SEO Dictionary

301 Redirect means Moved Permanently - The file has been moved permanently to a new location. This is the preferred method of redirecting for most pages or websites. If you are going to move an entire site to a new location you may want to test moving a file or folder first, and then if that ranks well you may want to proceed with moving the entire site. In order for the 301 redirect to be picked up, depending on your site authority and crawl  it may take anywhere from few days to a month or even more.

• Not Found - The server was unable to locate the URL. Some content management systems send 404 status codes even when documents do exist. Ensure files that exist do give a 200 status code and requests for files that do not exist give a 404 status code. You may also want to check with your host to see if you can set up a custom 404 error page which makes it easy for site visitors to

1. view your most popular and / or most relevant navigational options
2. report navigational problems within your site

Search engines require a robots.txt file to see what portions of your site they are allowed to crawl. Many browsers request a favicon ico file when loading your site. While neither of these files are necessary, creating them will help keep your log files clean so you can focus on other errors your site might have.

A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling downwards. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.

Anchor Text is a text that a user clicks on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image, the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor text.

Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur, they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links of your control to you try to mix up your anchor text.

Example of anchor text:

Search Engine Optimization Blog

Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google, you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same.

Arbitrage means utilizing market inefficiencies by buying and reselling a commodity for a profit.

Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they dumped Jeeves in early 2006. Their search engine is powered by the Teoma.

Active Server Pages - a dynamic Microsoft programming language.

Topical authorities are sites which are well trusted and well cited by experts within their topical community. A topical authority is a page which is referenced from many topical experts and hub sites. A topical hub is a page which references many authorities.

Automated Bid Management Software is used by Pay per click search engines. To help large advertisers cope with the increasing sophistication and complexity of these offerings some search engines and third party software developers have created software which makes it easier to control your ad spend. Some of the more advanced tools can integrate with your analytics program and help you focus on conversion, ROI, and earnings elasticity instead of just looking at cost per click.

Bait and Switch is a marketing technique where you make something look overtly pure or as though it has another purpose to get people to believe in it or vote for it (by linking at it or sharing it with friends), then switch the intent or purpose of the website after you gain authority.

It is generally easier to get links to informational websites than commercial sites. Some new sites might gain authority much quicker if they tried looking noncommercial and gaining influence before trying to monetize their market position.

Battelle, John is a popular search and media blogger who co-founded The Industry Standard and Wired, and authored a popular book on search called The Search.

Bias is a prejudice based on experiences or a particular worldview.  Any media channel, publishing format, organization, or person is biased by

1. how and why they were created and their own experiences
2. current set of social standards in which they exist
3. other markets they operate in
4. the need for self preservation
5. how they interface with the world around them
6. their capital, knowledge, status, or technological advantages and limitations

Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of the largest search engines may bias their organic search results toward informational (ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is heavily cited.

Search personalization biases our search results based on our own media consumption and searching habits.

Large news organizations tend to aim for widely acceptable neutrality rather than objectivity. Some of the most popular individual web authors / publishers tend to be quite biased in nature. Rather than bias hurting one's exposure

• The known / learned bias of a specific author may make their news more appealing than news from an organization that aimed to seem arbitrarily neutral.
• I believe biased channels most likely typically have a larger readership than unbiased channels.
• Most people prefer to subscribe to media which matches their own biases worldview.
• If more people read what you write and passionately agree with it then they are more likely to link at it.
• Things which are biased in nature are typically easier to be cited than things which are unbiased.

Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain ma

Block Level Analysis is a method used to break a page down into multiple points on the web graph by breaking its pages down into smaller blocks. Block level link analysis can be used to help determine if content is page specific or not.

Blog is a periodically updated piece of writing on a website  formatted in reverse chronological order. Many blogs not only archive and categorize information, but also provide a feedback and allow visitors of the blog website to comment on the topics covered in the blog in question.

Blog Comment Spam is either manually or automatically (via a software program) adding low value or no value comments to other sites.

Automated blog spam:

Nice post!
by
Discreat Overnigh

Blogger is a free blog platform owned by Google.

It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Blogspot.

A way to make words appear in a bolder font. Words that appear in a bolder font are more likely to be read by humans that are scanning a page. A search engine may also place slightly greater weighting on these words than reg

Bookmark is a feature in most Internet browsers that allows you to save the address of a web site you like. In Microsoft Internet Explorer bookmarks are known as favorites and a menu option is available for you to view your favorites in the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark.

Boolean Search  actually a search that allows formulas such as AND, OR, or NOT. Many search engines allow you to perform searches that contain mathematical formulas such as AND, OR, or NOT. By default most search engines include AND with your query, requiring results to be relevant for all the words in the search query.

Brand is the emotional response associated with your company and/or products.

A brand is built through controlling customer expectations and the social interactions between customers. Building a brand is what allows you to m

Branded Keywords are keyword phrases associated with a brand. Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle.

Breadcrumb Navigation is a navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between various pages of a website.

Brin, Sergey is the co-founder of Google.

A broken link refers to any clickable text that should take you to a document, image or webpage, that actually results in "page not found",  a time out or any other type of error.
Common reasons for broken links are

a. Typing errors while creating the web page.

b.  Web site structure changes. Links that has been defined relative to the current web site structure, but since the creation of the page, the web site structure has been changed and the page wasn't updated.

c.   Web site going offline.

Browser is a client used to view the world wide web.

The most popular browsers are Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox

Bush, Vannevar is WWII scientist who wrote a seminal research paper on the concepts of hypertext and a memory extension device titled As We May Think.

Copy of a web page stored by a search engine. When you search the web you are not actively searching the whole web, but are searching files in the search engine index.

Calacanis, Jason is the founder of Weblogs, Inc. Also pushed AOL to turn Netscape into a Digg

Canonical URL is the URL chosen by search engines out of  several seemingly similar URLs.  Generally, it is related with homepages of a website.  Most people would consider the following URLs as one and the same.

www.seodictionary.net

seodictionary.net/

www.seodictionary.net/index.html

seodictionary.net/home.asp

Cloaking means displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a

Cluetrain Manifesto, The is a book about how the web is a marketplace, and how it is different from traditional offline business.