SEO Jargon Buster

PageRank

Page Rank is a value of importance attributed to your site by a Google algorithm. It values from 1 to10 and is incremental. 2/10 is not double the importance of 1/10. The value of increment is not known but it is estimated to be around 5.5. A well established marker that indicates a certain health of a website, however it is not essential for great SERPs.

SERPs.

An abbreviation of search engine results pages. The pages that appear when you search a term
they contain both natural search results and paid results.

Black Hat

A term given to SEO techniques which are largely forbidden by major search engines as they manipulate SERPs.

White Hat

A term given to SEO techniques which are encouraged by major search engines and the SEO community as they are ethical and fair.

Anchor Text

The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

Crawler (spider)

A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.

Juice (trust, authority, PageRank)

Trust / authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.

In-bound link (back link)

In-bound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank. l Deep linking In-bound links that target pages within a site and not just the home page. l Keyword/Phrase The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.

Long Tail

SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail Searches.” The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail.”

META Tags

Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.

PPC (pay per click)

A contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords are an example of PPC advertising.

SEM

Short for Search Engine Marketing. SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a website within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your website. SEM includes things such as search engine optimisation, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will