Adwords - Google's - Cost Per Click (CPC) based advertising system.
Agent Name - the name of the software accessing a web page.
Aggregator - Software that lets you automatically download content to your computer
Algorithm - A mathematical formula used to determine the value of a page when compared against others.
ALT Text - The text that appears when you put your mouse on top of an image or a picture.
Anchor Text - Also known as Link Text, the clickable text of a hyperlink.
API - Application Programming Interface.
ATF (Above the Fold) - This is the part of the user's screen that is always displayed.
Authority Site - A site that has many In-Bound links coming to it, and very often, few outbound links.
Back link - A text link to your website from another website.
Banned - A term that means a site has been removed from a search engine's index.
Black Hat - A term referring to the practice of "unethical" SEO. These techniques are used to gain an advantage over your competition.
Blog - A "Web Log" that is updated frequently and is usually the opinion of one person. Also joking stands for Better Listing on Google.
Blogged - Term referring to have bookmarked a blog in your browser.
Bot - Short for robot. Often used to refer to a search engine spider.
Browser - Software application used to browse the internet - Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer are the 2 most popular browsers.
BTF (Below the Fold) - This is the part of the user's screen that is hidden unless the user scrolls down on the page.
Cache - A copy of web pages stored within a search engine's database.
CAPTCHA - Stands for : Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
Click Distance - The minimum number of clicks it takes a visitor to get from one page to another.
Click Through - The process of clicking through an online advertisement to the advertiser's destination.
Cloaking - A technique that shows keyword stuffed pages to a search engine, but a real page to a human user.
Contextual Link - Text links that are shown depending on the content that appears around them.
Conversion Rate - The number of visitors to a website that end up performing a specific action that leads to a conversion. This could be a product purchase, newsletter sign up or anything where information is submitted.
Converting Search Phrase - A phrase that converts traffic into money.
Cookie - Information stored on a user's computer by a website.
Copy - Text found on a web page.
Cost per Thousand (CPM) - The cost for each thousand impressions of your ad.
CPA - (Cost Per Action) - The price paid for each visitor's actions from a paid search.
CPC (Cost Per Click) - The amount it will cost each time a user selects your phrase or keyword.
Crawler - A bot from a search engine that reads the text found on a website in order to determine what the website is about.
Cross Linking - Having multiple websites linking to each other.
CTR (Click Through Rate) - The value associated to the amount of times a paid ad is viewed.
Dead Link - A hyperlink pointing to a non-existent URL.
Deep Link - A link on a website that is not reachable from the home page.
Delisting - When a site gets removed from the search index of a search engine.
Directory - Usually human edited, a directory contains sites that are sorted by categories.
DMOZ - Also known as the Open Directory Project.
DNS (Domain Name System) - A protocol that lets computers recognize each other through an IP Address, whereas the human sees a website URL.
Doorway Page - A web page designed to draw in Internet traffic from search engines, and then direct this traffic to another website.
Dynamic Site - A site that uses a database to store it's content and is delivered based on the variable passed to the page.
Error 404 - When a hyperlink is pointing to a location on the web that doesn't exist, it is called a 404 error.
External Link - A link that points to another website.
FFA (Free For All) - A site where anyone can list their link. Don't waste any time submitting your site to these places.
Filter Words - Words such as is, am, were, was, the, for, do, ETC, that search engines deem irrelevant for indexing purposes. Also known as Stop words.
Google AdWords - Google's PPC program.
Google Bombing - A technique where using the same text anchor links, many people link to a certain page, usually of irrelevant content.
GoogleBot - The spider that performs a deep crawl of your site.
Heading Tag - Tag that designates headlines in the text of a site.
Hidden Text - Text that can't be seen normally in a browser.
Hit - A single access request made to the server.
IBL (In-Bound Link) - A link residing on another site that points to your site.
Index - A term used to describe the database that holds all the web pages crawled by the search engine for each website.
Internal Link - A link that points to another page within the same site. Most commonly used for navigation.
Keyword Density - A ratio of the number of occurrences of a keyword or "keyword phrase" to the total number of words on a page.
Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) - The KEI compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results to pinpoint which keywords should be the most effective for your campaign.
Keyword Phrase - A group of words that form a search query.
Keyword Stuffing - Using a keyword or "keyword phrase" excessively in a web page, perhaps in the text content or meta tags.
KW (Key Words) - Used to define the terms a user might enter into a search engine to find information on their query.
Landing Page - Usually used in conjunction with a PPC campaign, they are call-to-action pages that prompt the user to engage the site.
Link - Also known as a hyperlink, it is the "clickable" area of text or image that allows for navigation on the Internet. Also the name of the main character og the Legend of Zelda video games.
Link Bait (Linkbaiting) - The process of getting users to link to your site.
Link Farm - A site that features links in no particular order which are totally unrelated to each other.
Link Partner - A website who is willing to put a link to your site from their website. Quite often link partners engage in reciprocal linking.
Link Popularity - How many sites link to your website.
Link Text - The clickable part of a hyperlink. Also known as Anchor Text or Anchor Link.
Listings - The results that a search engine returns for a particular search term.
Meta Description Tag - Hold the description of the content found on the page.
Meta Keywords Tag - Holds the keywords that are found on the page.
Meta Search Engine - A search engine that relies on the meta data found in meta tags to determine relevancy.
Meta Tags - Header tags that provide information about the content of a site.
MFA (Made For AdSense) - A term that describes websites that are created entirely for the purpose of gaming Google Adsense to make money.
Mirror Sites - A mirror site is a site that exactly duplicates another site.
Natural Listing - A listing that appears below the sponsored ads, also known as Organic Listings.
Niche - A specialised segment of a market that is usually geared towards one specific purpose.
NOFOLLOW - An attribute used in a hyperlink to instruct search engines not to follow the link. (And pass PageRank)
Off-Page Factors - Factors that alter search engine positions that occur externally from other website's. Having many links from other sites pointing to yours is an example of Off-Page Factors.
On-Page Factors - Factors that determine search engine positions that occur internally within a page of a website. This can include site copy, page titles, and navigational structure of the site.
OOP (Over Optimization Penalty) - A theory that applies if one targets only 1 keyword or phrase, and the search engines view the linking efforts to be spam.
Opt-In - When a user willing joins a subscription to a newsletter or some other service.
Organic Listing - The natural results returned by a search engine.
Outbound Link - A link from your site to any other site.
Page View - Anytime a user looks at any page on a website through their browser.
Paid Inclusion - A submission service where you pay a fee to a search engine and the search engine guarantees that your website will be included in its index. It can also be used as a term to include fee based directory submission.
Pay-Per-Click Management - Strategy, Planning and Placement, Monitoring and Adjustment of targeted keywords in the paid search results.
PPC (Pay Per Click) - A technique where placements are determined by how much id bid on a particular keyword or phrase. Can become very expensive.
PR (Google's PageRank) - Google's unique system of how it tries to predict the value of a pages rank.
Rank - Ranking - The actual position of a website on a search engine results page for a certain search term or phrase.
Reciprocal Link - When two sites link to each other.
Redirects - Either server side or scripting language that tells the search engine to go to another URL automatically.
Referrer - A referrer is the URL of the page that the visitor came from when he entered a website.
Results Page - When a user conducts a search, the page that is displayed, is called the results page. Sometimes it may be called SERPs, which stands for "search engine results page."
Robot - Often used to refer to a search engine spider.
ROI (Return on Investment) - The cost it takes to in order to see success on your marketing investment.
Search Engine - Best described as a database of websites users can search using search terms. Every search engine has its own algorithm which defines how the results are displayed.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - The practice of getting a website found on the internet
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The act of altering code to a website to have optimum relevance to a search engine spider.
Search Friendly Optimization (SFO) - As the term implies, this is the process of making a website search engine friendly.
Search Query - The text entered into the search box on a search engine.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) - The results that are displayed after making a query into a search box.
Sitemap (Site Map) - A page that lists all of the critical navigation points of a website.
Snippet - The text displayed from a search query.
Social Media Optimisation (SMO) - making use of Social Media sites (e.g. Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace) to promote a website - or - writing content (such as a blog entry) with the aim of being "picked up" by community based sites.
SPAM - Unwanted email or irrelevant content delivered. (or as some say, Site Placed Above Mine)
Spider - The software that crawls your site to try and determine the content it finds.
Splash Page - A page displayed for viewing before reaching the main page.
Stickiness - How influential your site is in keeping a visitor on your page.
Stop Word - A stop word is a "common word" which is ignored in a query because the word makes no contribution to the relevancy of the query.
Submission - The process of submitting URL(s) to search engines or directories.
Title Tag - It should be used to describe the web page using targeted keywords using no more that 60 characters, including spaces.
Tracking URL - Usually used in PPC campaigns, it is a URL that has special code added to it so that results can be monitored.
Traffic - The number of visitors a website receives over a given period. Usually reported on a monthly basis.
Unique Visitor - When a user visits a website, his/her IP address is logged so if he/she returns later on that day, the visit won't be counted - as a unique visit but as a page impression.
Universal Search - Launched in May 2007, this is Google's attempt to deliver the best result from the web. This can include video, images, news, podcasts or any other form of digital content.
User Agent - A User agent name is the name of the software accessing a web page. (Another term for Agent Name)
USP (Unique Selling Proposition) - Sometimes mistakenly defined as Unique Selling Point. The Unique Selling Proposition concept was first developed by Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency. Basically, it's what sets you apart from your competition.
White Hat - A term that refers to ethical practice of SEO methodologies that adhere to search engine Terms of Service.