SEO Buzzword Dictionary

I used to work for a BIG company that had far too many meetings. So, to pass the time, we used to play a game called buzzword bingo.
While writing my post on the death of the meta tag, I was struck by just how many buzzwords there are in SEO (search engine optimization). I plan to write a series of SEO guides for beginners on the Midphase blog, so I thought it might be useful to start by introducing some of the terms.

SEO Dictionary

• Algorithm – the secret mathematical formulas used by search engines to calculate a websites ranking for a given search term.
• Alt attribute or ‘alt text’ – an HTML attribute than can be added to an image tag providing an alternative textual description of the image for visually impaired surfers and web spiders.
• Anchor tag – this is the full name of the <a> tag in HTML that is used to create a link on a web page.
• Anchor text – the exact words or phrase of a text link, or, looking at the HTML code, the exact words or phrase that appears between the <a href="url">anchor tags</a>
• Back Link – a hyperlink from another web page that links back your web page. See inbound link.
• Black Hat SEO – SEO techniques that go against search engine guidelines or try to trick the search engines into giving you better search rankings.
• Deep linking – a type of backlink that links to an inner page of a website rather than to the homepage.
• Google Bot – a web spider specific to Google.
• HTML – hypertext markup language – the underlying code commonly used to create content of a web page.
• Inbound link – a link from another website to your website. A natural inbound link will pass on some of the linking websites link juice. This is a good thing.
• Keyphrase or keywords – the words or phrases that you are trying to optimize a web page for.
• Keyword research – the process of finding out which keywords you should optimize a website for.
• Link bait – Internet content created with the intention of attracting back links.
• Link juice – the value or authority that flows between web sites and web pages via links. If I link to a website, I will pass on a little bit of my web pages authority onto that website.
• Long tail – in an SEO context this is the practice of optimizing for longer and less frequently searched for combination of keywords.
• Meta tags – specific HTML tags used to provide information about a webpage to browsers and web spiders.
• Meta description – a type of meta tag used to provide a summary of a web page in the SERPS.
• Meta keywords – a type of meta tag (now largely ignored) used to tell the search engines which search terms it should rank for.
• Meta robots – a specific type of meta tag used to tell web spiders whether they should index a page or not.
• No follow – the rel="nofollow" HTML attribute can be added to anchor tags to tell web spiders not to follow and index said link.
• Off page SEO – optimizing a website by improving the text and links of other websites that point to your website.
• On page SEO – optimizing a website by improving the text and content of your website.
• Organic Search or Organic Listings – the non-paid for results that appear in the search engine results page. This is also known as Natural Search.
• Outbound link – linking from a web page to someone elses website. This will give away a little bit of your link juice.
• Paid Search – the paid for or ‘sponsored listings’ that typically appear to the right in the search engine results page.
• Search Engine – a website that people can use to search the Internet. Examples: Google & Bing
• Search Query – the words or phrases that someone types into a search engine when searching the Internet.
• SEM – Search Engine Marketing – the practice of marketing a website to search engines typically by SEO, PPC (pay per click) and paid inclusion.
• SEO – Search Engine Optimization – a system of methods used to publish & market your website to improve its performance in the organic listings.
• SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages – The page in which your search results are displayed.
• Web Spider – a computer program that crawls the Internet and indexes the content for a search engine.
• White Hat SEO – friendly natural SEO that works with search engines and surfers to create and promote good relevant content.

For the record, my favorite buzzword bingo buzzwords are: “pushing the envelope”, “thinking outside of the box” and anyone who expresses something as a percentage that is more than 100. Example: “Team, we need to give it 110% to ensure the web 2.0 paradigm shift leverages the enterprise synergies”.
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tom 😐