Search Engine Optimization Glossary
Know the term of search engines can help you achieve your goals of higher rankings in ALL the search engines and directories.

Glossary of Search Engine Optimization Terms

Algorithm: Search Engines all have their own set of programmed rules, their algorithm, for how they determine the rank of the results of specific queries. They keep these rules private to prevent spamming.

ALT Tags: These are HTML tags that determine the text that pops up when you scroll your mouse over an image. It is handy for people who view pages as Text-Only, so they see descriptions of the images they are not seeing.

Anchor Text: See link text.

Backlinks: Links that are inbound from another website to yours, as opposed to outbound links (links that take visitors away from your website) and internal links (links within your site or that move a visitor around within your website).

Banned Pages: Web pages that Search Engines remove from their results for spamming or violating content guidelines.

Boolean Search: A search that limits your terms with AND, OR, or NOT. For example, you may type into a search box: “knitting AND sweaters NOT scarves”. So your results will be about knitting sweaters specifically, with no results about knitting scarves.

Browser: A program used to view web pages such as Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Category: See Channels.

CGI: Common Gateway Interface is the standard that allows the server to communicate with CGI programs. There are many examples of programs that use the CGI standard to communicate with the server. For example, programs that keep track of how many hits a site has had are often CGI programs.

CGI PROGRAM: Programs that communicate with the server via the CGI standard as explained above.

CGI Bin: The name of the folder (directory) in which CGI programs are stored. Web hosts sometimes allow you access to the programs in a personal CGI bin so you can include interactive components on your website, such as order forms.

Channels, Channel Listings: Simply a category in a directory, such as MOVIES or HOTELS.

Clickthrough Rate: It is the percentage of people who click through a particular link (ad) out of the total number of people who view the link (ad). For example, if 100 people view a web page that has a link on it, and 50 of those people actually click on that link, its clickthrough rate is 50%. Also called CTR for short.

Client: A computer that requests information from another computer. A web browser is a client of the servers it requests information from.

Cloaking: To “cloak”, or hide, the content of a web page by having two versions of the same page, one submitted to search engines and one available to others. Cloaking is considered completely taboo by legitimate SEO companies, and search engines frown upon the practice completely.

Clustering: When you perform a search, sometimes you get so many results that they are hard to sift through. Clustering is a technique that categorizes the results for you in hierarchical folders, so you can more easily find exactly what you were looking for. For an example, see vivisimo.com

Comment Tags: HTML tags that make the text between them invisible to browsers. Some search engines ignore the content between these tags, others do not. Programmers use these tags to insert comments for any other future programmers that might look at the HTML code. However, you cannot and should not stuff your comment tags with keyword terms in an attempt to rank higher, for it is considered comment tag spamming.

Conversion Rate: The percentage of total visitors of a website who actually purchase something, request more information or another action you want the visitor to the website to complete.

Cost Per Click: A kind of advertising such as that offered in Yahoo and Google’s sponsored link sections where you pay by the click, i.e., you pay a set rate for each person who clicks on your ad.

CPC: See Cost Per Click.

CPM: Somewhat like CPC, only payment is based on impressions or how many times an ad is viewed, regardless of whether they follow the link.

Crawler: See Spider.

CTR: See Clickthrough Rate.

Dead Link: A link that leads to a web page that no longer exists.

De-listing: When a web page is removed from a search engine’s index, either because it has been banned or due to some technical glitch.

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