s last crawl date, you can use the “cache” search operator. For example, entering the search cache:example.com will display the last cached copy of the site along with its last crawled date.
Link Asset: Something on a site that would draw an audience to your website, and also compel them to link to that content.
Link Bait: Link bait is content considered so great that it attracts links for its general awesomeness.
Link Building: A system of tools, tactics, marketing strategies, and sometimes schemes created with the purpose of gaining links back to your website. Gaining links can improve a website's position in search engine rankings, leading to increased traffic and revenue.
Linking Domains: In search engine optimization, this refers to the number and variety of domains linking to your site. The greater the variety, the better.
Link Farm: A site that gives links indiscriminately, regardless of who, what, or where the link goes, for the sole purpose of helping those sites gain position in search engine rankings. The Google Panda update shut down most link farms.
Link Love: Similar to reciprocal linking, it is the practice of adding links to your site from other sites to show appreciation for their content or to build rapport between web communities.
Link Neighborhood: A link neighborhood is the location of your website, as determined by the sites that link to you and the sites that you link to. Just as links to and from authoritative and relevant sites can boost your rankings, links to and from bad sites can bring you down. Examples of bad sites include sites infected with malware, spam sites, sites with poor content, sites with too many ads, and sites involved in link schemes. If you have links from these kinds of websites, you may likely be in a bad link neighborhood, and this will ultimately impact your ranking.
Link Profile: Also known as a backlink profile, this refers to the assessment of the number, quality, variety, and overall health of the backlinks a website has.
Link Value: The potential worth of a given link for its ability to pass link juice and authority, for instance,, an .edu site has a greater authority than an article directory.
Link Velocity: The speed at which a site gains new links. Generally, a steady and reasonable increase in links enhances a website’s potential to rank in the SERPs. Acquiring a large number of links quickly is a red flag for search engines and usually indicates some form of automation.
Linkability: A webpage’s linkability refers to the number of backlinks it might attract. Useful, actionable content is highly linkable.
Linkerati: The linkerati are an elite group of high-use internet practitioners who generate content, build web presence, and increase the number of links to sites they see as valuable. This group is very effective for purposes of link building.
Live Blogging: Blogging from an event while present at the event. Live blogging has great link-building potential, provides content for sites that were unable to cover the event, and increases your site's visibility.
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Majestic SEO: An SEO company that offers a variety of tools based around its own web crawler, which has spent the better part of a decade indexing web links.
Manual Submission: The process of submitting URLs to search engines manually, rather than using software that automates the process. Manual submission tends to be a more effective and less expensive way to ensure your pages are indexed.
Mashup: A mash-up involves taking two or more pre-existing pieces of content and combining them in a novel way. Mash-ups are similar to remixes, except they usually combine disparate elements.
Meta Description: A meta description is a string of words in HTML code that the search engines use to describe your web page when displayed in the SERP. If no meta description is provided, search engines will automatically select text from the page to display in search results. If that happens, it could work out well, but Google could also choose no text or even irrelevant text, so it’s always better to carefully write meta descriptions for your web pages rather than leave it to the machines.
Meta Keywords: Previously, SEO companies would include keywords about the site in an HTML meta tag. However, this tool was overused and is now no longer effective in searches or web rankings.
Meta Tags: These are special HTML tags which define metadata about a particular HTML document. They can specify things such as page descriptions, keywords, the author’s name, and the date last modified. This information is used by web browsers and search engines, but is not displayed on the web page itself.
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Naked Link: A naked link contains anchor text that is the same as the website’s URL. For example, a naked link would be pageonepower.com, rather than The World’s Finest Link Building Firm.
Navigation Bar: A navigation bar is the static list of links, like a table of contents, that lead to other locations on the site. The navigation bar serves as the primary means for easily navigating a website.
Niche: The position that a company or business occupies within a specialized market.
Niche Directory: A website that contains a hierarchical list of products or resources related to a specialized market.
Nofollow Links: Links that have the HTML rel attribute that specifies that a spider or web bot should not follow that specific link, essentially meaning the site or document that linked to is not (fully) endorsed.
O
Organic Link: An organic link is a link that your site attracts naturally with quality content. It’s the objective of link bait or any other quality-driven web initiative.
Organic Search: Returned search results that appear because of their relevance to the search query or keywords. In contrast to paid search results, these results have not been paid for and show up based on their own merit, so to speak.
P
PPC: An acronym for pay-per-click advertising. PPC is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites. The publisher of the advertisement (i.e., the search engine or website) is paid by the advertiser each time the ad is clicked.
PPP: An acronym for pay-per-post, this refers to websites that pay people who create content in exchange for using it on their sites.
Panda: Panda is a Google algorithm update that changed how web pages are ranked and penalized sites with poor-quality content.
Paid Links: When one website offers a link to another website for money. Paid links violate Google’s quality guidelines, and therefore buying or selling links is a high-risk proposition. Penalties vary but can include a website being dropped significantly in search results or deindexed entirely. Despite this, the practice of buying and selling links remains fairly widespread.
Paid Strategy: A paid strategy includes paying for services, such as a positive product review, as part of a link-building plan.
PageRank: A link analysis algorithm named after Larry Page and used by Google. It is a measure of a web page's importance based on incoming links from other web pages.
Penalty: A penalty is a virtual reprimand imposed on site owners for engaging in practices that search engines deem unacceptable, such as black-hat SEO. A penalty typically consists of a site losing rankings in the SERP. Many penalties are timed (30, 60, or 90 days), while some are permanent, remaining in place until the offending issue is resolved.
Persona: The creation and implementation of an online individual (similar to an avatar) who has an extensive online presence that engages in blogging, social media, etc., that is both a representation of a company’s target consumer and is used as a means of link building for the company's products.
Petition: Part of the web cultural phenomenon called “hacktivism” (internet activism), petitioning is a means of getting signatures in protest of or support for an issue or cause. For a link-building strategy, it can increase link juice and brand awareness and, if it is related to your industry, could also generate a lot of linking and traffic from your target audience.
Press Release: A press release is a write-up on a company’s newsworthy events. Submitting press releases to media companies gains your company brand awareness, links, and other benefits. Many media companies accept free press releases, but it is up to the editorial staff to decide whether to publish them. Paid media companies will guarantee that the press release will be sent out, provided it does contain newsworthy content. The effectiveness of this as a link-building tactic has diminished greatly.
Printables: Information hosted on a website that can be easily printed. If the information is useful, it may be shared, resulting in increased brand awareness, authority, and links.
Profile Links: Profile links are usually found on forums or message boards, and anyone who wishes to register can often obtain one from their newly created profile. Profile links are very low-value links. As a link-building strategy, it has been abused by spammers and is therefore not recommended.
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Quiz: A quiz on a site can be used to increase traffic, potentially drive links, offer interactive content, test your web visitors with company- or product-related knowledge (which will actually educate them about your company/product), and improve your site's overall ranking.
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Resource Pages: A resource page is a site that collects and aggregates websites and content related to a specific online niche, and publishes this information into a list of webpages. Many specialized markets have websites that host resource pages, and it can be worthwhile to pursue them for relevant links.
Reciprocal Links: Reciprocal linking occurs when one site offers to link to another site if and only if the other site links back. Technically, reciprocal links are a violation of Google’s quality guidelines, which means websites can be penalized if caught engaging in this practice. But in some cases, reciprocal linking can happen very naturally and, in fact, can be hard to avoid. As a result, it remains a fairly common practice among webmasters.
Relevance: A critical part of both SEO and link building. Gaining links on pages that are relevant to your website is often a goal with any link-building project, as non-relevant pages that link to you have a questionable effect on search engine placement. In relation to SEO, relevance refers to having all on-page elements (titles, text, URLs) aligned with a particular keyword.
Robots.txt: Also known as the Robots Exclusion Standard, this file restricts search engine robots from crawling certain parts of a website. These bots are automated, and before they access a site's pages, they check whether a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages.
Root Domain: A root domain is the base domain of a site. eg…www.ebay.com not www.ebay.com/felines/kittens/kittenbeds.
RSS Feeds: RSS feeds are subscriptions to the posts the user selects for aggregation into a personalized stream of content. The acronym stands for RDF Site Summary.
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Scraped Content: Scraped content is simply content gleaned from the internet via a computer program and posted on another site.
Search Queries: Types of modifiers used in a web search to affect the results of the search, some of these include inurl, intitle, quotations, and intext modifiers.
SEO: Often confused with CEO (chief executive officer),n SEO is an acronym for the term “search engine optimization.” It is the practice of using technical tools to maximize a given website’s potential for ranking highly in the page results from a web search. The top three sites listed in an organic search engine results page (SERP) are highly sought after.
SEO Link Building: Tactically placing as many links as possible on topically res/expos held for the purpose of educating and collaborating with search engine and social media marketing-related sites throughout the web in order to increase a site’s SERP.
SERP: An acronym for “search engine results pages,” which are the links to websites that are populated onscreen after a term is searched for in a web browser. For instance, if I Google the word “cupcake,” the search engine will give me a list of websites that contain the term “cupcake.” The most relevant websites are listed first, with the first three sites traditionally considered the “best.” SES: A series of trade show/expos held for the purpose of educating and collaborating for search engine and social media marketing related companies. These shows are held in various locations throughout the U.S. and internationally.
SEM: SEM is an acronym for search engine marketing.
Sitewide Link: A sitewide link on a page remains in the same location on the website, no matter what page of the site you are on. (These are typically in a static header or footer of a website.)
Social Media: A term used to describe the popular and varied online social networking websites that have arisen online in the past decade. (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
Social Signals: A social signal is a metric for assessing how well a company’s posts, comments, or social shares are performing by evaluating the responses they receives/expos held for the purpose of educating and collaborating with search engine and social media marketing. Many SEO experts agree that social signals carry weight with search engines.
Social Payment System: A social payment company is one that pays out based on social shares within a given audience. A person who agrees to share a link via Twitter, for instance, is paid for doing so.
Source Flag: A source flag is the language that determines what kind of link it is, such as an ATL text flag.
Spam: Spam is unsolicited commercial-based content generated for monetary purposes, and is disliked by all.
Spamdexing: Spamdexing is the process of intentionally manipulating search engines to achieve higher page rankings by using various forms of spam-quality hyperlinks.
Splash Page: A site with a splash page provides the viewer with a fun, visual experience upon arrival. Using these has pros and cons, since some users find them aggravating.
Spider: A spider is a search engine robot (bot) that crawls a site for information used to determine site-relevance to a queried term.
Sponsoring: Sponsoring is a strategy that allows companies to support a club, charity event, contest, or other high-profile activity with financial or other resources. In terms of online marketing, sponsoring increases brand awareness and linking options.
Static Webpage: A static page is a plain HTML page with no dynamic content.
Strongest Links: 1. Links that are the most powerful in terms of achieving relevance and authority, and are most likely to be indexed by search engines. 2. Also, a collection of directories that have high authority.
Stories: When blogging on your site, a great story can become an effective organic link strategy if it has enough emotional thrust.
Subpage: A subpage is a page that is not the top-level domain. Pages following the (/) of a site’s home page are the site's subpages.
Submissions: A tactic of submitting articles, images, videos, etc., or other content to web directories, article databases, or other sites to increase links.
Surveys: A survey is a series of questions designed to get a consensus opinion of a given subject. Surveys, if interesting enough, will provide plenty of opportunities to link after the questions are asked and again once the results are posted. The data gleaned from the survey, if industry-relevant, can also be used by the site owner to tailor their products to consumer preferences.
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Testimonial: A testimonial is a positive affirmation of a company or its products. Writing and submitting testimonials to sites that publish these increases links, brand awareness, etc.
Time Sensitive Content: Time-sensitive content subject matter that is posted at significant times, such as anniversaries, holidays, elections, or seasonally. Images, graphics, stories, and other timely pieces will get greater traction if they’re tied to a culturally significant event.
Title Tag: A title tag is the title of a page, as found in the HTML. The title of a page is what appears in SERPs and can be optimized for keywords and click-through rate.
Toolbar: A toolbar on a site that is available for users to access, typically created as a widget that can be shared with other webmasters.
TLD: A top-level domain, or TLD, is the highest point of a given domain hosting websites.
Trade Articles: 1. Articles that are written about a specific trade or industry, to be used in article directories for additional links. 2. Trading content with another site in order to increase links, content, and to add potential visitors/links and other traffic from the trade site’s regular visitors.
Traffic: The number of visitors to your site.
Troll Bait: Creating content that is so polarizing or controversial that it will probably encourage many angry comments, links, and other online sparring for adding to your site’s link juice.
Tutorial: An instructional piece of content, usually a video or a class posted on your site, which, if the information is good enough, can result in massive linkages to the site. It serves as a great tool for link-building.
Twitter: Part social networking site, part microblogging site, Twitter is an incredibly effective social media tool used by millions of members of the web community, and is always part of a larger social media marketing strategy.
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UGC: This acronym stands for user-generated content, and using it allows sites to have a broader scope on a given topic. It is incredibly useful for sites such as e-commerce platforms and Amazon, and is part of what makes them so successful.
Unnatural Link: A link that has been intentionally placed by a webmaster on a site for the sole purpose of deceiving the search engines.
Unnatural Link Warning: An unnatural link warning is a notice from a search engine, such as Google, to a webmaster. These warnings typically say that a site has unnatural links. Unnatural links can negatively impact a site’s rankings. (The Google Penguin update will penalize sites that contain an “over-optimization” link profile.)
User-Rating Review: Sites that allow users to publish product reviews can be used to post a review with a link to the product. A review can be part of a link-building plan.
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Video Submission: Video submission is the strategy of submitting original videos for posting on video aggregate sites for the benefit of brand awareness and backlinks.
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Webinar: An online seminar or class. Users can watch via a live video feed or listen over the phone when invited by the webinar hosts, if your site supports this.
Web 2.0 Sites: Are sites that allow a user to interact with an online community by uploading content and commenting on other users' content. For example, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and other sites are user-dependent.
Web Tools: A web tool is an online instrument that makes a task easier or solves a problem. These interactive tools, if entertaining or useful enough, are often repeatedly linked to, thereby increasing the number of links on a site.
Web 2.0 Profiles: A Web 2.0 profile is the personal profile a user creates when signing up for a site like Facebook or Tumblr. A Web 2.0 user has a broad reach across multiple websites, with profiles linked to each other and content generated and interactions taking place spread across Web 2.0 sites.
White Hat SEO: White hat SEO means your search engine optimization practices align with published search engine best practices and webmaster guidelines. Typically, white hat SEO involves optimizing a website with great content and natural link building. There are a number of tactics used by SEO firms to get a site higher rankings in search engines, and white hat SEO is considered a strategic, organic way to affect rankings, whereas black hat SEO (spam) refers to automated techniques. SEOMoz writer Rand Fishkin had this to say about White Hat SEO, “Unless your manager/company/client is wholly comfortable with the high, variable risk that comes with black hat SEO, you’d better stay clear. I’m also of the mind that there’s almost nothing black hat can accomplish that white hat can’t do better over the long run, while building far more value. Unless it’s “I want to rank in the top 5 for ‘buy viagra’ in the next 7 days,” you’d better explain that you’re recommending black hat primarily because you’re not smart, talented, and creative enough to find a white hat strategy to do it.”
White Papers: A white paper is a paper written with a clear intention of demonstrating a particular point. These are often mistaken for scientific or scholarly papers, and the webmaster exploits this misconception to increase awareness of the paper's topic.
Widgets: A small JavaScript or program that blogs and other websites use to create additional content depth on a site, such as an email subscription form, a contact form, or a live Twitter feed. Widgets can also serve as tools; for example, an interest rate calculator is a popular widget on real estate sites.
Widget Directory: A site that has a directory of widgets. Submitting a widget to a widget directory is a great way to build links to your site hosting the widget.
Wiki: A wiki site is a site that allows all users to contribute information and is constantly seeking new information or to make existing information more accurate, complete, and authoritative. However, a wiki site is only as good as its contributors and the people who moderate its content for accuracy. Wikipedia is the most well-known example.
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