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Google AdSense: is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site — or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts- you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages.
It's also a way for website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.
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Google AdWords: Google's CPC (Cost Per Click) based text advertising. AdWords takes click through rate into consideration in addition to advertisers bid to determine the ads relative position within the paid search results. Google applies such a weighting factor in order to feature those paid search results that more popular and thus presumably 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.
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Alt tags: alternate text associated with a web page graphic that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the graphic. Alt tags should convey what the graphic is for or about and contain good relevant keywords. Alt tags also make web pages more accessible to the disabled. For example, a vision-impaired user may have a web browser that reads aloud the text and alt tags on a page. (For those familiar with HTML, "alt" isn't actually a tag by itself but an attribute to the "image" tag.). Note that the value of Alt tags for SEO has been discounted over time by the search engines to the point that now it is of minimal value.
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Anchor text: is the actual text part of a link (usually underlined). Used by search engines as an important ranking factor. Google pays particular attention to the text used in a hyperlink and associates the keywords contained in the anchor text to the page being linked to. Also see "Google bombing."
- Back links: are inbound links pointing to a web page.
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Black Hat SEO: is sometimes called spamdexing (the opposite of White Hat SEO). Black Hat SEO can be any optimization tactics that cause a site to rank more highly than its content would otherwise justify or any changes made specifically for search engines that don’t improve the user’s experience of the site. In other words, Black Hat SEO is optimizations that are against search engine guidelines. If you step too far over the mark, your site may be penalized or even removed from the index. For example, adding product reviews to e-commerce site is encouraged, because it adds useful content to the site. However, using bait-and-switch techniques to create a doorway page that hooks people querying for information on soccer, it then leads to information about health products will be unacceptable.
The following Black Hat SEO tactics should be avoided to keep your site away from penalties:
• Keyword, anchor text and domain name stuffing
• Using hidden text or links
• Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your pages, such as link farms
• Excessively cross-linking sites to increase link popularity
• Cloaking, delivering different pages depending on the IP address and/or agent who is requesting it
• Doorway / Gateway / Jump Pages
• Duplicate content taken from other sites
• Auto-generated content of no value to the end user
• Spamming forums or blogs
• Excessive outbound links to websites that use high risk techniques or spam
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Blog: Also known as a "weblog". An online diary with entries made on a regular if not daily basis. Some blogs are maintained by an anonymous author who uses a nickname or handle instead of his or her real name.
- Bot: Short for robot. See "spider".
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Cloaking: serving different content to search engine spiders than to human visitors. Cloaking is basically a "bait and switch" tactic, where the web server feeds visiting spiders content that is keyword-rich, thus fooling the search engine into placing that page higher in the search results. Yet when the visitor clicks on the link they are given different content, which may be totally unrelated. Search engines frown upon this practice and some will penalize or ban sites that they catch doing it.
- Conversation rate: the rate at which visitors get converted to customers or are moved a step closer to customer acquisition.
- CPC: the cost incurred or price paid for a click through to your landing page.
- Crawler: see “spider”.
- CSS: Cascading Style Sheet - used to control the design of website
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Directory: Human editors group websites into categories and provide site descriptions or edit descriptions that are submitted to them. With a directory, picking the right category and composing a description rich in key phrases will ensure maximum visibility. Contrast this with a search engine, which is unedited and concerned primarily with the HTML of a site's constituent pages.
- Doorway pages: Also known as a "bridge page" or a "gateway page". A doorway page is a web page full of keyword-rich copy that doesn't deliver any useful information on it other than a link into the site, and whose sole purpose is to be fed to the search engines.
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Fourms: A virtual community. Also known as discussion forums. Used by search engine optimizers and webmasters for information exchange. Users can post messages in different forums, either to the group at large or to certain users. However, all postings can be seen by anyone else who has access to that forum, so save sensitive materials for private email. Forums are also threaded, which means a reply to a particular posting becomes part of the "thread" of that posting that can be followed to provide a cohesive progression through a particular topic.
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Gateway pages: Also called a "doorway page" or a "bridge page". A gateway page is a low quality web page that contains very little content and exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. This is done through spamdexing, spamming the index of a search engine. Gateway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings.
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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.
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Inbound links: Links that point to your site from sites other than your own. Inbound links are an important asset that will improve your site's Page Rank (PR)
- Index: A search engine's database in which it stores textual content from every web page that its spider visits.
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Internal Link: An Internal Link is a hypertext link that points to another page within the same website. Internal links can be used as a form of navigation for people, directing them to pages within the website. Links assist with creating good information architecture within the site.
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Keyword: A word that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn't appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it's highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results.
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Keyword Density: The number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a web page. The more times that a given word appears on your page (within reason), the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search.
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Keyword Popularity: the number of occurrences of searches done by Internet users of a given keyword during a period of time. Both WordTracker.com and Overture's Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com) provide keyword popularity numbers.
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Keyword Research: Determining the words and phrases that people use to find something, and then compiling them into a list for use on web pages, etc.
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Keyword Stuffing: Placing excessive amounts of keywords into the page copy and the HTML in such a way that it detracts from the readability and usability of a given page for the purpose of boosting the page's rankings in the search engines. This includes hiding keywords on the page by making the text the same color as the background, hiding keywords in comment tags, overfilling alt tags with long strings of keywords, etc. Keyword stuffing is just another shady way of gaming the search engines and, as such, its use should be strongly discouraged.
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Landing Page: The landing page is a web page where people go to once they click on an online advertisement or natural search listing.
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Link Building: Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your "link popularity" and/or "Page Rank."
Considerations for link building can include directory submissions and press release syndication.
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Links: text or graphics that, when clicked on, take the Internet user to another web page location. Links are expressed as URLs. Its know as hyper text
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Meta Description: a Meta tag hidden in the HTML that describes the page's content. Should be relatively short; around 12 to 20 words is suggested. The Meta description provides an opportunity to influence how your Web page is described in the search results, but it will not improve your search rankings. Make sure your Meta description reflects the page content or you may be accused of spamming.
- Meta Keyword: a Meta tag hidden in the HTML that lists keywords relevant to the page's content. Because search engine spammers have abused this tag so much, this tag provides little to no benefit to your search rankings. Of the major search engines, only Yahoo! still pays any attention to the Meta keywords tag.
- Meta Tag: Meta-information (information about information) that is associated with a web page and placed in the HTML but not displayed on the page for the user to see. There are a range of Meta tags, only a few of which are relevant to search engine spiders. Two of the most well-known Meta tags are the Meta description and Meta keywords; unfortunately these are ignored by most major search engines, including Google.
- Outbound Links: links that direct "off-site" to another website.
- Page Rank: Google uses a weighted form of link popularity called Page Rank™.
- PPC: a pay-for-performance pricing model where advertising (such as banners or paid search engine listings) is priced based on number of click troughs rather than impressions or other criteria. Overture is an example of a search engine which charges advertisers on a pay-per-click basis.
- Reciprocal Links: the practice of trading links between websites.
- Robot.txt: Text file placed in a websites root directory and linked in the html code.
Allows for SEO's to control the actions of search engine spiders on the site or even deny them access.
- ROI-Return on investment: The benefit gained in return for the cost of investing budget into advertising or project. ROI can be measured by the following calculation:
"Total Revenues (generated from campaign or project) minus Total Costs".
- Search Engine: a web site that offers its visitors the ability to search the content of numerous web pages on the Internet. Search engines periodically explore all the pages of a website and add the text on those pages into a large database that users can then search. With a search engine, publishing web pages that incorporate relevant key phrases, prominently positioned in particular ways, is critical. Contrast this with directories, which don't siphon content out of the HTML of a site's constituent pages, but instead are comprised solely of site names and descriptions written or edited by human reviewers.
- Search Engine Marketing: strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines.
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP): a page of search results delivered by a search engine.
- Spamming: as in "spamming the search engines". Spamming is most commonly associated with the act of sending unsolicited commercial email, but in the context of search engine optimization, spamming refers to using disreputable tactics to achieve high search engine rankings. Such spamming tactics include bulk submitting spamglish-containing doorway pages.
- Search Engine Optimization: strategies and tactics undertaken to influence the rankings of web pages in the search engines
- Spider: Also known as a bot, robot, or crawler. Spiders are programs used by a search engine to explore the World Wide Web in an automated manner and download the HTML content (not including graphics) from web sites, strip out whatever it considers superfluous and redundant out of the HTML, and store the rest in a database (i.e. its index). Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, which will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).
A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, recursively browsing the Web according to a set of policies.
A spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalog websites on the internet. When a spider indexes a particular website, this is known as 'being spider'.
- Title Tag: The text displayed in the blue bar at the very top of the browser window, above "Back," "Forward," "Refresh," "Print," etc. Although inconspicuous to the user, the title tag is the most important bit of text on a web page as far as the search engines are concerned. Search engines not only assign the words in the title tag more weight, they also typically display the title tag in the search results, making the title tag an important potential call-to-action as well. Thus, the wording of each page's title tag should be thought through carefully. Also see "keyword prominence."
- Unethical SEO: Unethical search engine optimization techniques that are considered unscrupulous and can result in getting sites banned from the search engines. Examples of this include Keyword stuffing, where the site consists of a long list of keywords. Hidden text is when the text on the page is the same color as the background and often consists of lists of keywords that are put there in hope of tricking search engine spiders. Doorway pages that are designed for search engines and spiders in an attempt to trick them into indexing the web site into a higher position.
- Web Crawler: Also known as a 'web robot' or 'web spider', it is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner.
- White Hat SEO: Ethical SEO approved by the search engines.
- Off Page Optimization: The creation and proper structuring of links to aid in search engine optimization. Off page optimization can be done both via links from one's own website (Internal linking) or via third party websites (External linking).
Off page optimization should be coupled with solid on page optimization to maximize keyword rankings.
- On Page Optimization: The altering of particular web page factors to aid in search engine optimization. Many inferior SEO agencies and consultants focus on keyword density to the exclusion of other on page factors, and on page optimization to the exclusion of off page optimization through links.
- Open Directory Project: Human-edited, and extremely understaffed, if can be very difficult to get links from the Open Directory Project. When one does, however, they can be fairly powerful links, as the Open Directory Project feeds a large number of other directories, including the Google Directory. The open directory project is also known as DMOZ.
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