adwords Google’s Pay Per Click program, which shows up at the top and right side of SERPs.

affiliate a joint venture partner of a website which advertises their products and earns a commission for a referred sale.

algorithm A search engine’s secret coding their spiders use to determine rankings in SERPs for a given keyword phrase.

analytics Google program that analyzes and summarizes data of a website based on gathered data from the site.

anchor text Keyword phrase used to hyperlink to another page or website.

B2B Business to Business.

B2C Business to Consumer

back link inbound link from another website.

black hat Search engine optimization techniques that are used in an attempt to fool the search engines for the purpose of higher rankings without valuable content.

blog A Content Management System or website such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal that has consistent journal-style entries.

bot (robot, spider, crawler) A search engine program that will anonymously search the internet to find websites to add web pages to their search index.

CMS Content Management System – Programs such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal which can allow pages to be easily added to a website such as a blog, forum, or online community.

content (text, copy) the words on a website that are relevant to a keyword search term.

crawler (see bot, spider)

duplicate content -content which is found to be similar either found on the same site or another site. Google usually accepts the oldest contents date and ignores the duplicate content on other sites.

e commerce site website involving B2C sales of products.

Google dance a major change to Google’s algorithm in an attempt to reduce spam, duplicate or irrelevant content, often causing many sites to lose their place ion the SERPs .

Googlebot Google’s spider program

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) programming language of most web sites.

index – to job of the search engine spiders to add web pages to their databases (index/cache).

keyword / phrase – any word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.

keyword density The frequency of how often a search term appears on a web page, which can assist or penalize a page in the SERPS.

keyword research This is the basis of SEO research to determine what surfers are looking for in order to draw traffic to a website..

landing page -pages with backlimgs coming from other websites for the purpose of converting traffic to buyers

link building creating links either through back-linking or link-exchanges.

link popularity an important element to Google’s algorithm which helps determine the value of a website. It is like a “vote” coming from another site.

META tags section in html code that is not viewable on the site, but important to SEO

organic SEO – natural (white-hat search engine optimization techniques for the purpose of adding value to a website. .

pagerank (PR) – a method used by Google to help determine the link popularity of a site which can be caused by internal page structuring, or backlinking. It is a closely guarded secret that ranks each page on a site (from 0-10).

PPC (Pay Per Click) paid advertising in the search engines that will rank sites above organic results in the SERPs bases on amount paid per click (such as found with Google Adwords).

robots.txt a website file that limits where a search engine spider may visit on a website.

ROI (Return On Investment) a measure of the monetary benefit to a website sales vs. the cost of driving the traffic to the site

SEM search engine marketing – usually refers to the SEO and PPC techniques used to help a website rank higher in the SERPs

SEO search engine optimization – the techniques and strategies used to help a website rank higher in the search engines for given keyword terms. Proper landing page sales copy will also convert traffic to buyers.

SERP Search Engine Results Page

site map – a website file or page that maps out all the internal pages of a website. An html sitemap is used to help visitors navigate a site, whereas an xml sitemap is used to help the search engines locate all the internal pages on a site.

SMM (Social Media Marketing) Websites of large communities of people for the purpose of socializing, or coming together for a common purpose.

spider – see bot/crawler

static page A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.

URL Uniform Resource Locator – entered into web browser software to find a website on the internet.

web 2.0 refers to the newest techniques in web design but usually is a reference to Social Media Marketing..

white hat – organic SEO techniques that are approved by Google for the purposes of ranking naturally in the search engines (as opposed to black-hat techniques used to fool or manipulate search engine results).

People go to the internet to find information – it may be a product or a service, entertainment, or they are looking for a solution to a problem. Most people start their search with a major search engine such as: “Google, Yahoo, or MSN,” or a meta search engine such as “Dogpile.com, Looksmart.com, or Lycos.com.”

The Search Engines are basically huge websites that stores (cache) information about every page they can find (index) on the internet. If you’ve seen the movie Bruce Almighty, you’ll remember the analogy of when “GOD” opens the massive file cabinet to pull out a file about Bruce – the file is like a website, and the pages inside the folders are like pages on a website.

Search engines like Google find web sites with software (spiders) that crawl the internet – starting at highly visible sites (such as Wikipedia.org) and following the links they are connected to and so on. This is a continuous process.

Since the biggest search engine – Google claims that it has followed over 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) links on the internet, it’s no wonder that 85% of people go to the search engines first to look up what they’re searching for.

You may also think of the search engines as like a giant phone book, but instead of listing companies in alphabetical order, the search engines have mathematical algorithms that rank all the pages on the internet in terms of the value of the content for a specific search term such as “exotic pet stores in Dallas, Texas”, for example.

The more relevant to the specific search term the algorithm finds the information, the higher it will rank in the results – known as SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). Needless to say, the more specific the search term entered into the search engine, the more accurate the results will be.

Although the Search Engine algorithms are closely guarded secrets, there are two main factors which determine ranking positions:

On page (on site) optimization: This is the optimization of the content found on the website -these factors include things like meta-tags and keyword density (frequency). Meta-tags are located in the HTML code of a web-page that is not visible when viewing the site. An example of meta tags for SEO are:

SEO Meta-tags:

<head>

<title>On-page Search Engine Optimization</title>

<meta name=”keywords” content=” on page, optimization, search engine, rankings, seo”>

<META NAME=”description” content=”Factors that affect on-page optimization in the Search Engines”>

</head>

Off Page (off-site) optimization: These are the techniques implemented to increase the number of links to a site that will drive traffic to it. The purpose is to sell a product or service, create a community, offer information, or express an opinion. Links can include from many different sources such as  directory submissions, social networking websites, article marketing, blogging, and link exchanges.

There are other techniques that many search engine optimizers implement that attempt to cheat the search engines into thinking their pages have value – known as black-hat SEO. The search engines keep revising their algorithms in an attempt to eliminate high rankings from black hat search engine optimization. Because of this, black-hat SEO results are often short-lived, and companies end up paying a bill for work that doesn’t last.

Adventure Capitalism implement natural, organic (white-hat) practices only, which results in high lasting results in the search engines. Call us now at 1-888-688-6326 to learn how we can help drive traffic to your site and increase your sales today!!