Search Engine Optimization made easy - SEO terminology 101 part 1

22 January, 2008 (14:49) | Increasing Traffic, Search Engine Optimization | By: clive

SEO

Search Engine Optimization are the steps taken to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via the search results for targeted keywords. The higher the site appears on the results page, the more traffic that site is likely to get. Those trying to optimize a website need to consider how the search algorithms work as well as which keywords people use to do a search. Once this is known, they then need to design the site in such a way that the coding, presentation and structure all work towards optimizing the site for search engines. They will also make sure that the site contains unique content, that this content is easily indexed by the search engine robots and that the site is user friendly.

Other, less acceptable methods include Black hat optimization or spamdexing. These use techniques such as keyword stuffing and link farming. Black hat optimization may cause that the website is excluded from the search engines index. So beware.

Search Engine Optimizers are the people that do the optimization.

SEARCH ENGINES

Search engines are an information retrieval system which help find information stored on computers. Google is a well known search engine which searches for information on the World Wide Web. There are many more.

ALGORITHMS

Algorithms are a list of instructions for completing a task from its initial state to its end state. In terms of search engine algorithms, they process the search according to a definite set of instructions which make up the algorithm and terminate with the search result.

SPIDERING

A web crawler, also known as a web spider or web robot is a program which browses the World Wide Web. This process is called web crawling or spidering. During this process, a copy of all the visited pages is created and later indexed. It is the index that search engines consult when doing a search. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a website, such as checking links or validating HTML code. They can also harvest email addresses which are then used for spam. So don’t have your email address anywhere on your website pages where the crawler can read it.

CONTENT

Web content includes the graphics, photos, video, animation, text and sound content that makes up the users experience when they visit a website.

BLACK HAT

A black hat is a person who compromises the security of a computer system without permission, typically with malicious intent. A black hat is also known as a cracker and generally tries to break into information systems.

WHITE HAT

A white hat is a person who is ethically opposed to the abuse of computer systems and is as skilled as a black hat. A white hat is also known as an ethical hacker. A white hat generally focuses on securing information systems.

NOFOLLOW

Nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value which instructs search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. Its aim is to reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing.

SPAMDEXING

Spamdexing uses a number of methods to manipulate the likelihood of website content being indexed by search engines. Usually this takes the form of cramming keywords into the META keywords tag, or repeating keywords in the body of the page or even within the URL. Many search engines check for spamdexing and will remove transgressing pages from the index.

see part 1 for general SEO terminolgy
see part 2 for Spamdexing: Content Spam
see part 3 for Spamdexing: Link Spam
see Part 4 for Spamdexing: World-Writable Pages
see part 5 for Spamdexing: other types