Glossary

Anchor text

The text incorporated in a link between webpages

Conversions

Turning visitors to a website into buyers of a product. The ratio of buyers to visitors is called the conversion factor

External link

A link to a website from a different website (one with a different domain). The website owner usually does not have control over these links so they are given higher priority than internal links by search engines

Googlebot

Google's spider which crawls the web and indexes webpages

Hidden text

An unethical search engine optimization technique, for example white text on a white background, text positioned off the viewable screen area, text positioned behind an image

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language, the language that most webpages are written in. Search engine optimization requires some knowledge of HTML

Internal link

A link between pages within a website. The website owner has complete control over these links so they are given lower priority than external links by search engines

Keyword stuffing

An unethical search engine optimization technique, in which multiple keywords are used in over-long phrases on the webpage and within the source code itself, to the detriment of the user experience

Landing page

The page a user arrives on from a search engine

META tags

META tags are descriptive tags in the source code of a webpage. They are not displayed on the screen. There are various types of META tags, e.g. the META description tag and the META keywords tag. Historically META tags were overused and frequently stuffed with hundreds of keywords, so over time search engines have deprioritised the emphasis on META tags. They are still worth having for completeness, but they won't have much of an impact on your search engine ranking

Reciprocal link

Link structure where two related sites link to each other. Reciprocal links are frowned upon where they are purely for SEO purposes, but fine where the links add value to the user experience

SEM

Search Engine Marketing; can incorporate SEO to some extent. Optimizing a paid search advertising campaign and managing the related marketing issues including controlling the route of the user from landing page to product sale

SEO

Search Engine Optimization; optimizing a webpage for position in free, "organic", search engine listings

SERP

Search Engine Result Page; the page of results for a particular search term. The first goal of an SEO program is to get on to the first SERP, i.e. the top 10 results

Spider

Automated robot which crawls the web indexing webpages

Title

The page title is one of the most important aspects of a webpage and is what comes up in the search results on Google. It should contain the most important keywords and keyphrases, but also convince a user to click on the link when they find it in the search engine. It should be concise and to the point

Webmaster

Owner and manager of a website