If you are new to SEO, Most likely, you will come across certain SEO sepcific search terms/jargons which you've never heard of. This article is to make your life easy.
Here is a list of Search Engine Optimization related terms/jargons that you commonly come across on many web resources.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization the planning and adjusting of the content of a web page in order to improve its position in natural, organic search results, including modifications to code and displayed content.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing any marketing activity involving a search site, including advertising on search result pages, paying for placement.
SMO: Social Media Optimization
SERP: Search Engine Result Page, the page that display the results of a search.
Sitemap: a file created in XML format that helps search engine spiders distinguish the structure of your website and instructs them how often to crawl certain pages on your website (This is different from HTML sitemap).
Crawl: the action of search engines traversing through the Internet while updating their database of websites.
Spider: a piece of code (packet) that is sent out from a search engine to crawl the web to build and edit its search engine database.
Conversion Rate: metric to evaluate the effectiveness of a conversion effort the number of visitors who took the desired action divided by the total number of visitors in a given time period.
CPC Cost Per Click : the amount an advertiser pays an ad host each time a visitor clicks on the advertiser’s link. (see Pay Per Click)
CPM Cost Per Thousand: the cost per thousand people viewing an ad or listing.
Absolute Link: a link that displays the full path of a website URL that is linked to.
Anchor Text: the text that is clicked on to activate and follow a hyperlink to another web page.
Backlink: a link to a website.
CTR - Click Through Rate: the number of clicks on a link, as a percentage of the number of views of the link. (( no. of clicks / no. of views ) x 100)
White Hat: a term used to describe SEO techniques that adheres to proper and acceptable on-page and off-page optimization.
Black Hat: a term used to describe any SEO techniques utilized to manipulate the search engines.
Cloaking: a black-hat SEO technique that manipulates search engines by displaying specific content served up to the search engine spider that is different then what the normal surfer sees.
Delisting: the removal of a web page from a search engine’s results.
Description Meta Tag: a meta tag describing the content of the web page.
External Link: a link from another website that links to yours.
Reciprocal Link: a link from a website that links back to your site, in exchange for linking to that website.
One Way Link: an external link that does not require your website to link back to that site.
Internal Link: a link that exists and links to other web pages within your website.
Outbound Link: a link from your website to an external website.
Link Spamming: a black hat technique used to generate and acquire bogus external links to manipulate search engine rankings.
Index: a search engine's database, consisting of all the web pages it has crawled and recorded.
Meta Tag: Html elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page.
Alt Attribute: the description text that is associated with an image.
Keyword: the word(s) or phrase(s) a person types into a search box.
Keyword Meta Tag: a meta tag listing the main keywords and keyphrases that are contained on that web page.
Keyword Density: a formula to determine the frequency a keyword is displayed on a web page. The formula is the total number of words in al keyword mentions divided by the total number of words on a page. Keywords should fall between 2 and 8 % density.
Keyword Stuffing: a blackhat technique to manipulate search engines by overly displaying a keyword or keyphrase, unnecessarily.
Landing Page: the destination page a visitor arrives when clicking on a link.
PageRank: Google's indicator of a particular page's value.
Organic Traffic: traffic generated as a result of being indexed within a search engine (vs. paid traffic).
Paid Traffic: traffic generated as a result of using paid advertisements (vs. organic traffic).
Rank: the position of a web page within a search engine.
Robots File: file in site's root directory that instructs search engine spiders to ignore certain pages or directories.
