Glossary of SEO Terms

These are common knowledge terms and the definitions and/or explanations have been gathered from various places.

GoogleBot - The name of the spider used by Google.

Google Dance - used to describe the index update of Google. A time when fluctuations in ranking appear. Google's index update occurred on average once per month.

PR or Page Rank - the actual, real, page rank for each page as calculated by Google. This can range from 0.15 to billions.

HTML - Hypertext Markup Language - the (main) language used to write web pages.

HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol - the (main) protocol used to communicate between web servers and web browsers (clients).

Yahoo Slurp - The name of the spider used by Yahoo.
Scooter - The name of the AltaVista search engine's spider

Title - The text contained between the start and end HTML head tags of the source code. The title is usually at the top of the window when viewing the source code. The Title text forms the link to the URL page from the search engine results, and search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing any page in your web site.

CPC - Cost per Click
PPC - Pay per Click
CPM - Cost per thousand

Spider Food - a term used for a site map, or another page of a web site that contains all the links in a web, allowing the search engines spider to index all the pages in a web.

Inbound Link - A hypertext link to a particular page from elsewhere, bringing traffic to that page. Inbound links are counted to produce a measure of the page popularity. Searches for the inbound links to a page can be made on AltaVista, Google and HotBot.

Reciprocating Link - An exchange of links with a web site that is similar in services.

Dynamic Content - Information on web pages which is changed automatically, by database content or user information. Search engines will currently index dynamic content, although they will not usually index URLs which contain the ? character.

robots.txt - A text file stored in the top level directory of a web site to deny access by robots to certain pages or sub-directories of the site. Only robots which comply with the Robots Exclusion Standard will read and obey the commands in this file. Robots will read this file on each visit, so that pages or areas of sites can be made public or private at any time by changing the content of robots.txt before resubmitting to the search engines.