Greetings and a warm welcome to Dictionary Corner! Leaving the world of journalism behind and entering the mysterious realm of Digital Marketing meant learning an entirely new language. At first the binary acoustics of ‘geek speak’ seemed as impenetrable as ancient Greek and were surely designed to keep people out of the SEO club.
Spool forward a decade and today SEO is apparently all about inclusivity. Not only are optimizers happy to give-away their once closely guarded secrets; they’re likely to ram them down your electronic throats. Still there’s still that pesky language barrier to get over. In a bid to further lift the lid on SEO (and help you better understand which sites are truly trustworthy and which bloggers make sense) we have decided to publish a plain English SEO Jargon Buster.
In the interests of public health we have split it into four bite-sized chunks. After all, it’s fairly rich and we wouldn’t want you getting indigestion. If you think you could improve on any of the definitions, or would like to see a definition includes that’s been overlooked, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Today we kick off with A-C and we will be testing you on everything from Black Hats to Canonicalization; so you had better pay attention!
301 redirect Also known as a permanent redirect, a 301 is the most search engine friendly way to redirect a web page. It’s also the most efficient way of passing on existing page strength to a new location
404 error An error message explaining that a web page can not be found. 404s typically occur when a link points to an incorrect address or the user types in the address
Above the fold The portion of a web page visible to a user without using the scroll bar
AdSense Google’s contextual advertising program which allows webmasters to place Google Ads on their web pages and generate revenue in return. Webmasters add a short piece of code and Google does the rest. Ads are served to reflect the ‘context’ (for which you can read ‘content’) of each page, so if your page is all about ‘Skiing in Austria’ the Google Ads will focus on related commercial products and services, such as Austrian hotels, flights to Austria, Ski guides to Austria etc…
AdWords Effectively the ‘other half’ of the AdSense program; AdWords allows merchants to advertise their products across much of Google’s network. Advertising opportunities include placement in the ‘sponsored links’, next to the organic search results, and on sites which have signed up to the Adsense program. AdWords has traditionally been priced on a Cost Per Click basis, but new models (such as Cost Per Acquisition) are being tested
Affiliate A marketing partner or website which generates leads or sales for other websites in exchange for a commission
Agent name Also known as user agent. The agent name is recorded when a spider or browser requests a web page from a server. Google’s agent name for example is Googlebot/2.1
Algorithm A mathematical formula used by search engines to determine a web page’s position in the SERPs. The algorithm is constantly updated by the search engines and used to improve the relevancy of results returned
Alt tag An HTML tag used to describe an image. This ‘alternative’ text is displayed when a user’s mouse hovers over an image or the browser cannot display an image. Alt tags are also used by people who view pages in text only mode and often by the visually impaired. Some search engines use Alt text as a factor in their algorithm
Anchor text Also known as link text. Anchor text is the ‘clickable’ part of a text link and refers to the on-screen text behind which the actual HTML link is located. It’s an important factor in many search engine algorithms which use it to help determine the nature of the destination page
ASP Active Server Pages an application used to build dynamic websites. ASP differs from other application in that code is produced on the server rather than on the browser
Authority Google loves authority (on the web at least) and as a SEO you’ll learn to love it too. Authority sites are the most trusted within a web community, they naturally attract high-quality relevant links…and are rewarded in the SERPs accordingly
Backlinks Also known as inbound links. Links pointing to a website are referred to as backlinks. Quality, and to a lesser extent quantity, of backlinks are widely recognized as a key factors in a number of search engines algorithms; Google included
Bad neighbourhoods As in real life bad neighbourhoods are places that are best avoided. Sharing an IP block or server with a website that has been penalised (usually for using spammy SEO techniques or hosting dubious content) may jeopardise your website’s performance. Similarly getting links form a bad linking neighbourhood won’t reflect well on your site.
Banned Being removed from Google’s index is every SEO’s worst nightmare. However, there is usually a good reason for it and most commonly it involves a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines
Below the fold The portion of a web page which is ‘off screen’ when the page first loads. Because the user must use the scroll bar to get ‘below the fold’ advertising rates are understandably markedly cheaper
Black hat, Grey hat & White hat SEO ‘hats’ come in a variety of colours and refer to the purity of the approach they take. Google’s webmaster guidelines insist on squeaky clean SEO (White hat), but the reality is that most SEO companies operate in shades of grey. Despite the fact black hat techniques are a sure-fire way to get you banned (it’s a question of when, not if, you get caught) dubious SEOs still dabble in the dark arts
Blog Short for web log, a blog is an online journal or diary. Google loves blogs and they are a great way of keeping customers up-to-date with company and product information
Blogosphere A collective term describing all the blogs and bloggers out there
Body copy Refers to the main ‘body of copy’ (or text) on any page. Search engines dig into the body copy to establish what your page is really all about
Bounce rate Refers to the percentage of visitors who enter, then exit a page without following any links or navigating deeper into the website
Cache As in the real world a cache is a hiding place. Browsers commonly ‘store’ websites they have visited so they load more quickly on the next visit. Google also stores a cached version of websites that show a snapshot of the site the last time it was crawled
Call to action A prompt given to encourage the user to carry out a desired action, whether it’s to get a car insurance quotation (get quote now!) or to subscribe to a newsletter (sign up for free!)
Canonical URL Search engines stay in business by providing the most authoritative (or canonical) results and it’s your job to point them in the right direction. If you publish a number of pages with the same content you are likely to confuse the search engines. But the real problem with ‘canonicalisation’ is that most webmasters don’t know they are doing anything wrong. In t
he past webmasters were forced to use redirects to navigate through the canonicalisation maze. However today webmasters can use the rel=“canonical” tag and you can find out more in Google Webmaster Tools Support
Click-through rate or CTR refers to the percentage of visitors who click on a particular link as a function of the number of page impressions. CTR is often used as a metric to gauge the success of an ad campaign
Cloaking A black hat technique that serves up one page to the spider and a different page to the user. Cloaking is carried out in a variety of ways, notably by delivering different content based on: the IP address or the user agent information of the requesting the page. The aim of cloaking to deceive the search engines into ranking a particular page when it would not normally be included in the results.
CMS Is shorthand for ‘content management system’. CMS pages are database driven and generated dynamically by the server when requested by a visitor
Contextual advertising Adverts delivered to a webpage depending based on an algorithmic interpretation of the ‘context’ (for which you can read ‘content’) of the page
Conversion When a visitor completes a call to action, this typically means generating a lead or a sale
Cookie A file created by a web server and stored on a user’s computer to hold information about their browsing patterns and preferences. Cookies typically store: user IDs, log-ins, shopping cart details etc
CPM ‘Cost per thousand’ is a common metric used in online advertising for pricing 1000 page views (or impressions) of a particular advert
CPC ‘Cost per click’ refers to the amount charged to the merchant (by the ad program, such as Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing) for every click on a given advertisement
CPA ‘Cost per Action’ or ‘cost per acquisition’ refers to the amount charged to the merchant for the completion of an agreed action, such as a quotation or a sale
Crawl Spiders and robots get around by crawling. More specifically they crawl the web by following hyperlinks from one page to another
CSS Is short for cascading style sheet. A CSS contains instructions specifying how a web page should be displayed, such as: fonts, colours, background etc. Because the information is stored centrally, rather than on each page, a CSS enables you to make site-wide changes relatively easily. A CSS also cuts the amount of on-page code that spiders have to crawl through; great for SEO
