Glossary

Search Engine Terms

Here is a list of some popular Search Engine terms, which may help the visitor to have a sound knowledge over Search Engine Optimization.

Anchor Text	Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example: Indian SEO Expert
Back Link	Any link, that points to the site from other site. This is also called inbound links or IBLs.
Bot	Abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
Cloaking	Cloaking describes the technique of serving different views of the same web page to a search engine spider and visitors. This may the ground for banning the site by many search engines.
Crawler	A Spider that downloads multiple pages from the same domain.
Dead Link	A hyperlink for which no destination page exists.
Directory	Place in web where sites are arranged on theme wise. Internet directory lets site owners to include their site into it, if their site matches the criteria of directory. DMOZ and Yahoo are two major directories.
Doorway Pages	They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Doorway pages are rarely written for visitors.
Gateway Page	Also called a doorway page. A gateway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page.
IBL	Abbreviation for IBL is In Bound Link. This refers to a link to your site from other site.
Ink	Abbreviation for Inktomi, the back-end search engine acquired by Yahoo.
Keyword/Keyphrase	Keywords are words which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are multi-word phrases used in search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and keyphrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.
Keyword Stuffing	This is a practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the 'benefit' of search engines and not human visitors. Sometime tricks are applied to distract users from viewing the abundance of keywords but this may create a ground for banning web sites by the search engines.
Link Farm	A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity.
Mirror	Mirror refers to identical or duplicate site. Making mirror sites reduce the effort of designing new site and lets give the scope to target different keywords.
PFI	Many search engines offers Pay For Inclusion program to assure frequent spidering / indexing of a site (or page). Webmasters pay to search engines for indexing their sites on regular basis. But this program doesn’t guarantee the high rank of such sites.
Portal	These are the sites from where users get so many facilities such as: content about different subjects, free chat and mailing, free e-cards, newsletter, article etc. It’s an amazing place in internet for getting so many stuffs. Yahoo is the most popular portal of the internet world.
PPC	Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. An advertising model offered by search engines, where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads.
PR	A numerical value given by Google to a web page considering it’s link popularity. Before giving Page Rank, Google takes different aspects into consideration. Google ranks out of 10. There is a green progress bar appears on Google toolbar to indicate PR of a web page.
SEM	Abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing. SEM encompasses SEO and search engine paid advertising options (banners, PPC, etc.)
SEO	Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO covers the process of making web pages spider friendly (so search engines can read them) making web pages relevant to desired keyphrases
SERP	Search Engine Result Page shows sites serially on the basis of search engine rank, while user searches giving query to search engine.
SPAM	This refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are being resorted by many webmasters to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds for banning.
Spider	Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.