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SEO GLOSSARY

Here is a list of helpful little explanations to demystify the wonderful world of getting your site to the top of Google. It won’t get you to the top, but it will certainly help you understand some of the instructions others offer (whether good or bad). If you have an obvious one we've missed, let us know.

SEO

Acronym for Search Engine Optimisation, which is the process whereby web pages are designed, built and modified to increase visibility in search engines.

  • Bounce Rate

    The number of visitors who enter your site on a page, but do not visit at least one other page. May also apply to visitors who visit your site for less than 10 seconds a page depending on your analytics provider. Bounce rate is something you will like to keep in check, alongside your conversions.

  • Conversions

    Number of people who for instance, view a jacket on your shop, and then go to buy it. May also be the number of people who view your membership page and sign up, or just visit your contact page from another page you specify.

Keywords, Keyphrases

These refer to the meta tag keywords, and also are used to refer to search terms, such as "plastic boxes" or "carpenter in Stevenage" that someone puts into a search engine.

Sponsored Listing

Paid advert, for example Google Adwords, that allows you to pay to have your site advertised at the top of the search results or on the right hand panel, if someone searches for a particular phrase.

  • Reciprocal Link

    Inbound and outbound links (as long as they are not from link farms) are great for your listing. Directories are an excellent way of building up these links, and by providing a reciprocal link (a link on your site back to them), you often get bonuses or favoured listings on sites. A sort of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours approach.

  • Google Analytics

    A very powerful and free service to analyse and record visitors to your site. It has become a favoured service for individuals and businesses, over paying for enterprise deployments of software doing similar things. Difference is you log in online to Google to view the stats, rather than using a piece of software (though widgets may be available from third parties). May also be shortened to “GA”.

Domains

A domain is the address such as google.com or google.co.uk. You can have more than one domain "pointing" to the same website, for instance welovesquirrels.com and welovesquirrels.co.uk could go to the same site, or welovesquirrels.com and squirrelsarelovely.com could. There’s also subdomains which normally look like all.squirrelsarelovely.com or many.squirrelsarelovely.com, which are often used for sections of a site, or a minisite (for example a product minisite).

  • Sitemap

    There are two versions of this beast that you need to know about. Firstly, the physical sitemap, which is a page on the site (often linked in the footer) that acts like the index or content page of a book for the website. This is great for a visitor who doesn’t want to go through your menus, and search engine bots love them when they find them, as they can jump onto all the other pages on your site easily. The second type is the XML sitemap which is becoming a standard for submitting your pages to a search engine more efficiently. It is a file purely for the search engine robot, but ensures that the robot finds all your pages. Sites over 500 pages may not find this much benefit.

  • Web Standards

    Much like health and safety, building standards, these are the guidelines that, when followed, are set out to make a browsing experience as easy as possible. Look upon it as your English teacher marking your paper, and scrutinising everything down to your semi-colon use. By trying to follow and meet the standards, developers reduce the likelihood that the site will work incorrectly. You may also see “W3C” banded about here, and the term "validation".

X-Browser

This is shorthand for cross-browser, which refers to how a site functions or appears in different browser software, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome.