SEO Glossary
backlinks/inlinks - links that point to your site from sites other than your own. Inbound links are an important asset that will improve your site�s PageRank.
bot - is an automated program that accesses a web site and traverses through the site by following the links present on the pages
conversion - the act of converting a web site visitor into a customer or at least taking that visitor a step closer to customer acquisition (such as convincing them to sign up for your e-mail newsletter)
cascading style sheet (css) - used to control the design of website
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.
firefox - An alternate web browser growing in popularity.
googlebot - is a search bot used by Google. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.
heading tag - An HTML tag that is often used to denote a page or section heading on a web page. Search engines pay special attention to text that is marked with a heading tag, as such text is set off from the rest of the page content as being more important.
html source - The raw, unrendered programming code. It can be accessed in web browsers by going to the �View� menu then selecting �Source�.
hypertext - underlined text that points to another web page. Google pays particular attention to the text used in a hyperlink and associates the keywords contained in the hyperlink text to the page being linked to. Also see �Google bombing.� keyword/s - word or phrase 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 (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine).
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 engine user. Keyword Density=Total number of keyword occurences on a page/Total number of words. Most experts agree that 3-5% shoud be the maximum keyword density.
keyword research - Determining the words and phrases that people use to find something, then compiling them into a list for use on web pages.
meta tag - A meta tag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page’s content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices.
landing page - the web page that a visitor clicks through to from a banner ad or search results listing.
link building - Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your �link popularity� and/or �PageRank.�
outbound links - links that direct �off-site� to another website
pagerank - Google uses a weighted form of link popularity called pagerank. Not all links are created equal. Google differentiates a link from an important site (such as CNN.com) as being better than a link from a personal home page. The Google Toolbar (which is a free download from http://toolbar.google.com) has a PageRank meter built into it, to see which web pages are considered important by Google and which aren�t. PageRank scoring ranges from 0 to 10, 10 being the best. PageRank scores get exponentially harder to achieve the closer to 10 they are. For example, increasing your own homepage�s PageRank from a 2 to 3 is easy with not a lot of additional links, jumping from a 7 to an 8 is very difficult to achieve. The higher the PageRank of the page that�s linking to you, the more your site�s PageRank will benefit. The better your PageRank, the better you�ll do in Google, all else being equal.
