Glossary of Terms

A
Algorithm: An algorithm is a sequence of instructions, often used for calculation and data processing.

B
Baidu: A Chinese Search Engine.
Black Hat methods: Unethical SEO methods which will inevitably damage your search engine ranking or get you kicked out of the SERP’s all together.
Blog: from the term web-log. Blog refers to an article published on a frequent basis, normally in descending chronological order based on date or category.

C
Cloaking: is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique.
Conversion Rate: refers to the number or percentage of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.
Crawling: See Spiders.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation.

D
Data Mining: This is the process of sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information.

E
Excite: is an Internet Portal, including features such as search, web-based email, instant messaging, stock quotes and a customizable user homepage.

F
Flock: is a web browser that specializes in providing social networking features built into its interface.

G
Google: Google is an Internet Search Engine. Google has expanded into many online features and services including World Wide Web searches, free web based e-mail accounts, Goole Earth and Google Maps, social networking sites and Google Video.
Green Magic fairy dust: comical term referring to PageRank.

H
Hidden Text: Text that is found on a web page that is not viable by the user. I.e. white text on a white background.
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol is the primary communication protocol for the internet. It is a text based transfer protocol, used to transmit the HTML of a web page as well as the binary of the images. It can also be transmitted over a secure socket layer, via using https://
HTML: HyperText Markup Language. This is a type of document for the initial writing of websites.
HTML Element: In computing, a HTML element indicates structure in an HTML document and a way of hierarchically arranging content.

I
Inbound Link: This is a Link coming into your website from an exterior website.
Indexer:  The component of a search engine that store data regarding a given web page and organises into relevance to be compared against a search engine query. 

J
JavaScript: is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development.

K
Keywords: words declared to the search engine to tell them their target area of interest of a given page i.e. if your page was about football, one of your keywords may be football or soccer.
Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is the technique by which a web page is stuffed full of keywords, in an unethical SEO attemt to manipulate keyword densities, and therefore the search engine rankings

L
Link Farm: Link farms are groups of websites that have hyperlinks to all the other websites in the group.
Links: Used to navigate round the web. Links direct your browser to other web pages or applications.

M
Meta Tags: Meta tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. These elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. They can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.
MSN: This is an acronym for Microsoft Network. MSN started life as being an Internet Service Provider however it is now a widely used search engine with various web based services. Hotmail and MSN instant messenger are examples of such services.

N
Nutch: is an open source search engine.

O
Off-web Factors: These factors relate mainly to when a person performs a search, and they relate to current circumstances of the world and the demographic of the person conducting the search.
Outbound Link: This is a link to an exterior website that goes out from your website.

P
PageRank: Link equity and authority given to an individual page based on a scale of unranked to 10.

Q
Quirks mode: Quirks mode is a technique usually found within Internet Explorer to ensure a website will display correctly, whilst still validating. It was brought into effect during the Netscape(now Mozilla) vs Internet Explorer browser war, to ensure websites would always render correctly.

R
RDF: The Resource Description Framework relates to a group of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifications and needs.
Return on Investment (ROI): This is based on a ratio of the money gained or lost on an investment over the initial money invested.
Root directory: This is the first directory in a computer file system hierarchy.

S
Search engine results pages (SERP’s): The result return when you type a query into a search engine.
SEM: Short hand for search engine marketing which refers to numerous methods used to advertise your site on the web.
SEO: Short hand for Search Engine Optimisation, the art of developing a given website or web page to gain a better rank within the search engines results.
Spamdexing: A way of manipulating a search engine by repeating phrases and by using hidden words. Another way is excessive, hidden linking and close knit communities referring each others websites.
Spider: The component of a search engine that crawls a page ready for indexing.

T
Top-level Domain Name (TLD): This is the last part of an Internet domain name. E.g. In ‘www.positiongoldltd.com’ the ‘.com’ is the TLD.

U
Unicode: Web pages authored using hypertext markup language (HTML) may contain multilingual text represented with the Unicode universal character set.
URL: A Uniform Resource Locator is an address that directs users to a resource on the internet.
Url Canonicalisation: This is the duplication, normally, of your home page because of the way the web is set up to handle it.  I.E http://www.mysite.co.uk will be duplicated as http://mysite.co.uk.

V
Verizon: An American Broadband and Telecommunications company.

W
W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization governing usage of the World Wide Web.
White Hat methods: SEO methods which conform to the standard laid down by the search engines administrators.

X
XHTML: Extensible Hypertext Markup Language.

Y
Yandex: A Russian Search Engine.

Z
Z-index: A CSS command used to structure the layout of a website.