Glossary of search engine optimisation terms

Anchor text – like link text but specifically refers to the part of a link that sends the reader to a particular part of a page, not just the whole page

Backlinks – links from other website that link to yours

CPM – cost per mille (1000) – used in banner advertising as a way of charging for the number of impressions an ad receives

Directory – a website that lists other sites in a systematic way based on categories.  Directories differ fundamentally from search engines in that it is the submitted data that is used in determining matches with keywords not page or site content

HTML – hypertext mark up language

HTTP – the protocol used on the web

HTTPS – the protocol used for secure web pages

IImpression – when an ad is displayed on a page, whether or not it results in a click

KEI – keyword effectiveness index – a measure of how easy a particular keyword is to optimise for.  It looks at the amount of traffic the term is likely to generate compared with the number of competing sites also targeting it

Inbound link – same as backlinks

Link text – the text that when clicked leads to another web page (or part of the same page in some cases)

LSI – latent semantic indexing – used by search engine algorithms in matching page content with search terms.  It results in search engines looking at clusters of words that are likely to appear together on any particular topic

Meta data – information embedded in a web page source code designed to be read by search engines (though rarely is) and which is not displayed when the page is displayed in a browser

Meta engine – a type of secondary search engine that gather results from primary engines.  The result is an engine, like for example Webfetch, that displays results from a number of other engines

NSO – natural search optimisation

PPC – pay per click

ROI – return on investment – used extensively in the context of PPC and other online advertising

Search engine – a software program that collects data from individual web pages and used algorithms based on information retrieval and artificial intelligence to match individual pages with keyword searches

SEM – search engine marketing – includes NSO and PPC

SERPS – search engine results pages – what you get when you search on a search engine

SEO – search engine optimisation – this is the original terms for NSO but with the advent of PPC, it can be a little ambiguous

URL – uniform resource locator – in other words the web address