Search Engine Marketing Glossary

• Algorithm -- a search engine algorithm is an elaborate equation that determines which websites appear for any given search query as well how those websites are ordered.
• Alt tags/text -- text associated with an image or other non-text content; often used to boost keyword density on a website
• Anchor text -- this is the clickable text within a hyperlink; search engines place importance on these words and associate them with the target page of the link
• Backlink -- an incoming link from an another website
• Cloaking -- black hat technique of tricking the search engines into seeing something other than what is displayed to the human viewer; using this technique can get websites penalized or banned from search engines
• Conversion rate -- the number of visitors that eventually become customers or the number of people who click on an ad; usually expressed as a percentage of total traffic or ads displayed
• Cost Per Click (CPC) -- the cost paid to a publisher each time someone clicks on a pay per click ad
• Directory -- A list of websites that are organized based on category. Sometimes confused with search engines, directories differ greatly from search engines in that they are maintained by a team of human editors that approve or deny inclusion based on specific criteria.
• Domain -- a domain is the name given to a website in order to be easily remembered and accessed, such as search-placement.com; domains must be registered and purchased through an appropriate agency
• FTP (file transfer protocol) -- the most common way to connect to a web server. This is most often use to send and receive files when working on a website.
• Index -- The list of websites that a search engine stores and uses to deliver search results.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) -- the process of optimizing a website or webpage in order to achieve better search engine placement for a specific search phrases
• SERP (Search Engine Results Page) -- the webpage(s) that a search engine generates after someone performs a search query
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing) -- refers to the set of methods and techniques used to increase a website's visibility in search engines, such as SEO and PPC
• Spider -- the term used to describe the banks of computers employed by search engines to "crawl" the Web and thereby build their index of websites and the content they contain.
• Link Popularity -- The number and quality of links pointing to your website. This is a very important factor in the search engine placement of your website.
• Meta Search -- a search run on several search engines simultaneously
• Meta-tags -- HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. The most common are the meta-keywords and meta-description tags.
• On-page Optimization -- the area of search engine optimization that applies to the content and structure of the website itself
• Off-page Optimization (Link Building) -- the area of search engine optimization that applies to building backlinks and link popularity
• Organic search -- refers to the area of search engine results and marketing that are a result of optimization, in contrast to paid inclusion and pay-per-click programs
• Paid Search Marketing -- refers to advertising campaigns in which the advertiser pays a search engine only when comeone clicks on the sponsored ad
• Page Title -- The page title appears at the top of each webpage in your browser. Search engines tend to place heavier importance on the keywords included within page titles. Page titles also appear as the link for each entry in search engine results.
• Page Rank (PR) -- Google's measure of a website's link popularity; on a scale from 0-10
• PPC (Pay Per Click) -- refers to advertising campaigns in which the advertiser pays the ad publisher only when comeone clicks on an ad
• Robot -- a computer who's job is to crawl webpages; some robots are simply looking for content, like those employed by search engines while others look for harvestable information like email addresses
• Site map -- sitemaps serve as a 'table of contents' for site visitors and/or search engines; they can be displayed as HTML on the actual website or submitted directly to search engines This is also the text that appears with each listing on search engine results pages (SERP).
• Unique visitor -- metric for tracking how many people have visited a website, is distinguished from hits which measure the number of times a piece of any page is served (such as an image)
• URL (Uniform Resource Locator) -- the technical term for a web address; for example, http://www.search-placement.com/blog/ is a URL