Accessibility

Accessibility is the practice of making websites usable by people with disabilities.

Because search engines are essentially blind (ie they can’t see pictures or use Flash) accessible websites tend to have better search engine rankings than inaccessible websites.

Adwords

Google’s CPC (Cost Per Click) based text advertising. Businesses and individuals can pay for their ad to display when people search for specific keywords. AdWords takes clickthrough rate into consideration in addition to advertiser’s bid to determine the ad’s relative position within the paid search results. Google has also started taking into account the quality of the landing page and its relavence to the keyword.

Adwords campaign

Campaigns are used to give structure to the products or services you want to advertise. The ads in a given campaign share the same daily budget, language and location targeting, end dates, and syndication options.

Within each campaign, you can create one or more ad groups. While a campaign may represent a broad product class, the ad groups within that campaign can be more focused on the specific product you want to advertise.

Blog

Also known as a “weblog”. An online diary with entries made on a regular if not daily basis. Some blogs are maintained by an anonymous author who uses a nickname or handle instead of his or her real name.

Blogs can attain a higher than usual search engine ranking because the content is regularly updated and indexed, they are also keyword rich and can have higher volumes of regular traffic.

CMS

Content Management System. A CMS page is created, saved, edited and delivered dynamically from the web server. The content of a website is stored in a database on a server and the content of a web page is generated on the fly when a visitor accesses a page.

Put another way, the content of the page is not static or pre-written. Content is changed and created through a web browser allowing, users to update their site remotely.

Directories

Human editors group websites into categories and provide site descriptions or edit descriptions that are submitted to them. With a directory, picking the right category and composing a description rich in key phrases will ensure maximum visibility. Contrast this with a search engine, which is unedited and concerned primarily with the HTML of a site’s constituent pages.

eCommerce

eCommerce is the practice of marketing, promotion, servicing or selling products or services through the Internet. An eCommerce site is most commonly a site that has some element of conducting core business activities over the Internet.

Forums

A virtual community. Also known as discussion forums. Using appropriate methods for posting to forums specific to your site's content and linking to your site within the content (or from your user signature) can provide relevant traffic and improve ranking on keywords within the post.

Geographic disbursement

Details the physical location of your sites visitors.

Google maps

Google’s geography based search engine. Millions of people search Google Maps every day. A free listing on Google Maps makes it easy for them to find you.

The Google Local Business Center is used to create and manage listings on Google Maps. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they’ll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products.

Mailing list

A list of e-mail addresses managed and identified by a single mail account. When mail is sent from the mailing list it is automatically forwarded to all the addresses in the list.

Meta Tags

Meta-information (information about information) that is associated with a web page and placed in the HTML but not displayed on the page for the user to see. There are a range of meta tags, only a few of which are relevant to search engine spiders. Two of the most well-known meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords.

Navigation trends

An analysis of site traffic statistics, such as time spent on pages, main entrance and exit pages of a site and the route through which most users navigate the site’s content.

Negative keywords

Negative Keyword is a term referenced by Google AdWords and is a form of keyword matching. This means that an advertiser can specify search terms that they do not want their ad to be associated with.

For example, if you add the negative keyword “-nike” to the keyword “running shoes”, the ad will not be displayed if a person searches upon the term “nike running shoes”.

Negative keyword matching ensures that only qualified traffic is clicking upon advertising.

New vs Returning visitors

The breakdown of site traffic between those that have been to the site before and those that are viewing the site for the first time.

The balance between the two will be different for different types of sites, but it can give an indication of how valuable the customer finds their experience on the site if they return, or how effectively new campaign’s are driving traffic if there is an increase in new visits.

Primary keywords

A word that a search engine user is most likely to use to find your site, products or content. 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 (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine, like Adwords).

Primary keywords should be included in your site content and meta-tags wherever possible to increase the search engine’s recognition of relevance for those keywords to your content.

Product / service review sites

A type of site that is either an automatic or human-edited catalogue of other businesses, products or services.

Many of these use a business model based on advertising income, through building traffic by having the largest or best quality content, therefore charging for listings is usually counter-productive.

This makes them an excellent referrer target, if chosen correctly.

Relevant traffic

Relevant traffic, sometimes referred to as qualified traffic are visitors to the site that have an interest in that sites content. Online marketing and SEO attempts to maximise the amount of relevant traffic, in order to get the highest possibility of converting traffic to sales or other marketing goals.

Referrer

A web page, containing a link to your web page, that delivered your visitor to your web page.

Robots

These are also known as bots, spiders, crawlers. They are programs which performs an activity more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers sometimes use bots to “scrape” content for usually illegal anti-copyright reuse for their own benefits.

SEO sources

A way of segmenting your sites traffic by source, looking specifically at the volume and percentage of visitors who came to the site from sources that have been established or enhanced by SEO.

These may include search engines, advertising and targeted referrers.

Secondary keywords

These are keywords that are identified to be relevant to your site and content, though may not be effective enough to use in online advertising or your site description.
They can act as supplementary keywords for search engine registration or meta-tags, allowing you to catch possible alternatives to your primary search terms.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Strategies and tactics undertaken to influence the rankings of web pages in search engines. Focuses on three main areas, technical optimisation, content optimisation and link building.

Search engine indexing

Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics and computer science. An alternate name for the process in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet is Web indexing.

Search engine ranking

The method by which search engines sort their results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site.

“Authority” is the term sometimes used as to quantify the values a page is ranked by. Google specifically uses a system called Pagerank, which is a measure of link popularity, the correlation between content, keywords and page structure and authority amongst other mostly unknown factors.

Search results

The list of links, content or any other indexed item that is generated by a search engine, either within a site or across the Internet.

Internal site search results in the context of SEO can be used to evaluate what people are looking for on your site and how effectively they find it. The Internet search engine results your site appears in can also be used to determine effective keywords and content for SEO.

Spam

Spamming is most commonly associated with the act of sending unsolicited commercial email, but in the context of search engine optimization, spamming refers to using disreputable tactics to achieve high search engine rankings.

Traffic

The amount of visitors to a site. Traffic can be categorised into new vs returning, by geographic disbursement, browser type or any number of other characteristics that can assist in analysing the make-up and behaviour of visitors.

Traffic statistics

Information generated or recorded by online software monitoring the traffic of a website. One of the most comprehensive systems for monitoring site traffic is Google Analytics, which can be used to track all the usual site activities: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rates and average time on site as well as deeper levels of analysis, such as conversion tracking for click-thru advertising to registration of a sale.

Traffic sources

A way of segmenting your sites traffic by source. Usually looking at the volume and percentage of visitors who came to the site through referrer links, search engine results or by entering the URL of the site manually.

User-driven content

Any content contributed or edited by a site’s users, as opposed to an automated system or human editors employed by the site’s parent company.

Forums and blogs are obvious user-driven content sites, but others could be user driven reference sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and Digg, or social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook.

User driven content sites are useful resources for SEO because anyone can post information to them, they usually have a high volume of users and are indexed regularly by search engines.

As long as posted content is not obviously spam, visitors to the site may also regard the information as more authentic, because it is not serving the vested interest of the site owner.