22 Top SEO Terms and Definitions...

Below is a List of 22 Top SEO Terms and Definitions...

SEM
Search Engine Marketing. The act of marketing a website via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities.

SEO
Search Engine Optimization. The act of altering a web site so that it does well in organic listings of search engines.

Organic Search
Search results in a search engine that are not paid advertisements. The results that come up naturally based on their indexing within a search engine. Organic search results are good. We all want to come up on top for organic searches using keywords we are optimized for. For example, searching for "marcidesign" will return this website in organic search results.

PPC
Pay Per Click. Advertising method where an advertiser pays for their ads (which are displayed on a given website) if and only if someone actually clicks on the ad.

Title Tag
A meta data element that determines the actual "title" of a given webpage. The title is what shows up in the top bar of your browser.

Meta Tags
Web page specific, descriptive information that helps a search engine identify the purpose and topic of a given web page. Common meta data include a web page's title, description, and keyword listing.

Alt Tag
An HTML attribute typically used within the IMG tag to provide alternate text when images cannot be displayed.

Anchor Tag
An HTML tag that allows you to create a link to another document or web page or to a bookmark within the current web page.

Landing Page
A content-rich web page geared around a particular topic, product or conversion goal. Typically a main navigation item of a website.

Keyword Density
How often a keyword or keyword phrase is used on a given web page.

CSS
Cascading Style Sheets. A language used to describe how a given page or web site will look. Used to control font styles, graphical layouts, color, etc.

CPC
Cost Per Click. Typical rate of measuring the expense involved with acquiring web traffic.

301 Redirect
Method of redirecting an old webpage to a new location. More simply, to display another web page for the web address that you are trying to visit. 301 implies that the move is permanent (as opposed to temporary, etc.)

Conversion
Web traffic that fulfills a pre-established goal, such as purchasing of a specific product or filling out a registration form, etc.

Blog
"Web Log". An online journal of sorts.

SERP
Search Engine Results Page. The listing of web pages that a search engine shows a user once they've entered a search value.

Spider
Programs written to scour the web automatically for various reasons (to index web pages, for spamming purposes, etc.) aka web robots, web crawlers, bots, internet bots.

White Hat SEO
The use of accepted SEO practices in order to get higher rankings, more traffic, etc.

Black Hat SEO
The use of unaccepted or frowned upon SEO practices in order to get higher rankings and more traffic. Use at the risk of being dropped from the engines or at least being removed from high rankings. More on black hat seo.

B2B
Business To Business. Marketing strategy which involves the transaction of goods or services between businesses.

B2C
Business To Consumer. Transaction of goods or services directly to the end consumer.

RSS
A family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed," "web feed," or "channel," contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually.