While browsing the World Wide Web searching for information on SEO, or reading this blog, you’re going to come across some terminology that you may not be familiar with. Instead of you running around all confused, I thought I would put together a list of terms that you’ll find fairly frequently. I know for me, it’s easier to refer to a list for information, than random paragraphs all of the time.

  • 301 – A server redirect. Let’s say you change the location of something address wise, but everything is still pointing to the original location, this is when you would use a 301 redirect.
  • Alt text – Used with images, if for some reason they do not load, the ‘alt text’ will appear instead of nothing at all.
  • Anchor text – This is the text you link to an article associated with that text. The linked text.
  • Backlink – Any incoming link. A link on someone else’s site linking to your site, would be backlink for your site. It brings people back to your website.
  • Blog – A Web-log “blog”. This is where you can write articles/thoughts down. It’s sometimes referred to as a journal. You’re reading a Blog right now – MySEOBlog.
  • Content – All of the information within a website.
  • Directory – A website for multiples of other websites. MySEOBlog has a directory.
  • Googlebot – The spider program that is Google. It crawls websites for content.
  • HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language. This is the code that is used in designing a website for functionality/appearance.
  • Keyword – A word that is specific to what you are searching for. Type this into a search box, or put keywords into your webpage so people searching can find it.
  • Mirror Site – A website identical in content to the one you are either on or trying to get to. Some downloads have mirror sites.
  • Nofollow – The code in the HEAD of a webpage or in individual links to tell search engines not to link to it.
  • Robots.txt – A document for a website that tells search engines what to do with that site.
  • SE – Search Engine
  • SEM – Search Engine Marketing
  • SEO – Search Engine Optimization
  • SERP – Search Engine Results Page
  • Social Media – Several social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, that share information with other people.
  • SPAM – Mass quantities of nonsense emails, comments and links. These are meant to draw traffic back to the link’s target, and often flood websites, creating a lot of extra moderation.
  • URL – Uniform Resource Locator. This term is often used instead of saying “website address”.

These are really just a few of the incredibly long list of terms, but these are some of the most comment terms you’ll hear/see in general conversation about websites.

I hope you find these useful. I know I certainly did when I was learning about SEO.

Have a question about what a term is? Leave a comment and ask, I’d be happy to answer your questions.