Useful Search Engine Optimization Terms and Definitions

It's no secret -- for any business to thrive, regardless of how big it is, a solid presence on the Internet is a must. This means making your company's website as visible as possible to Google, MSN, Yahoo and all the other search engines across the Web.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a collection of web copy-writing and viral marketing techniques that can be employed to make your website leap to the top of the Google search results.

Marketing Breakthroughs specializes in the creation and implementation of effective, results-driven SEO web copy, site design and web marketing initiatives. While we can't give away all of our secrets, we can provide you with the following in-depth glossary of useful search engine optimization terms and definitions, which should prove tremendously useful to anybody looking to make their website a bigger hit with the search engines.

Anchor Text

• The anchor text or link label is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink (that is, the text a user clicks on when clicking a link on a web page).
• Using SEO keywords as anchor text is vital. Search engines use it to determine the main keyword for the target page.
• Anchor text should contain text that is informative and helpful to your reader. It should give a clear indication of what the target page is about, whether that page is on your site or is an external link.

Deep Links

• Deep links are links to internal web pages within your own site. The number of deep links is a valuable indicator of the quality of a site.
• Deep linking enhances usability because it is more likely to satisfy users' needs. Generic links, such as links to a company's homepage, are less useful than specific links that take users to an individual article or product.

Deep Linking Percentage

• Deep linking percentage is the number of deep links as a total of the overall links directing to your site. This percentage generally ranges from 5% to 80%. A DLP of over 30% is the minimum that should be strived for.

Domain

• The address of a site, without the protocol, path, page or other items attached. For example, microsoft.com is a domain, while a full URL could be http://www.microsoft.com/stuff/page.html.

Domain Branding

• Domain names should be short, unique and easy to remember. They should be descriptive of the content of the site and ideally contain SEO keywords or phrases.

Google Pages Indexed

• Pages indexed refers to the number of pages within a site that have been crawled or viewed by a search engine.
• Search engines index and categorize sites based on the site's content, and the more pages indexed, the more important the site is in the eyes of a search engine.
• As a minimum, any given site should strive to have at least 400 pages indexed.

Hyperlinks

• A hyperlink (commonly referred to as a link) is a reference or navigation element in a website to another section of the same website or another website, which automatically brings the referred information to the user when the navigation element is selected.

Header Tags

• Use header tags to define your page's organizational structure and simplify page navigation. Well-written header text informs visitors and helps them navigate through your page, perhaps even keeping them at your site longer. Effective header tags will even increase your site ranking on some search engines by incorporating keywords and keyword phrases.
• Think of header tags like the main section headers in a term paper outline. The major points go in larger text while subheadings appear underneath in smaller text.

Homepage

• The homepage is the main page of a website. Typically, the home page serves as an index or table of contents to other documents stored at the site.

Inbound Links

• Links that point to your site from sites other than your own. Inbound links are an important asset that will improve your site's Page Rank. As a minimum, sites should strive to have more than 200 inbound links.

Keywords

• To achieve a high search engine placement for a relevant search, a website must contain the appropriate positioning and density of keywords or phrases related to the search terms used. This is a critical part of the search engine optimization (SEO) for any website.
• Keywords are words that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page. 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 for that term (unless you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine)
• Website copy should be optimized for popular search terms and keywords in order to improve search results ranking.

Keyword Density

• The ratio of the number of occurrences of a particular keyword or phrase to the total number of words in a 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.
• Although it is important to use keywords in web copy, they must not be overused or else the search engine might consider the site to be "spam". Ideally, keywords should make up between 5% and 10% of a site's titles and text.
• Sites with too little keyword density (below 5%) may not be properly categorized by search engines.

Keyword popularity

• The number of occurrences of searches done by Internet users of a given keyword during a period of time.

Link Popularity

• A measure of the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site. Many search engines use link popularity as a factor in determining the search engine ranking of a website.

Latent Semantic Indexing

• Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching query text.
• By placing additional weight on related words in content, or words in similar positions in other related documents, LSI has a net effect of lowering the value of pages, which only match the specific term and do not back it up with related terms.
• LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant.
• When indexing a page, Google not only considers keywords, but also analyzes whether the text is semantically close to the keywords a site is optimized for. This allows Google to ensure that the site is actually about what it says it is about.
• Remember to vary your anchor text. Latent semantic indexing can also be used to look at the link profile of your website. If all your links are heavy in a few particular phrases and light on other similar phrases then your site may not rank as well.

Meta Description

• A meta description is a tag hidden in the HTML coding that describes the page's content. This tag should be relatively short (around 12 to 20 words, in sentence format, is recommended).
• The meta description provides an opportunity to influence how your website is described in the search results; however, it will not necessarily improve your search rankings.
• Make sure your meta description reflects your actual page content or you may be accused of spamming.

Meta Keywords

• A meta tag hidden in the HTML that provides a list of keywords relevant to the page's content.
• Because search engine spammers have abused these lists so much, this tag provides little to no benefit to your search rankings. Of the major search engines, only Yahoo! still pays any attention to the meta keywords tag.

Meta Tags

• Meta tags are used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes.
• Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site.
• Information placed in a web page not intended for users to see but instead which typically passes information to search engine crawlers.

Outbound links

• Links that direct away from your site and to another website.

Page Rank

• Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each web page on the Internet; this PageRank denotes your site's importance in the eyes of Google.
• The scale for PageRank is logarithmic, like the Richter Scale, and is roughly based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the importance of the page providing the link. PageRank is also based on keyword rich content and the number of pages indexed.
• As a minimum, any given site should strive to have a Page Rank of 5 to be competitive.

Reciprocal Linking

• The practice of trading links between websites

SERP

• Acronym for "search engine results page". The SERP is the page displayed by a search engine after a successful search displaying a list of links to pages for a particular keyword.

Site Architecture

• The structure of a web site. It reflects how information is organized, including categories, sub sites, labelling and other relationships.
• Web site architecture is an approach to the design and planning of websites, which, like architecture itself, involves technical, aesthetic and functional criteria.
• Search engine optimization for today's search engine robots requires that sites be well designed and easy-to-navigate.

Site Navigation

• The navigation scheme is the road map of your web site. The information must be organized and accessible in an easy to follow and easy to access format.
• On every page of your site, you must provide clear and unambiguous answers to the two basic questions your visitors will ask themselves: "Where am I?" and "Where do I go from here?"

Styles of Navigation

Links:

• The most basic form of navigation.

Bread-Crumb Trail:

• Breadcrumb navigation shows the user's path to their current location. These are links (usually in a small font and placed directly below the page header) that show where the user is in relation to the homepage.

Nav Bar:

• Most common style of navigation, the nav bar consists of a series of links or icons usually arranged in a row down the left hand side or along the top that plays a crucial role in getting site visitors to view more than just the home page.

Site Map

• "One-stop shopping" for everything on your site, this page is an overview of the navigational structure of a website, acting like a Table of Contents, and is used to orient users and show them the scope of the entire web site.
• Site maps can be textual or visual. Usually each location is an active link, enabling a user to move directly to that section. Site maps can also be important sources of links for search engine spiders to follow.

Spider

• The software that scans documents and adds them to an index by following links. Spider is often used as a synonym for search engine.

Subdirectory

• Subdirectory is used when the information on the page is still part of the main domain, but is a sub section of information. For example, "www.example.com/barcelona" is a subdirectory.

Subdomain

• A sub domain is a subdivision of a larger domain. For example, "mail.yahoo.com" is a sub domain of "yahoo.com."
• Subdomains provide a way of dividing a primary domain into specific sections and creating separate sites. Usually the sub domain is a descriptive name placed before the main domain.

Title Tags

• The text displayed at the very top of the browser window. Although usually inconspicuous to the user, the title tag is the most important bit of text on a web page as far as the search engines are concerned.
• Search engines not only assign the words in the title tag more weight, they also typically display the title tag in the search results, making the title tag an important potential call-to-action as well. 

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