In Part One of the web project’s ‘complete SEO lexicon’ we covered the ABCs. So if you don’t know the difference between CPM, CPA and CSS then it’s straight into detention. In the meantime the rest of the class can continue from D-K:
Deep linking Is the process of pointing links to pages ‘deep’ within the website’s structure, rather than just at the homepage. Deep linking is a great way of giving internal pages a push and passing around ‘link love’
Dmoz Otherwise known as the ‘Open Directory Project’, Dmoz is arguably the most authoritative human-edited directory anywhere on the web. As a result a link from Dmoz carries weight in Google’s eyes
DNS is shorthand for ‘domain name system’. A DNS is a program which runs off the server and is responsible for translating the text-based domain names into the numeric IP addresses
Domain name A unique address identifying a website e.g. www.thewebproject.co.uk
Doorway page A favourite black hat technique is to create pages aimed exclusively at getting as much search traffic as possible. When the searcher clicks on a doorway page they are automatically redirected to a different website. Google isn’t impressed because they are being tricked into effectively serving up content which hasn’t earned its position in the SERPs
Dynamic pages Web pages that are created ‘on the fly’ are known as dynamic pages. Unlike static pages they have no real home and are instead generated from a database (using programming languages such as ASP, PHP or ColdFusion) when requested. You can identify dynamic pages by the presence of a question mark (?) in the url string
Ethical SEO Using Google approved SEO techniques to rank a website without any manipulation of the search engine’s results. Also known as ‘white hat’ SEO
Everflux Refers to the continual shuffling of search results in response to changes in Google’s algorithm
Flash A program used to create interactive and animated material for a website. Search engines aren’t very good at reading Flash so sites generated solely using Flash generally don’t rank well
FTP is shorthand for file transfer protocol and denotes a system for transferring files from one computer to another using a network such as the internet
Geo targeting refers to the process of ‘geographically targeting’ your website, marketing or advertising for a specific country or user base
Google bombing Or link bombing refers to a collaborative effort made to manipulate the search results by pointing links with a specific anchor text to a chosen website. Often the sport of bloggers, the most frequently quoted example pushed the official biography of George W. Bush to Google’s top spot for the term ‘miserable failure’
Google dance Back in the old days Google updated its algorithm at the end of each month. During updates websites would bounce around the SERPs for approximately a week. Even today Google likes a dance from time to time
Google Sitemap An XML or text file that lists all the pages on your website. Submitting a Sitemap can help Googlebots to navigate around your site and easily access all your pages
Hit A hit is simply a request for a particular file from a server. Each web page is made up of a number of files such as images, JavaScript and CSS. When a server downloads your page it logs each request separately, so a single visitor to a single page can be recorded as several hits. For accurate information on the number of visitors a page receives refer to ‘page view’ statistics instead
Hosting Websites don’t float around cyberspace but live on web servers. If you don’t have your own server you will need someone to look after (or host) your site on their server
HTML Is shorthand for ‘hypertext markup language’ and is the code used to build web pages. Like all languages, if you can’t speak it; you will need to find someone who can
Inbound links See backlinks
Index Google has a vast database containing details of every site it has crawled. Google’s index refers to the web pages that are chosen by Google to appear in the search results. As well as being a noun ‘index’ can also be used as a verb; referring to the process of a search engine spider visiting your site
IP address Is shorthand for ‘internet protocol address’ and is a unique number given to every computer connected to the internet at any moment
JavaScript Java is a programming language used to add functionality to websites. It may make your site look great, but in terms of SEO it’s a bad idea. Search engines have trouble reading text contained in JavaScript, so if it’s important; you’ll need to add the text elsewhere
Keywords At the most basic level a keyword is a word (or phrase) used for search; it’s the ‘bit’ you type into the query box. An important part of any SEOs job is to identify the language (or keywords) used to search for a particular product/ service. The next step is to then carefully use the keywords to label pages in a bid to encourage search engines to display their results
Keyword density Refers to the concentration of given keyword in the text on a web page, expressed as a percentage of the total number of words on the page. It’s old world SEO and doesn’t ad-up to a hill of beans
Keyword stuffing The ‘art’ of getting as many keywords on a page as you can in the hope of better rankings. Frowned upon by Google, keyword stuffing is something of an antiquated SEO technique
KPI Is shorthand for ‘key performance indicator’ and refers to whichever yardsticks you choose to gauge the success of a campaign by. KPIs can be anything from: the volume of traffic visiting a certain page to individual rankings. The point is that you need to know exactly where you are starting out and how you are going to measure performance
