SEO Glossary of Terms
25/02/2009
The following are commonly used terms within SEO (search engine optimisation) and a brief explantaion of their meaning.
Anchor text
The anchor text is the clickable text of a link. It is important for natural search, Having an anchor text of “click here” or ‘read more’ is not very helpful for search engine optimisation, and also makes the website non accessible.
Keyword, Key phrase or keyword phrase
Keywords are words and phrases that are likely to be used to search for your website’s products or services by potential website visitors. People do not always search for the actual product or service by name, but may use a generic name or brand name or related words.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to duplicating and over using keywords within the page content and/or meta tags to help search engine optimisation. Keyword stuffing is an example of unethical, or black-hat search engine optimisation and Cornish WebServices do not use these techniques as they risk your website being excluded from the search results all together.
Natural Results
Natural Results refer to the unpaid results of a search query in the main search engines. Website owners cannot pay the search engines to position themselves in these results
Page Rank (PR)
Page Rank is a ‘score’ awarded to your website by Google. A high PR means your site is an authority site. PR is awarded according to the linking structure of your website and also the quality of the sites that link to you. PageRank is shown in the Google Tool Bar but is sow in being updated and cannot be relied on as a measure of search engine optimisation progress.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing involves all online marketing strategies to make your website more visible. It includes SEO, PPC, plus other areas such as online PR, articles distribution and local search advertising.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation is the process of fine tuning your website o encourage high ranks within the natural results of the main search engines. It gives huge long term ROI.
Search engine Robots or Spiders
Search engine robots or spiders are robots that are sent out by search engines to ‘crawl’ through your website gathering data.
SERPs
SERPs is short for Search Engine Ranking Positions, and SEO agencies used to produce monthly SERPS reports. Many in fact still do, despite the fact that accurate SERPs on Google cannot be measure following the development of personalised search results.
URL Re-writing
URL re-writing is a technique in search engine optimisation that make web pages with long query parameters (such as in a shopping cart) into filenames which the search robots can index more easily.
