• Glossary of Search Engine Optimization Terms

    • (Last modified on: Mar. 26 at: 11:11 pm. EST)
      This pages offers a more in-depth explanation of terms relating to SEO.

  • Algorithm

    • An algoritm, basically, is a series of instructions telling a program to filter out all incorrect or unlikely answers, until a conclusion is reached.
    • In SEO terms, an algorithm is the system that search engines use to determine which pages are most relevant for search terms. They can emphasize, or place weight, on a variety of factors, such as link popularity, directory listings, paid inclusion, and content quality.
    • A whole industry has been formed on finding ways to beat these algorithms because SEO is the most effective form of advertising. Therefore, most algorithms have become sophisticated trade secrets.

  • Black Hat

    • Tricks and cheats that intentionally and artificially inflate search engine rankings are known as 'black hat' techniques. Common tricks, such as link farming, spamdexing, and cloaking, are listed throught this glossary.
    • Alizarian.com has a strict policy against black hat tricks. Websites that try to cheat the system always get caught and penalized. Black hat techniques are the opposite of white hat.

  • Bots

  • Cloaking

    • When a web designer takes advantage of the fact that spiders read pages differently than humans, they engaging in cloaking. All cloaking tricks are black hat techniques that are easy to catch:
    • Making the font color the same as the background color so it can't be read
    • Placing a block layer or an image over text so that it's hidden
    • Positioning text outside the the browser window
    • Shinking the font size so that the text becomes virtually unreadable

  • Crawling

    • A term to describe the process by which search engine spiders find, read, and index websites. Normally, crawling occurs when the spider program finds a link - first the spider indexes the current page, then jumps to the next link.
    • If your website is not linked to by others, or is not included in search engine directories, it will not be found.

  • Data Mining

    • The process by which someone collects massive amounts of information from users, often without the user's awareness. This information consists of your behaviors and activities while online, your preferences, and your contacts, and is used to build a profile for potential custumors. For example, every time you use Amazon.com, the website automatically suggests books that you might want to buy.
    • The biggest employers of data mining are social networking sites and search engines. A site like Facebook.com will know what things you like, where you live, which school you attend, who your friends are, what your friends like, etc. - simply by your use of their site. That way, their advertisers know specifically which potential customers to target.
    • Even though data mining is essentially a white hat technique, it can at times get unreasonably obtrusive. The truth is, all websites collect user information in one form or another. We advise you to check the privacy policies of websites to make sure that your information is only being used to enrich your online experience, instead of being up for bids.

  • Doorway Pages

    • Websites that actually consist of two distinct versions - one that only the user sees, and one specifically tailored for search engines. Similar to cloaking, doorway pages are another black hat technique.
    • In February, 2006, car manufacturer BMW tried to cheat by making doorway pages. Users got to see fancy javascript pages full of pretty graphics, while seach engines only saw large files full of keywords. Their efforts did not last long - soon afterwards, a search for BMW on Google yielded zero links to their company. BMW actually had to beg Google for reinclusion.

  • Google Bombing

    • While not necessarily black hat, Google bombing is a trick to confuse the PageRank system by modifying the context of a link to associate a certain, unrelated word to another site.
    • The most notorious case of Google bombing is the “miserable failure” campaign in the early 2000's. Website owners would intentionally associate links to George Bush's biography on Whitehouse.gov with this phrase. Consequently, if one searched for the phrase, “miserable failure” on a Google-powered search engine, the #1 hit would be the president's personal page. The campaign was so effective that, even to this day, one only needs to type in the word, “failure” to get the same results.
    • In contrast, a search for “failure” on an MSN Live search engine will link to Failure magazine.
    • Alizarian.com takes no political stance on this issue.
    • Update: as of Janauary 2007, Google has corrected and solved most Googlebombs, including “miserable failure.” However, the results have had a “Streisand Effect” - that is, the current hits are pages that talk about how the phrase, “miserable failure” used to link to George Bush's biography page.

  • Harvesting

    • Instead of writing original content, some websites will actually use their own spider programs to search for other websites containing a topic of interest, in order to steal, or 'harvest' their text for their own pages. While nothing can be done to stop these sites from harvesting your content, rest assured that they usually rank low on search engines.
    • Harvesting is a black hat technique that usually does not obey robots.txt files.
    • Back in the late 90's, a website owner could climb search engine rankings instantly, by copying the content of a popular page and substituting it for one's own.

  • Indexing

    • The process by which search engines collect and categorize the information and relevancy of websites that they come accross. Index information is then placed into very large database servers. Hence or otherwise, the big three search engine companies each have a saved, cached copy of the internet. Sophisticated algorithms help to sort through all of this content to create search engine results pages faster than a computer can download into your browser.
    • Since the maintainence of these enormous databases is so costly, it takes a lot of capital to found an independant search engine company. Most search sites, such as AOL.com or Go.com, simply feed off the big three. Knowing this information saves time - one does not have to check minor sites to see if one's page is listed.

  • Keyword

    • The main topics and interests of a page are its keywords. When a visitor to an search engine page does a search for a particular word, the results page attempt to list links to sites that are most relevant to that term.
    • Dominating a keyword is the essential goal of SEO. Research shows that most people tend not to stray too far from their first search engine results page.
    • Keywords to a website can be listed in META descriptions.

  • Keyword Stuffing

    • Back in the early days of search engine technologies, the logic for making relevant results pages worked on a more intuitive sense - if the page uses a certain keyword often, the topic most likely has to do with that word. What cheaters would do, of course, is to 'stuff' their pages excessively with with a particular word. Keyword stuffing is a black hat technique.
    • Search engine algorithms can now catch keyword stuffing. If a page contains anything that appears more like a list of the same word (or different forms of the same word) and not an actual sentence, it will be penalized. An example of keyword stuffing the word bicycle:
    • “I wanted to take my bicycle out today, but I took my brother's bicycle to go bicycling on the bicycle path on my way to the bicycle store.“
    • There are more extreme examples - back in the late 90's, a way to cheat the infoseek.com search engine was to copy and paste whole dictionaires to the bottom of one's page.
    • Keyword stuffing is closely related to another black hat trick known as META abuse.

  • Link Farming

    • Also known as 'link pharming', this black hat technique occurs when website owners deliberately create pages for the sole purpose of artifically inflating a website's popularity by creating lots of referring links. These pages themselves serve no useful purpose otherwise.
    • Link farming sites are easy to catch. Often, one will go to a page, looking for a topic, only to find out that the page only links to other pages. Usually, these pages contain an excessive amount of links and little content in comparison.
    • Google punishes sites that participate in link farms because they abuse the PageRank. If a website owner just wants to list a bunch of sites that he or she likes or thinks are significant, the best method is to write a page with rich content, explaining each link.

  • META abuse

    • Closely related to keyword stuffing, this black hat technique involves putting excessive and irrelevant information into a website's META Tags. The trick was design to confuse search engines that relied on the <meta> attribute for rankings.
    • Most pages need no more than a dozen keywords to describe their content. However, extreme cases include pages that contained more information in their META descriptions than actual content.

  • META Tag

    • The <meta> tag is an unseen, descriptive HTML attribute that describes a page. These tags can assign pages serveral things, including the title, author, description, language and keywords.
    • The <meta> tag was developed with good intentions in the late 90's a way for search engines to index websites. Rather than crawling a page's entire content, search engine spiders could save time by just referencing these attributes.
    • However, all shortcuts and good intentions have consequences. Cheaters just resorted to META abuse.

  • PageRank

    • The name for Google's algorithm for ranking websites and their relevancy for particular keywords. The system works on the concept that popular websites tend to be the ones that are referenced most. Thus, if one website links to another, that link counts as a vote.
    • The votes themselves are not all equal. Votes coming from popular sites carry more weight. Additionally, the way that links are contructed is significant. The context of a link determines its credibility.
    • The PageRank system ranks pages on a scale of 0 to 10, and is protected trade secret. Only the largest, most influential sites get a ranking 10. Naturally, Google.com gets a PageRank of 10. What we do know is that the system works on a magnitude of somewhere between four and five for every level. That is, a website with a ranking of 2 is roughly four times more popular than one with a ranking of 1.
    • The weakness of the PageRank system is that popularity does not necessarily imply relevancy. Websites that tend to suffer are research pages - people prefer to link to sites with current interests and trends. Research sites tend to perform better on search engines powered by MSN Live.
    • The PageRank system also leads to abuse. One such trick is called link farming. Another trick is known as google bombing.

  • Participation Inequality

    • In most online communities and social networking sites, a small minority of visitors amount for the majority of contributions. According to usability researcher Jacob Nielson, participation follows the 90-9-1 rule:
    • 90% of users are lurkers - they read and observe, but never add anything.
    • 9% add some input occasionally - but have better things to do with their time.
    • 1% generate most of the contributions - it's as if they spend all their time posting comments or replying to others'.
    • There are many downsides to participation inequality. The comments and reactions on these communities usually represent a small minority of all visitors. It is inevitable - those most passionate about an issue tend to be the most vocal. Often, their opinions are are typically at the extremities of the discussion spectrum. They do not represent average, level-headed viewpoints. Lurkers are the "silent majority."
    • Beware of forming conclusions from the contributions of online communities. They can drastically skew customer feedback, product reviews, politics, and user preferences.
    • Participation inequality is unavoidable. It has become one of the largest unintended consequences of the web 2.0 phenomenon.
    • However, you can diminish its effects by making it easier for users to contribute. Instead of typing up a review, give your visitors the choice of giving 1-5 star ratings of products. Additionally, simple data collection can yield enriching content such as "people who bought this item also bought ____," and "##% of visitors preferred Book A over Book B."

  • Robots.txt

    • When the owner of website does not want search engines to find or index a particular page, the owner will write a robots.txt exclusion file to prevent access.
    • Robots.txt files are crucial to prevent listing of sensitive pages (such as contact information) and supplemental files (programs or scripts that help generate the format of websites).
    • While most legitimate search engines will abide by the robots.txt protocol, harvesting sites will not.

  • Search Engine Optimization

    • Tactics used to increase a website's popularity on search engines - These techniques be either “white hat” (ethical and legal) or otherwise, “black hat.” There are many benefits for your website if it is optimized for search engines.

  • Sitemaps

    • These files outline to an entire website by providing links to every page. There are two types of sitemaps - formatted webpages for visitors, and XML files for search engines.
    • The most notable sitemap system is Google's "Sitemap Protocol." However, both MSN Live and Yahoo Inktomi have adopted similar programs.
    • Sitemap files are crucial for indexing, especially if a website's pages come from dynamically-generated addresses.

  • Social Networking

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  • Spamdexing

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  • Spiders

    • Also known as 'bots' these are programs that search engines use to find websites. Spiders usually find pages by crawling through links and submissions.
    • Each search engine company has their own spider - the Google spider is GoogleBot, the MSN Live spider is MSNBot, and so on. This information is vital for writing robots.txt files.

  • Web 2.0

    • Coined in 2004, Web 2.0 is a phrase to describe a newer generation of internet of social networking, online collaboration, and user-generated content. Rather than there be a site owner with a team of writers, the visitors to the site are the ones that create the online environment.
    • The advantages of web 2.0 sites are:
    • Since they are responsible for their online environment, the site visitors have a vested interest in furthering, promoting, and building their environments.
    • Meanwhile the site owner only needs to moderate, instead of spending time creating and gathering content.
    • As a promotion tool, the reach is vast - if one site visitor tells the others of some particularly interesting website, that website is sure to receive immediate, real traffic.
    • The disadvantages of Web 2.0 are:
    • The more visitors use the services of a website, the more information is collected, potentially threatening that visitor's privacy with data mining.
    • Web 2.0 sites usually lack centralized focus and consistency.
    • Web 2.0 sites are victims of participation inequality.
    • Some content-driven sites, such as YouTube,waste large amounts of bandwidth when distributing content. YouTube has yet to make a profit.
    • The main classifications of Web 2.0 sites are:
    • Referral sites - places where people can trade links to new websites (Del.icio.us, Fark), or expose interesting news on current events (Digg, Newsvine), tech trends (Slashdot, Gizmodo), etc.
    • Collected information - visitors work together to compile large bodies of content (Wikipedia) and media (Flickr, YouTube).
    • Social Networking (MySpace, Facebook).
    • Like it or not, Web 2.0 is here to stay. Its influence is far-reaching, immediate, and its potential for promoting websites is already apparrent. An unknown site can receive a referral on Digg.com, and receive exponential volumes of traffic within hours - all for free.

  • White Hat

    • Ethical and legal techniques for search engine optimization. Alizarian.com strongly supports white hat techniques and uses only such. These tactics tend to be the most effective in the long run, without having to suffer any consequences.
    • White hat techniques are the opposite of black hat.
    • “Innovative, usable solutions for competitive webpage development” - Alizarian Web Design, Inc.
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      last updated on 2007-04-24 EST 23:04:28-0500
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