Common SEO terms explained for beginners
I have written a short glossary of some of the terms i will be using in my articles and forum posts, you may also see many of these in other articles and resources around the internet, this is NOT a full glossary, this is just designed to give beginners a reference page to refer to that covers the basic terms. If anyone feels there is anything missing from here, please post on the forum and i will add the term to this page if its suitable.
Affiliate Marketing
A product creator or author pays affiliates a commission for selling his or hers product online. For example if you have a website on dog training you could sell someone elses dog training courses and get paid a commission for the sales by the author. This is a good way to make money from your website.
Alt Tag
Alternative text, this is the text used in html to provide display text when an image on your site cannot be displayed.
Backlink
A weblink leading from one website to another.
Black Hat SEO
The use of techniques that are not widely accepted as good practice, in order to improve your websites position in the search engines, the use of such techniques can result in your site being penalised by the search engines.
Blog
Web log, this is like a journal where webmaster regular write about a given subject and often allow visitors to comment on their writings.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets. A language used to define the attributes that control the appearance of a webpage, including fonts, colours, and layouts.
CTR
Click Through Rate, is a measurment of the number of times an advert on your site was clicked as a ratio of how many times the advert was seen, this is often used by webmasters using google adsense or similar.
Dynamic Website
A website thats content is not fixed, like a forum, or other database driven site
Google PageRank
Google PageRank is a numeric value applied to a specific page by google to show its importance.
Keywords
Words that are used by users and search engines to determine the topic of a page or website.
Keyword Density
The number of time a keyword or keyword phrase is used on a web page.
Meta Tags
Descriptive data hidden at the top of your webpages to help search engines identify the topic of your website/page.
Organic Search
Search results displayed on a search engines page that are NOT there via paid advertising, but occupy the space naturally. These are the best form of results and where most webmaster aim to have their websites displayed.
Paid Link Building
Websites that offer paid links to your website, this is frowned upon by the search engines.
PPC
Pay Per Click. This is a form of advertising where you can earn money each time an advert on your site is clicked by a visitor to your site.
Reciprocal Link
A link placed on website A linking to website B, with a link on website B linking back to website A. Its a case of i will place a link for you, and in return, you place one to me!
Search Engine
A website with the express function of cataloguing websites and helping users to find sites relative to their topic. Examples of search engines would be Google, Yahoo & MSN.
SEM
Search Engine Marketing. This is the process of marketing a website with a view to improving its rankings in the search engines, either in the organic listings or via paid adverts.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization. Making changes to a website in conjunction with SEM to target a website to its required audience.
SERP
Search Engine Results Page. This refers to the pages of results that appear on search engines.
Static Website
A website that displays fixed content that can only change by a webmaster manually changing it.
Title Tag
A meta tag in html that assigns a page title to each page on your website. This is the line that shows right at the top of your browser and indeed the first line describing your site on the SERPs.
URL
Uniform Resource Locator. This is basically, a web address.
White Hat SEO
Accepted practices used to place your website higher in the search rankings.
You can discuss or ask questions about this glossary HERE