SEO Terms

Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink on a web page.
Here is an example: < a href="http://www.searchbliss.com/" >This is the anchor text< /a >

Back Link
Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Back links are also referred to as inbound links.

Bot
Abbreviation for robot, refers to software that scan
the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to
harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

Cloaking
Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Conversion
Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose.

CPC
Cost Per Click

CTA
Content Targeted Ad(vertising).

CTR
Click Through Rate

Doorway Page
Also called a gateway page. A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

FFA
Free For All. FFA sites post large lists of unrelated links to anyone and everyone. FFA sites and the links they provide are basically useless. Humans do not use them and search engines minimize their importance in ranking formulas.

Gateway Page
Also called a doorway page. A gateway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Gateway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using gateway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

IBL
In Bound
Link. Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Also called a back link.

Keyword/KeyphraseKeywords are words which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are multi-word phrases used in search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and keyphrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.

Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the 'benefit' of search engines and not human visitors.

Link
Farm
A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (or PR). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines.

Mirror
In SEO parlance, a mirror is a near identical duplicate website (or page). Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to target different keywords/keyphrases.

Portal
Designation for websites
that are either authoritative hubs for a given subject or popular content driven sites (like Yahoo) that people use as their homepage. Most portals offer significant content and offer advertising opportunities for relevant
sites.

PPC
Pay Per Click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads.

PR
PageRank - Google's trademark for their proprietary measure of link popularity for web pages.

Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.

SEM
Abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing. SEM encompasses SEO and search engine paid advertising options (banners, PPC, etc.)

SEO
Search Engine Optimization. SEO covers the process of making web pages spider friendly (so search engines can read them) making web ages relevant to desired keyphrases

SERP
Search Engine Results Page/Positioning.

Spam
In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds for banning.

Spamdexing
Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine's index. Spamdexing is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for
banning.

Spider
Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

Spider Trap
A spider trap refers to either a continuous loop where spiders are requesting pages and the server is requesting data to render the page or an intentional scheme designed to identify (and"ban") spiders that do not respect robots.txt.

Stop Word
Stop
words are words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries. Common words such as "the".

Black
hat
This is Unethical SEO. Search Engine Optimization techniques that defy search engine TOS.

White hat
an ethical SEO method that follows search engine TOS.

Grey hat
an SEO using both methods.

Link building
a method of creating backlinks to your own website.