SEO Software Glossary
(A - C)
(D - F)
(G - L)
(M - O)
(P - Q)
(R - Z)
Manual Submission
definition: the process of submitting Websites or Web pages to
search engines and directories for inclusion in their databases
using specific guidelines unique to each index. When people look for
a submission tool, they often think about something that saves them
a lot of work. However, there are some important submissions that
need some work. Submissions to large directories such as Yahoo! and
DMOZ are considered strategic. We recommend that you submit to these
and other directories manually. Each directory is unique in its
category structure, requirements and title/description length. Read
the submission guidelines carefully to learn the best approach to
directories. Search engines sometimes prevent automated submissions
by including an image that has a special code that must be typed in,
together with the site data. Submission to these search engines can
only be manual. Some search engines and directories only accept paid
submissions or paid options have advantages like prominent position
or regular updating of a Web page in the index. There are
bid-for-placement auctions like former Overture, a pioneer in this
area. These are also called pay-per-click search engines. You can
only submit to this type of engine manually. You will find the 'best
of breed' directories and search engines wanting manual submissions
in our 'Manual Submission' section. On the information page, there
are some facts about these search engines that help.
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META Description
definition: syntax: <META name="Description" content="Web page
description"> This Meta tag provides a brief description of a Web
page. It is important the description is clear about the purpose of
the page. The importance of the Description tag for ranking purposes
has decreased significantly over the years, but there are still
search engines supporting this tag. They log descriptions of the
indexed pages and often display them with the Title in their
results.
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META Keywords
definition: Syntax: <META name="Keywords" content="keyword1,
keyword2, keyword3"> This Meta tag lists words or phrases about the
contents of a Web page. It provides some extra text for
crawler-based search engines. However, because of frequent attempts
to abuse their system, most search engines ignore this tag. Please
note that none of the major crawler-based search engines, except for
Inktomi, supports the Keywords Meta tag.
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META Refresh
definition: Syntax: <META http-equiv="refresh"
content="0;url=http://newURL.com/"> This HTML Meta tag also belongs
in the Head tag of your HTML page. The META Refresh tag is a way to
redirect or refresh users to another Web page after a specified
number of seconds. META Refresh tags can be used for a doorway page
specifically optimized for a particular search engine. It is
accessed first by users, who then are redirected to the main Web
site.
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META Robots
definition: Syntax: <META name="Robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW"> The
Robots instructions are normally placed in robots.txt file that is
uploaded to the root directory of a domain. However, if a Webmaster
does not have access to /robots.txt, then instructions can be placed
in a Robots META tag. This tag tells the search engine robot whether
a page should be indexed, included its database and its links
followed.
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Meta Robots Tag
definition: a HTML tag that instructs spiders to either index the
page or not. Common uses are all, none, index, noindex, follow and
nofollow.
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Meta Search
definition: a search of searches. A query is submitted to more than
one search engine or directory, and results are reported from all
the engines, possibly after removal of duplicates and sorting. Also
the meta search engine of the same name, found at
http://www.metasearch.com/
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Meta Search Engine
definition: compiles its results from many different search engines
and returns them in one combined listing. An up-and-coming Meta
search engine is Vivisimo. Other well-known meta search engines are
IxQuick and Dogpile. Many surfers use Meta search engines as a
convenient way to collate the best results from many different
sources. In fact, many surfers don't even realize they are using
Meta search engines. A general trend for some search engines to
combine a number of different sources for their results. For
example, Freeserve currently uses Yahoo! to enhance its listings.
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Meta Tag
definition: a construct placed in the HTML header of a web page,
providing information which is not visible to browsers. The most
common meta tags (and those most relevant to search engines) are
KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION. The KEYWORDS tag allows the author to
emphasize the importance of certain words and phrases used within
the page. Some search engines will respond to this information -
others will ignore it. Don't use quotes around the keywords or
keyphrases. The DESCRIPTION tag allows the author to control the
text of the summary displayed when the page appears in the results
of a search. Again, some search engines will ignore this
information. The HTTP-EQUIV meta tag is used to issue HTTP commands,
and is frequently used with the REFRESH tag to refresh page content
after a given number of seconds. Gateway pages sometimes use this
technique to force browsers to a different page or site. Most search
engines are wise to this, and will index the final page and/or
reduce the ranking. Infoseek has a strong policy against this
technique, and they might penalize your site, or even ban it. Other
common meta tags are GENERATOR (usually advertising the software
used to generate the page) and AUTHOR (used to credit the author of
the page, and often containing e-mail address, homepage URL and
other information).
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Metacrawler
definition: a meta search engine found at
http://www.metacrawler.com/. Results from various search engines are
summarised in an easy to read form.
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MiniRank/Local Rank
definition: is a modification of the PageRank based on the link
structure of your single site only. Since search engines rank pages,
not sites, certain pages of your site will rank higher for given
keywords than others. Local Rank has a significant influence on the
general PageRank.
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Mirror
definition: in SEO parlance, a mirror is a near identical duplicate
website (or page). Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to target
different keywords/keyphrases. Using mirrors is a violation of the
Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for
banning.
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Mirror Site
definition: is often set up with the purpose of backing up a popular
site if it ever has problems - some times a mirror site will be used
for load balancing, when a website becomes to busy the response
times may slow down and a mirror site on a different server can be
used to keep the service running as normal.
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Misspellings
definition: people quite often spell words incorrectly when using
search engines. Pages which use common misspellings will quite often
receive extra hits, so it is a useful technique to include common
misspellings of words in alt tags, keywords, page names and titles.
A similar effect occurs when spaces are missed out and words are
accidentally joined together. Often, intelligent marketers will also
optimize sites for misspellings in order to capture this sort of
traffic.
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Moderator
definition: is usually a volunteer reader of the forum with an
interest in the subject who acts as a watchdog for the good of the
forum. (i.e. deletes offensive or irrelevant posts and comments).
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Monitoring
definition: if your site is not accessible on the Web, then your
potential visitors cannot see it and access your products and
services. So the longer your site is down, the more money you lose.
That is why it is so important to always know that your site is up
and running and then to react immediately if something goes wrong.
Monitoring helps you here. It checks the availability of your site
and notifies you immediately if it goes down, or some of its
services are unavailable.
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Monitoring Center
definition: a station that sends different types of queries to your
Web server to check its availability and proper functioning.
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Monitoring Interval
definition: a predefined period between checks. Depending on the
monitoring plan chosen, monitoring interval can vary from 5 minutes
to 2 hours. In case of failure, your Web server will receive a
'down' status and will be monitored in short intervals irrespective
of your license type until the site has fully recovered.
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Motivated Visits
definition: if two or more pages are browsed during a visit, this
will be counted in the Motivated Visits report. The ratio of visits
when more than one page is viewed to all visits is a good sign of
your site's attractiveness.
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MSN
definition: Microsoft Network
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MSN Search
definition: Microsoft's search engine athttp://www.msn.com
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Multiple Titles
definition: it used to be possible to repeat the HTML title tag in
the header section of a page several times to improve search engine
positioning. Most search engines now detect this trick.
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Navigation Paths
definition: is a sequence of pages that the visitor viewed from the
moment she enters the site to the moment she leaves. From the
marketing view, it is important to know the most common paths your
visitors follow to get to the landing pages. You will learn which of
the navigation paths are the most effective. The frequent exit
patterns will show where your site is underperforming. You will see
where to improve the content of your site to make your visitors'
experience perfect.
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Negative Keyword
definition: allow you to eliminate searches that you know are not
related to your message. If you add the negative keyword "vacation"
to your keyword "Hawaii climate" your ad will not appear when a user
searches on "vacation Hawaii climate". Negative keywords should be
used with caution, as they can eliminate a large portion of a
desired audience if applied incorrectly.
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New Visitor
definition: this is a brand-new visitor, arriving at your site for
the first time. New visitors are always unique, although they are
not the same as unique visitors. The number of new visitors will
always be smaller than the number of unique visitors, because a
unique visitor is one arriving for the first time in the selected
period (so the system may identify the visitor as unique in the
current period but it also knows that he has been before). A new
visitor is one on his first visit.
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definition: usually abbreviated to OCR, is a type of computer software designed to translate images of handwritten or typewritten text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text, or to translate pictures of characters into a standard encoding scheme representing them (e.g. ASCII or Unicode).
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ODP
definition: The Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/)
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"Off-Page Factors"
definition: "Off-page factors" are: the number of pages linking to you, the text used in links that point to you, the PageRank of linking pages, the page presence in directories under related categories and link popularity score, etc.
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Off-Page Optimization
definition: in addition to on-page factors, search engines are increasingly using off-page factors to calculate relevance. This is because off-page factors are more difficult to manipulate artificially. The most important off-page factor is link popularity. Others include link text, link community and click popularity. Off-page optimization involves ensuring that these elements are in place to boost relevance for the targeted terms.
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Old Pages
definition: if the file modification date is earlier than specified in Web CEO Auditor's 'Page evaluation' settings (File> Settings> Auditor> Scan Rules> Page evaluation), this page is considered old. If you regularly update the content of your site and some pages remain unchanged, they are reported.
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Online Advertising
definition: Online advertising is advertising on the Internet.
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"On-Page Factors"
definition: are elements which actually appear on the page (such as page title, headings and body text) and contribute to the engine's assessment of the subject matter and relevance of the page. The search engines' programs will analyze the HTML code of the page to compute such essential scores as keyword frequency, prominence, weight, and others.
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On-Page and off-Page Factors
definition: influencing your ranking. When search engines rank pages, they evaluate many different parameters and stick to certain rules. These rules are also known as ranking algorithms. There are two main questions search engines ask when they decide if the page should be included in their results: Is the content of the page relevant to the query? Is this particular page important to the query because other linked pages corroborate it. This makes search engines check for keywords on the cached page (on-page parameters relating to keywords). Next, they find other pages linked to the analyzed page, count them, and check how they link. Off-page parameters indicate your page 'weight' compared to other Web resources. This makes search engines check for keywords on the cached page (on-page parameters that relate to keywords). Then find other Web pages linking to this analyzed page to see how many, and in what way they link to that page. Off-page parameters that show your Web page 'weight' among other Web resources. The program will analyze the HTML code of the page to compute such essential scores as keyword frequency, prominence, weight, and others - Analyzing off-page factors will include link popularity score, theme, and presence/absence of ODP and Yahoo! listings.
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On-Page Optimization
definition: search engines use several factors in their ranking algorithms, one of which is on-page factors. These are elements which actually appear on the page (such as page title, headings and body text) and contribute to the engine's assessment of the subject matter and relevance of the page. On-page optimization involves ensuring that these factors are optimally included for the targeted search terms.
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OOP
definition: Over Optimization Penalty
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Open Directory Project
definition: a directory project run by thousands of volunteer editors. In principal, this is a very exciting and powerful way to organize the web. In practice, there have been some problems with the behaviour of some of the editors, which has caused some initial difficulty for the organizers. Initially known as NewHoo, the project is now part of Netscape (and therefore of AOL). See http://directory.mozilla.org
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Open Rate
definition: is a measure primarily used by marketers as an indication of how many people "view" or "open" the commercial mail they send out.
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Optimization
definition: changes made to a web page to improve the positioning of that page with one or more search engines. A means of helping potential customers or visitors to find a web site. Optimization may involve design/layout changes, new text for the title-tags, meta-tags, alt- attributes, headings, and changes to the first 200-250 words of the main text. A large image map at the top of a page should be moved further down the page. Frames should be avoided (unless navigational links are also provided within the frames).
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Optimized Pages
definition: unlike Gateway pages, are pages optimized for targeted key phrases, but integrated with the main website. They contain content relevant to the user and maintain brand consistency with the rest of the site. Optimized pages can be viewed as pages of the web site which serve as landing points for users coming in from search engines.
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Opt in Email
definition: is a term used when someone is given the option to receive "bulk" e-mail, that is, e-mail that is sent to many people at the same time. Typically, this is some sort of mailing list, newsletter, or advertising. Obtaining permission before sending e-mail is critical because without it, the email is Unsolicited Bulk Email, better known as spam.
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Organic Listings
definition: on many search engines with in the results pages there will be sites that have paid to be there as well as the one that have got their by their own merits, the free listings are also known as the organic listings.
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Organic Search Listing
definition: listings in search engines, which are delivered from the search engine's main database and are not affected in any way by 'paid' for or 'sponsored' advertising activity. Also know as 'natural' or 'algorithmic' results. Organic search results should form the core of a search marketing strategy, complemented by paid search campaigns.
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Orphaned Files
definition: these are files that have been found on the servers but have no links pointing to them. This makes orphaned files useless. Orphaned files can be searched for either directly on your Web server by FTP or in the local copy. Typically, you may want to either remove them or restore some navigational links.
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OSEO
definition: Organic Search Engine Optimization. To Build a site that ranks high in search engines without spending large amounts of cash.
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Outbound Link
definition: a link from a page of your site to another site.
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