About AllTheWeb

Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features.

AltaVista

Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare.

Alt Tags

Alt tags alternate text associated with a web page graphic that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the graphic. Alt tags should convey what the graphic is for or about and contain good relevant keywords. Alt tags also make web pages more accessible to the disabled. For example, a vision-impaired user may have a web browser that reads aloud the text and alt tags on a page. (For those familiar with HTML, "alt" isn't actually a tag by itself but an attribute to the "img" tag.). Note that the value of Alt tags for SEO have been discounted over time by the search engines to the point that now it is of minimal value.

Anchor Text

The text that a user would click 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 naturally 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 that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

Cache

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.
Some search engines provide links to cached versions of pages in their search results, and allow you to strip some of the formatting from cached copies of pages.

Backlinks (Inbound Links)

Back links are inbound links pointing to a web page. Links that point to your site from sites other than your own. Inbound links are an important asset that will improve your site's PageRank (PR).

Banned

When a search engine blocks your site from appearing in its search results.

Content

The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.

Crawler

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

Duplicate Content

Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any Trust from the search engines compared to the content that the SE considers being the original.

Google

The world's leading search engine in terms of reach. Google pioneered search by analyzing linkage data via PageRank. Google was created by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Google's success should be attributed to its unique algorithmic ranking system PageRank - a system that assigns a score to a web page based on the number of links to that page.
Based in Mountain View, California the company now employs 13,748 people. The company has a relaxed corporate atmosphere that is illustrated in the companies philosophy "Don't be evil".

Google dance

The change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.

GoogleBot

Google has a shared crawl cache between their various spiders, including vertical search spiders and spiders associated with ad targeting.

Google Sitemaps

Program which webmasters can use to help Google index their contents.
Please note that the best way to submit your site to search engines and to keep it in their search indexes is to build high quality editorial links.

Indexed Pages

The pages on a site which have been indexed by search engines/crawlers.

Internal Links

An Internal Link is a hypertext link that points to another page within the same website. Internal links can be used as a form of navigation for people, directing them to pages within the website. Links assist with creating good information architecture within the site.

Search engines also use internal text links to crawl pages within a website. The way internal links are structured will impact the way in which search engine bots spider and subsequently index pages.

Headings

The heading element briefly describes the subject of the section it introduces.
Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower numbered headings being most important. You should only use a single H1 element on each page, and may want to use multiple other heading elements to structure a document. An H1 element source would look like:

Inbound Link

Link pointing to one website from another website. Most search engines allow you to see a sample of links pointing to a document by searching using the link: function. For example, using link:www.seobook.com would show pages linking to the homepage of this site (both internal links and inbound links). Due to canonical URL issues www.site.com and site.com may show different linkage data. Google typically shows a much smaller sample of linkage data than competing engines do, but Google still knows of and counts many of the links that do not show up when you use their link: function.

Internal Link

Link from one page on a site to another page on the same site.
It is preferential to use descriptive internal linking to make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is about. Use consistent navigational anchor text for each section of your site, emphasizing other pages within that section. Place links to relevant related pages within the content area of your site to help further show the relationship between pages and improve the usability of your website.

Keyword

A word that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn't appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it's highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine)

Keyword Density

The number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a web page. The more times that a given word appears on your page (within reason), the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search

Link

A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document.
Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.

Meta Description

A meta tag hidden in the HTML that describes the page's content. Should be relatively short; around 12 to 20 words is suggested. The meta description provides an opportunity to influence how your Web page is described in the search results, but it will not improve your search rankings. Make sure your meta description reflects the page content or you may be accused of spamming.

Meta Keywords

A meta tag hidden in the HTML that lists keywords relevant to the page's content. Because search engine spammers have abused this tag so much, this tag provides little to no benefit to your search rankings. Of the major search engines, only Yahoo! still pays any attention to the meta keywords tag.

Meta Tags

Meta-information (information about information) that is associated with a web page and placed in the HTML but not displayed on the page for the user to see. There are a range of meta tags, only a few of which are relevant to search engine spiders. Two of the most well-known meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords; unfortunately these are ignored by most major search engines, including Google.

Pagerank (PR)

(PR) a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors. Often confused with Toolbar Pagerank.

Google uses a weighted form of link popularity called PageRank. Not all links are created equal. Google differentiates a link from an important site (such as CNN.com) as being better than a link from Jim-Bob's personal home page. The Google Toolbar (which is a free download from http://toolbar.google.com) has a PageRank meter built into it, to see which web pages are considered important by Google and which aren't. PageRank scores get exponentially harder to achieve the closer to 10 they are. For example, increasing your own homepage's PageRank from a 2 to 3 is easy with not a lot of additional links, jumping from a 7 to an 8 is very difficult to achieve. The higher the PageRank of the page that's linking to you, the more your site's PageRank will benefit. The better your PageRank, the better you'll do in Google, all else being equal.

Search Engine (SE)

(SE) a program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Web site. SEM strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favorably ranked by the search engine. SEO strategies and tactics undertaken to influence the rankings of web pages in the search engines. Search Engine Optimisation involves the 3 steps of SEO including technical optimisation, content optimisation and link buidling.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

A page of search results delivered by a search engine.

Title Tag

The text displayed in the blue bar at the very top of the browser window, above "Back," "Forward," "Refresh," "Print," etc. Although inconspicuous to the user, the title tag is the most important bit of text on a web page as far as the search engines are concerned. Search engines not only assign the words in the title tag more weight, they also typically display the title tag in the search results, making the title tag an important potential call-to-action as well. Thus, the wording of each page's title tag should be thought through carefully. Also see "keyword prominence."

Yahoo Directory

One of the original, most popular, and most authoritative web directories, started by David Filo and Jerry Yang in 1994.
The Yahoo! Directory is one of a few places where most any legitimate site can pick up a trusted link. While the cost of $299 per year may seem expensive to some small businesses, a Yahoo! Directory link will likely help boost your rankings in major search engines.

Web Crawler

Also known as a 'web robot' or 'web spider', it is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner.

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