Algorithm: Rules which a search
engine uses to rank listings in its index. Algorithms are kept secret
by search engines to protect themselves from people who want to gain an
unfair advantage in ranking.
Conversion Rate: The number of positive
outcomes (such as sales) a site receives divided by the amount of
visitors to a site, expressed as a percentage value.
Cost Per Click (CPC): An agreed fee paid
by the advertiser to the site which displays their link, for each click
someone makes on the link leading to their website.
Crawler: Also known as a spider or
robot, a program which automatically fetches web pages and adds them to
a search engine’s index.
Directory: A type of search engine where
humans are responsible for the review of websites, rather than by
automated crawling of the web. Websites are usually reviewed,
summarized and placed in an appropriate category. DMOZ is an example of
a major directory.
Doorway Page: A web page which itself
does not deliver much information to those viewing it, but rather aims
to rank well for a specific term and often for a certain search engine.
A website may have several door pages created for different search
terms and search engines with all of them linking to the same end page.
Most search engines have guidelines against doorway pages as they are
seen as a form of SPAM.
Inbound Links: A website contains
inbound links if other websites link to it. Inbound links are highly
considered by search engines, such as Google, when determining ranking
for a particular web page.
Keywords: See Search Terms.
Link Popularity: Link popularity is one
of the most important factors in getting a good ranking for a website
and it is derived from the number of inbound links to your website. It
is important to mention that search engines do not only take the number
of inbound links into account when assigning the ranking to a website.
The relevancy of those inbound links also needs to be considered,
meaning that the links should come from websites that deal with topics
related to your own.
Listings: Listings are the results that
a search engine returns for a particular search term.
Meta Tags: Meta tags are bits of text
which are placed within the HTML code, but are not displayed on the
website. Search engines use these tags for the sole purpose of indexing
and cataloging your website.
Meta Description Tag: The description
meta tag is a general description of what is contained in your web
page. Some search engines (not all) display the content of the
description tag below your title in the list of results.
Meta Keywords Tag: The keyword meta tag
was designed to help search engines understand the relevance between a
website and the search terms people use in order to find it.
Organic Results / Listings: Organic
listings are the natural listings returned on the Search Engine Results
Pages (SERPs), which are ranked on relevancy to a search term.
Outbound Links: Links on a particular
web page leading to other web pages. These links can be links to other
websites or links within a same website.
Paid Inclusion: Paid inclusion is a
submission service where you pay a fee to a search engine and the
search engine guarantees that your website will be included in its
index. Paid inclusion programs will also ensure that your website is
indexed very fast and crawled on regular basis.
The best known paid inclusion service is Yahoo! Search Submit
PPC (a.k.a. Pay-For-Performance): Stands
for Pay-Per-Click and is the type of program where you bid on keywords
for your site to be displayed in sponsored ads/links area when a user
searches upon certain keywords. URLs with a higher bid will be
displayed in a more prominent position.
Rank: Rank is a certain position where
your website gets displayed in search engine results for a particular
search term.
Results Page: When a user conducts a
search, the page that is displayed, is called the results page.
Sometimes it may be called SERPs, which stands for "search engine
results page."
Robot: see Crawler.
Robots.txt: A file used to keep certain
web pages from being indexed by search engines.
Search Engine: A search engine is best
described as a database of websites users can search using search
terms. Every search engine has its own algorithm which defines how the
results are displayed. The aim is to display the most relevant pages
for a given search term at the top of the search results.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): The act
of marketing a website via search engines, whether this be improving
rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of
these and other search engine-related activities.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search
engine optimization is both a science and an art ensuring that a
website appears higher on a search engine results page for relevant
search terms. This is achieved by altering a number of factors both on
and off the page to take advantage of the way that a search engine
works.
SEO is an overwhelming task for most of people and that’s why Keith
Cash Associates offers a range of optimizing services
Search Terms: The words or phrases used
by people when performing searches in search engines. Also called
keywords, query terms or query.
Spider: See Crawler.
Submission: Submission is the process of
submitting URL(s) to search engines. It is important to note that
unless you purchase paid inclusion, submission does not guarantee that
your URL will be included in a search engine’s index.
Trusted Feed: Trusted feed is a form of
paid inclusion which uses bulk a XML feed to directly send website
content to search engines for indexing. The feed can be optimized so
that your website can take advantage better rankings and therefore more
traffic. |
