This is a follow up post to Confusing search engine marketing and SEO jargon made simple (A-F), where we hope to help demystify the world of search engine marketing.
Gateway pages – A website or web-page that exists to attract search engine traffic and re-direct it through to another site. Gateway pages (also known as doorway pages) are an example of black hat SEO and are frowned upon by search engine companies.
Googlebot – The name given to the spider used by Google to crawl over, and index, web pages.
Google dance – The changes seen in Google results, often around the time of a change to the algorithm or update to the index. The Google dance is something all SEO professionals will be familiar with and is often a time of great stress as rankings can shoot up and down quite dramatically.
HTML - Stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the programming language in which web pages on the internet are written.
Hub – A web page respected as having expert content, that links out to other sites of the same subject.
Inbound link – Hyperlinks coming into your website from others are inbound links. Important to search engine optimisation, as the more inbound links a website has from relevant, good quality sites, the more likely it is to rank highly and increase search traffic share.
Keyword – The word or phrase that a user submits into a search engine query.
Landing page – The first page a person lands on after clicking on a Pay Per Click advert or search engine listing.
Link bait – Content that has been created to attract in-bound links from other sites. Common types of link bait include informative articles, videos, audio, downloads, blog posts.
Link farm – A group of websites which exchange links between one another. Link farming is an example of black hat SEO and if discovered, can lead to a website being penalised by the search engines.
Long-tail – A more targeted search made using a number of words. Whilst a broad search might be “Mercedes coupe”, a long-tail example would be “Used black Mercedes CL500 coupe”. The amount of people using long-tail searches to find information is growing, so website owners need to be aware of both the broad and long-tail keywords used in their market.
META data – Information held within the HTML make-up of web-pages that describe to search engines what that page is about. The META title and META descriptions need to be written well as these are displayed to users within the search engine results, and should contain keywords the page is targeting (as should the META keywords list, obviously). META data are also often referred to as META Tags.
Monetisation – The process of turning a normal website into an income producing one. Placing adverts or becoming an affiliate are two of the most popular ways.
Natural listings – The web pages displayed on the left hand side of the search engine which are not labelled as “sponsored listings”. Search Engine Optimisation is the technique used to bring websites higher up in the natural search listings.
Nofollow – An instruction that can be placed on a web-page that tells search engines not to follow the links from the page. Nofollow can also be applied to individual links.
Noindex – An instruction that can be placed on a web-page that tells search engines not to index that page.