Search Engine Marketing Glossary
A comprehensive Glossary for anyone interested in learning more about Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click Search Marketing.
Algorithm
Computer calculations that the search engines use to rank pages in their index based on the search terms to then display in the results. Each of the major search engines has a different ranking algo rithm with Google’s algorithm including over 100 individual ranking criteria.
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Directory
A directory is a listing of websites, usually in a specific organised format. The largest directories on the web are the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and the Yahoo Directory. DMOZ important because it is used extensively by Google's own Directory.
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Keyword
A keyword is any word that could be used by someone in a search engine to help them find what they are looking for. Multiple keywords make up keyword phrases which are used in search queries. It is crucial to make sure that you chose the correct keywords when designing and developing a website so that its easier for the people searching for your products to find your company.
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Keyword Density
Keyword density is the measure of the number of occurrences of a specific keyword, or keyword phrase, on a web page. This was a major ranking factor in the good old days but this was very open to abuse and so now plays a very minor role in deciding where to rank a website.
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Keyword Phrase
A keyword phrase is common phrase used on search engines. A search phrase is a combination of a number of individual keywords, which together make the search more specific. Keyword phrases are more important than individual keywords because most people search with a combination of words rather than just the one word.
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Link Building
Link building is a program of seeking out and building up the link popularity of a site from other relevant and authority sites. It also includes finding relevant sites to offer as a resource to visitors to your site. This can be a very time-consuming process as it involves many hours of research. It is perhaps one of most crucial aspects of search engine marketing however.
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Link Popularity
Link popularity is the measure of the number of websites that link to your own website. This mesurement can vary from search engine to search engine. It is one of the major factors involing Googles PageRank.
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Log Files
Every time somone visits your website they leave a footprint. This information is contained with the web servers log files. Log files are a record of every action on a web site. Discovering information about what people do on your website is one of the most important aspects of a successful search engine marketing campaign. Get to understand your visitors properly and you can then understand how to improve your website accordingly.
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Meta Refresh
A meta refresh is a method of redirecting visitors when they arrive at a page. This is achieved using a meta tag that simply tells the browser which page to redirect to. Do not ever use this technique however. If at all possible you should use a permanent or temporary redirect command using an .htaccess file.
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Meta Tags
Meta tags offer additional information about a webpage. They help the search engines discover more information about a particular page. The most imporant meta tag is now the description tag, which most be unique for every single page you on your website. Keywords used to be important but this is only used to support additional imformation already contained on the page these days.
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Off-Page Optimisation
Off-page optimisation is now the most important aspect of search engine optimization. Off Page optimization includes developing successful incoming links and improbving the external profile of your site. In otherwords not necessarily what you say about your website but other websites say about it. The recent algorithm update by Google codenamed Jagger, seems to reinforce this.
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On-Page Optimisation
Ideally this should be the first stage of any optimization project. You need to ensure that your site is properly set up for the search engines. The friendlier and easier it is for the search engines to crawl your site the better your rankings will be. See Off Page Optimization. Ensure your site has clear navigation, good relevant content and a search friendly site map.
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Optimisation / Optimization
Optimisation is the practice of analysing and making changes to a number of different factorsrelating to a website. This will sometimes involve a site redesign and most certainly Off Page and On Page Optimization. See Above
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Organic / Natural Search Listings
Organic or natural search engine listings are those that appear on the search engine results pages (SERPs) that have not been paid for as part of a pay per click campaign. The better the organic listings the higher the number of visitors to your site.
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Page Views
Page views is the number of times a sites web pages have been viewed over a given period. It is a far more accurate measurement of a sites popularityy than hits but is still not a particuarly helpful statistic exept in determining how good your sites content is. Generally the higher number of page views per visit the better and more interesting the website is.
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Pay For Inclusion
Paid inclusion is the model of paying to ensure a web site is listed in a search index. This can be very costly, but also very necessary to ensure a site is visible in the major search engines. This is becomming less important in the UK market with very few sites offering pay for inclusion. Preferring to rely on there search spiders to gather up relevant sites. Yahoo has stopped there Pay for Inclusion programme in then UK.
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Paid Search Listings
Paid search listings are those search results that have been included on the search engine results pages (SERPs) as part of a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. These listings have been created by and are paid for by site owners (or their account managers). They are essentially adverts that are tailored to the particular search.
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Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a model for search-related advertising. With pay per click campaigns, you create your ad creative, select a budget or Cost Per Click (CPC) and then specify the particular keyword searches for which you would like that ad to appear. Your ad is then displayed each time someone enters those search terms into a search engine that uses the results of the pay per click engine you created the ads on.
Pay per click advertising can be a very rewarding marketing tool but it involves a great deal of research and it can be difficult to achieve a good ROI.
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Relevancy
Relevancy is the measure of a site’s relevance to individual search terms. This is determined by a search engines algorithm which determine which sites should be displayed in the results.
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Robot
A robot is essentially a computer program that visits web pages. These robots are created by the search indexes and help to build and maintain those indexes.
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Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file you must place within your website root directory. It allows you to tell the robots to ignore individual pages or whole directories, or even the whole site. Basically it tells the search engine robots how to behave. For more information on this read our article on the robots.txt file and duplicate content.
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SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
Search engine results pages are the pages produced by the search engine after it has been queried using a search phrase. This is where the relevant search results appear.
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Stop Word
Stop words are words like ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’ and ‘of’ and also ‘where’ and ‘how’. All search engines automatically exclude these words because they may slow down the search and are not actually needed to improve results.
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Title Tag <title></title>
The title tag is a piece of HTML code that defines the text that appears at the top of the browser window whilst a page is being displayed. The contents of the title tag also appears as the link to the page in search results. Google, especially puts a great deal of emphasis on a webpage's title. Try and reflect your most important keywords within this title tag.
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Trusted Feed
A trusted feed is an XML-based method of ensuring up-to-date inclusion in search indices. An XML file is used to hold information about pages on a site which is referred to by the search index to keep the index up-to-date. A site utilising a trusted feed will be re visited and updated every 48 hours on average.
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Unique Visitors
Unique visitors is the number of individual people who visit a site in a period of time. This figure is gained through web analytics. The more unique visitors a site has the more popular it is and generally speaking the better ranked it will be in the search engines.
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Should you wish to discuss any of these services with us please call us on 0845 658 0330 or fill in our Search Engine Marketing Enquiry Form and one of our consultants will contact you shortly.
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