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How anchor text boosts your search engine rankings

Anchor text is the hyperlinked words on a web page - the words you click on when you click a link.

Here’s an example, reciprocal links, in which “reciprocal links” is the anchor text.

Anchor text usually gives your visitors useful information about the content of the page you’re linking to.

Here’s why anchor text is so important…

It tells search engines what the page is about. Used wisely, it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google.

If you use “click here” as the words people are going to click on, you’re telling people the page is about the subject “click here”. If you use “Part 2″ as the anchor text, your telling the search engines the page is discussing “part 2″.

You wouldn’t want to rank highly for “click here” or “Part 2″.

Anchor text is so important that it’s possible for a page to appear in the top 10 in Google’s search results for a phrase which isn’t mentioned anywhere on the page.

Some blog publishers have fun using “Google bombing” to get pages ranked highly for humorous phrases. If the phrase is obscure, only a handful of links will win the phrase a No.1 ranking. If it’s highly competitive, hundreds or thousands of links might be needed.

[UPDATE: In January, 2007, Google created a new algorithm which reduced the impact of many prank Google bombs, but anchor text is still very important.]

When asking other sites to link to your site, it’s a good idea to provide them with the HTML code ready to cut and paste into their page. That way, you choose the anchor text.

However, if your site is all about purple widgets, you don’t want only “purple widgets” to be used as the phrase in every link to your site. Over-optimizing like that would create an unnatural pattern.

You can use anchor text in:

• External links - links from other sites
• Internal links - links on your pages
• Navigation maps
• Links on your main page. A very important spot.

Remember that real live humans will read your links as well as search engines, so the words in your anchor text need to make sense!

SEO, Search Engines

What are backlinks and how do you find them?

Backlinks or “back links” are links from other web sites to your site. They’re sometimes also known as incoming links.

Links from your site to other sites are forward links, usually described as “links” or hyperlinks.

So links going in the reverse direction are backward links, or backlinks.

Google’s free toolbar shows backward links but the results are confusing.

If you have the toolbar installed on your Internet Explorer browser, you can visit a web site, click on the blue “i” and then click on “Backward links” to see what appears to be the number of links pointing to the site you’re visiting.

However, ONLY SOME of the site’s backlinks are displayed.

How to find backlinks using Google

You can use link:example.com

This gives an unreliable sample. For more reliable results, type the following command into the Google search box:

example.com -site:www.example.com -site:example.com

(Remember to type in your actual site, not “example.com”.)

Doing this shows you pages that link to your site, minus the links on pages on your own site.

(You’ll also see sites that just mention your site but don’t actually link to it.)

BEWARE: A Google backlink check teases us. It does NOT show all the backlinks that Google knows about. Here’s a much better way…

How to find more backlinks using Yahoo!

Go to Yahoo! Site Explorer - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com - and login.

Type the URL of the site you want to explore.

Click on “Explore URL”.

Click on “Inlinks”.

Modify your search to make it more useful. Select the options to show Inlinks “except from this domain” and “entire site”. This will exclude internal links and show you all external links that Yahoo! knows about to ANY page of the website.

How to find backlinks to an individual page

At Yahoo! Site Explorer, type in the URL at the top of the page, and Click on “Explore URL”.

At MSN, use

link:example.com/page

In Google, it’s not so simple. Try this search:

example.com/page.html -site:example.com

It doesn’t actually give you “links”. It gives you mentions. However, most mentions tend to be links and it’s more accurate than Google’s “link:” command.

How to find backlinks using MSN

At MSN, do this search:

link:example.com

OR link:example.com -site:example.com

At MSN can also use:

linkdomain:example.com which shows pages that link to ALL pages on your site.

How to find backlinks using Alltheweb

At Alltheweb.com, do this search:

link:www.example.com

(Remember to change “example” and you MUST include the “www”.)

How to find backlinks using Hotbot

At Hotbot, type this into the search box:

linkdomain:www.example.com

Search using Hotbot.

Link popularity check

You can check for backlinks by using link popularity sites such as www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm

Free backlinks checker

You can find which sites are linking to you by using this free tool, which also shows the anchor text used in the link:

www.helpfulinformation.org/seo-tools/anchortext.pl

Why backlinks are important

When ranking sites, search engines such as Google look at the number and quality of sites that link to your site. Ideally, you want backlinks from sites in your industry that have many popular sites linking to them.

How to get backlinks

Common ways to get backlinks include exchanging links with other sites (reciprocal links) and by placing articles you write in article directories and on other sites.

Perhaps the most effective way of all is to create such a useful, fascinating site that other sites voluntarily link to yours.

FREE way to get links to your site

Check out the free Value Exchange for sites in your category that are eager to exchange reciprocal links with other sites. As the Value Exchange’s popularity grows, it is becoming more and more useful.

In some topics, it will locate only a few potential links partners. In other niches, it can find several hundred potential links partners for you. I highly recommend it.

To avoid the displeasure of search engines, getting reciprocal links should be just one of the strategies you use, not your main strategy. Matt Cutts of Google has made it clear that it’s possible to overdo reciprocal links.

An excellent way to get backlinks

If you want thousands of visitors a day from search engines (and don’t we all!) it’s absolutely essential that you encourage other sites in your field to link to you.

One excellent way to get links to your site is by writing articles for newsletters, which are then published on other people’s sites.

In the book Turn Words Into Traffic Jim and Dallas Edwards give step-by-step instructions showing you how to do it.

SEO, Search Engines

Unnatural linking methods can get your site banned

An artificial link structure is a way of linking websites together in a method designed purely with the aim of getting higher search engine rankings.

A few years ago, artificial link structures were popular and successful.

I interviewed a webmaster who owned a cluster of 20 or 30 sites all about different kinds of posters. The sites were linked together using multiple links.

The sites ranked well and he was earning about $5,000 a month in affiliate commissions.

Unfortunately for him, those golden days didn’t last. Eventually, all the sites in the cluster were penalized by Google. I don’t think any of those sites exist any more.

These days, the search engines are smarter. Excessive crosslinking is likely to get your sites penalized by Google and especially by Yahoo!, which is stricter than Google.

Some affiliates now do tricky things such as getting domains registered around the world in the names of friends and relatives, so that their artificial link structures are not obvious.

For long-term success, build a genuinely useful, interesting website that people WANT to link to. If you do that, you’ll automatically have a natural link structure. Here are some other factors which seem to ring alarm bells, and what to do about them:

• Having a large percentage of reciprocal links could ring alarm bells. Good, popular sites have lots of one-way links. Try to get one-way links to your site, for example, by writing articles for other sites. In my experience, reciprocal links are still very helpful, but make sure they’re not your only linking strategy.
• Having identical anchor text on all links to your site looks artificial. When sites link to you, try to persuade them to use a variety of key phrases in the anchor text (the words people click on). One way to do this is to provide the HTML code for them to paste into their sites.
• Sudden huge increases in backlinks (inbound links) look artificial. People doing something unusual get huge surges in links. Get links to your site steadily, a few at a time, in a natural way.
•  Links to “link farms” are dangerous. Link farms create pages of links which are cut and pasted into large clusters of sites. To search engines, these are “bad neighborhoods”. Also, it’s not a good idea to link to sites which have huge directories indiscriminately linking to anyone. Link to good, useful sites related to your topic.
• It’s possible that getting lots of site-wide links could cause you trouble. “Site-wide links” are links which appear on all pages of a site, linking to your site. That’s an unnatural pattern, but probably less harmful than some of the other factors. A wonderfully generous man is linking to this site from more than 2,000 pages on his site. You probably want to avoid having a large number of friends who do that.

If all this seems terribly complicated, take heart from the fact that the search engines’ ultimate goal is to deliver good search results. Build a useful, interesting, high-quality site and you’ve taken a huge leap in the direction of search engine success.

SEO, Search Engines

Excessive crosslinking an expensive mistake

Crosslinking means linking websites you own together.

Crosslinking is acceptable to search engines. Excessive crosslinking is not.

If you link in a logical, sensible way, crosslinking is accepted by search engines.

For example, in an article about purple widgets you could link to a site you own that is all about purple widgets.

Excessive crosslinking means linking sites you own together in multiple ways and doing it so much than you attract a penalty from a search engine. Both Google and Yahoo! warn you against excessive crosslinking.

This site was penalized for excessive crosslinking.

I hope the following story will help other sites that have been penalized.

Getting a Yahoo! penalty lifted

In mid-2005, after a long wait, Yahoo! lifted its penalty on AssociatePrograms.com.

Because Yahoo! never explained what I did wrong and what I did right, some of the following story is guesswork. That’s the way things often are in search engine optimization.

I linked three of my sites together. That helped my visitors and helped me. I added a few more links, and a few more, and then dozens of links. Things went well for many months.

I added more links, and Yahoo! penalized me. Google didn’t.

As far as I was concerned, there were good reasons for the links. I guess Yahoo! didn’t see things my way.

For ages, while the site remained in the Yahoo! directory, it was nowhere to be found in the Yahoo! search index.

Then for a while a search at Yahoo! for…

url:http://www.associateprograms.com

…revealed that AssociatePrograms.com WAS in the search index.

However, being there didn’t do me any good, because none of my pages was showing up in any Yahoo! searches, in spite of having No.1 and No.2 rankings in Google. I was obviously being penalized.

Here are the steps I took to get the Yahoo! penalty lifted…

I checked the Yahoo! guidelines

I went to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html and checked the Yahoo! quality guidelines carefully to ensure I wasn’t breaking any of their rules.

I removed almost all the crosslinks among the sites I owned.

I tried the Yahoo! feedback form

If you do a search at Yahoo! and scroll down to the bottom of the page you’ll see this:

“Help us improve your search experience,” and a link that says: “Send us feedback.”

So I clicked on the link and wrote a polite message in the contact form saying AssociatePrograms.com pages were not showing up in the search results, although they were being found in Google.

I waited several months. Nothing happened.

I wrote a polite email

I hunted around the Internet for helpful articles and at WebmasterWorld.com I found an email address…

webmasterworldfeedback AT yahoo DOT com

I wrote to that address and asked for a review.

I won’t tell you word-for-word what I wrote, because I don’t want Yahoo! to receive dozens of emails that look exactly the same.

Explaining that my site appeared to have been penalized by the Yahoo! search engine, I said that the only possible reason I could think of was excessive crosslinking.

I explained that I respect search engines and see them as my friends, so I’d removed nearly all of the links between AssociatePrograms.com and other sites I own.

After deciding that it might be easier to get ONE ban lifted, rather than multiple bans, I mentioned only AssociatePrograms.com.

I wanted to give Yahoo! a strong reason for replacing my site in its search index, so I wrote…

“AssociatePrograms.com has been a respected directory of affiliate programs ever since it was launched in 1998.

“It has ranked highly in Google for years, so if it is not found in Yahoo! that reduces the effectiveness of your search engine.”

I didn’t expect it to make any difference, but I also mentioned that I’d been buying advertising on Yahoo! for several years.

I said I’d done my best to co-operate, and repeated my request for a review.

I waited, and waited

I’d been warned that I’d have to be patient. Getting a review can take weeks.

However, it was only after waiting four months that the site reappeared in Yahoo!’s search index. It looks as though I’ve been forgiven.

I can’t say for certain that my email did the trick.

However, the site I mentioned in the email is no longer penalized.

Of the other two sites, one has been freed from the penalty and is ranking well in Yahoo! but the other still appears to be heavily penalized.

Is your site in the Yahoo! search index?

To see if your site or page is listed in the Yahoo! search index, Yahoo! advises you to enter an identifiable phrase (5-10 words) in quotes, that matches the title or text on the web page you are looking for into the Yahoo! search box at: http://search.yahoo.com.

“If your site appears in the results, it’s listed in the Yahoo! Search Index, and you don’t need to complete a feedback form as your request will not be processed,” Yahoo! says.

If your site was once in the index and is currently not found in a unique phrase search, and you feel that site is in full compliance with the Yahoo! Content Quality Guidelines, you can inquire about your site’s status by completing the following form: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_urlstatus

If that doesn’t get you anywhere and you’ve waited several weeks after fixing everything wrong with your site, you can try this Second Review Request form:

http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_rereview

I’m trying to get another penalty lifted

What if your site IS in the search index but is obviously being penalized? Yahoo! doesn’t really tell you, except to direct you to its Quality Content Guidelines.

At the bottom of that page, Yahoo! asks: “Is this enough information?”

I’ve clicked on “No” and told Yahoo! that another of my sites IS in the search index but is obviously being penalized (because of my past excessive crosslinking, I assume). I’ve politely asked for a review. Now I’m waiting to see what happens. I’ve been waiting a long time.

I’ll update this article if there’s any news.

If your site is being penalized by Yahoo!, I hope this helps.

Good luck!

SEO, Search Engines

Search Terms
The words or phrases used by people when performing searches in search engines. Also called keywords, query terms or query.

Ad Pimp
A website that has too many ads on it in an obvious attempt to monetize the site.

Ad Rank
Google AdWords multiplies Quality Score (QS) and the maximum CPC (Max CPC) to reach an Ad Rank for each ad.

Added Value Affiliates
Provide a value-added service to visitors in addition to affiliate links and affiliate content.

AdSense Arbitrage
The process of buying traffic with pay-per-click programs, sending traffic to highly optimized Adsense pages and collecting the difference.

AdSense Link Clicking Bots
Automated programs that try to spoof random IP addresses to click through AdWords displayed on a site.

Adwords Google’s - Cost Per Click (CPC) based advertising system.

Affiliate Sniper
People who save money on purchases by switching your affiliate ID with their own.

Agent Name
An agent name is the name of the software accessing a web page.

Aggregator
Software that lets you automatically download content to your computer

AIDA
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action: A term used to describe a formula to increase conversions.

Algorithm
A mathematical formula used to determine the value of a page when compared against others.

AlltheWeb
Second Tier search engine.

ALT Text
The text that appears when you put your mouse on top of an image or a picture.

AltaVista
Used to be the #1 search engine until Google came along.

Anchor Text
Also known as Link Text, the clickable text of a hyperlink.

AOL
America On-Line - Great for novice users, uses Google as part of it’s search results.

API
Application Programming Interface.

ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange

Ask Trying to be considered as one of the “Top Dogs” along with Yahoo and MSN, following Google.

ASP
Dual meanings: Microsoft Active Server Pages (filename.asp) or Application Service Provider (e.g. a provider of web based applications)

Astroturfing The practice of faking, pushing or help to mold a “grass roots” movement.

ATF (Above the Fold)
This is the part of the user’s screen that is always displayed.

Audioblog
An audio web log in MP3 format and available for download to an MP3 player or a computer.

Authority Site
A site that has many In-Bound links coming to it, and very little outbound links.

Back link
A text link to your website from another website.

Banned
A term that means a site has been removed from a search engine’s index.

Banner Blindness
The act of web visitors to ignoring advertisements on the site whether it is a graphic or text ad.

BAP (Blog and Ping)
A method (ab)used to get the search engines to quickly index your blog’s content.

Black Hat SEO A term referring to the practice of “unethical” SEO. These techniques are used to gain an advantage over your competition.

Blind Traffic
This is traffic that is extremely low quality often by low relevance pages.

Blog A “Web Log” that is updated frequently and is usually the opinion of one person. Also joking stands for Better Listing on Google.

Blogged
Term referring to have bookmarked a blog in your browser.

Blogola
The emerging practice of giving free stuff (from tote bags to travel junkets) to bloggers, in return for a sympathetic review.

Blook
A book that is serialized on a blog site. Chapters are published one by one as blog posts.

Bot
Short for robot. Often used to refer to a search engine spider.

Browser
Software application used to browse the internet - Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer are the 2 most popular browsers.

BTF (Below the Fold)
This is the part of the user’s screen that is hidden unless the user scrolls down on the page.

C Class IP
This is the third block of numbers found in an IP Address.

Cache
A copy of web pages stored within a search engine’s database.

CAPTCHA
Stands for : Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

Catablog
A blog that describes products for sale.

Click Arbitrage
Purchasing PPC ads and hoping that traffic leaves with a click on your ads.

Click Distance
The minimum number of clicks it takes a visitor to get from one page to another.

Click Flipping
The process of identifying and maximizing, multiple profit pathways, using PPC traffic and converting that traffic with Cost Per Action offers.

Click Pirates
Peuple who click on ads, knowingly and proudly, stealing from advertisers, as they encourage others to join with them in this quest.

Click Poison The process of using blatant phrases such as “Cool New Idea” and “Click here for Travel Tips” to get a site buried on sites such as digg and netscape.

Click Through
The process of clicking through an online advertisement to the advertiser’s destination.

Clickprint Derived from the amount of time a user spends on a Web site and the number of pages viewed, a clickprint is a unique online fingerprint that can help a vendor identify return visitors, curb fraud, and collect personal information for “customer service.” aka invasive marketing

Cloaking
A technique that shows keyword stuffed apges to a search engine, but a real page to a human user.

Clustering
In search engine search results pages, clustering is limiting each represented website to one or two listings.

Collabulary
A collaborative vocabulary for tagging Web content. Like the folksonomies used on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, collabularies are generated by a community. But unlike folksonomies, they’re automatically vetted for consistency, extracting the wisdom of the crowds from the cacophony.

Content Networks
A nicer way to say Link Farm.

Content Repurposing
A nicer way to say scraping a site for content.

Contextual Link Inventory (CLI)
Text links that are shown depending on the content that appears around them.

Conversion Optimization
Transforms your site into a selling tool - your site logically leads visitors through the sales cycle and closes sale.

Conversion Rate
The number of visitors to a website that end up performing a specific action that leads to a conversion. This could be a product purchase, newsletter sign up or anything where information is submitted.

Converting Search Phrase
A phrase that converts traffic into money.

Cookie
Information stored on a user’s computer by a website.

Copy
Text found on a web page.

Cost per Thousand
The cost for each thousand impressions of your ad.

CPA - (Cost Per Action)
The price paid for each visitor’s actions from a paid search.

CPC (Cost Per Click)
The amount it will cost each time a user selects your phrase or keyword.

Crawler
A bot from a search engine that reads the text found on a website in order to determine what the website is about.

Cross Linking
Having multiple websites linking to each other.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
Used to define the look and navigation of a website.

CTR (Click Through Rate)
The value associated to the amount of times a paid ad is viewed.

Cybrarian
A person who finds, collects, and manages information available on the Internet.

Dangling Link
This term is applied to a web page with no links to any other pages. Also known as an Orphan Page.

Dead Link
A hyperlink pointing to a non-existent URL.

Deep Crawl
Once a month, Googlebot will crawl all of the links it has listed in it’s database on your site. This is known as the Deep Crawl.

Deep Link
A link on a website that is not reachable from the home page.

Delisting
When a site gets removed from the search index of a search engine.

Deliverable
In a contract, these are the expected results of the services provided.

diggbait
Purposely creating content to get traffic from digg.com

Directory
Usually human edited, a directory contains sites that are sorted by categories.

DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
A declaration that protects digital works found online.

DMOZ
Also known as the Open Directory Project.

DNO
Domain Network Optimizers

DNS (Domain Name System)
A protocol that lets computers recognize each other through an IP Address, whereas the human sees a website URL.

Dooced
Fired for negative blogging about the company you work for.

Doorway Page
A web page designed to draw in Internet traffic from search engines, and then direct this traffic to another website.

Dynamic Site
A site that uses a database to store it’s content and is delivered based on the variable passed to the page.

EPC (Earnings Per Click)
How much profit is made from each click from a paid ad.

EPV (Earnings Per Visitor)
The cost it takes to make profit from a site’s total number of visitors.

Error 404
When a hyperlink is pointing to a location on the web that doesn’t exist, it is called a 404 error.

Everflux
A term associated with the constant updating of Google’s algorithm between the major updates.

External Link
A link that points to another website.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Question)
Commonly found on websites, FAQs answer questions that many users generally have about a product or service.

FFA (Free For All)
A site where anyone can list their link. Don’t waste any time submitting your site to these places.

Filter Words
Words such as is, am, were, was, the, for, do, ETC, that search engines deem irrelevant for indexing purposes. Also known as Stop words.

Flog
A fake blog, a website pretending to be a blog but actually the creation of public relations firms, the mainstream media, or professional political operatives.

Folksonomy
The construction of open-ended organization systems that allow multiple internet users to sort web sites and their elements.

Frankenbuild
Pirated software cobbled together from beta versions and early releases.

Fresh Crawl
Utilizes FreshBot to review already indexed pages and any pages where the content has been updated.

FreshBot
A sister to GoogleBot, this spider crawls highly ranked sites on a very frequent basis.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
Technology that allows file transfers from a local machine to a remote host.

Geo Targeting
A very tactful way to employ cloaking.

GFNR
Google First Name Rank.

Google
Currently, the world’s #1 search engine.

Google AdWords
Google’s PPC program.

Google Bombing
A technique where using the same text anchor links, many people link to a certain page, usually of irrelevant content.

GoogleBot
The spider that performs a deep crawl of your site.

Googlebowling
To nudge a competitor from the serps.

Googlephobia
The fear of Google taking over everything.

Googlewashing
When your content is copied and inserted into someone else’s site without permission or credit.

GOOGOL
This is the term that inspired the creators of Google to use this name - it means: 10100 = 1 followed by 100 zeros

Heading Tag
Tag that designates headlines in the text of a site.

Hidden Text
Text that can’t be seen normally in a browser.

Hit
A single access request made to the server.

Hoax Marketing
The creation of false stories to drive traffic to a site.

htaccess
.htaccess is an Apache file that allows server configuration instructions.

HTML
HyperText Markup Language - the basics for all web coding.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for many tasks.

HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure)
It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for many tasks, but has security features enabled to protect sensitive data.

Hub
A site that has many outbound links, and few sites linking back.

IBL (In-Bound Link)
A link residing on another site that points to your site.

ICRA (Internet Content Rating Association)
The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) is an international, non-profit organization of internet leaders working to make the internet safer for children, while respecting the rights of content providers.

IM (Instant Messaging)
As the name implies, this protocol allows for extremely fast communication over the Internet

Index
A term used to describe the database that holds all the web pages crawled by the search engine for each website.

Indexing Assistance
An even more advanced form of cloaking.

Information Architecture
The gathering, organizing, and presenting information to serve a purpose.

Informational Query
A query about a topic where the user expects to be provided with information on the topic.

Internal Link
A link that points to another page within the same site. Most commonly used for navigation.

Internet
An interconnected system of networks that connects computers around the world via the TCP/IP protocol.

Internet Traffic Optimizer (ITO)
A broader term for a person who optimizes not only for search engines but to get traffic from other sources such as blogs, RSS feeds and articles.

Interstitials
Loads a commercial in the background of a Web page. When the user exits the page, the user gets served a full-page, between-page advertisement in Flash, an animated gif or other rich media.

Invisible Web
Web Pages that are not reachable by search engines.

IP (Internet Protocol)
This protocol allows for machines to communicate to each other via the Internet.

IP Address (Internet Protocol Address)
how data finds its way back and forth from your computer to the internet.

IP Spoofing
A method of reporting an IP address other than your own when connecting to the internet.

js (JavaScript)
A scripting language that provides browser functionality.

Keyword Density A ratio of the number of occurrences of a keyword or “keyword phrase” to the total number of words on a page.

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)
The KEI compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results to pinpoint which keywords should be the most effective for your campaign.

Keyword Phrase
A group of words that form a search query.

Keyword Stuffing Using a keyword or “keyword phrase” excessively in a web page, perhaps in the text content or meta tags.

Klog
The term used when weblogs are used in knowledge management use cases.

KW (Key Words)
Used to define the terms a user might enter into a search engine to find information on their query.

Landing Page
Usually used in conjunction with a PPC campaign, they are call-to-action pages that prompt the user to engage the site.

Link Also known as a hyperlink, it is the “clickable” area of text or image that allows for navigation on the Internet. Also the name of the main character og the Legend of Zelda video games.

Link Bait (Linkbaiting)
The process of getting users to link to your site.

Link Farm
A site that features links in no particular order which are totally unrelated to each other.

Link Maximization
The method of getting popular sites in your industry to link to your website.

Link Partner
A website who is willing to put a link to your site from their website. Quite often link partners engage in reciprocal linking.

Link Popularity
How many sites link to your website.

Link Text
The clickable part of a hyperlink. Also known as Anchor Text or Anchor Link.

Linkerati
People who are the target of linkbait - bloggers, forum users, social taggers, etc.

Listings
The results that a search engine returns for a particular search term.

Mashups
Commonly thought of as a way of merging two different items, or scraping more than one source.

Meta Description Tag
Hold the description of the content found on the page.

Meta Keywords Tag
Holds the keywords that are found on the page.

Meta Search Engine
A search engine that relies on the meta data found in meta tags to determine relevancy.

Meta Tag Masking
An old trick that uses CGI codes to hide the Meta tags from browsers while allowing search engines to actually see the Meta tags.

Meta Tags
Header tags that provide information about the content of a site.

Metadata
META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements, are found within the section of your web pages.

Metajacking
The use of copyrighted names and slogans in META tags.

MFA (Made For AdSense)
A term that describes websites that are created entirely for the purpose of gaming Google Adsense to make money.

MFD
Made For Digg - Similar to MFA (Made for AdSense) sites, these sites try to get traffic from digg by having entire sites full of funny images or postings.

Microchunk
To split up a product or service sold traditionally as a package, offering each piece to buyers a la carte.

MicroFormats
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging). - taken from (http://microformats.org/about/)

Mirror Sites
A mirror site is a site that exacltly duplicates another site.

Mobisode
TV shows shot exclusively for mobile phones.

MoBlog Short for “My Mobile Blog”, a service from Blogger that when you send an email to go@blogger.com from your cellphone, it automatically creates a new blog.

Mociology
The study of how people adapt and use wireless technologies.

Most Wanted Response (MWR)
This is what you want your customer to do on your site.

Mowser
Short for Mobile Browser.

MP3 Stands for “MPEG Third Layer.” A standard for storing and transmitting music in digital format across the Internet.

MSN (MicroSoft Network)
Microsoft’s search engine.

Narrowcasting
Creating a program aimed at a small and specific niche or group of people.

Natural Listing
A listing that appears below the sponsored ads, also known as Organic Listings.

Navigational Query
A query that normally has only one satisfactory result.

NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement)
Usually required as part of a contract to protect the company engaging in services.

Necroing The act of posting to old threads to bring them back up. Also known as “bumping”.

Niche
A specialized segment of a market that is usually geared towards one specific purpose.

Niche Aggregators
Another way of saying Spam site.

NOFOLLOW
An attribute used in a hyperlink to instruct search engines not to follow the link. (And pass PageRank)

Off-Page Factors
Factors that alter search engine positions that occur externally from other website’s. By having many links from other sites pointing to yours is an example of Off-Page Factors.

On-Page Factors
Factors that determine search engine positions that occur internally within a page of a website. This can include site copy, page titles, and navigational structure of the site.

OOP (Over Optimization Penalty)
A theory that applies if one targets only 1 keyword or phrase, and the search engines view the linking efforts to be spam.

OpenRank (Open Source PageRank)
A suggestion to make a web-wide ranking system as opposed to Google’s Pagerank.

Opt-In
When a user willing joins a subscription to a newsletter or some other service.

Organic Listing
The natural results returned by a search engine.

Orphan Page
A page that has a link to it, but has no links to any other sites.

Outbound Link
A link from your site to any other site.

Page View
Anytime a user looks at any page on a website through their browser.

PageMatch
A cost-per-click advertising program that serves your site’s ad on a page that contains related content.

PageRank Drain
When a page has no outbound links, it causes pagerank drain because it cannot pass any value to another web page.

Paid Inclusion
A submission service where you pay a fee to a search engine and the search engine guarantees that your website will be included in its index. Paid inclusion programs will also ensure that your website is indexed very fast and crawled on regular basis. It can also be used as a term to include fee based directory submission.

Pay-Per-Click Management
Strategy, Planning and Placement of targeted keywords in the paid search results.

PFI (Pay For Inclusion)
A system in which a site pays to get a guaranteed listing.

PFP (Pay For Performance)
A system in which payment for services is only made when a conversion takes place.

Podcasting
A Podcast is just an audio file that is syndicated via an RSS feed, that is downloaded and listened to with a computer or a portable device such as an iPod.

Podcatching
The process of subscribing to podcasts.

PPC (Pay Per Click)
A technique where placements are determined by how much id bid on a particular keyword or phrase. Can become very expensive.

PR (Google’s PageRank)
Google’s unique system of how it tries to predict the value of a pages rank.

Pro Blogging
A person who makes a living by blogging.

Query
An inquiry that is entered into a search engine in order to get results.

Rank - Ranking
The actual position of a website on a search engine results page for a certain search term or phrase.

Reciprocal Link
When two sites link to each other.

Redirects
Either server side or scripting language that tells the search engine to go to another URL automatically.

Referral Spam
Sending multiple requests to a website spoofing the header to make it look like real traffic is being sent to another site.

Referrer
A referrer is the URL of the page that the visitor came from when he entered a website.

Relevance Rank (RR)
A system in which the search engine tries to determine the theme of a site that a link is coming from

Relevancy
Term used to describe how close the content of a page is in relation to the keyword phrase used to search.

Results Page When a user conducts a search, the page that is displayed, is called the results page. Sometimes it may be called SERPs, which stands for “search engine results page.”

RFP (Request for Proposal)
Used to send out to multiple companies in order to get a list of services to be delivered and at what cost.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
Applications such as Ajax and Flash that provide a better user experience by delivering content in an on-demand web environment.

Robot
Often used to refer to a search engine spider.

ROC (Return on Customer)
The value each customer brings.

ROI (Return on Investment)
The cost it takes to in order to see success on your marketing investment.

RSS Feed (Rich Site Summary or Rich Site Syndication)
RSS feeds use an XML document to publish information.

Scope Creep
When the contracted amount of work to be completed changes because of client changes or technology advances.

SE (Search Engine)
A web based information retrieval program.

Search Engine
Best described as a database of websites users can search using search terms. Every search engine has its own algorithm which defines how the results are displayed.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
The practice of getting a website found on the internet

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The act of altering code to a website to have optimum relevance to a search engine spider.

Search Friendly Optimization (SFO)
As the term implies, this is the process of making a website search engine friendly.

Search Query
The text entered into the search box on a search engine.

SEOlebirty
Famous people in the world of search.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
The results that are displayed after making a query into a search box.

SFO
Search Friendly Optimization.

Sitemap (Site Map)
A page that lists all of the critical navigation points of a website.

Slurp
The name of Yahoo’s Search Engine Spider.

Smishing
Phishing via text message. Smishers bombard cell phones with SMS versions of standard phishing solicitations, directing victims to Web sites that install spyware on their computers.

Snippet
The text displayed from a search query.

Social Media Poisoning
A technique where unscrupulous marketers will try to sabotage a competitor’s web site by engaging in social media communications and link seeding/spamming tactics that they hope will spark a rash of bad publicity, and maybe even trigger some sort of rankings and/or reputational search penalty against their competitor.

SPAM
Unwanted email or irrelevant content delivered. (or as some say, Site Placed Above Mine)

Spam Cannon
A term used in conjunction with sites that use email sign-ups for spamming purposes - the latimes.com is an example.

Spamming
The act of delivering unwanted messages to the masses.

Spamouflage
The method or result of concealing or disguising search engine spam to make it appear to be legitimate.

Spider
The software that crawls your site to try and determine the content it finds.

Spiderbaiting
A technique that makes a search engine spider find your site.

Splash Page
A page displayed for viewing before reaching the main page.

Stemming
The main part of a word to which affixes are added.

Stickiness
How influential your site is in keeping a visitor on your page.

Stop Word A stop word is a “common word” which is ignored in a query because the word makes no contribution to the relevancy of the query.

Stop Word Stop words are very common words such as ‘a, the, and & that’ and are filtered out of your search query. Search engines do this in order to try to serve the best results for a user query.

Strategic Linking
A thought out approach to getting websites to link to your site.

Submission
The process of submitting URL(s) to search engines or directories.

SWOT
A methodic way of identifying your Strengths and Weaknesses, and of examining the Opportunities and Threats you face.

Syntax
The proper use of language when coding a website.

Tag Soup
Tag soup is HTML code written without regard for the rules of HTML structure and semantics.

The Deep Web
The content in databases that rarely shows up in Web searches. It is estimated that there are 500 billion Web pages that could potentially be hidden.

Theme
What the site’s main topic is about.

Thin Affiliates
Doorways that send visitors to affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user.

Title Tag
It should be used to describe the web page using targeted keywords using no more that 60 characters, including spaces.

TLD (Top Level Domain) Most commonly thought of as a “.com”, also includes “.org” and “.edu”

TOM (Tactical Online Marketing)
The process of informing the customer of your services from various sources.

TOS (Terms of Service) Usually found in a contract, also known as the contracts “deliverables”.

Tracking URL
Usually used in PPC campaigns, it is a URL that has special code added to it so that results can be monitored.

Traffic
The number of visitors a website receives over a given period. Usually reported on a monthly basis.

Transactional Query
A query where the user expects to conduct a transaction.

Trusted Feed
A form of paid inclusion which uses bulk a XML feed to directly send website content to search engines for indexing. The feed can be optimized so that your website can take advantage better rankings and therefore more traffic

TrustRank
A method of using a combination of limited human site review in conjunction with a search engines algorithm.

Typosquatting
Relies on typographical errors by users to serve up websites that look like Google to launch viruses and trojans to unsuspecting users.

Unique Visitor When a user visits a website, his/her IP address is logged so if he/she returns later on that day, the visit won’t be counted as a unique visit but as a page impression.

Universal Search
Launched on May 16, 2007, this is Google’s attempt to deliver the best result from the web. This can include video, images, news, podcasts or any other form of digital content.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
Commonly referred to as the domain name, this is how humans navigate through the Internet, whereas computers use IP addresses.

User Agent
A User agent name is the name of the software accessing a web page. (Another term for Agent Name)

USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
Sometimes mistakenly defined as Unique Selling Point. The Unique Selling Proposition concept was first developed by Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency. Basically, it’s what sets you apart from your competition.

VEO
Visitor Enhanced Optimization

VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol)
VoIP converts the voice signal from your telephone into a digital signal that travels over the internet then converts it back at the other end so you can speak to anyone with a regular phone number.

Web Saturation
How many pages of your site are indexed by the search engines collectively.

Webneck
Slang term for a person who spends most of their time on the internet, most of their friends are netpals, and they are uncomfortable if they can’t get online.

White Hat SEO
A term that refers to ethical practice of SEO methodologies that adhere to search engine Terms of Service.

White Paper
A White Paper is your statement about how a problem should be solved.

Whois Data
Registration data such as the company name, address and telephone number when registering a domain name.

Whore Trains
A list of people on MySpace that you add yourself to and keep reposting the list so that you can get a lot of people requesting to be your friends.

Wi-Fi (certification mark)
Used to certify the interoperability of wireless computer networking devices.

WikiSoldiers
Users who enjoy the process of building and defending wikipedia.

Wilf
What was I looking for?

WWW (World Wide Web)
Another term to describe the Internet.

XML (Extensible Markup Language (filename.xml))
A scripting language that allows the programmer to define the properties of the document.

Yahoo!
The #2 Search Engine in the world.

Zeitgeist (Google Zeitgesit)
A service provided that shows snippets of the emerging and declining trends of what people are searching for through the Google search engine.

SEO