SEO / SEM glossary Part 1

With search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) such hot topics these days - and constantly evolving, it's easy to get lost in all the various terminology and words used - especially when you're starting out and trying to learn SEO/SEM strategies.

Even if you don't intend to handle search engine optimization yourself and contract the work to others, it's important to understand what your SEO person is telling you.

With some basic familiarity of SEO terminology, you'll also be able to tell if a SEO person is heading down the wrong path - possibly taking your site with them in the form of a ranking penalty.

The following list consists some common SEO/SEM terms and definitions, with links to articles in some instances discussing the topic in more detail:

301 - A server response code, meaning "page has been permanently moved to x" A 301 redirect is commonly used to redirect sites or individual pages in cases where a domain or page name is changed and is usually the preferred method of redirection by search engines.

302 - A server response meaning, "Page has temporarily moved form this location".

Anchor Text - The visible text component of a hyperlink.

Alexa ranking - Alexa is a famous search engine that provides extra information such as traffic rankings. An Alexa ranking is an indicator used to gauge site performance.

ALT Image tag - Spiders cannot able to read images as such, so the alt tag or text attribute describes what the specific image represents.

Black hat - A person engaged in or tactic used to increase search engine rankings using methods prohibited by search engines.

Bot - Used in reference to a search engine robot or spider; software applications that retrieve web page information to feed into a search engine database.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. Used mainly to decrease the amount of source code on a page, by referencing a single set of instructions on how to display various elements on web page.

Crawl - The process by which search engine spiders fetch web page information.

DMOZ - Directory MOZilla is a human reviewed directory, the contents of which appear on many sites, including Google. A listing in DMOZ said to assist boosting rankings in general search results.

Doorway Page - A page used for driving traffic form any page to another specific page and usually focusing on specific keywords. Generally, doorway pages are designed for search engines only, human visitors never see them - consequently, they are illegal one. Doorway pages must not be confused with landing pages, a legitimate strategy.

Dupe/Duplicate content - Usually used in reference to a penalty applied by a search engine for the same content appearing on different pages/sites.

FFA - Free For All pages; basically a link farm. You add your site link to the page, it then gets pushed down as other links are added until your link is ultimately pushed off the page. Not a standard method of promotion or link building.

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Author : Prashant Main