Internet-Experts-Live

Today the English language has five times (!) as many words as it had during Shakespeare’s times, and almost every day new words get created, especially in the technology arena …

Below are explanations for a number of important SEO terms that are used in the industry and within this site:

Above the Fold

In the old days, ‘Above the Fold’ used to describe the top half of the front page of a folded newspaper. So when the folded newspaper was lying on a pile, this was the part you could see. In email or web marketing the part of the page you see first when you open a website is called the top fold.

Ad Words

This is Google’s PPC based text advertising. Google AdWords takes click-through rates (CR) into consideration in addition to the advertiser’s bid to determine the ad’s relative position within the different ads. Google applies this to feature paid search results that are more popular and thus probably more relevant and useful. Google has also started taking into account the quality of the landing page and applying a quality score to the landing pages.

Affiliate Programs

In an affiliate program the affiliate promotes a business and is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale made through his/her efforts.

Age of Site, Domain Age, Age of Page etc.

Aggregation of Content

Aggregation is the process of combining and remixing content from blogs and other websites that provide RSS feeds. The resulting content can be displayed in a so called aggregator website such as Bloglines (www.bloglines.com/) or Google Reader, (www.google.com/reader/view/) or on your desktop using software programs called ‘newsreaders’.

Alerts – Google Alerts

Search engines such as Google (www.google.com/alerts) let you specify words (e.g. your name, company), phrases or tags that you want to keep an eye on. The alerts usually arrive in your mailbox by e-mail and some can be read by RSS feed. Alerts allow you to see whether you, your business or other terms that you regard as newsworthy have been mentioned online.

Algorithm – Search Engine Algorithm

A set of rules that search engines use to rank listings. Search engines do not disclose the algorithms they use, as they are the unique formulas used to determine a website’s or blogs relevancy. A bit like the formula for Coca Cola, everyone drinks it but no-one really knows what’s in it.

Alt Text – Image Alt Text

A description of an image, which usually isn’t displayed to the user, unless the image can’t be shown. The alt text is the description of the images for the search engines since they can’t distinguish one picture from another.

Anchor Text – Link Text

B2B

Means ‘Business to Business’ and describes a business that markets its services or products primarily to other businesses.

B2C

Means “Business to Consumer” and describes a business that markets its services or products primarily to consumers.

Back links

Back links are inbound links pointing from another website to your page or blog post.

Ban – Banned – Delisting

Websites and blogs get usually banned or delisted from search engines for using so- called ‘Black-Hat’, spamming or other malicious techniques.

Blog – Blogs

Blogs, also known as a ‘weblogs’ – are online diaries with entries, called ‘blog posts’ made on a regular, preferably daily basis. Posts are dated in reverse chronological order and may have keyword tags associated with them. They are usually available as RSS feeds, and often allow commenting.

Blogs are websites where the content (e.g. text, photos, video, audio) can also be identified by tags. These tags can act as keywords and can be searched individually. Blog posts can be made available in an RSS feed subscription (usually free). You then can subscribe to a blog RSS news feed and read it via a newsreader or aggregator. That means you don’t have to visit a blog site to read it – you can pull the content to your desktop.

Body Copy

This is the text content of a web page that is not part of the site’s navigation.

Bookmarks – Social Bookmarking

Most browsers today come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Bookmarking is saving the address of a website or item of content in your browser.

Social bookmarking means sharing your bookmarks with others on ‘tagging’ sites like del.icio.us.com. The popularity of a document as measured by the number of bookmarks is a signal for the quality of the content. Some search engines may use bookmarks to help their search relevancy.

Brand and Branding

“A brand is a customer experience represented by a collection of images and ideas; often, it refers to a symbol such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme. Brand recognition and other reactions are created by the accumulation of experiences with the specific product or service, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary.

A brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols, sound which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Broad Match

Canonicalization

Canonicalization is a way of organizing your URLs to get maximum ranking benefits and avoiding ‘duplicate content’ penalties.

Call To Action (CTA)

A call to action is copy used in advertising to encourage a person to complete an action as defined by the advertiser. Call to action words are ‘action words’ such as ‘Click here’, ‘Buy Now’, ‘Enter Now’, ‘Go to’ or ‘Click to download’.

Categories

Categories are used ways to organize content – for example, a set of keywords. Dividing your content into distinct categories helps your website visitors to find what they are looking for and categories have nowadays become more important to search engine optimization. Categories that separate your different products and services from one another are the basis to build a proper silo structure on your site or blog.

You can use Google’s Search Keyword Tool (www.google.com/sktool) to get ideas for relevant categories, to categorize Keywords and find Google categorized Long-Tail keywords. (See this video on how to find categories: www.noblesamurai.com/blog/keyword-research/google-debunks-lsi-then-shows-you-how-to-do-it-532)

Competitive Analysis

Competitive Analysis (within SEO) is the assessment and analysis of strengths and weaknesses of competing web sites, including identifying traffic patterns, major traffic sources, keyword use and selection, advertising success, etc.

Conversion – Conversion Funnel – Conversion Rate (CR)

Cost Per Acquisition, Cost Per Action (CPA)

Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

Cost Per Click is the amount search engines charge advertisers for every click that sends a searcher to the advertiser’s web site.

CPM

Short for Cost Per Thousand Impressions (ad serves or potential viewers). Compare to CPC pricing (defined above). CPM is a standard monetization model for offline display ad space, as well as for some context-based networks serving online search ads to, for example, web publishers and sites. CPM or “Cost Per Thousand” – A unit of measure typically assigned to the cost of displaying an ad.

If an ad appears on a web page 1,000 times and costs $5, then the CPM would be $5. In this instance, every 1,000 times an ad appeared, it would incur a charge of $5.

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

“The Difference between CPA and CPL Advertising – In CPL campaigns, advertisers pay for an interested lead (hence, Cost Per Lead) — i.e. the contact information of a person interested in the advertiser’s product or service. CPL campaigns are suitable for brand marketers and direct response marketers looking to engage consumers at multiple touchpoints — by building a newsletter list, community site, reward program or member acquisition program.

In CPA campaigns, the advertiser typically pays for a completed sale involving a credit card transaction. CPA is all about ‘now’ — it focuses on driving consumers to buy at that exact moment. If a visitor to the website doesn’t buy anything, there’s no easy way to remarket to them.

There are other important differentiators:

1. CPL campaigns are advertiser-centric. The advertiser remains in control of their brand, selecting trusted and contextually relevant publishers to run their offers. On the other hand, CPA and affiliate marketing campaigns are publisher-centric. Advertisers cede control over where their brand will appear, as publishers browse offers and pick which to run on their websites. Advertisers generally do not know where their offer is running.

2. CPL campaigns are usually high volume and light-weight. In CPL campaigns, consumers submit only basic contact information. The transaction can be as simple as an email address. On the other hand, CPA campaigns are usually low volume and complex. Typically, consumer has to submit credit card and other detailed information.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate or CTR is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if a banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and one person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1 percent.

Banner ad click-through rates have fallen over time, currently averaging much less than 1 percent. In most cases, a 2% click-through rate would be considered very successful. By selecting an appropriate advertising site with high affinity (e.g. a movie magazine for a movie advertisement), the same banner can achieve a substantially higher CTR. Personalized ads, unusual formats, and more obtrusive ads typically have higher click-through rates than standard banner ads.

CTR is most commonly defined as number of clicks divided by number of impressions and generally not in terms of the number of persons who clicked divided by the number of impressions. As a person clicks a single advertisement multiple times, the CTR increases using the latter definition, whereas the CTR doesn’t change using the former definition.” (Source: Wikipedia) For example, if an ad has 1000 impressions and 60 clicks, the CTR is 6%.

Deep Linking – Deep Links Ratio

Guiding a searcher or a search engine crawler to a specific internal web page other than the homepage or other top level (landing) pages.

The Deep Links Ration is the ratio of links pointing to internal pages compared to links pointing to a website homepage. A high deep links ratio is often a sign of a good natural link profile.

Description Tag

The Description Tag refers to the information contained in the description Meta Tag. This tag carries the brief description of the web page content it is on. The information contained in this tag is generally the text displayed beneath the link on many search engine result pages.

Directory

A Directory is a categorized catalog of websites, typically manually organized by topical editorial experts. Some directories focus on specific niche topics, while others are more general. Major search engines place significant weight on links from DMOZ.org and the Yahoo! directory. Smaller general directories carry less ranking weight. The search engines will probably not trust links from a directory if it does not exercise editorial control over its listings.

DMOZ

The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL, and is primarily run by volunteer editors.

Domain Age

Duplicate Content

Content that appears more than once on your own site or on your and other sites. Search engines have no interest in indexing multiple versions of similar content and if you have duplicate content on your pages search engines might give you less ranking power.

“For example, printer friendly pages may be search engine unfriendly duplicates. Also, many automated content generation techniques rely on recycling content, so some search engines are somewhat strict in filtering out content they deem to be similar or nearly duplicate in nature.

See also: Duplicate Content Detection (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9028425054136856586#1m18s) – video where Matt Cutts talks about the process of duplicate content detection.

Identifying and filtering near-duplicate documents (www.nevelos.com/seo/andre-aka-andrei-broder.html), Stuntdubl: How to Remedy Duplicate Content. (www.stuntdubl.com/2006/06/12/dupe-content/)” (Source: SEOBook.com)

External Link – Incoming (Inbound) Links – Outgoing Links

An External Link is a link that comes from or goes to another domain. Incoming links (‘Inbound’ Links) from other relevant quality sites provide search engine ranking power for your site. Links from low quality sites or reciprocal links may not provide any ranking power. Links from your site (Outgoing Links) to other websites or blogs can help the search engines to understand what your site is about. It is therefore important to choose quality sites to link to and to avoid ‘bad neighborhoods’.

Most search engines allow you to see a sample of links pointing to a document by searching using the link: function. Google typically shows a much smaller sample of links, even when you log into your Google Webmasters account, than for example Yahoo! (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com).

Forums – Discussion Forums

Forums, also known as discussion forums have primarily been used to ask questions / exchange information. Users can typically post their messages either to a group or to specific users.

Geo-Targeting – Local Listings

Geo-Targeting with Local Listings uses marketing and advertising based on your specific geographic location. Online advertising nowadays allows for specific targeting of countries, states, cities etc.

Google

Google was created by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin and pioneered search by analyzing link data via PR (www.google.com/corporate/tech.html). Despite the recent rise of Bing, Google is still the world’s leading search engine in terms of reach. See Google corporate history, Google labs (new products) and Google papers (research papers).

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offering detailed visitor statistics. The tool can be used to track all the usual site activities: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rates and average time on site etc. But it can also be used to specifically track Adsense traffic – therefore helping webmasters to optimize Adwords adverts based on where visitors come from, time on site, click path and geographic location.

Google OneBox

The part of the search results page above the organic search results which Google sometimes uses to display vertical search results from Google News, Google Base.

Headings – Heading Tag

The heading element describes the subject of the section it introduces. Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower numbered headings being more important. Only use one H1 element on each page, and you may want to use multiple other heading elements to structure a document. An H1 element source code would like this: <h1>Your Heading</h1> Search engines often pay attention to text that is marked with a heading tag.

Hits

A Hit is a download of a file from a web server and does not correlate with web page visits since every image on a web page counts as a hit. Thus, a single access of a web page with 10 unique images on it register as 11 hits – 10 for the graphics and 1 for the HTML page.

Inbound Link (IBL)

see ‘External Link’

Information Architecture

Designing, categorizing, organizing, and structuring content in a useful and meaningful way. Good information architecture considers both how humans and search spiders access a website. Information architecture suggestions:

• focus each page on a specific topic

• use descriptive page titles and meta descriptions which describe the content of the page

• use clean (few or no variables) descriptive file names and folder names

• use headings to help break up text and semantically structure a document

• use breadcrumb navigation to show page relationships

• use descriptive link Anchor Text

• link to related information from within the content area of your web pages

• improve conversion rates by making it easy for people to take desired actions

• avoid feeding search engines duplicate or near-duplicate content.

(Source: SEOmoz.org)

Internal Link

An Internal Link is a link from one of your pages to another page on your site. Descriptive internal linking can be used to make it easier for search engines to understand what your website is about and therefore can help you in achieving higher search engine rankings. How internal links are structured on your site will influence the way in which search engines spider and index your pages.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key Performance Indicators help organizations to evaluate the progress towards their vision and long-term goals. Key performance indicators usually are long-term considerations for an organization and differ depending on the nature of the organization and the organization’s strategy.

For example: “Increase Average Revenue per Customer from $1.000 to $1.500 by EOY 2009″. In this case, ‘Average Revenue Per Customer’ is the KPI.

Keyword – Keyword Phrase – Keyphrase

A specific word or combination of words that a searcher might type into a search field. Includes generic, category keywords; industry-specific terms; product brands; common misspellings and expanded variations (called Keyword Stemming), or multiple words (called Modified or Long Tail keywords). All might be entered as a search query. For example, someone looking to buy coffee mugs might use the keyword phrase “ceramic coffee mugs.” (Source: A-Z of Social Media)

Keyword Density

Keyword Density gets used in different ways. For some time it was claimed to be an exact formula of how many keywords per text words should be on a page. SEO professionals today mostly agree that there is no exact formula and the term keyword density nowadays just gets used as a shorter form of saying: “the quantity of keywords on a specific page”.

Keyword Funnel

The relationship between various related keywords that searchers search for.

Keyword Matching

Keyword matching describes a) the process of selecting and providing advertising or information that match the user’s search query and b) the matching of keywords in Link or Anchor Texts and the keywords on the link target page as well as the source page.

Keyword Popularity

Keyword popularity describes the search volume for a keyword during a specific time period, typically over the last month or the last 12 months as in Google’s Keyword tool.

Keyword Prominence

Keyword Prominence describes the location of a keyword in a specific location. This can be a web page or a Title Tag etc. On a web page keyword prominence would describe how high up on the page or how early in the text the keyword appears. In a Title Tag whether the keyword appears as the first, second, third etc. word in the tag.

Keyword Tag

The Keyword Tag is a meta tag within a webpage and can hold a number of keywords. If you use this tag, do not include your top keywords since the keyword meta tag is also an easy way for your competition to see what you are focusing on. Due to people stuffing many keywords into the keyword meta tag, sometimes using the same keyword several times, Google does not give any weight anymore to the keywords stated here.

Link

Text or graphics that, when clicked on, take the Internet user to another web page, blog etc.

Link Bait

A concept that webmasters use to compel others to link to them.

Link Building

Means requesting links from other sites to increase your ‘Link Popularity’ and/or ‘PR.’

Link Equity

Link Equity measures how strong a site or page is based on its number of inbound links and the authority of the sites providing those links.

Link Hoarding

A method of trying to keep all your link popularity by not linking out to other sites, or linking out using JavaScript or through redirects. Generally link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons:
• many authoritative sites were at one point hub sites that freely linked out to other relevant resources

• if you are unwilling to link out to other sites then people are going to be less likely to link to your site

• outbound links to relevant resources may improve your credibility and boost your overall relevancy scores (Source: sempo.org)

Link Popularity

Your Link Popularity is the total number of links pointing to your domain. Link Popularity gets measured for internal and external links. Internal link popularity refers to the number of links or pages within your web site that link to a specific URL. External link popularity refers to the number of Inbound Links from external web sites that are pointing to your site.

Link Reputation

Link Reputation is the combined score of your link equity and Link Text / Anchor Text.

Link Rot

Link Rot is a measure of how many website links are broken. Broken links may be an indication of a site that has not been properly maintained for some time and therefore might be seen as less relevant in the eyes of the search engines, resulting in lower rankings. See Xenu Link Sleuth (free) or WebAnalyzer for programs to find broken links.

Link Text

Log File Analysis

The analysis of records stored in your server’s log file. In its raw format, the data in the log files can be difficult to read but log file analyzers can help to convert log file data into user-friendly charts and graphs.

Long Tail

“The Long Tail” as a term was coined by Chris Anderson in an Wired magazine article (Oct 2004) which described the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, to sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities.

Long Tail keywords are keyword phrases with at least three, sometimes four or five, words. These long tail keywords are usually specific and draw lower traffic than shorter, more competitive keyword phrases, which is why they are also cheaper. However often long tail keywords, in aggregate, have good conversion ratios for the low number of click-throughs they generate. See:

The official Long Tail blog (www.thelongtail.com/) and the Long Tail book (www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Future-Business-Selling).

Meta Description

The meta Description Tag contained in an HTML document describes the content of a page in one or two sentences. Search engines may display the contents of this tag in their search results. A meta description should reinforce the page title (tag), be relevant to the page content and include offers and secondary keywords (phrases) to support the page title message.

Code for a meta Description Tag:

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your meta description here. ” / >

The Free Meta Tag generator (http://tools.seobook.com/meta-medic) – offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta Description Tags. (Source: SEOBook.com)

Meta Tags

Meta-information about the content of a page placed in the source code of an HTML page. See ‘Description Tag’, ‘Keyword Tag’ and ‘Title Tag’.

Organic Results – Organic Search Listings – Organic Search Results

“Listings on SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) that were not paid for; listings for which search engines do not sell space. Such sites appear in organic (also called “natural”) results because a search engine has applied formulas (algorithms) to its search crawler index, combined with editorial decisions and content weighting, that it deems important enough to allow inclusion without payment. Paid Inclusion Content is also often considered “organic” even though it is paid advertising because paid inclusion content usually appears on SERPs mixed with unpaid, organic results.

[Organic Search Listings are] listings that search engines do not sell (unlike paid listings). Instead, sites appear solely because a search engine has deemed it editorially important for them to be included, regardless of payment. Paid Inclusion Content is also often considered “organic” even though it is paid for. This is because paid inclusion content usually appears intermixed with unpaid organic results.” (Source: Sempo.org)

Outbound Links

Outbound Links to another website.

PageRank
Google describes PageRank as:

“ PageRank (PR) relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”. (Source: Google)

Pay-For-Performance

see ‘Affiliate Programs’

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC is an advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. See Google Adwords (http:// adwords.google.com)

Phrase Match

Phrase Match is a form of keyword matching where the user’s search query includes the exact phrase, even if the query contains additional words. “If you enter your keyword in quotation marks, as in “tennis shoes,” your ad would be eligible to appear when a user searches on the phrase tennis shoes, with the words in that order. It can also appear for searches that contain other terms as long as it includes the exact phrase you’ve specified. Phrase match is more targeted than broad match, but more flexible than exact match.” (Source: Google)

Quality Score

The Quality Score is a number assigned by Google to paid ads that, together with Cost per Click (CPC), determines each ad’s rank. Quality scores reflect an ad’s historical Click Through Rate (CTR), keyword relevance, landing page relevance, and other factors proprietary to Google.

Query

The keyword or keyword phrase a searcher enters into a search field.

Rank

How well positioned a particular web page appears on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Reach

In statistics, advertising and media analysis, “reach refers to the total number of different people or households exposed, at least once, to a medium during a given period of time. Reach should not be confused with the number of people who will actually be exposed to and consume the advertising, though. It is just the number of people who are exposed to the medium and therefore have an opportunity to see or hear the ad or commercial. Reach may be stated either as an absolute number, or as a fraction of a given population (for instance ‘TV households’, ‘men’ or ‘those aged 25-35′). (Source: Google)

Reciprocal Linking

The practice of trading links between websites resulting in links going ‘both ways’.

Referential Integrity

This is a definition of the indexing technique that some SEO experts believe Google uses to get a better understanding of the meaning of the content on a web page or blog: “Referential Integrity is a property of data which, when satisfied, requires every value of one attribute (column) of a relation (table) to exist as a value of another attribute in a different (or the same) relation (table)”. (Source: The Web Division)

Referrer

A web page that refers visitors to your site or blog.

Relevance

In the eyes of a searcher or a search engine, the probability that a certain web page will be of interest or useful to a searcher.

Robots.txt

A file in the root of a site that tells search engines which files not to crawl. However some search engine robots will still list your URL even if you tried to block them using a robots.txt file. Don’t put files on a public server if you do not want search engines to index them!

RSS – Really Simply Syndication – Rich Site Summary

A variety of web feed formats used for distributing frequently updated digital content usually originating on blogs.

Search Term

A keyword or phrase used in a search engine query.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

“SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. The industry peak body Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) founded by Barbara Coll in 2003, includes search engine optimization (SEO) within its reporting, and SEO is also included in the industry definitions of SEM by Forrester Research, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, and industry expert Danny Sullivan. The New York Times defines SEM as ‘the practice of buying paid search listings”. (Source: Wikipedia)

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via ‘natural’ (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence. (Source: Wikipedia)

SERP

Akronym for Search Engine Results Page: the page returned to your browser after submitting a search.

Siloing

Siloing is a site architecture technique [also called Silo Structure,] used to split the focus of a site into multiple themes. The goal behind siloing is to create a site that ranks well for both its common and more-targeted keywords. (Source: Bruce Clay)

Social Search

Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users. When applied to web search this user-based approach to relevance is in contrast to established algorithmic or machine-based approaches where relevance is determined by analyzing the text of each document or the link structure of the documents.

Social search takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels to more sophisticated approaches that combine human intelligence with computer algorithms.

The search experience takes into account varying sources of metadata, such as collaborative discovery of web pages, tags, social ranking, commenting on bookmarks, news, images, videos, podcasts and other web pages. Example forms of user input include Social Bookmarking or direct interaction with the search results such as promoting or demoting results the user feels are more or less relevant to their query. (Source: Wikipedia)

Spam

Any search marketing method that a search engine deems to be detrimental to its efforts to deliver relevant, quality search results. Some search engines have written guidelines on their definitions and penalties for SPAM.

Examples include doorway landing pages designed primarily to manipulate search engine algorithms rather than meet searcher expectations from the advertiser’s clicked-on ad; keyword stuffing in which search terms that motivated a click-through are heavily and redundantly repeated on a page in place of relevant content; attempts to redirect click-through searchers to irrelevant pages, product offers and services; and landing pages that simply compile additional links on which a searcher must click to get any information.

Determining what constitutes Spam is complicated by the fact that different search engines have different standards, including what is allowable for listings gathered through organic methods versus paid inclusion (referred to as spamdexing), whether the listing is from a commercial or research/academic source, etc. (Source: Webmaster World Forums)

Static Web Page

A Static Web Page that was created and saved as a HTML file not created dynamically from a database.

Submission

Submitting a web site to search engines and search directories. For some search engines, this is performed simply by submitting the home page URL, directories usually request descriptions of the web site submitted.

Tagging, Tags

(see Bookmarks)

Target Audience

The target audience is the market in which advertisers wish to sell their product or service to. Target markets are defined in terms of demographics, psychographics, purchase behaviour media or product usage.

Technorati

One of the most influential search engine for blogs. Now owned (and favoured?) by Google.

Themes

A theme is an overall idea of what a web page is focused on. Search engines determine the theme of a webpage through analysis of the density of associated (key-)words on a certain page.

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 Text / Anchor Text. Thus, by using a descriptive page title you are likely to gain descriptive and are more likely to have your listing clicked on.

Title Tag

The Title Tag can be found in the source code of a page and in the <head> tag of a web page. The page title should be determined by the contents of that web page and is generally displayed in a search engine result as a bold blue underlined hyperlink.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors is the number of individual users who have accessed your web site. The “user session” metric however does not provide an accurate unique visitor count, as multiple user sessions can be generated by one unique visitor.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator

This acronym stands for Uniform Resource Locator and means basically the same as website address.

User Generated Content

User-generated-content gets created and published by the end-users, typically on social media sites. Examples are content sharing sites such as Facebook and YouTube.

Viral Marketing

The buzzwords viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.

Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable.

The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create Viral Messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along. (Source: Wikipedia)

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a term coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2)

to describe blogs, wikis, social networking sites and other Internet-based services that emphasize collaboration and sharing, rather than less interactive publishing (Web 1.0). It is associated with the idea of the Internet as platform. (Source: Sempo.org)

Weblog

see ‘Blog’

WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms, offering a downloadable blogging program (wordpress.com) and a hosted solution (wordpress.org).

Wordtracker

(see also ‘SEO Tools’)

Wordtracker is a popular keyword research tool to assist search marketing professionals and webmasters in identifying important keywords and phrases relevant to their website. It provides detailed information on the number of searches, predicted number of daily searches, competing pages and KEI data.

Continue with: “Your SEO Plan“