Search engine optimization is a really big topic for many online business designers. But before you can start working on it you have to understand few basic SEO terms, this SEO glossary gives you a clear idea on all SEO terminology.

A permanent 301 redirect in your .htaccess file lets search engines and others know that an old link has been replaced by a new one. some common uses of a 301 .htaccess redirect. Redirect individual files on the same domain.

Google pay per click relative advertising program, very common way of basic website advertisement

(MFA) Made For Google Adsense Advertisements - websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for GA advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV programming is usually Made For Advertisement.

An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or percentage.

A program used by search engines to determine what pages to advise for a given search query.

It is a common shorthand term used to refer to the ALT attribute within in the IMG tag. Any time you use an image, be sure to include an ALT tag or ALT text within the IMG tag. Doing so will provide a clear text alternative of the image for screen reader users.

It is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic .  Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.

It is known as Google webmaster tools previously. It is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It helps webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.

The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites.

A website which has many incoming links from other related expert/hub sites. Because of this simultaneous citation from trusted hubs an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank, and search results placement. Wikipedia, is an example of an authority site.

Any link into a page or site from any other page or website is known as backlinking.

As per SEO glossary, black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience Google Webmaster Guidelines.

A website which presents content in a more or less chronological series. Content may or may not be time sensitive. Most blogs us a Content Management System such as Word Press rather than individually crafted WebPages. Because of this, the Blogger can chose to concentrate on content creation instead of arcane code.

A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer. It is one of the important search term in SEO glossary.

The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.

It is often nearly impossible to avoid duplicate content, especially with CMSs like WordPress, but also due to the fact that www.site.com, site.com, and www.site.com/index.htm are supposedly seen as dupes by the SEs - although it’s a bit hard to believe they aren’t more sophisticated than that. However these issues can be dealt with effectively in several ways including - using the noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the canon.

The practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and caries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.

Content Management System - Programs such as WordPress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so choose.

Posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an back link to another site. The reason many blogs use link condoms.

The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Publicity, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.

Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.

Percentage of users who convert - see conversion.

This refers to the actual price you pay for each click in your pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns.

A statistical metric used to quantify the average value / cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M - from the Roman numeral for one thousand.

A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.

A site devoted to directory pages. The Yahoo directory is an example.

A page of links to related WebPages.

Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any trust from the search engines when compare to the content that the SE considers being the original.

A website develops to start online retail sales is known as eCommerce websites. FastWebHost provides you the feasible plans to host your both static and dynamic websites.

Content which is delivered to the user via special websites or programs such as news aggregators.

A web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within it’s own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to correctly navigate them. Additionally, most users dislike frames because it is almost like having two tiny monitors neither of which shows a full page of information at one time.

If a web page design is to attract traffic from a search engine and then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page is not exactly the same as cloaking but the effect is the same in that users and search engines will serve different content.

The combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results, usually for humorous effect. The “miserable failure” - George Bush, and “greatest living American” - Steven Colbert Google bombs are famous examples.

Maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from the “bad neighborhood” - Kind of like yelling “Good luck with that infection!” to your buddy as you get off the school bus - there is some controversy as to if this works or is just an SEO urban myth.

The change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.

Trust / authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

Google - Yahoo - Microsoft, the big three of search Engines.

Directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.

​Sometimes called a view or an ad view, is a term that refers to the point in which an ad is viewed once by a visitor, or displayed once on a web page.

Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.

The pages on a site which have been indexed.

The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.

It happens when a website's information architecture rely on a single keyword or phrase on multiple place of the website

The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unusually high the page may be penalized.

The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.

Inappropriately high keyword density.

The page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP.

This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail Searches”. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail”. The significance is that it might be almost impossible to rank well for “mortgage”, but fairly easy to rank for “second mortgage to finance monster truck team”.

A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media.

Actively cultivating incoming links to a site.

A reciprocal linking scheme often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves. Quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.

Link juice is a non-technical SEO term used to reference the SEO value of a hyperlink to a particular website or webpage.

A measure of the value of a site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it.

Unwanted links such as those posted in user generated content like blog comments.

The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

Longer more specific search queries that are often less targeted than shorter broad queries. For example a search for “widgets” might be very broad while “red widgets with reverse threads” would be a long tail search. A large percentage of all searches are long tail searches.

Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.

A standard of measurement used by analytics programs.

Websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV programming is usually MFA.

An identical site at a different address.

To extract income from a site. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetize a website.

The search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.

A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link. A form of link condom.

A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link.

If site A links to site B, but site B does not link back to site A, then the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of approval between sites.

Organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.

Out link plays a vital role in SEO and search engine ranking. When you link out to related domains, it not only helps the search engines but also helps in link building.

A value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors.

 A web service which offers a wide array of features to entice users to make the portal their “home page” on the web. IGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN are portals.

Very similar to Pay Per Click accept publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversions.

A contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal and potentially incestuous nature.

Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.

It is a text file. It is through this file, it gives instruction to search engine crawlers about indexing and caching of a web page, file of a website or directory, domain.

One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment, and thus cost / benefit of different schemes.

There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or exact behavior of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs.

A program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a user's keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.

Pages created to cause search engines to deliver inappropriate or less relevant results. Search Engine Optimizers are sometimes unfairly perceived as search engine Spammers. Of course in some cases they actually are.

Short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.

Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and completely ranked by the search engine.

A search engine results page (SERP) is the page displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a searcher.

It is a bit of Extensible Markup Language (XML), a standard machine-readable format consumable by search engines and other data-munching programs like feed readers. XML sitemaps convey information about one thing: the URLs that make up a site.

Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.

Website or brand promotion through social media channels like Facebook.com, Youtube.com, twitter.com and many more is known as SMM.

A term coined by Rand Fishkin - any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques designed to implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example, blog comment spamming in the name / brand of a competitor

It is an online identity used to either hide a persons real identity or to establish multiple user profiles.

A form of Social Media where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.

This is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR etc.

These are pages that are specially created to rank high on search engines using deceptive techniques. Doorway pages do not provide useful content but instead redirect users to the main page.

Panda is to improve the search in Google. The latest version has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many more.

Penguin is the code name for Google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease the ranking of that website that are violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like cloaking and stuffing.

A Made For Adsense/Advertisement page which uses scraped or machine generated text for content, and has no real value to users other than the slight value of the adds. Spammers sometimes create sites with hundreds of these pages.

Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deceptively modifying web pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner. - Wikipedia

A person who uses spam to pursue his goal to get a good rank for his website.

A special bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.

An endless loop of automatically generated links which can “trap” a spider program. Sometimes intentionally used to prevent automated scraping or e-mail address harvesting.

Spam Blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or made up of scraped content.

 A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.

Mitigation of bounce rate. Website changes that entice users to stay on the site longer, and view more pages improve the sites “stickiness”.

A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.

The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of quality and relevance.

Uniform Resource Locator - AKA Web Address

Social Media, wikis, forums, question answer websites and some blogs rely heavily on User Generated Content. 

A group of pages which link to each other, but are not attach to any other pages. A walled garden can still be indexed if it is included in a sitemap, but it will probably have very low pagerank.

In SEO gIossary, it is characterized by websites, which encourage user interaction.

SEO techniques, which confirms the best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to “game” or manipulate SERPs. Also, it completely follows rules and policies of SEO.

Small applications which use on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP address display. These programs can make good link bait.

A complete SEO glossary guide provides you all terms and definitions which would help in online digital marketing. Please post your comments in the below comment box if you like this article. Your feedback helps us to share more information in future.