SEO Glossary. Terminology explained 
Alt attributes - what search engines read in order to determine what an image is about. Therefore alt atributes on images should be descriptive and keyword heavy.
Anchor text - the text used to describe a link i.e. ‘click here to view’ or ‘ View Casio EXILIM Hi-Zoom EX-H10 Digital camera’. The latter is is good, the former not so good.
Blackhat SEO - certain SEO practices that could fall foul of the Webmaster Guidlines and result in a site being black listed from a search engine.
Content - the words, images, video etc that fill the pages of a website and what the search engines use to determine the relevance of a site to a search query.
Crawling - what ‘bots’ (bits of software) do as they run around the internet scanning and indexing websites.
CSS - Cascading Style Sheets are used to determine the look and format of a website (as separate from the content).
Googlebots - bits of software that crawl the internet indexing webpages.
H1 tags - heading tags are the headings on your pages used to define the content.
Hosting - the ‘physical’ location of your website on the net i.e where the actual files sit and are viewable on the internet via a server.
Indexing - how search engines search, find and log websites so they can then be made available to searchers.
Information architecture - the structure of the pages of a website i.e. the family tree.
Keyword - the word a searcher writes into the search space on a search engine to indicate what they are looking for i.e. camera
Link Juice - the ‘votes’ passed from one page to another when linked i.e. increased ranking through association with well ranked pages.
Links - these are links in or out of a website. Links in (inbound) from highly regarded sites increase ranking of the linked to site. This is the basis of link building in SEO.
Logfile - a file that contains detailed history of all requests to your website and therefore can be used to see long-term search engine crawling pattens i.e. how many times the bots visit the site.
Longtail keywords - a longer keyword query, usually from 4 words upwards (average is 2.9) i.e instead of ‘casio digital camera’ it could be ‘casio digital camera 12 mpeg 40x zoom’.
Meta tag - a list of keywords associated with the website and inserted into the code. Google no longer uses the meta tags for ranking.
Meta description - a description of the website which is displayed by search engines in the SERPS (pages) i.e. the bit you read before clinking on a link in search engine results. It has no SEO value.
Page rank - the popularity of a page determined by the popularity of the pages that link to it.
robots.txt - a file on the server that tells the search engine bots what to index and not index.
Root domain - the domain name you register and pay for i.e. www.digitalcameras.com
Search algorithm - a mathematical set of equations comprising of hundreds of components in order to determine the importance of one search relevant webpage from another.
SERPs - Search Engine Ranking Pages are the results delivered by a search engine in response to a keyword search.
Spiders - another word for the bits of software that search engines send around the web to index pages. Also known as bots.
Subdomain - a third level domain i.e. as in www.blog.digitalcameras.com. Subfolders should be used instead if SEO is a priority.
Title Tags - considered one of the most important factors in SEO, the title tag describes the page to the search engine. Put important keywords at beginning of the title.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator i.e. the address of a webpage which for SEO purposes should be clean, short and descriptive.
Whitehat SEO - SEO techniques that follow the search engine Webmaster Guidelines.
XML site map - a list of the URLs you would like the search engine to crawl and index
301 redirect - a permanent redirect which allows the search engine to find a moved page. Should be default for SEO purposes.
302 redirect - a temporary redirect that blocks the search engine from finding a page after it has been moved. Should not be used if SEO is a priority.
404 page - error page seen when a requested page is not found on the server. This should be customized for SEO purposes.
