Web Development & SEO Glossary

404 Error - A 404 Error Page is the page that a user lands on when he has clicked a broken link within a Web site. A sitemap is the best choice for a custom 404 Error page, so that a user can navigate to the desired page.

800 x 600 - Maximum resolution of most flat panel screens.

Above the fold - The part of a Web page that appears on the screen before scrolling downward.

Absolute link - An absolute link gives a specific location of the Web file or document including: how to go get the document, what server it comes from, the directory, and the actual document.

Accessibility means that people regardless of disability as well as machines can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web.

ActionScript - A scripting language used in Macromedia Flash. It is similar to JavaScript.

AJAX - This is a technology that allows a webpage to make small requests back to the server, and change page elements based on response without a page refresh. Example: http://www.thekarchergroup.com/seminar/smokeandmirrors The links below the yellow box use AJAX to go back to the server and get content- but your page never completely reloads.

Algorithm - formula to determine the rankings of Web sites returned within search queries, based on criteria such as number of incoming links, keywords, quality of the site, page titles, meta descriptions, and more. The exact algorithm formulas are closely guarded by the search engines to keep the rankings fair.

Alt Attribute - Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object.

Analytics - Tools and methods used by search marketers to determine the effects of SEO on a Website’s traffic and conversions.

Anchor text – The clickable text in a link. The text will usually give the user an idea as to what information the destination will contain.

ASP (Application Service Provider) - a company that provides computer services to it’s clients through a network.

Avg. Page Views - The average number of pages each visitor sees within a single session. Higher values when combined with a long visit length indicate users read lots of content. High values with short visit length indicate visitors are clicking around but not reading.

Avg. Time on Site - The average amount of time in seconds visitors spend on the site. This is a measurement of how effective you are at holding on to visitors once they have reached your site. When this number is low, you should consider what those visitors were looking for, and why they failed to find it on your site.

Backbone - Is your core network infustructure. Typically used in reference to how you connect to the Internet but in a large corporate or service provider environment the backbone includes all elements of your network NOT used to connect to the end-points. For example core switches or routers which exchange data between other switches and routers.
Backlinks - Links that are pointing to a given domain from other sites; often called a site’s link popularity.

Black Hat SEO - Unethical SEO techniques used to (temporarily) increase Search Engine rankings; results in being banned by the Search Engine's once discovered.

Blog – Slang for “weblog”, an online log, or diary, can be about any topic imaginable.

Block list - a collection of names or addresses that do not have permission to access a given resource. This is also called a black list.

Breadcrumb Navigation - Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between pages.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) - A language/document that allows developers to separate presentational style (e.g. fonts, colors, images, layout and spacing) from HTML and XML documents and contain them separately to then be referenced as needed.

Cart Abandonment Rate - The total number of people who complete the checkout process divided by the total number of people who add to cart. The Cart Abandonment Rate is helpful because it can help identify potential weaknesses in the shopping cart process.

Clicktracks – A system of tracking and analyzing SEO efforts and trends.

Cognitive Load – A theory based on the idea that Web sites and other interactive media create a certain amount of stress on the brain. A goal of good Web design is to reduce the cognitive load, make it easy to use and as stress free as possible.

Content Management System – A system built into a Web site to allow the site owner to make updates and additions to the content / copy as needed.

Conversions - A conversion is reached when a desired goal is completed, such as email sign up, newsletter sign up or a completed sale.

Conversion Rates – The percentage of visitors to a Web site who take a positive action is considered a conversion. Conversions include making a purchase, completing a request for more information, etc., depending on the type of site. For instance, if 100 people visit a site and 3 people make a purchase, the conversion rate is 3%.

Conversion tracking – the act of tracking user actions in order to analyze behavior, and thus adjust SEO and design efforts accordingly.

Cookie - Small data file written to a user's local machine to track them. Cookies are used to help websites customize your user experience and help affiliate program managers track conversions.

CRM - Customer Relationship Management

Custom error page - A page designed specifically for a certain Web site, so that when a user clicks a broken link inside the site, they will not leave the site. The sitemap is often used as a Custom error page.

Database Driven Web site - A dynamic site that can be changed easily, run by a database.

Datacenter – the room with all the blinking lights that Dustin won’t let us enter. It is a climate controlled room, with special heat sensors and fire protection where we store all the servers. It is the nerve center.

Deep Link - A link to any page on a site other than the home page. Could be a hyperlink from another site or a result from a search engine.

Dedicated hosting – having your own server.

Direct Traffic - The number of visitors who directly accessed your site. Direct visits can be the result of bookmarks, browser home page, or manually typing in your domain URL. In other words, these visitors did not click on a search engine result, PPC ad, or link to access your site.

Directory – A Web site that includes links under specific categories, to enable the user to find sites that have what they are looking for rapidly.

DNS - An acronym for Domain Name System. Domain Name System servers are used to resolve a human-readable name (such as www.thekarchergroup.com) into an IP address. Computers use IP addresses (a string of 4 octets such as 192.168.0.1) to give each node on a network unique-id.

Domain - The human readable name of an I.P. address, such as www.thekarchergroup.com .

Dreamweaver - A program used to build web pages.

Dynamic content - Content that changes regularly, such as on a blog or e-commerce site.
E-Commerce - Commerce performed through a Web site.

Fixed-Width - A design that remains the same width regardless of the browser window size and does not "stretch" to fill the screen.

Fluid Design – Sometimes called "stretchy". A site that expands to fill the width of the browser.

Front Page – A Microsoft Office application that enables the authoring of Web pages.

Google Analytics - Google’s Search Engine Optimization analysis program.

Google bomb – efforts by internet users to create anchor text that skews results to produce a ranking for a page that is not relevant or really related to the query.

Hits - Represents the number of file requests made to the server, but this figure serves as an inaccurate gauge of a site’s traffic. In fact, ignore it.

Homepage Exit Rate - indicates how many people viewed your site’s homepage and then left. This data may indicate that your site’s design, navigation, or usability is flawed, or that your keyword list is targeting the wrong traffic.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) - the main language for coding Web pages.
Keyword - A word used by a searcher to find relevant webpages on a search engine.
Keyword Research - Allows you to discover what people are searching for on the engines. Knowing this information proves to be invaluable when running both organic and Pay-Per-Click campaigns since you can tailor your keyword list accordingly.

Landing Page - The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.

Link Building - the process of acquiring backlinks to a site by submitting the site to various directories, other similar sites and asking for a link to be added to their Website, leading back to yours.

Link Popularity - The Number of pages that link to a particular site.

Link Traffic - The number of visitors who were on another site before clicking a link which led into your site.

Manual Submission - Submitting sites to Directories and search engines by hand, instead of using a program.

Load Time - The amount of time in seconds that it takes a page to fully load.

Meta Tag - An HTML tag that describes to the Search Engines what the page is about, when it was last updated and who created the page.

Mobile Web Design – designing for mobile devices such as PDAs, Blackberrys, cell phones and more.

Natural or “Organic” Results - Results from a computer ranking (algorithm) with no paid placements or inclusions.

Page Rank - What Google thinks a webpage is worth; Google ranks pages on a 1-10 basis.

Page Weight – How large a page is in megabytes or gigabytes (size of all the combined files on the page); relevant to how long the page takes to load.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - Listing result placed as a result of monetary bid or paid inclusion. Usually called a "Sponsored Links/Sites"

PHP – programming language used for programming sites.

PPC Traffic - The number of visitors who clicked on a paid ad which led into your site.

Propagation – Internet changes need to be recognized by other computers throughout the net. This is known as propagation.

Reciprocal Link - A link that is exchanged with another website relevant to your own to increase link popularity, in hopes of gaining higher search engine ranking.

Referral Rate - A measure of the traffic visiting your Web site broken out by channel: search engine, PPC, link, or direct. The Referral Rate can help determine which channel is most effective at driving traffic to your site.

Referring Site - A site that sends visitors your site’s way and may include directories, banner advertisements, or any other sites targeted during link-building campaigns.

Returning Visitor - a Unique Visitor that has come back for more; in other words, they’ve visited your site at least twice. Keep an eye on how many Returning Visitors your site enjoys to get a feel for your site’s “sticky-ness” factor.

RFP - Request for Proposal - An invitation for companies to submit a proposal for specific services or products
Robots.txt - A Web site command in HTML that tells search engine spiders to stop indexing a site or page.

Scope Creep – When the scope of a project gets somewhat out of control, resulting in cost overruns, loss of time management and focus.

Search Engines - Search Engines are the databases of websites that are searchable to the public. They provide results based on the search terms entered. Examples are www.google.com and www.yahoo.com .

Search Engine Marketing - Includes marketing for the whole of the search industry.

Search Engine Optimization - the process of making changes to a Web site to encourage high rankings in the search engines and therefore increased traffic to a given website.

Search Engine Referrals - Relates directly to how often a user got to your site by way of a search engine. This lets you know whether or not your site’s rankings are having an effect on your traffic. Look to your conversion rate when analyzing this figure, as well, to see if you’re making any profit from your referral rate. Also, a high referral rate coupled with a low conversion rate may indicate that your site is ranked under the wrong keywords or phrases.

SERP - Search Engine Results Page: the page that a search engine returns with the results of your query.
Search Engine Saturation - Describes the number of pages a Search Engine has indexed for a particular Website.
Search Engine Submission - The act of manually submitting your website for inclusion in a Search Engine database.

Search Engine Traffic - The number of visitors who clicked an organic search result (non PPC) which led into your site.

Search friendly – A site that has been designed and optimized for the easiest crawling of the search engine bots.
“Search Friendly” Design – Designing a website to be easily found and crawled by Search engines. This also means that it will be easily found and used by the target audience.

Semantic Markup - Semantic markup is a method of writing HTML that employs using HTML tags that add meaning to the content they contain that is descriptive enough to allow humans and the machines we program to recognize it and make decisions about it. In other words, markup means something when we can identify it and do useful things with it. In this way, semantic markup becomes more than merely descriptive. It becomes a brilliant mechanism that allows both humans and machines to “understand” the same information.

Server Collocation – When an entire copy of your site is hosted in another server.
Shopping cart – The virtual shopping cart that a user can place items from an e-commerce site in until she is ready to check out.

Sitemap – A map of a Web site that lists each page and it’s subpages. Ideally this is used as the 404 Error Page, to help users find what they need when they get an error or just need a quick way to find what they need.

Social Media - Online technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and media themselves. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. The social media sites typically use tools like message boards, forums, podcasts, bookmarks, communities, wikis, blogs, etc. (Wikipedia) Popular social media sites include Technorati, Digg, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo! Answers, and del.icio.us.

Spec - Acronym for Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, a nonprofit corporation set up by many computer and microprocessor vendors to create a standard set of benchmark tests. The most widely used set of tests, known as SPEC CPU2000 contains two benchmark suites: CINT2000 for measuring and comparing compute-intensive integer performance, and CFP2000 for measuring and comparing compute-intensive floating point performance. The SPEC CPU2000 benchmark tests are also called CPU2000 tests.

Spider -A program that surfs the Web in order to index information for a search engine.

SSL (secured socket layer) - Secures a site so that it is safe to send personal information.

Text link - A link that looks like highlighted text on a Web page or in a document.

Top Converting Keywords - This report breaks out the top keywords and phrases which lead to a conversion. The Karcher Group will often use these words in order to identify additional optimization opportunities and/or phrases worth purchasing for PPC. Within the keywords report you may see 'other' or 'none' being listed. 'Other' indicates that there were additional words or phrases that are not showing in this list. 'None' indicates that there were additional conversions that occurred as a result of non-search/PPC traffic channels (link or direct).

Traffic Referral Rates – The total traffic visiting your Web site broken out by channel: search engine, PPC, link, or direct. The Traffic Referral Rate can help determine which channel is most effective at driving traffic to your site.

Unique Visitor – An actual human being who has spent time on your site. This, and not hits, is the number you want to pay attention to when evaluating your site’s traffic status.

Usability – A Web site’s usability is determined by the navigation, cart system, forms, etc. Conversions are more likely in a site that is easy to use, navigation is simple and not too much effort is required by the user.

User Path – This information tracks what a user did while on your site and in what order. If the user made a purchase, the User Path would tell you what page they entered on and any subsequent pages they visited before making the purchase.

User Session - an accumulation of the total time a user spends on your site and what they do while on your site. The session is usually "ended" when all pages have been closed or after a specific time of inactivity.

Visitor Session - represents how much time a Unique Visitor spent on your site. As you read through our site, for instance, you’re adding one “Visitor Session” to our statistics. Thanks!

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) – They develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.

Web Analytics – The act of analyzing a site’s SEO, usability and statistics to determine what factors created the greatest traffic and conversions, or what changes need to be made.

Web Hosting – Where a Web site “lives” – where the data for a site is actually stored.

Web Mail – email that can be accessed over the internet from any internet connection.

Web Standards - The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call “web standards,” are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.

"White Hat" SEO - SEO techniques that follow Search Engine guidelines. Search Engine Optimization performed with high ethical standards.

Wysiwyg - "What you see is what you get" - A desktop or web application that allows someone w/out knowledge of HTML to construct web pages/sites. Typical online solutions work very similar to Microsoft word by dragging and dropping elements as the application writes the supporting HTML in the behind the scenes.

To learn more about our SEO solutions, call 800-310-0317 or contact us online.