The Search Engine Marketing defination
200
Status OK – The file request was successful. For example, a page or image was found and loaded properly in a browser.
Some poorly developed content management systems return 200 status codes even when a file does not exist. The proper response for file not found is a 404.
301
Moved Permanently – The file has been moved permanently to a new location.
This is the preferred method of redirecting for most pages or websites. If you are going to move an entire site to a new location you may want to test moving a file or folder first, and then if that ranks well you may want to proceed with moving the entire site. Depending on your site authority and crawl frequency it may take anywhere from a few days to a month or so for the 301 redirect to be picked up.
302
Found – The file has been found, but is temporarily located at another URI.
Generally, as it relates to SEO, it is typically best to avoid using 302 redirects. Some search engines struggle with redirect handling. Due to poor processing of 302 redirects some search engines have allowed competing businesses to hijack the listings of competitors.
404
Not Found – The server was unable to locate the URL.
Some content management systems send 404 status codes when documents do exist. Ensure files that exist do give a 200 status code and requests for files that do not exist give a 404 status code. You may also want to check with your host to see if you can set up a custom 404 error page which makes it easy for site visitors to
view your most popular and / or most relevant navigational options
report navigational problems within your site
Search engines request a robots.txt file to see what portions of your site they are allowed to crawl. Many browsers request a favicon.ico file when loading your site. While neither of these files are necessary, creating them will help keep your log files clean so you can focus on whatever other errors your site might have.
Above the Fold
A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.
Absolute Link
A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.
AdCenter
Microsoft’s cost per click ad network.
While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft’s limited marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity.
AdSense
Google’s contextual advertising network. Publishers large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google.
AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue stream which will help some publishers establish a baseline for the value of their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is the trade off for automating ad sales.
AdWords
Google’s advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google’s ads are keyword targeted and sold on a cost per click basis in an auction which factors in ad clickthrough rate as well as max bid. Google is looking into expanding their ad network to include video ads, demographic targeting, affiliate ads, radio ads, and traditional print ads.
AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords. Rather than doing that here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying independent agents on a cost per action (CPA) basis. Affiliates only get paid if visitors complete an action.
Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for wasting money on instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage via other’s affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value.
Age
Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents.
Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home pages.
AJAX
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load.
Alexa
Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic.
Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.
AllTheWeb
Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features.
Alt Attribute
Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object.
Example usage
<img src=”http://www.razibmiah.com/images/whammy.gif” height=”140″ width=”120″ alt=”Press Your Luck Whammy.” />
AltaVista
Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare.
See also:
Analytics
Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site.
Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not.
Anchor Text
The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor text.
Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.
Canonical URL
Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use PageRank or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.
Webmasters should use consistent linking structures throughout their sites to ensure that they funnel the maximum amount of PageRank at the URLs they want indexed. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL.
Cloaking
Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine.
Cloaking has many legitimate uses which are within search guidelines. For example, changing user experience based on location is common on many popular websites.
Comments Tag
Some web developers also place comments in the source code of their work to help make it easy for people to understand the code.
HTML comments in the source code of a document appear as <!– your comment here –>. They can be viewed if someone types views the source code of a document, but do not appear in the regular formatted HTML rendered version of a document.
In the past some SEOs would stuff keywords in comment tags to help increase the page keyword density, but search has evolved beyond that stage, and at this point using comments to stuff keywords into a page adds to your risk profile and presents little ranking upside potential.
Contextual Advertising
Advertising programs which generate relevant advertisements based on the content of a webpage.
Contextual Advertising
Advertising programs which generate relevant advertisements based on the content of a webpage.
CPC
Cost per click. Many search ads and contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is charged a certain price per click.
See also:
Google AdWords – Google’s pay per click ad program which allows you to buy search and contextual ads.
Google AdSense – Google’s contextual ad program.
Microsoft AdCenter – Microsoft’s pay per click ad platform.
Yahoo! Search Marketing – Yahoo!’s pay per click ad platform
CPM
Cost per thousand ad impressions.
Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a website is or has the potential of becoming.
CTR
Clickthrough rate – the percentage of people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to measure how relevant a traffic source or keyword is. Search ads typically have a higher clickthrough rate than traditional banner ads due to being highly relevant to implied searcher demand.
GoogleBot
Google’s search engine spider.
Google has a shared crawl cache between their various spiders, including vertical search spiders and spiders associated with ad targeting.
Google Keyword Tool
Keyword research tool provided by Google which estimates the competition for a keyword, recommends related keywords, and will tell you what keywords Google thinks are relevant to your site or a page on your site.
Hidden Text
SEO technique used to show search engine spiders text that human visitors do not see.
While some sites may get away with it for a while, generally the risk to reward ratio is inadequate for most legitimate sites to consider using hidden text.
HTTP
HyperText Transfer Protocol is the foremost used protocol to communicate between servers and web browsers. Hypertext transfer protocol is the means by which data is transferred from its residing location on a server to an active browser.
Index
Collection of data used as bank to search through to find a match to a user fed query. The larger search engines have billions of documents in their catalogs.
When search engines search they search via reverse indexes by words and return results based on matching relevancy vectors. Stemming and semantic analysis allow search engines to return near matches. Index may also refer to the root of a folder on a web
Keyword
A word or phrase which implies a certain mindset or demand that targeted prospects are likely to search for.
Long tail and brand related keywords are typically worth more than shorter and vague keywords because they typically occur later in the buying cycle and are associated with a greater level of implied intent.
Keyword Density
An old measure of search engine relevancy based on how prominent keywords appeared within the content of a page. Keyword density is no longer a valid measure of relevancy over a broad open search index though.
When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).
Keyword Research
The process of discovering relevant keywords and keyword phrases to focus your SEO and PPC marketing campaigns on.
Example keyword discovery methods:
using keyword research tools
looking at analytics data or your server logs
looking at page copy on competing sites
reading customer feedback
placing a search box on your site and seeing what people are looking for
talking to customers to ask how and why they found and chose your business
Landing Page
The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.
Landing Page Quality Scores
A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of their AdWords program.
When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market, but as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to try to keep their ads relevant.
Link
A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document.
Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.
Link Baiting
The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media and bloggers.
See also:
Link Bait
Link Building
The process of building high quality linkage data that search engines will evaluate to trust your website is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy.
A few general link building tips:
build conceptually unique linkworthy high quality content
create viral marketing ideas that want to spread and make people talk about you
mix your anchor text
get deep links
try to build at least a few quality links before actively obtaining any low quality links
register your site in relevant high quality directories such as DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com
when possible try to focus your efforts mainly on getting high quality editorial links
create link bait
try to get bloggers to mention you on their blogs
It takes a while to catch up with the competition, but if you work at it long enough and hard enough eventually you can enjoy a self-reinforcing market position
Meta Keywords
The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to highlight keywords and keyword phrases which the page is targeting.
The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”keyword phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more “>
Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers typically never see the tag, so most search engines do not place much (if any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags.
Meta Tags
People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the page title in with these.
The page title is highly important.
The meta description tag is somewhat important.
The meta keywords tag is not that important.
Niche
A topic or subject which a website is focused on.
Search is a broad field, but as you drill down each niche consists of many smaller niches. An example of drilling down to a niche market
search
search marketing, privacy considerations, legal issues, history of, future of, different types of vertical search, etc.
search engine optimization, search engine advertising
link building, keyword research, reputation monitoring and management, viral marketing, SEO copywriting, Google AdWords, information architecture, etc.
Nofollow
Attribute used to prevent a link from passing link authority. Commonly used on sites with user generated content, like in blog comments.
The code to use nofollow on a link appears like
<a href=”http://wwwseobook.com.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text </a>
Nofollow can also be used in a robots meta tag to prevent a search engine from counting any outbound links on a page. This code would look like this
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
Google’s Matt Cutts also pushes webmasters to use nofollow on any paid links, but since Google is the world’s largest link broker, their advice on how other people should buy or sell links should be taken with a grain of salt. Please note that it is generally not advised to practice link hoarding as that may look quite unnatural. Outbound links may also boost your relevancy scores in some search engines.
Organic Search Results
Most major search engines have results that consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. The unpaid / algorithmic listings are called the organic search results. Organic search results are organized by relevancy, which is largely determined based on linkage data, page content, usage data, and historical domain and trust related data.
Most clicks on search results are on the organic search results. Some studies have shown that 60 to 80% + of clicks are on the organic search results.
Outbound Link
A link from one website pointing at another external website.
Some webmasters believe in link hoarding, but linking out to useful relevant related documents is an easy way to help search engines understand what your website is about. If you reference other resources it also helps you build credibility and leverage the work of others without having to do everything yourself. Some webmasters track where their traffic comes from, so if you link to related websites they may be more likely to link back to your site.
PageRank
A logarithmic scale based on link equity which estimates the importance of web documents.
Since PageRank is widely bartered Google’s relevancy algorithms had to move away from relying on PageRank and place more emphasis on trusted links via algorithms such as TrustRank.
The PageRank formula is:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
PR= PageRank
d= dampening factor (~0.85)
c = number of links on the page
PR(T1)/C(T1) = PageRank of page 1 divided by the total number of links on page 1, (transferred PageRank)
In text: for any given page A the PageRank PR(A) is equal to the sum of the parsed partial PageRank given from each page pointing at it multiplied by the dampening factor plus one minus the dampening factor.
Quality Link
Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links.
There are a variety of ways to define what a quality link is, but the following are characteristics of a high quality link:
Trusted Source: If a link is from a page or website which seems like it is trustworthy then it is more likely to count more than a link from an obscure, rarely used, and rarely cited website. See TrustRank for one example of a way to find highly trusted websites.
Hard to Get: The harder a link is to acquire the more likely a search engine will be to want to trust it and the more work a competitor will need to do to try to gain that link.
Aged: Some search engines may trust links from older resources or links that have existed for a length of time more than they trust brand new links or links from newer resources.
Co-citation: Pages that link at competing sites which also link to your site make it easy for search engines to understand what community your website belongs to. See Hilltop for an example of an algorithm which looks for co-citation from expert sources.
Related: Links from related pages or related websites may count more than links from unrelated sites.
In Content: Links which are in the content area of a page are typically going to be more likely to be editorial links than links that are not included within the editorial portion of a page.
Redirect
A method of alerting browsers and search engines that a page location moved. 301 redirects are for permanent change of location and 302 redirects are used for a temporary change of location.
Robots.txt
A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search engines which files not to crawl. Some search engines will still list your URLs as URL only listings even if you block them using a robots.txt file.
Do not put files on a public server if you do not want search engines to index them!
SEO
Search engine optimization is the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries.
SEO consists largely of keyword research, SEO copywriting, information architecture, link building, brand building, building mindshare, reputation management, and viral marketing.
SEO Copywriting
Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries.
There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly
Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content for your site or already have an amazingly authoritative site.
Write page titles that are exceptionally compelling to link at. If enough people link at them then your pages and site will rank for many relevant queries even if the keywords are not in the page titles.
Search Marketing
Marketing a website in search engines. Typically via SEO, buying pay per click ads, and paid inclusion.
Social Media
Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are social bookmarking sites and social news sites.
Del.icio.us – social bookmarking program
Digg – social news site
Spam
Unsolicited email messages.
Search engines also like to outsource their relevancy issues by calling low quality search results spam. They have vague ever changing guidelines which determine what marketing techniques are acceptable at any given time. Typically search engines try hard not to flag false positives as spam, so most algorithms are quite lenient, as long as you do not build lots of low quality links, host large quantities of duplicate content, or perform other actions that are considered widely outside of relevancy guidelines. If your site is banned from a search engine you may request reinclusion after fixing the problem.
Title
The title element is used to describe the contents of a document.
The title is one of the most important aspects to doing SEO on a web page. Each page title should be:
Unique to that page: Not the same for every page of a site!
Descriptive: What important ideas does that page cover?
Not excessively long: Typically page titles should be kept to 8 to 10 words or less, with some of the most important words occurring near the beginning of the page title.
Page titles appear in search results as the links searchers click on. In addition many people link to documents using the official document title as the link anchor text. Thus, by using a descriptive page title you are likely to gain descriptive anchor text and are more likely to have your listing clicked on.
On some occasions it also makes sense to use a title which is not literally descriptive, but is easily associated with human emotions or a controversy such that your idea will spread further and many more people will point quality editorial links at your document.
There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly
Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content for your site or already have an amazingly authoritative site.
Write page titles that are exceptionally compelling to link at. If enough people link at them then your pages and site will rank for many relevant queries even if the keywords are not in the page titles.
URL
Uniform Resource Locator is the unique address of any web document.
URL Rewrite
A technique used to help make URLs more unique and descriptive to help facilitate better sitewide indexing by major search engines.
Apache Module mod_rewrite – Apache module used to rewrite URLs on sites hosted on an Apache server.
ISAPI Rewrite – software to rewrite URLs on sites hosted on a Microsoft Internet Information Server.
White Hat SEO
Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next.
Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.
People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs.
When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.
