I have included this reasonably comprehensive SEO Glossary of Terms to help everyone along in the learning process as well as to remind even the more seasoned SEO practitioner what some of these terms are REALLY supposed to mean.

Adsense – a way to monetize a web site, this is Google’s contextual advertising program

Adwords – this is Google’s paid search ad program

Algorithm – the secret formula search engines use to decide the value of a web page and thus how highly it should be ranked for a specific search term.

Alt attribute – sometimes erroneously referred to as an “alt tag” this is a descriptive title given to an image. According to W3C the generic rule for the content of the alt attribute is: use text that fulfills the same function as the image. If your image fails to appear the user will still know what was supposed to be in that space – or a site reader will speak the alternative text for the sight impaired.

Anchor text – HTML uses the anchor tag to create a link to another web document. When text is used as part of that link we call this anchor text. This is a key part of navigation and educating users where they are about to visit. It also tells the search engine what a page is substantially about and thus a critical part of SEO.

Ask – search engine formerly known as Ask Jeeves.

Backlink – sometimes called incoming link, these are links from other web sites to your web site.

Banned - refers to a web site being de-indexed from a search engine. This usually only happens in cases where a webmaster has attempted to manipulate search engine results.

Black Hat SEO – optimization techniques that seek to gain an unfair advantage in search engine results and are generally against the webmaster guidelines of Google and other major search engines. Using such techniques will typically end up getting your site banned from these engines.

Cloaking – showing one page to search engines and another to the public. Against Google’s webmaster guidelines.

CMS – Content Management System

CSS – Cascading Style Sheets, sometimes referred to as simply “style sheets”.

DNS – Domain Name System

Doorway Page – a page designed solely to rank highly in the search engines with human traffic being redirected to another page. This is against Google’s webmaster guidelines and is a fast way to get banned.

External Link (see Backlink)

FTP – File Transfer Protocol, quite simply a method for uploading and downloading files from your server. Most people do this using FTP software such as Filezilla or Cute FTP.

Google “Sandbox” – sometimes called the “aging delay”.

HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language

Incoming Link (see Backlink)

Internal Links – links within and between pages in your own web site

Keyword – a single word typed into a search box in a search engine, for example: “cars”.

Keyword Phrase – (aka Keyphrase) a group or set of keywords typed into a search box to find something using a search engine, for example: “florida vacation home”

Keyword Stuffing – adding excessive amounts of keywords to the content of a page (to the point where human readers find the text almost ridiculous to read) for the purpose of trying to manipulate search engine results.

Link Exchange – (aka reciprocal linking) the act of trading links between web sites. You give me a link and I’ll give you one. Not always a great way to build links, remember the goal is to build traffic first, not links.

Link Farm – typically a network of automated link pages where everyone trades links between themselves to try and make their web pages seem extremely popular in Google’s eyes. They forget the fact that Google ignores link farms and gives more weight to links that are “relevant”, that is: they are related to your market niche. Avoid link farms at all costs.

Link Juice – the amount of link popularity passed through a link to the page it is linking to.

Link Popularity – more incoming links = more link popularity. If you receive an incoming link from a highly popular page, it carries more link popularity (more link juice) than a link from a less popular page.  Google indicates a pages popularity via PageRank

Link Text – (see Anchor Text)

MFA Site – Made For Adsense site. This is a common term amongst senior webmasters to describe web sites filled with low quality content to draw traffic. Their sole purpose is to get people to click their Google ads. I call these “Garbage Sites” because they clutter up the Internet with lousy content and waste people’s time.

Nofollow Attribute – the nofollow attribute will stop Google from following a link. Google recommends using the rel=”nofollow” attribute on links that have been paid for. Google is against people buying links from popular sites to try and artificially build up a site’s popularity and thus manipulate search results.

Page Title – (see Title Tage)

PageRank – Google’s determination of how popular a page is. Toolbar PageRank is not the same as PageRank. Toolbar PageRank is only update occasionally by Google. We cannot know what our actual PageRank is (this is calculated by Google internally) but we can see what our Toolbar PageRank is by installing the Google Toolbar in our web browser.

Reciprocal Linking – (see Link Exchange)

SE – Search Engine

Search Engine Spam – any activity designed to trick a search engine into ranking one web page higher than another through manipulating the SE algorithm.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

SERP – Search Engine Results Page

Site Map – (aka sitemap) a single page or index of all the pages in a web site. This is usually a text based list of links that can be easily read by both humans and robots to make navigation easy for both. Webmasters often use this as a way to ensure the site is fully indexed by SE robots.

Text Link – exactly what it sounds like, a link made up of text, clickable and void of graphics. Typically the best kinds of links for SEO.

Title Tag – in the <head> section of the page <title>This is the page title </title>, one of your key components of SEO.

Toolbar PageRank – a number between 1-10, toolbar PageRank is a rough indicator of how well your linking program is coming along. It is not an indicator of traffic or anything else. Many people put a lot of stock in Toolbar PR but unfortunately this has only served to cheapen it’s value over time.

URL – uniform resource locator

White Hat SEO – SEO done the right way in accordance with guidelines set forth by Google and other major search engines.