Contextual advertising by Google. Website publishers earn a portion of the advertising revenue for placing Google sponsored links on their site.



Algorithm: The search engine program that ranks sites based on certain criteria. Google has over 100 different ranking criteria that sites need to meet.

Automated Submissions: Services that use a web based tool or software to submit sites to search engines, free for all pages, and directories. CM SEO does not recommend using these services; these submissions can be viewed by the receiving party as spam.

Bid for click: A search engine under which you bid for your site to be ranked under a keyword. See Pay Per Click (PPC) and Paid Placement (PP).

Code: The background code that runs a web site. As well as HTML, this can include, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, JSP, Cold fusion and more.

Click popularity: a measure of how often a listing presented by a search engine is clicked. Some search engines and directories will rank a site higher on their results pages if the site proves to be popular among searchers.

Cloaking: also known as ?stealth, ?involves serving a specific page to each search engine spider and a different one to human visitors. In most cases, frowned upon by search engines.

Comment tag: html code that describes or documents content. Most search engines ignore the content of comment tags.

Dynamic html: web pages generated on demand by data in databases or using similar technology. Can create ranking problems because a search engine's spider may not retrieve relevant content.

FFA Site: A so-called ?free for all links?page, which is created for the sole purpose of compiling links. Submission software or companies that claim to submit your site to hundreds or thousands of ?search engines ?actually use these for most of that number. FFA sites are essentially worthless in terms of generating traffic, and links from them will count nothing towards your site's link popularity. Basically, they're a waste of time.

Frames: Some sites have pages that are made up of multiple HTML pages. Typically the navigation will be on one page and the content on another. You can tell if you scroll down the page and the navigation remains static. Frames are bad for a sites search engine promotion.

Hand Submissions: A service to develop appropriate titles and descriptions for submission to directories, search engines, and advertising sites. The submission is often unique for each directory, being sure to be compliant with all guidelines. CM SEO always offers hand submissions and has great success in getting relevant listings in appropriate directories.

Hidden text: Text that is visible to the search engine spiders but not to site visitors. Used to add extra keywords in the page without actually adding content to a site. Most search engines will penalize Web sites which use hidden text.

Keyword phrase: A phrase used to find pages when conducting a search.

Keyword frequency: Keyword frequency is the number of times keywords occur in the text on a given page. Search engines want to see more than one repetition of a keyword in your text to make sure it's not an isolated case.

Keyword prominence: The general location of a keyword or phrase in relation to the overall text on that page. You'll want to make sure your important keywords appear early in your Web site copy and that they draw attention to themselves.

Keyword research: Researching the most relative and popular keywords for a given site.

Keyword Spamming: Deliberate repetition of keywords in a page by using invisible or tiny text to increase keyword density. This is banned by search engines.

Link popularity: Search engines often use link popularity as part of their ranking criterion. In simple terms, link popularity is the measurement of the number of other Web sites that include a link to your Web site on theirs. Each search engine, depending on their specific algorithms, determines it differently.

Mirror sites: Sites designed as duplicates of an original site, but are hosted on a different server. Link cloaking and doorway pages, the creation of mirror sites are a recognized spam tactic and violators will be penalized by many of the major search engines.

ODP - Open Directory Project: The largest human edited directory on the Internet. The Open Directory provides listings for free but only for qualified sites and because editors are volunteers, wait times can be lengthy.

Theme: a relatively recent change in search engine ranking algorithms, theme-based engines essentially try to determine what a page is ?about? ? and to compare it to other pages that seem to be related to the same topic ? and rank it highly for certain keywords that are determined to be related to that page theme.

Traffic: The actual visitors to a Web page or Web site.

Unique Visitor: A real visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site. If for example, someone visits twenty pages within a web site, the server will count only one unique visitor.

URL: The Uniform Resource Locator is used to specify the address of Web sites and Web pages