Glossary – Internet, SEO, WebPublishing

This Web Glossary list provides brief description on various web and internet terms.  It may also include other computer-related terminology.
Click on letter below to go directly to the start of terms beginning with that letter.

Alphabet (Glossary Index)

A

Alexa Rank

Alexa rank is measurement based on the traffic to a website. The lower the number, the better. Highly visited websites get lower numbers. Yahoo, Google, and MySpace have an Alexa Rank of 0. Every website in the world is included so the Alexa rank of a site varies constantly in relation to other website on the Internet.Note: anything below 100,000 is considered very good.

anchor text

Anchor text is sometimes called link label. This is the text that forms the hyperlink (clickable text in a link). The text in an anchor text can affect the ranking of a page.

B

backlink

A link from outside your site that points to a page on your site.Backlinks are also spelt as “back links” and are also known as “incoming links” or “inbound links”.

Think of these links as links coming back to your site.

Backlinks are the opposite of outbound links.

 

bait-and-switch

see: cloaking

 

block

In Drupal, a block is usually a collection/list of nodes (content). ‘Blocks’ are usually employed as a means of navigation and frequently placed in the right or left ‘regions’. You assign a ‘block’ to a ‘region’ via Administer > Site Building > Blocks. You can also create new ‘blocks’ if you like.

C

canonical domain

see: preferred domain

 

cloaking

Refers to a page that redirects to another page before any content can be seen. This technique is employed to delivery one page to a search engine and a different page to users. Sites can be banned from search engines for this.

CMS

Content Management System

conversion rate (CR)

In a nutshell: Percentage of visitors who click.e.g. 100 people visit a page with a specific link and 1 person clicked on the link ==> CR=1%

cookie cutters

Pages that are identical or nearly identical. Google considers them as spam and may cause the page or the entire site to be penalized.

D

dangling link

This is a link from page A to page B and page B has no links going out from it or page B has not been indexed by Google.

Demand; Keyword

see: Keyword Profitability

doorway page

A page that is designed to direct users to another page.

E

F

G

General Keyword

A word/phrase with a broad meaning, that is somehow related to the Specific Keyword for that page and to the overall theme of your site.

H

HTML

HyperText Markup Language

HTTP

HyperText Transfer Protocol

HTTPS

HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure

I

inbound link

see: backlink

in-coming link

see: backlink

J

K

Keyword; General

see: General Keyword

Keyword; Specific

see: Specific Keyword

Keyword Demand

see: Keyword Profitability

Keyword Profitability

The Demand/Supply ratio. Often used in keyword analysis. This is not an absolute but helps to give an indication on the profitability of using a keyword.Demand is the number of times the keyword has been searched in a month.Supply is the number of web pages offering the same keyword. This is also an indication of the amount of competition you face for that topic/keyword.

Keyword Supply

see: Keyword Profitability

L

link label

see: anchor text

link farm

A site whose sole and usually only purpose is to provide links between member sites as an attempt to affect link popularity and thereby to manipulate the search engine results.

M

mirror sites

Mirror sites are those with identical content with another at an altogether different URL.

Menu Bar on Mac

The menu bar on a Mac is the top horizontal (menu) bar on screen.

Menu Bar on a Mac

N

NLP

Natural Language Processing

node

In a Drupal database, content is stored in nodes. These content can be different types of content (called content types). The standard Drupal content types are Blog Entry, Book Page, Comment, Forum, Page, Poll, Sotry.

O

outbound link

A link, from within your site, that points to an external page – i.e. to a page outsite of your site. This is also known as “out-going link”.An outbound link is the opposite of a backlink (aka “inbound link”).

P

Page Rank

This is a term coined and made important by Google. It ranges from 1 – 10; 10 being the highest. Primarily, this measures the number of back/inbound links. Getting a backlink from a high PR site (like Yahoo! Directory) can significantly boost one’s own PR number and also the positioning in SERPs.The PR ranking of any site can be seen by using the Google toolbar. The PR rank is still an influential factor for top placement in Google’s SERPs. Hence, building a solid link popularity is still important.

pass PR

Some ‘bad’ directories may not pass the benefit of their own high PR (page rank) to you. They will be using some kind of internal process that results in no PR benefit being passed to your site. Important to check that a directory you submit your site to actually does pass PR to your site.Human visitors can still click the link and go to your site/page, but as far as the spiders are concerned, that link to you is invisible. They don’t see you, they don’t get to go to your site from that “no pass PR” link, and so .. no PR is passed to you. In SEO terms, having your link in those kinds of directories have given you zero benefit.

preferred domain

When both the www version and the non-www version of your domain name points to your site, the preferred domain is the version you choose for search engines to index your site and used in search results. Usually both versions point to the same physical location, but that is not always the case. If preferred domain is not set, spiders will treat each version as separate pages which can result in your actual page having a lower ranking than it should. After setting up a preferred domain, it can take a while before changes are fully reflected in the search engine’s index and in the displayed search results.

Profitability (;keyword)

see: Keyword Profitability

Q

R

render blocking

Render blocking refers to whether a browser will hold the rendering of a page due to a resource (e.g. CSS). So a page is not loaded till the render blocking resource has been downloaded by the browser.

S

SEM

Search Engine Marketing – optimizing sites for paid search results.

semantics

The science of language. Search engines use the knowledge of semantics to return more meaningful results than just exact matches of query-terms.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization – the strategies to improve page ranking and position in SERPS (search engine results pages)

SERP

Search Engine Results Page – the page(s) of listings that is returned by search engines. It contains the results of the user’s query. These listings comprise of indexed listings (obtained by search engine’s spider), indexed listings from directories (inserted by humans), and paid listings.

Specific Keyword

The keyword or phrase that a page focuses upon. Should be the first word in your meta-keyword list.

SSL

Secure Socket Layer. Often used interchangeably with HTTPS in common parlance.

stealth

see: cloaking

stop words

Some search engines exclude common words from their index, therefore these words are ignored when searches are carried out.’The’, ‘or’, ‘in’, ‘it’ are examples of such words. These words are known as “stop words.” Avoid using stop words in the most important areas of your page like title, meta tags, headings, alternative image attributes, anchor names, etc.
Stop words have no contextual meaning – using them in short areas such as a title, headings, and anchor texts will reduce weight, prominence and the frequency of keywords.

Supply; Keyword

see: Keyword Profitability

T

Twitter terms

Twitter terms and terminology that is specific to Twitter.

U

UGC

UGC stands for User-generated content. This covers various media content that is produced by end-users and made publicly available. UGC is also sometimes known as CGM (consumer-generated media) or UCC (user-created content). More information at Wikipedia.

V

W

W3C

World Wide Web Consortium

X

Y

Z