Search engine optimisation terms.

Algorithm
A formula that search engines use to determine the ranking of a website.

Alt tag
An attribute in the image tag to define the alternative text for the image.

Anchor text
Text that links to another web page.

Authority page
A web page that has a great level of trust on a topic.

Backlinks / inbound links
Links pointing to a website from external websites.

Banned
Removed from a search engines index.

Black hat
SEO techniques that break search engine guidelines.

Canonical URL
The primary form of a URL. Websites can use http://michaeljbyers.com or http://www.michaeljbyers.com and this can lead to loss of link juice.

Directory
A directory is a list of links to web pages, usually categorised.

Index
Search engines database of web page content.

Invisible text
Text on a website that is hidden from the visitors but visible by search engines.

Keyword
A word or phrase describing key content on a web page.

Keyword density
Calculated as a percentage it is the number of times a keyword appears on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page.

Landing page
A web page designed as a destination for search engine traffic to direct traffic to a website.

Link juice
Link juice refers to the quality or weight that any website can pass on to other sites through links.

Long tail
Search queries that are longer more focused and less used by searchers.

Metadata
Hidden comments such as keywords, description, author and copyright.

Meta description
Metadata that describes the content of the web page.

Meta keywords
Metadata that lists keywords related to the content of the web page.

Metrics
Measurements of website evaluation.

Niche directories
Directories that are topic specific and provide links to websites that relate to that topic.

Organic search results
Organic search results are the links that are not adverts on the search engine results page.

PageRank (PR)
Googles measurement of the importance of a web page.

Page title
The text that is displayed in the web browsers title. Search engines display the page title as the first line of the listing.

Robot
Used by search engines to index web page content.

Robots.txt
A text file that can exclude certain pages or folders from being indexed in search engines.

Search engine marketing (SEM)
A broad term for the use of both on-site as well as off-site adjustments with the goal of increasing targeted traffic to the website.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Improving your website to increase quality traffic from a search engine through organic search results.

SERP
Search engine results page.

Short head
Frequently used, short queries used searchers.

Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking websites allow users to save, share and tag web pages.

Spam comment
A blog or forum comment thats purpose is to promote the website of the person posting the comment.

Web analytics
The measurement and analysis of website activity.

White hat
Using search engine optimisation techniques that comply with search engines guidelines.