Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Search Engine Terms

Adwords - This is the Pay Per Click advertising program offered by Google.

Adsense - Contextual advertising by Google. Website publishers earn a portion of the advertising revenue for placing Google sponsored links on their site.

Automated Submissions - Services that use a web based tool or software to submit sites to search engines, free for all pages, and directories. CM SEO does not recommend using these services, these submissions can be viewed by the receiving party as spam.

Directory - A directory is a method of organizing sites by category. Typically the directory structure is created and sites are reviewed and entered into the appropriate categories by humans. The two largest directories on the Internet are The Open Directory (ODP) and the Yahoo Directory.

Dmoz - Another name for ODP, Open Directory Project. The largest human edited directory on the Internet.

Hand Submissions - A service to develop appropriate titles and descriptions for submission to directories, search engines, and advertising sites. The submission is often unique for each directory, being sure to be compliant with all guidelines. CM SEO always offers hand submissions and has great success in getting relevant listings in appropriate directories.

Link Popularity - One of the early innovations by Google was the development of Page Rank, a numerical page ranking based on incoming links to a site. Further information on the original algorithm can be found at The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Link popularity is the process of developing incoming, outgoing, and reciprocal links for the purpose of increasing Page Rank.

Overture - This was the Pay Per Click advertising program offered by Yahoo. Renamed in early 2005 to Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Meta Tag - Information in the body of the html including description and keywords. These tags are often used by the search engines as part of their determination of placement and the description is often displayed in the results.

ODP - Open Directory Project - The largest human edited directory on the Internet. The Open Directory provides listings for free but only for qualified sites and because editors are volunteers, wait times can be lengthy.

Page Rank - See also Link Popularity. A numerical rating of a site developed by Google as part of it's algorithms for determining search engine listings. To view page rank requires installing the Google tool bar in your browser. Yahoo also utilizes Page Rank calculations.

PPC - Pay Per Click. This is an advertising option in which the advertiser has typically a small textual ad on a search engine site and pays only if a user clicks on the link in the ad.

PFI - Pay for Inclusion. This is a fee charged by a search engine to be spidered on a periodic basis to be included in the search engine results. Yahoo has a service that is a combination of PFI and PPC.

Search Engine Optimization - The process of fine tuning the content of a site along with the html and meta tags so that it is search engine friendly (and we hope people friendly at the same time).

Search Engine Optimizer - A Consultant the provides search engine optimization and Internet marketing services.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing - The process of marketing a site for improved search engine results, often including a combination of search engine optimization and paid advertising.

SEO - Search Engine Optimizer or Search Engine Optimization.

SEO Consultant - A SEO consultant specializes in web site promotion and visibility within the search engines.

SERP - Search Engine Results Page - This refers to the resulting listings that are shown when a keyword is searched upon.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

SEO Glossary

Alexa ranking - Alexa is a famous search engine that provides extra information such as traffic rankings. An Alexa ranking is an indicator used to gauge site performance.

Algorithm - A set of mathematical equations or rules that a search engine uses to rank the content contained within its index in response to a particular search query.

ALT Image tag - Spiders cannot able to read images as such, so the alt tag or text attribute describes what the specific image represents.

Analytics - Technology that helps analyze the performance of a website or online marketing campaign.

Anchor Text - The visible text component of a hyperlink.

Blog - A chronological journal that is available on the Web. Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog.

Blogosphere or Blogsphere - The current state of all information available on blogs and/or the subculture of those who create and use blogs.

Bot - Used in reference to a search engine robot or spider; software applications that retrieve web page information to feed into a search engine database.
Crawl - The process by which search engine spiders fetch web page information.

Crawler - Component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically trolling the Web and following inks to Web pages (also called a spider or robot or bot). It makes copies of the Web pages found and stores them in the search engine’s index.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. Used mainly to decrease the amount of source code on a page, by referencing a single set of instructions on how to display various elements on web page.

Directories - A type of search engine where listings are gathered via human efforts rather than by automated crawling of the Web.


Google Algorithm - A mathematical formula used in calculating search engine ranking. The goal of any SEOP is to understand the algorithm as best as possible. Algorithms of course are very closely guarded secrets and possibly you’ll never meet anyone who has “cracked” an algorithm. Search engine algorithms change regularly to prevent anyone from guessing the system.


HTML Code - The code used to build Web pages. Affiliates use HTML code to put links on their websites. Affiliate solution providers often provide a tool so that affiliates can simply copy the code for an affiliate link and paste it into their own HTML pages.

Link popularity - A gauge of a site’s popularity based on the number of inbound links. Link popularity is a major factor in search engine ranking and has greater strength (in theory) where inbound links are from other quality sites.

Meta tag - These mainly refer to the title, keywords and description tags. They are summary of the content that is on the page in different formats. Meta tags content does play a role in rankings for many search engines.

Off-page factors - Factors such as inbound links and the popularity of sites with links pointing into your site that you have little control over, but that still play a role in your site’s rankings.

On-page factors - A reference to the elements on your site and their role in your rankings, for example, Meta Tags, Code Cleaning relevance etc.

Monday, May 26, 2008

Search Engine Optimizations Tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an act of of increasing the the number of visitors to a particular Web site by adding appropriate keywords and phrases, and such ranking high in the search results.