The following glossary of terms is to be construed in context of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. The literal meaning of the word may vary slightly.

Authority: An adjective refers to a page having several links to different web pages inhered in it. A webpage in context of SEO is authoritative if it has a lot of content in a specific niche.

Bait-and-switch: It implies a kind of strategy used by seasoned webmasters. This strategy is primarily implemented targeting search engines, making it have a dissimilar view with respect to a particular site or document. However, when users click on the link to such a page, they are airted or redirected to an altogether different page. Thus, this strategy generates web traffic to the site.

Blog: Blog is a kind of internet site where blogger can post articles of almost any type. It may include article posts relating to hobby, opinion about a policy or an issue, or even his or her daily activities that he wants to share with everyone. It is also known as “Web logging” or “Web journaling”, Blog are a way of driving traffic to a website by regularly updating the content and hence the search engines ranking.

Blog Farm: A blog farm is a Noun phrase. It refers to a whole segment of blogs operated by just one person but appearing to search engines as if they were owned by different bloggers having no relations with each other. Blog farms may be posted with fresh content daily through some sort of software. Such Blog Farms are primary used as a tool for link building. A blog farm may also employ a RSS-feed scraping script.

Body Links: Any kind of anchor text or hypertext link found in the content of a website to give a licit look to the web document is known as Body Link.

Conversion: The term conversion, which is a noun, connotes a state of action whereby a visitor of a webpage or blog does something or acts in a particular way to deliver the anticipated results. For instance, the term conversion may mean the visitor buying a product or commodity sold online, or clicking an advertisement as expected, a visitor that clicks on a particular link. There are, typically four different types of conversion viz. Transactional Conversions, Transformational Conversions, Search Conversions, and Informational Conversions.

Content-rich Doorway: A webpage decorated with images, pictures, navigation, and other links such that it creates a sitemap. The page is thus, organized to ensure that it appears to be a part of a Web site. A doorway is usually targeted to rank for one particular keyword.

Crawl: A search engine robot or a crawler scans through the content of a Website in order to index and store them in search engine database. This entire process is known as crawling. There are certain criterion used by search engines to determine rates and priorities of crawl.

Crawl Page: A crawl page is a webpage or document containing hyperlinks that link to pages on other sites. Crawl Page is created keeping the search engine bots or crawlers in mind to enable them to index the page. A crawl page helps in a complete site crawling quickly in a controlled way.

Doorway: A doorway, a noun term, consists of a web document with a little bit of text proposed to rank high specifically on a given expression. Webmasters create several doorways as a means of targeting search engines with specific keywords.

Host: A host in hardware terminology is a single physical computing device i.e. a desktop, a laptop or a server. However, in SEO parlance host refers to a domain or sub-domain hosted on a server. Note that it is not necessarily same as a site. Multiple domain or sub-domains pointing to a single physical server would connote different hosts in SEO nomenclature. For instance, a domain xyz.com and a sub domain site1.xyz.com would both be treated as different host.

Hub: A web page linking several other pages or web documents revolving around a single topic is referred to as Hub. This is particularly applicable in context of web URL directories. For instance a main category page in all major directories such Yahoo! or DMOZ are hub pages. All the liked documents are assumed as an authority in their respective domain. Major page ranking algorithms such Jon Kleinberg’s HITS, Edison algorithms, ExpertRank and CLEVER refer to a hub as a document on a particular topic linking to several different experts on the topic.

Index: When used in the context as a noun, search engines store web page and site information in relational databases. An index file contains the sorted information to quickly locate a record when a search is performed by the database against a keyword or expression. However, in SEO parlance index is considered as a database used by search engines to deliver search results when the user submits search query. Thus, it contains or refers to all of the database(s) against which search queries are resolved. Search engines maintain multiple indexes to deliver quick search results based on keywords. The index database either may be stored in physically separate files, or virtually or logically segmented portions of a master database. For a DBA this definition of indexes may not hold good completely.

Index: When used as a verb index refers to the process of adding information into the search engine database and then creating indexes on the keywords to deliver quick results against the search query. The appropriate use of keyword in the document is very extremely critical in enabling search engines to index the documents as per expectations of an SEO technician.

Information Retrieval Science: Information Retrieval Science refers to a scientific study or a systematic discipline of locating documents in a database. Information Retrieval Science is one of the basic technological approaches used in Web search.
Informational Conversion: When a visitant to a webpage finds the accurate information he is looking for it is said that an informational conversion has occurred.

Internal PageRank: When a page is indexed, by a search engine in its database an algorithm is applied to the stored information to calculate what is called as Internal Page Rank. The order in which a web page is listed in the search results is depending on the page ranking value of the page as determined by the search engine. Internal page rank is thus a statistical value that search engines computes and add to dynamic or run-time relevance scores of the web sites. Matt Cutts, in his blog has tried to differentiate between Internal PageRank and Toolbar PageRank. Tough at time toolbar page rank is confused with the internal page rank but they are not the same. Toolbar page rank is a static value that does not change more than couple of times in a year, and hence has no relevance in SEO.

Landing Page: A landing page is a specially created web page or a rich-content doorway created primarily to receive the traffic generated form PPC advertisements. Landing page is written targeting the visitor, and not the search engine. It usually contains a sales letter that may contain fake testimonials. Landing pages are used in some of the organic SEO techniques as a means of carrying out experimentation.

Link Baiting: In simple terms, such a link baiting scheme refers to the ability of creating attractive headlines and then submitting them to various social media sites so that it can result in the creation of thousands of links on forums, blogs as well as various other sites in a short period of time.

Link Building: Link building refers to a method of generating traffic to a webpage. It involves acquisition of links pointing to a Web document by in one or more ways either through the request, creation, distribution of copy, lease/purchase, reciprocation, or through automated services.

Link Circle: It refers to a group of Web sites linking one another in a circular manner. For instance, in a link circle two or more documents would link to each other such that X links to Y, Y links to Z, and Z links to X.

Link Farm: Link farm is a group of Web sites in which each member site circularly links to another member site within the group.

Link Flow: It is nothing but a manifestation of PageRank in the Search Engine Optimization i.e. SEO theory. Both users and search engines may use link flow as a link pathway to hop between different pages.

Link Wheel: Link wheel is a purpose built link circle such that the links within the circle also link to a hub site or the central site.

MFA: Usually an acronym for Made for Advertising that refers to various pages in such a manner that they all have useful data and content. These can include press releases, articles, blogs or even article reprint pages. However, the main reason for having such pages is to ensure that there is a mannerism of being able to draw in traffic to a website so that visitors can then go ahead and click on various advertisements present on the website such as Google Ads or Yahoo Publisher Ads.

Navigational links: They include links to web pages within a web site on the internet. They provide clear pathways across several pages to website visitants. Navigation Links have the property of being uniform across all pages within the site.

PageRank Evaporation: It is a process whereby page rank algorithms distribute a web document’s page rank across other different pages within a website. Thus, even though a specific page may gain higher page rank it may get evaporated because of its distribution across other low page rank web documents.

Page Rank Hoarding: The process by which a page rank evaporation is assayed to be preserved is known as page rank hoarding. However, as all esteemed promulgated sources on the subject has accorded that a document’s calculated Page Rank must be distributed across the entire collection of documents from which the overall Page Rank is calculated.

Page Zone or Zone: Page zones are used to place advertisements and links in a web site. There are no hard and fast rules for designating a certain visible portion of web page as a zone. A zone is therefore, an indiscriminately assigned visible portion used for advertisement and link on a Web page.

Pull Quote Link: As the term itself suggests a pull quote link is a link to a web document implanted in a pull quote. These Pull Quote Links are extremely helpful in attribution. A pull quote, a snippet of content or citation specially positioned such that grabs a reader’s attention as they scan through pages.

Quality Links: Its only purpose is to differentiate between different links that people think are better than others. It only construes the posting of links on forums, blogs, and social network sites in seemingly non-spamming way. Most of the SEO forum moderators and administrators use “quality links” in more or less the same context. The term quality link is therefore does not hold any real value.

Query Space: It includes all queries and aggregation of relevant search results for a given search expressions.

Search Conversion: When a user clicks a link out of search result, a search conversion is said to have occurred. In order to be termed as a search conversion a user may be required to point the destination sites for a basic minimum length of time.

Search Engine Marketing: Search engines index the pages by deploying search engine robot or crawlers. However, there are ways of manipulating such behavior of search engine. Search marketing refers to a) Paid promotion of a web site using search engines and b) PPC i.e. pay-per-click advertisements.

Search Engine Optimization: Abbreviated as SEO is all about the principles of devising, designing, editing, or supplementing web pages using documents to gain higher search engine ranking.

Search Listing: Also commonly known as search result, search listing is the list of web pages with a snippet or descriptive text produced by a search engine on a searched keyword or expression. A typical search result or listing generally includes a page title along with summary text, page URL, and cached pages if any.

Search Result: It is same as search listing. In nutshell, it is the result page generated by the search engines such as Google as an answer to a user inputted query.

Search Results Management: It refers to the systematic way of managing multiple results that are being displayed in a search page. Search Results Management is one of the most important factors determining a search engine’s reputation.

Search Visibility: Search visibility is the ability of a website to appear in search listings across multiple search queries. A web site always has a higher search visibility as against a web page or web document.

SEO Technician: SEO technician is a professional also known as SEO Specialist who is employed full time or part time in search engine optimization services.

Site Map: A site map or sitemap is a web document or a web page consisting of a web site’s page directory. Usually sitemaps are prepared using XML coding. However, a text sitemap or a HTML sitemap may also be used web masters to direct the web page crawling by search engine robot or a crawler.

Sitelinks: Sitelinks are specific to Google. These are pocket-sized sub-listings of seemingly useful links within a web site that sometimes appear under the first listing on the first page in Google search results. According to Google’s webmaster central “…. sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for“. Google seem to show sitelinks only for results when the sitelink algorithm finds the website to be a good candidate for sitelink listing. However, one can deduce that site links are if a website has huge content with various sections, there is a likely hood that sitelinks would be enabled by Google’s algorithm for such site.

SpamAd Page: A spam page has no relevant to any visitor. It is created just to drive traffic by making a visitor believe its content. It is made only with a belief that the visitor would click one or the other advertisement.

Transactional Conversion: When a visitor buys a product or a service in return of money or a valued commodity, a transactional conversion is said to have occurred. For instance, a transaction conversion would result in purchase of goods or services, subscription fee payments, paid membership registrations and so on.

Validation: Generally, it is assumed that validation of site refers to validation of HTML code as published in W3C manuals. However, an appropriate definition of the term would relate it to seemingly non-spamming content of a website as validated by search engines. Therefore, there is a possibility of even spam site being validated while even a genuine site might appear invalid, the validation process is automatic, and algorithm or some sort of logical programming is used to validate websites. Thus, validation is not strictly about compliance with any arbitrary standards. Instead, it is more of meeting a search engine’s algorithm requirements.