Should You Flaunt Your Search Engine Rankings?

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on the topic of promoting the fact that you rank number one in a search engine for an important keyword. Does it make sense, in some cases or any case, to promote the fact that you are the top result in Google, Yahoo or Bing?

Clearly, if you are an SEO company and you need to show your results to prospects, it would be wise to show off your success. But do you plaster the specific search terms you rank well for on your web page for all to see?

If you are a web site that ranks number one for blue widgets, do you flaunt the fact on your web site? Or do you keep it under the radar? I would assume your competitors already know, so does it hurt? Can it help if you promote that fact to your potential customers?

As you can see, there are many variables mentioned here and many I have not mentioned.

What do you think? Is it wise to show off your success or are you asking for a beat down? Take our poll:

Have We Lost All Control?

I don't know Charlene Li. I can't truly guess who she is as a person or what she's really like. But I was fortunate enough to see her speak at Search Engine Strategies San Jose a couple weeks ago.

If I had to guess, I'd say she's an analytic-type of person. She didn't strike me as someone who was flamboyant or over-exaggerated. She seems like a person who tells it like it is, matter-of-factly.

So, when she said, "In the future, everyone is a marketer. The time where you control the message has come and gone," I was shocked.

This sounds like the kind of apocalyptic extremist talk I'd say, not something that came out of the mouth of an analyst.

I'm always looking for the shock factor in my speeches. I recently told a group of 100 people that if I had a choice of selling Gutenberg's printing presses or selling social media, I'd sell social media every time. "Social media is the greatest media revolution in the history of humanity," is what I like to say.

But Charlene isn't that kind of person. She's a straight shooter.

"The time where you control the message has come and gone."

That's heavy.

It's also true.

In 2005, Thomas Friedman wrote "The World Is Flat." He was describing a flattening of the global economic market. This is a pivotal book that describes precisely what has been happening in the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Jumping ahead four years, this flattening continues at a fierce pace.

Twitter, specifically, has pushed this flattening to even greater extremes. As Clay Shirky described at his keynote at SES San Jose, we're witnessing, for the first time, a medium that allows "the many to communicate with the many." This has never been possible before.

We see it all the time now: Iran, "Bruno," and most recently "District 9." These are a couple examples of the power of Twitter that have jumped out at me recently.

I bring this up because if you ever want a sell-out business event right now, make it about social media. Every time I speak about social media it's to a standing-room-only crowd.

I get a sense that the crowds are there out of fear and curiosity. I don't usually feel like they are there because they are super-excited about this "social media revolution."

I feel like they're there because social media is like a freight train heading right for them. Or they're there to validate their beliefs that social media is a fad or "not for them."

I bring it up to you because: "The time where you control the message has come and gone."

That is the fact. You can participate in the message. You can pay for your message to go out. But you can't control the message like you used to.

So, instead of getting run over by the freight train, jump on board. The next time you have a promotion, ask yourself what you can do to get people talking about it.

Your concern shouldn't be about what they say. You just want them to say something.

I've been involved with promotions where the marketing director has scoured each and every blog post about the promotion. Virtually every posting of the promotion had something unacceptable in it. The blogger didn't say this right. They forgot to mention that. They can't legally say such and which.

That kind of micromanagement is gone. You have to stop that kind of thinking.

"The time where you control the message has come and gone."

I'm not saying this as some kind of social media zealot. I'm telling you this because it's the truth.

Send this to your brand managers. Send this to your public relations people. Send this to your attorneys.

This is the world we live in.

You aren't in control any more.

The people are in control.

Accept it and move on.

Google AdWords Continues To Test New Product Ad Formats

A reader emailed us a screen capture of Google testing a new form of display product results in the AdWords listings. This is the third significant test of how the product data is shown in the search ads. We have the way most people see Google AdWords product plusbox and some more recent quick link version and top right ad box format.

This new format, shows the product images and pricing, without clicking on the plus box. Here is the screen capture:

Translate documents: sharing across languages and generations

My cousin is in first grade and sometimes she writes short stories for class. I try to share the stories with her grandparents, but because Japanese is their first language and they don't speak English very well, it's been tough. Today we're releasing a feature for Google Docs to make this kind of multi-lingual sharing easier — you can now automatically translate documents into 42 different languages.

So for my cousin's latest story, I helped her type it up in Google Docs and then clicked "Translate document" from the "Tools" menu. In a matter of seconds, Google Docs has translated the whole story into Japanese using Google Translate's technology.

Url Capitalization & SEO : How there important to SEO?

Many people are really surprised to learn that URLs are actually case sensitive (unlike the actual domain name). Simply put, while it doesn’t really matter how you spell your domain name (domainname.com or DomainName.com or DOMAINNAME.com), it DOES make a huge difference how you spell your URLs (domainname.com/page1 or domainname.com/Page1).

Let’s say, you have started promoting capitalized version (domainname.com/Page1) because you think it looks prettier and is better to remember. Let me explain what may happen (I guess a table is better to explain this because you can always use it as a cheatsheet):

	domainname.com/page1	domainname.com/Page1
Your site is hosted on a Windows-based server
Header response when requested either of the two	200	200
Google’s reaction	Both URLs will be indexed and ranked. Obviously, this will cause some duplicate content issues but Google will most obviously be able to figure that out (by choosing one of them). What’s more important is that you are wasting plenty of link juice spreading it between the two versions.
Your site is hosted on a Linux / Unix-based server
Header response when requested either of the two	200	404
Google’s reaction	Google will try to index both but will drop the 404-one. Again, you are wasting your link juice in this situation. What’s also important, you confuse your visitors by sending them to the non-existent page.

So what’s the best way to handle the problem?

• While most basic SEOs factor that will recommend sticking to only one version, I recommend to always choose lowercase pattern (just because there will always be people who will link to a more traditional, plain-text version);
• If for some reason you start seeing URLs with capital letters get into index (someone linked to it or you changed your content management system and it capitalized some URLs), use 301-redirect to let people, search crawlers and links go to non-capitalized URLs to avoid any problems.

Finding great stuff to read with Google Reader

I only followed a handful of blogs when I first started using Google Reader, but was always on the lookout for more great stuff to read. Over time, I discovered that my friends followed lots of interesting sites, and my reading list grew from 4 to 34 sites and blogs as I incorporated their recommendations.

Since then, Reader has launched several sharing features that make it easier to find and subscribe to feeds that your friends like, and we thought that recommendations could make finding good stuff to read even easier. This time, instead of asking our friends, we approached leaders across a variety of fields and asked them what they read online. We received lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we've expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies, basic seo factors and more. We hope this will be a good place to find great things to read, whether you already have an extensive reading list or are totally new to Google Reader.

Plus, now we can answer some questions that have interested us for years: Where does Arianna Huffington go to get different perspectives on the news? When Paul Krugman surfs the web, what are his favorite economics sites? What blogs do tech, foodie and fashion bloggers read? Visit www.google.com/powerreaders to explore and subscribe to any of their reading lists, or to any individual items that they recommend.

Hows Of Multiple Metric Optimization

The beauty of online marketing is that every step in the click path is visible. And some basic seo factors that follows in searcher clicks on an ad, lands on a merchant’s site and navigates to purchase—all of which can be viewed and analyzed.

This process is often referred to as multiple metric optimization. However, this term is often misused so it is worth spending some time on explaining the process and how marketers can use it to their advantage.

Simply put, In some basic seo factor they multiple metric optimization refers to the class of methods that seek to maximize a marketing goal (for example, ROI/Revenue) using more than one event in the click path. Examples of these metrics are clicks, leads, revenue, purchase, visit time, times of day etc. It is important to note the word “optimization” in the context of bid management necessitates the need for statistical algorithms. Applying arbitrary rules or filters to five or so metrics does not mean you are optimizing to multiple metrics. Perhaps an example will make it clear....Read More

Common SEO Mistakes

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is the ongoing lack of recognition it plays in getting traffic to your Web site. This can be especially true in larger organizations where key members of management aren't familiar with it, and how it works. Uninformed senior managers can easily make decisions that are catastrophic from an SEO perspective.

Here are some of the most common mistakes made as a result:

1. Not Starting Early Enough

Even organizations that are aware of SEO's importance have a tendency to start the process too late. People in these organizations may think that SEO is about keyword selection and copywriting, but not realize that SEO also plays a critical role in technical implementation decisions. The key to remember here: it's easier to do it right the first time than to do it over.

2. Picking a Poor Content Management System

Unfortunately, many CMSs lack even basic SEO features, such as the ability to select title tags, headings, and anchor text. Other CMSs may allow these basics, but aren't crawler-friendly or create massive duplicate content.

3. Use Crawler Unfriendly Development Methods

Sometimes a senior marketing manager insists on using Flash for the whole site. Search engines are doing a better job at understanding the content within Flash files, but they still don't deal with it as well as plain HTML text. There are ways to completely block search engine spiders too, such as implementing links in JavaScript that can't be parsed by the crawler.

4. Duplicate Content Pages

There are many ways to implement duplicate content, such as creating print pages or referring to pages on the site with more than one URL (example: www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html.

5. No Canonical Redirect

Many Web sites allow http://example.com and http://www.example.com to co-exist without 301 redirecting one version of the URL to the other. This is actually a duplicate content problem, but it's so common that it deserves its own mention. A somewhat rarer cousin to this is where http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com are allowed to co-exist.

6. Pseudo Duplicate Content

One example of this is an e-commerce catalog that offers alternate sort orders for its products (e.g., a shoe catalog that allows you to sort on price, color, or size). To a user, the content on all these pages is different; to a search engine, they aren't because all the same elements of text are on the page.

7. Thin Content Pages

Many sites implement pages that have too little content per page. These can even be pages that the user sees as content rich, such as a page with images showing a product, and basic product information such as price. However, if the only text on the page that differs from other product pages is the title and heading tags and the price, the page will either be seen as a low quality page, or a duplicate.

8. Poor Use of Internal Anchor Text

A surprising number of sites still use "click here" or "more" as the anchor text on many links. This is a loss of a golden opportunity to help search engines understand what the page being linked to is about.

9. Over-Optimized Pages

Sometimes people go off the deep end after learning about SEO. They start creating overly keyword-rich pages in an effort to move their rankings upwards. This can quickly make for a poor user experience, resulting in a decrease in conversion rates and/or the site being less attractive for others to link to.

One warning signal of this is when you hear people talk about "SEO copywriting." This is a flag that the content author is thinking about search engines and not users, and that will get you into trouble. You're almost always better off having the writer focus on creating quality content, but controlling the title of the article so you can make sure that the keyword is in it.

10. Not Investing in Site Promotion

Many organizations think that the process is complete once a site is launched. They don't realize that the Web site needs to be promoted much like any other product or service. Inbound links (and in the future other references to your Web site, company, or products on the Web) are the primary voting mechanism that search engines use to tell them which are the most important sites related to a particular search query.

Social, Search, and Branding

Social media is frequently looked at by search marketers as an exercise in SEO. And, in some cases, it might be. But looking at social media from an SEO perspective will get you into trouble.

What's Your Definition of Social Media?

What is frequently referred to as "social" is a universe of activities covering anything from user-generated content and blogs on your site, to blogger outreach and social networking, bookmarking, sharing, and back scratching (OK, that last one's made up, but I hold that it can't be too far behind). You may as well say that SEO and the tax code naturally go together.

Social media is about interacting with your target audience, creating bonds with your brand, and then giving your audience outlets to exercise those bonds, either directly with your brand (e.g., purchases, signups) or spreading the word to others. To focus on mere content and links is not only missing the point of participation, but is probably setting you up for PR headaches.

Public Relations

Speaking of PR, the symbiosis between social media and SEO is a lot like the leverage between public relations and SEO. The ultimate goal of PR is to grow the brand: To put a human face on your brand, to draw people into conversations, and to encourage interaction outside of typical mercantile settings through content of many varieties.

Can you use PR to grow your search engine rankings? Sure. Can you use it purely as a means to that end? Technically.

Article submission and press releases are a tried and true method for building links -- but if performed solely to win authority with search engines, you miss out on winning authority with the people you're ultimately looking to influence much more than search engines.

A well-written release, a well-executed video, or a well-done publicity move that's performed with SEO value included -- but not as the primary goal -- will gain you more link value to your site than the link value you get from a dozen spammed-out releases that you spent five minutes on.

A good PR execution should be designed to get people to interact with your creation by sharing it with friends, followers, and readers across a range of channels. This expands the resulting inbound links from your efforts, and also draws more people to your site, giving you the opportunity to earn links, subscriptions and purchase from visitors. Can you say the same of an article that you randomly threw together, added links to, and posted somewhere?...more

My Favorite Link Building Lie

People will tell you it’s no longer possible to obtain links by asking for them via email. Spend even a little time reading the SEO/SEM blogs, forums, comments, etc., and you’ll find a reasonable and well-meaning post, something like this beauty I read over at the UK version of TechCrunch. “The days of asking a site [...]..more

Get Traffic Data To Maps

Google is now using location-enabled mobile phones that have Maps for mobile installed to improve its real-time traffic data. According to the Google Blog: If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that’s exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends [...]..more

Curious Case Of Google’s Bizarre UK Search Results

SEOs are wracking their brains over what Google is up to in the UK. The Twitterverse has been buzzing over the last three months about Google’s strange search results, and many bloggers have addressed the problem since early June.

What’s happening? Last June several UK SEOs started to notice changes in the UK SERPS. At first it seemed as if the Vince Update, which hit the US last February, caused the change in rankings. But in the UK there seemed to be more than just Vince affecting results.

The Vince update, for a short period, caused a change in rankings for brand-related searches. In the last couple of months, however, it was not just big brands that dominated search results—.com sites were taking over the results in the UK, gaining prominence over .co.uk sites based in Great Britain.

Something like this happened before in 2008, when UK searches were mixed with US searches. But this time it was different. Not just American results started popping up. Australian, South African and even Dutch results started ‘beating’ the local UK results. Some results were pretty surprising. Where you would expect UK results for local searches now (in many cases irrelevant) US-results appeared.

Kevin Gibbons of SEOptimise, also a Search Engine Land writer, was one of the people who noticed the US results first. After that more and more started to notice bizarre search results.

More Read

Crowdsourcing road congestion data

What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere.

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

Searching For Jessica Biel May Be Dangerous To Computer’s Health

Danger, thy name is Jessica Biel!

No, we’re not turning Search Engine Land into a celebrity gossip blog … we’re talking about the risks of searching online for certain celebrities. And, according to a McAfee report issued today, Jessica Biel is the most dangerous celebrity on the web, passing last year’s master of search disaster, Brad Pitt.



McAfee explains the risks involved in being a search engine-using fan of Jessica Biel:

“Fans searching for “Jessica Biel” or “Jessica Biel downloads,” “Jessica Biel wallpaper,” “Jessica Biel screen savers,” “Jessica Biel photos” and “Jessica Biel videos” have a one in five chance of landing at a Web site that’s tested positive for online threats, such as spyware, adware, spam, phishing, viruses and other malware.”

Here’s the full top ten, according to McAfee’s study:

1. Jessica Biel
2. Beyoncé
3. Jennifer Aniston
4. Tom Brady
5. Jessica Simpson
6. Gisele Bundchen
7. Miley Cyrus
8. Megan Fox & Angelina Jolie (tie)
9. Ashley Tisdale
10. Brad Pitt

Every One Will Monetize there 15 Min

We first launched the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to help some of our more popular users make money from their videos on YouTube. While we've focused on accepting prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience — like Fred and ValsArtDiary — we've occasionally extended the program to include some of the site's more unforgettable videos, such as the Battle of Kruger, David after dentist and Otters holding hands. These individual video partnerships recognize the role popular "one-off" videos play on YouTube, and have helped many people earn thousands of dollars a month as their videos went viral and endured over time.

We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account:

New Search Clothes Yahoo

Yahoo’s done a long conference call about search changes today, as detailed in our Live Blogging Yahoo’s Product Call post. Beginning today, millions are to be included in a test of the new search features, with no specific date on when they’ll roll out to everyone. In a blog post to go with the call from Yahoo, we’re told:

We know that search has been a hot topic over the past few weeks, so we wanted to share with you what the Yahoo! Search team has been focusing on lately. Today, we are announcing a new search page design that makes search more personally relevant and helps people explore the things that matter most to them. It exemplifies how Yahoo! is continuing to innovate in search technology and the user experience.

The changes, which I’ll detail shortly, follow on recent improvements to Yahoo’s Delicious bookmarking service and Flickr photo sharing service. Both of those have search aspects to them, and along with today’s news, gives the impression that Yahoo’s just as busy as ever being innovative in search.

The reality is that all these changes have been in the works for months, by Yahoo employees before their company made clear its intention to get out of the search indexing game. The momentum of work already done will carry Yahoo forward for a bit. It remains uncertain to me whether Yahoo’s talent will remain in the long term. It remains even more uncertain that user interface changes will have any impact on growing Yahoo’s search share. More on that at the end — let’s look at those new features!

I have noticed two blogs picking up on what appears to be some sort of navigational data being added to the Google search results snippet. The Red Cardinal blog posted screen shots, as did Rob Hammond at his blog.

Google has confirmed this is indeed an experiment they are running, a “site navigation experiment,” they told me. Google did clarify that this data is being generated from Google and not being taken from a third-party source. Google promised to keep me posted on how this experiment progresses.

Swiss Govt. Not So Neutral On Google Street View

A Swiss privacy official issued a statement demanding that Google “immediately withdraw its online service Google Street View concerning Switzerland on friday.” Thuer apparently did some Street View browsing of his own and felt that Google hadn’t adequately blurred license plates and people’s faces.

According to InformationWeek, the Swiss complaint came as a surprise. “We were surprised by the FDPIC’s announcement. We have been engaged in constructive dialogue with the organization ahead of [last] week’s launch to demonstrate how we protect people’s privacy on Street View,” says a Google spokesperson.

Thuer met with Google reps today — Google called the meeting “a good exchange of views” and indicated they’re open to additional discussions. Google says very few Swiss users have asked Google to remove Street View images, and when they have, the deletions happen within hours “in most cases.”

In fact, Swiss consumers seem to be quite happy with the service. Google attorney Peter Fleischer tells the AP that “Google Maps had an 80 percent increase in volume and only a small number of requests to erase pictures.”

A new website for the rapid sharing of influenza research

The successful development of open access publishing by organizations including the Public Library of Science (PLoS) in recent years is a dramatic illustration of how the Internet is revolutionizing scientific communication. Today, after several months of work, I’m delighted to announce that PLoS is launching PLoS Currents (Beta) — a new and experimental website for the rapid communication of research results and ideas. In response to the recent worldwide H1N1 influenza outbreak, the first PLoS Currents research theme is influenza.

PLoS Currents: Influenza, which we are launching today, is built on three key components: a small expert research community that PLoS is working with to run the website; Google Knol with new features that allow content to be gathered together in collections after being vetted by expert moderators; and a new, independent database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) called Rapid Research Notes, where research targeted for rapid communication, such as the content in PLoS Currents: Influenza will be freely and permanently accessible. To ensure that researchers are properly credited for their work, PLoS Currents content will also be given a unique identifier by the NCBI so that it is citable.

PLoS Currents: Influenza welcomes contributions covering any and all aspects of research into influenza: influenza virology, genetics, immunity, structural biology, genomics, epidemiology, modeling, evolution, policy and control. Contributions might take the form of new datasets, preliminary analyses or entire manuscripts. The launch site already features new findings from some outstanding influenza researchers.

To enable contributions to PLoS Currents: Influenza to be shared as rapidly as possible, they will not be subject to in-depth peer review; however, unsuitable submissions will be screened out by a board of expert moderators led by Eddie Holmes (Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Pennsylvania State University) and Peter Palese (Department of Microbiology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine).

The key goal of PLoS Currents is to accelerate scientific discovery by allowing researchers to share their latest findings and ideas immediately with the world’s scientific and medical communities. Google Knol’s features for community interaction, comment and discussion will enable commentary and conversations to develop around these findings. Given that the contributions to PLoS Currents are not peer-reviewed in detail, however, the results and conclusions must be regarded as preliminary. In time, it is therefore likely that PLoS Currents contributors will submit their work for publication in a formal journal, and the PLoS Journals will welcome these submissions.

PLoS Currents: Influenza is an experiment and a prototype for further PLoS Currents sites. It reflects our commitment to using online tools to the fullest extent possible for the open sharing of research results. As with any new project, we will be listening carefully to the reactions within and beyond the scientific and medical communities and welcoming suggestions for improvements.

SEO Terms

SEO Terms

Below is a listing of some of the more common SEO Terms and definitions. This is not a complete list by any means and will be appended in the future as new terms come up (which they invariably will). If you like this list and use it, please link to it from your website.

If you have any suggestions for additions to this list, please contact me and let me know.


301 Redirect
- Method of redirecting an old webpage to a new location. More simply, to display another web page for the web address that you are trying to visit. 301 implies that the move is permanent (as opposed to temporary, etc.)

Affiliate Marketing
- A marketing program in which an advertiser pays an affiliate for driving event-driven traffic to their site. An event is primarily completing an order on the advertisers site but could simply be some sort of lead generation. Affiliate gets paid a commission based on order or lead. See affiliate marketing programs.

AJAX
- Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. A way to design web pages that are more end-user friendly and respond more quickly when the user requests data. A good example of AJAX in practice is Google Maps.

Alt Tag
- An HTML attribute typically used within the IMG tag to provide alternate text when images cannot be displayed.

Anchor Tag
- An HTML tag that allows you to create a link to another document or web page or to a bookmark within the current web page.

B2B
- Business To Business. Marketing strategy which involves the transaction of goods or services between businesses. (Wikipedia)

B2C
- Business To Consumer. Transaction of goods or services directly to the end consumer.

Backlink
- Links originating from one website and pointing to another website or web page. See link building.

Black Hat SEO
- The use of unaccepted or frowned upon SEO practices in order to get higher rankings and more traffic. Use at the risk of being dropped from the engines or at least being removed from high rankings. More on black hat seo.

Blog
- "Web Log". An online journal of sorts.

Bot
- Programs written to scour the web automatically for various reasons (to index web pages, for spamming purposes, etc.) aka web robots, web crawlers, internet bots, spiders.

Cloaking
- Showing a different web page to a search engine spider than what is normally seen. Method typically used by spammers.

Conversion
- Web traffic that fulfills a pre-established goal, such as purchasing of a specific product or filling out a registration form, etc.

CPA
- Cost Per Acquisition. Fee paid to an affiliate marketer for driving a particular action or event on your site (either a sale or lead generation, etc.).

CPC
- Cost Per Click. Typical rate of measuring the expense involved with acquiring web traffic.

CSS
- Cascading Style Sheets. A language used to describe how a given page or web site will look. Used to control font styles, graphical layouts, color, etc.

CTR
- Click Through Rate. Standard method of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. Calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of times the ad was shown (also known as an impression). (Wikipedia)

Dynamic Website
- A website whose content is not fixed. What is shown on a page is based on user-selected activities and/or programmatically driven.

Google PageRank
- Google PageRank™ is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web.

Keywords
- Words that are used by search engines to determine the topic of a given web page.

Keyword Density
- How often a keyword or keyword phrase is used on a given web page.

Landing Page
- A content-rich web page geared around a particular topic, product or conversion goal. Typically a main navigation item of a website.

Latent Semantic Indexing
- Or LSI for short, is an algorithm used by Google (and possibly other search engines) to determine how words are related to each other in the context of a web page. An article about "cookies" might contain words such as chocolate, sugar, flour or dough for example.

Meta Data
/
Meta Tags
- Web page specific, descriptive information that helps a search engine identify the purpose and topic of a given web page. Common meta data include a web page's description and keyword listing.

Organic Search
- Search results in a search engine that are not paid advertisements. The results that come up naturally based on their indexing within a search engine. Organic search results are good. We all want to come up on top for organic searches using keywords we are optimized for. For example, searching for "george ajazi" will return this website in organic search results.

peanut butter and jelly sandwich
Paid Link Building
- Websites who are willing to link back to your site for a fee in order to boost your rankings/weight in the search engines. See link building.

PBJ
- Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich.

PPC
- Pay Per Click. Advertising method where an advertiser pays for their ads (which are displayed on a given website) if and only if someone actually clicks on the ad.

Reciprocal Link
- The practice of placing a link from website A to website B strictly because website B is linking to website A. I scratch your back, you scratch my back.

Sausage Link
- A tasty snack to munch on while building reciprocal links.

Search Engine
- Web site whose function is to help users find web pages on any given searched topic.

SEM
- Search Engine Marketing. The act of marketing a website via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities.

SEO
- Search Engine Optimization. The act of altering a web site so that it does well in organic listings of search engines. A service I give away for free.

SERP
- Search Engine Results Page. The listing of web pages that a search engine shows a user once they've entered a search value.

Spider
- Programs written to scour the web automatically for various reasons (to index web pages, for spamming purposes, etc.) aka web robots, web crawlers, bots, internet bots.

Splash Page
- Typically an introductory web page (first page seen by a web surfer) that is graphics-heavy. Meant for attention-grabbing purposes only. Not rich in content (if any). Eye candy.

Static Website
- A website or web page whose content is fixed (does not change or has to be manually changed).

Supplemental Results
- Google's secondary index of web pages it doesn't consider worthy of being in the main index. This concept has been done away with by Google publicly, but I do feel it actually still exists in a not-as-readily-identifiable way.

Title Tag
- A meta data element that determines the actual "title" of a given webpage. The title is what shows up in the top bar of your browser. It is also the hyperlink that shows in search engine results listings.

TLD
- Top Level Domain. The three main domain extensions: .com, .net, .org

URL
- Uniform Resource Locator. Or, more commonly, a web address.

W3C
- World Wide Web Consortium.

White Hat SEO
- The use of accepted SEO practices in order to get higher rankings, more traffic, etc.