Search Engine Optimization

Another very important part of search engine optimization is the social sites. Here is an opportunity to have inbound links from quality sites, and you don't have to pay for them. You can get people into your social network, and before you know it you have generated hundreds of visits to your website that you otherwise wouldn't expect. So I you have the time to go online and socialized then by all means go the websites and begin to make friends. If not, then you should allow SEO Business Solutions to do your search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

Are you looking for an Search Engine Optimization company?

Look no more! SEO Business Solutions can get your website where you want it to be on search engine results. Go to our website and ask for a free analysis of your website, no strings attached. We will even help you optimize your website. Should you run into any problems, you will always have our SEO experts available. Ask for a free quote. We will be happy to tailor a package to fit your specific needs.

We Have Said This Before and Do Not Tire of Saying it: We are an ethical company.

Webmasters want quick and easy solutions to their Search Engine Optimization problems.

If you are an experienced webmaster, you know that real Search Engine Optimization takes time and lots of patience. Most people want to get high rankings in Google and they want these rankings now. That's the reason why some companies offer quick and easy solutions that are supposed to bring your website in Google's top 10 results quickly and easily. Are these methods good for your business and can you afford to use
them?

5 quick and easy methods to get high rankings on search engines

The following five methods are the most popular quick fix solutions that some website promotion companies offer:

1. Hide text on your web pages
If you want to get high rankings for a special keyword, the keyword must appear on your web pages. If you don't want to change your web pages, hide keyword rich text on your web pages. For example, use white text on a white background, use CSS to hide text areas, fill HTML comments with keywords, etc.

2. Cloak your web pages
Cloaking is a method that allows you to deliver different pages to search engines and website visitors. For example, your website visitors could see your regular web pages while search engine spiders are redirected to keyword rich web pages that are stuffed with keywords that are relevant and not-so-relevant to your business.

Cloaking is an easy way to provide search engines with lots of content without changing your regular web pages.

3. Get content from other websites
Everybody knows that search engines need content to get high search engine rankings. The easiest way to get content rich web pages is to reproduce content from other websites on your website.

4. Buy links
Buying links is a quick way to get many links to your website. Why waste time to develop natural link partnerships with related websites?

5. Participate in linking schemes
Search engines prefer websites with many inbound links. Why not join a link network that promises hundreds of links within days with little work or no work at all?

Quick and easy solutions can become extremely expensive!

The problem with the methods mentioned above is that they all will get your website banned from Google's search result pages sooner or later. Google thinks that these methods are spam and we agree with that opinion. In fact, we consider such practices highly deceptive and unethical. We have discussed in previous blogs the ethics of
Search Engine Optimization.

You can get short term results with these methods but it is only a matter of time until your website will be penalized for using these methods. Just to be clear: Do not use the methods above or you will harm your website! You will end up being penalized, banned and/or blackballed.

Can you afford these methods?

Three questions and a risk-free plan.
Can your business afford to use one of the methods above? Consider these three questions:

* Do you have employees or investors?
* Is your website the primary source of your income?
* Would losing most of your visitors be a disaster for your income?

If your answer to one of these three questions is yes then you should avoid the tactics mentioned above at all cost. The risk is just too high. If you want to get high rankings on Google without risking your website, use ethical search engine
optimization methods. If you want to get lasting rankings, optimize your web pages for your keywords without spamming and get high quality links instead of using shady linking schemes.
Ethical search engine optimization methods take some time but they produce much better results than shady quick fix solutions.
Thank you Axandra for such highly informative and valuable articles!
We continue to advise our website visitors and customers to practice ethical search engine optimization. After all, we believe that you want to go to the top of the search engine results and stay there. Well, the way to stay
there is through ethical SEO.
This is a reprint from our website blog. We are making it more readily available because of the importance that we give ethical SEO.

Search Engine Optimization Term of the Day

Bookmarks
Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy.Social bookmarking sites are often called tagging sites. Del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yahoo! MyWeb also allows you to tag results. Google allows you to share feeds and / or tag pages. They also have a program called Google Notebook which allows you to write mini guides of related links and information.
There are also a couple meta news sites that allow you to tag interesting pages. If enough people vote for your story then your story gets featured on the homepage. Slashdot is a tech news site primarily driven by central editors. Digg created a site covering the same type of news, but is a bottoms up news site which allows readers to vote for what they think is interesting. Netscape cloned the Digg business model and content model. Sites like Digg and Netscape are easy sources of links if you can create content that would appeal to those audiences.Many forms of vertical search, like Google Video or YouTube, allow you to tag content.
See also:
Del.icio.us - Yahoo! owned social bookmarking site
Yahoo! MyWeb - similar to Del.icio.us, but more integrated into Yahoo!
Google Notebook - allows you to note documents
Slashdot - tech news site where stories are approved by central editors
Digg - decentralized news site
Netscape - Digg clone
Google Video - Google's video hosting, tagging, and search site
YouTube - popular decentralized video site

Visit our Glossary for more relevant Search Engine Optimization terms.

Search Engine Optimization at SEO Business Solutions

SEO Business Solutions is your only solution for your Search Engine Optimization needs. We have been at the vanguard of search engine optimization for many years now and will continue to work and improve in order to stay out in front. To this end, we have made many search engine optimization tools available to our customers and website users. We realize that many people don't have the financial resources to pay for search engine optimization or SEO. We also know that if you have a specialty website, your traffic might be such that it allows you the free time to do your own SEO. Also, we know that many people like to tinker and learn new things.
If you are one of the aforementioned people, then our free SEO tools are the thing for you. All you have to do is go to our Contact Us page and let us know that you are looking for free SEO tools. We will be more than happy to share some of the tools that we use with you. However, if you find yourself in a bind or pressed for time, don't hesitate to ask for a free website analysis and SEO quote. We will work with you to formulate an SEO plan that falls within your budget and expectations.

Search Engine Optimization Term of the Day at SEO Business Solutions

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor Text is the text that a user would click on to follow a link. In case that the link is an image the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor text.

Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

For an example of anchor text, go to our search engine optimization glossary.

Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites.

See also:
Backlink Analyzer - free tool to analyze your link anchor text

SEO Business Solutions Welcomes Your Contributions to its SEO Blog.

We are looking for new and fresh ideas, software or products so our website users and customers can take advantage of them. If you wish to comment on any Blog posted by SEO Business Solutions, go to our contact us page and let us know what you think.  If you have an idea or product related to SEO, let us know and we will post it.  Make yourself and your ideas known.

SEO Business Solutions, constantly ahead of the pack

You can see that we have definitely, but not definitively, defined the unknown through our Glossary of SEO Terms. We've done this to help our customers, website users and potential customers in understanding what SEO is really about. SEO has developed a jargon of its own, and you have to be familiar with the terms so that you can make an informed decision when you optimize your website.
We've identified thousands of SEO terms. We have also identified over 100 unique variables that directly affect natural search algorithms and our Search Engine Optimization specialists optimize your website or blog in accordance to these variables. However, we will not waver in our effort to let you know that search engines are constantly adjusting their algorithms to try to halt spammers. Therefore, SEO Business Solutions constantly re-evaluates and updates its software to ensure that the correct weight is given to each of these variables to ensure that your website will end up on the first page of search results for your chosen keywords and phrases.

By using ethical SEO practices, leading edge software and search engine algorithm trend analysis, SEO Business Solutions seemingly without effort will make the proper corrections to account for the changes and trends so that your website can maintain its good rankings and to secure new and higher rankings.

SEO Business Solutions Says Blogging Makes Sense

A good blog with lots of keywords and content has become a great tool for search engine optimization.

Good search engine optimization involves much more than the correct keyword strategy, inbound links, fresh content and all of the other things which SEO companies do to move your site up in the search engine results. What's particularly great about having a good blog is that it gives your site fresh content. If you use the right amount of keywords, your blog will place highly in search engine results. It is, of course, a great opportunity to have an inbound link from your blog to your website. There are really endless possibilities as far as blogging is concerned. It is up to the SEO Company and the imagination of its content writers and keyword analysts. SEO Business Solutions has developed its own software for optimization. We have worked countless hours on our software and continue to work on it so that it stays current. When there are changes in the algorithms of the search engines, we update our software to include the new changes. We apply our state of the art software to web logs, or blogs, in an effort to optimize your site in every way possible. We understand the possibilities that a good blog presents and take every advantage we can of the possibilities presented. We want you to see your site where you want it to be; on the first page of search results.

Have we used terms which you would like clarified? Visit our SEO Business Solutions Glossary of SEO Terms.

What's new at SEO Business Solutions?

SEO Business Solutions has added the new term "favicon" to its glossary. If you don't know what the term means, then go to our glossary and find out. This and many other relevant terms can be found in our alphabetical glossary. We are going to continue updating our glossary and adding or removing terms as it becomes necessary. If you wish to make a contribution, go to our contact us page and let us know what the new term you have is or how we can improve the definitions we have. All suggestions will be given serious consideration.

Glossary of SEO Terms

In an effort to assist its customers and website users, SEO Business Soltions recently introduced a glossary of SEO Terms. It is done in alphabetical order for your convenience. All you have to do is find the letter that correspondes to your term. However, if you don't find the term you're looking for, write to us at:
info@seobusinesssolutions.com
and let us know. We will find the term and place it in our glossary. In addition, if you think you have a better definition for one of our terms, write to us at the above stated email address and let us know what that better definition is. We will take it all under advisement and make the necessary changes.

Strong Growth for Google Inc.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc., showed strong growth in its ability to convert Web searches into ads viewed, according to a closely watched industry report quoted by analysts on Thursday, and its shares rose 2.5 percent.
Web tracking firm comScore Inc's monthly report on "paid clicks" showed Google's U.S. growth at 19.6 percent in April from a year ago, compared with growth of 2.7 percent in March and 3.1 percent in February, according to analysts.
Lehman Brothers analyst Douglas Anmuth said the growth suggests a reversal in trends seen for Google during the first quarter of the year and could spur shares higher on hopes the Web leader had reaccelerated growth in the market.
"We are cautious about reading too much into the data as they track only domestic (owned and operated) paid clicks and exclude Google's full network and international paid clicks," Anmuth wrote in a note to clients.
Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali said Google could exceed his revenue expectations for the second quarter if growth remained on its current trajectory.
He noted that paid click declines of 4.4 percent for Yahoo Inc., and 9 percent for Microsoft Corp's MSN could bolster the case for the two to combine, or for Yahoo to clinch a search partnership with Google that has been under discussion for weeks.
Microsoft withdrew a $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo earlier this month in a disagreement over price. Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang said on Wednesday the two companies were still discussing a potential partnership or alternatives to a deal.
ComScore does not publicly release the paid click reports it sends to clients.
Google shares rose $15 to $583, Yahoo slipped 11 cents to $27.06 while Microsoft gained 32 cents to $28.50.

What does this article that appeared in today's New York Times mean to you? Well, it means that you should optimize your website for the Google search engine. We have been saying this over and over and will not get tired of advising our clients that optimizing for Google makes good business sense. We concentrate on the major search engines, Google and Yahoo! and two of the lesser players, MSN and Ask.com. In this way, we optimize for over 98% of the searches done in the USA. SEO Business Solutions is the clear choice for your websites's search engine optimization.
This and other relevant articles can be found in the New York Times Online.

SEO Business Solutions and Web Directories

Why request inclusion in web directories if they are losing their relevance?

On May 14th, SEO Book commented on the fact that the directory JoeAnt is now a PageRank 3. We have submitted hundreds of sites to hundreds of directories. For sites at the lower end of the quality spectrum, we simply would not submit them to JoeAnt, because we knew they would not list them. Many of those same lower quality sites were accepted in other directories like Business.com, DMEGS and the Yahoo! Directory.
However it is not surprising to us that JoeAnt was dropped to a PageRank 3. Nick Stamoulis that same morning said that after all, it is a paid directory, which means your link is a paid link and we all know how Google feels about those for Search Engine Optimization. In fact, we do all we can to stay away from paid directories and link farms.
DMOZ, on the other hand, still gets a nod of respect from Google. Even though Google no longer needs data from DMOZ in order to index websites, it still crawls the human edited directory and uses the information. If it were up to us, we would lower DMOZ’s PageRank and give paid directories like JoeAnt a higher PageRank. But, of course, it’s not up to us, is it?
Yesterday, DMOZ announced that it has had visitors from over 200 countries. Are you surprised? We’re not. It’s a venerable website with lots of time and history on its side. They’ve been around a long time which Google and other search engines seem to love. We’d be surprised if they didn’t have that many countries in their referrer bin.
We’ve said for a long time now that directories are losing relevance because of other factors taking place on the Internet and supplanting the usefulness of directories. Well, it isn’t entirely so. In fact, to a certain degree, we believe that general directories are a lot less important than they used to be for Search Engine Optimization, but haven’t entirely lost their relevance. However, with the coming of other marketing tools like blogging, social bookmarking, social networking and RSS, directory listings just seem so ponderous and monolithic. DMOZ is a perfectly good example. You submit your site on DMOZ and have to wait 9 months to a year for your site to be listed. In the meantime, you could have built up thousands of inbound links using different means. Then why bother at all with DMOZ? The answer is simple but truly: Since DMOZ is still loved by Google, it makes sense to request inclusion in the directory, even if it takes a year to be included. An inclusion in a directory with a PR of 8 is the eventual payoff. We would also add that it pays to have as many inbound links as possible.
Even though directories, in general, are losing their relevance, SEO Business Solutions thinks that not requesting inclusion of your site in the DMOZ is not a good Search Engine Optimization practice.

Basic Differences When It Comes to Web Pages and Blogs With Regards to SEO

What are the differences when it comes to web pages and blogs with regards to SEO?

There are distinct differences when it comes to web pages and blogs, not just in the look or navigation, but in the search engine optimization strategies as well. Sure, both need the usual villains of content, keywords and links. However SEO outcomes for each can be quite different.
Aside from the ease of creating multiple pages, each page of a blog will get indexed by they search engines. If there are ten pages to (or posts) on a blog, that is potentially ten pages indexed. A web page on the other hand gains only one indexing. Most web sites are made up of more than one page, however, extra pages are far more difficult to create and require some knowledge of web page coding. Because each page can be designed from scratch, search engine optimization strategies can be fine tuned for each page.Blogging requires little to no knowledge of programming codes, however your ability to fine tune your search engine optimization strategies is limited to the types of plugins available and how well you utilize them. It is much harder to customize each page on a blog.
Blogs and blogging can be great for delivering traffic. Web sites on the other hand are well suited to action such as buying, signing up to newsletters of or any other activity. Search engine optimization strategies for blogs require a focus not just on the search engines, but also with an eyes to the many social sites.
Search engine optimization on web pages can concentrate purely on gaining search engine result placement. Blogging and social sites fit like hand and glove as do web sites and search engines. Whilst more than half of many searches deliver blogs in the results pages, individuals who are looking to buy will almost always click through to a web page rather than a blog.
If you have a web site that is commercial in nature, you need to maximize your search engine optimization efforts to deliver targeted traffic. A blog in reality is a support service for your web page. Blogs need to not only target search engines, but also target the social community as well. Search engine optimization needs to take that social community into consideration as well.A good example of this is in keyword selection. A web page can target keywords centering around the products being sold. A blog needs to expand on those keywords to include phrases that relate to solving problems, offering tips and providing information. The search engine optimization strategies for each can be totally different.The best approach is to consider each as totally separate entities with totally different requirements. Your search engine optimization strategies should be separated and optimized for each entity to gain the maximum return for your efforts.
After all, you should expect a good return for your investment if you hire a company to optimize your site for search engine results. SEO Business Solutions can help you to maximize your investment. We consult with our clients to determine what the best strategy is and then we explain what we are going to do in terms that can be easily understood.
We always try to keep our clients as informed as possible so that they can make the best decision when it comes to search engine optimization. Visit our website and ask us for a free analysis and quote.

SEO Business Solutions

The Region's best Search Engine Optimization company. Visit our site, compare us to other SEO companies and ask for a free analysis and quote.

SEO BUSINESS SOLUTIONS CONCENTRATES ITS EFFORTS ON THE MAIN SEARCH ENGINES

YAHOO! AND GOOGLE ARE UP IN THEIR SHARE OF SEARCH ENGINE VOLUME

Don’t put all your search engine optimization eggs into one basket. Well not yet anyway. Despite Yahoo! gaining a small increase in search volume, Google is still the one that is way out in front and not slowing down, at least, not yet.
Google also increased their share of search volume leaving the other players to continue their downward slide. On present volumes, search engine optimization should focus on Google and Yahoo! and forget the rest. According to Compete, the big two have over 83% of search volume between with Google bringing home a huge 68.9%. The big loser over the last 12 months, apart from Yahoo! which has dropped almost 5%, has been MSN and Club Live (both Microsoft).
Yahoo!’s rise may have come at the expense of MSN and Club Live due to Microsoft’s attempted takeover of Yahoo! Club Live had the biggest percentage drop falling almost 33%.
It makes sense for SEO Business Solutions to concentrate its efforts on the main search engines. It also makes sense for you to hire a search engine company like SEO Business Solutions to handle your website's optimization because we will maximize your investment.
After all, hiring SEO Business Solutions is an investment which you hope will pay dividends in the form of increased traffic and sales. Let SEO Business Solutions do your website's Search Engine Optimization and watch your website move up in the search results to the place where you want it to be.

SEO terms you should be familiar with 0-9 and A-D

You should become familiar with these SEO terms is you are planning to hire a company like SEO Business Solutions to do your Search Engine Optimization.

0 - 9
200
Status OK - The file request was successful. For example, a page or image was found and loaded properly in a browser.

Some poorly developed content management systems return 200 status codes even when a file does not exist. The proper response for file not found is a 404.

See also:

W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions
301
Moved Permanently - The file has been moved permanently to a new location.
This is the preferred method of redirecting for most pages or websites. If you are going to move an entire site to a new location you may want to test moving a file or folder first, and then if that ranks well you may want to proceed with moving the entire site. Depending on your site authority and crawl frequency it may take anywhere from a few days to a month or so for the 301 redirect to be picked up.

See also:

W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions
On Apache servers you can redirect URLs in a .htaccess file or via in the headers of some dynamic pages. Most web hosts run on Apache.
On IIS servers you can redirect using ASP or ASP.net, or from within the internet manager.
302
Found - The file has been found, but is temporarily located at another URI.
Generally, as it relates to SEO, it is typically best to avoid using 302 redirects. Some search engines struggle with redirect handling. Due to poor processing of 302 redirects some search engines have allowed competing businesses to hijack the listings of competitors.

See also:

W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions
404
Not Found - The server was unable to locate the URL.
Some content management systems send 404 status codes when documents do exist. Ensure files that exist do give a 200 status code and requests for files that do not exist give a 404 status code. You may also want to check with your host to see if you can set up a custom 404 error page which makes it easy for site visitors to

view your most popular and / or most relevant navigational options
report navigational problems within your site
Search engines request a robots.txt file to see what portions of your site they are allowed to crawl. Many browsers request a favicon.ico file when loading your site. While neither of these files are necessary, creating them will help keep your log files clean so you can focus on whatever other errors your site might have.

See also:

W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions
A
Above the Fold
A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.
See also:

Google AdSense heat map - shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
Absolute Link
A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.
Example absolute link

Cool Stuff

Example relative link

Cool Stuff



AdCenter
Microsoft's cost per click ad network.
While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft's limited marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity.

See also:

AdCenter - sign up for an account
Microsoft AdLabs - view many of the free search marketing tools Microsoft offers.
AdSense
Google's contextual advertising network. Publishers large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google.
AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue stream which will help some publishers establish a baseline for the value of their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is the trade off for automating ad sales.

AdSense ad auction formats include

cost per click - advertisers are only charged when ads are clicked on
CPM - advertisers are charged a certain amount per ad impression. Advertisers can target sites based on keyword, category, or demographic information.
AdSense ad formats include

text
graphic
animated graphics
videos
In some cases I have seen ads which got a 2 or 3% click through rate (CTR), while sites that are optimized for maximum CTR (through aggressive ad integration) can obtain as high as a 50 or 60% CTR depending on

how niche their site is
how commercially oriented their site is
the relevancy and depth of advertisers in their vertical
It is also worth pointing out that if you are too aggressive in monetizing your site before it has built up adequate authority your site may never gain enough authority to become highly profitable.

Depending on your vertical your most efficient monetization model may be any of the following

AdSense
affiliate marketing
direct ad sales
selling your own products and services
a mixture of the above
See also:

Google AdSense program - sign up as an ad publisher
Google AdSense heat map - shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
Google AdWords - buy ads on Google search and / or contextually relevant web pages.
AdWords
Google's advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google's ads are keyword targeted and sold on a cost per click basis in an auction which factors in ad clickthrough rate as well as max bid. Google is looking into expanding their ad network to include video ads, demographic targeting, affiliate ads, radio ads, and traditional print ads.
AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords. Rather than doing that here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources.

See also:

Google AdWords - sign up for an advertiser account
Google Advertising Professional Program - program for qualifying as an AdWords expert
Google AdWords Learning Center - text and multimedia educational modules. Contains quizzes related to each section.
AdWords Keyword Tool - shows related keywords, advertiser competition, and relative search volume estimates.
Google Traffic Estimator - estimates bid prices and search volumes for keywords.
Free PPC tips [PDF] - my ebook offering free pay per click advice.
Andrew Goodman's Google AdWords Handbook - costs roughly $75, but is well worth it
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying independent agents on a cost per action (CPA) basis. Affiliates only get paid if visitors complete an action.
Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for wasting money on instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage via other's affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value.

Some power affiliates make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year because they are heavily focused on automation and/or tap large traffic streams. Typically niche affiliate sites make more per unit effort than overtly broad ones because they are easier to focus (and thus have a higher conversion rate).

Selling a conversion is typically harder than selling a click (like AdSense does, for instance). Search engines are increasingly looking to remove the noise low quality thin affiliate sites ad to the search results through the use of

algorithms which detect thin affiliate sites and duplicate content;
manual review; and,
implementation of landing page quality scores on their paid ads.
See also:

Commission Junction - probably the largest affiliate network
Linkshare - another large affiliate network
Performics - another large affiliate network
Azoogle Ads - ad offer network focused on high margin / high profit verticals
CPA Empire - similar to AzoogleAds
Amazon Associates - Amazon's affiliate program
Clickbank - an affiliate network for selling electronic products and information
Age
Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents.
Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home pages.

Some search engines may also try to classify sites to understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites or reference sites that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages and try to classify them based on how frequently they change.

See also:

Google Patent 20050071741: Information retrieval based on historical data - mentions that document age, link age, link bursts, and link churn may be used to help score the relevancy of a document.
AJAX
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load.
Alexa
Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic.
Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.

See also

Alexa.com
AllTheWeb
Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features.
See also:

AllTheWeb
Alt Attribute
Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object.
Example usage



See also

W3C QA: Alt Attribute
AltaVista
Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare.
See also:

AltaVista
Amazon.com
The largest internet retailing website. Amazon.com is rich in consumer generated media. Amazon also owns a number of other popular websites, including IMDB and Alexa.
See also:

Amazon.com - official site
Analytics
Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site.
Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not.

See also:

Google Analytics - Google's free analytics program
Conversion Ruler - a simple and cheap web based analytic tool
ClickTracks - downloadable and web based analytics software
Anchor Text
The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor text.
Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

Example of anchor text:

Search Engine Optimization Blog

Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites.

See also:

Backlink Analyzer - free tool to analyze your link anchor text
AOL
Popular web portal which merged with Time Warner.
API
Application Program Interface - a series of conventions or routines used to access software functions. Most major search products have an API program.
Arbitrage
Exploiting market inefficiencies by buying and reselling a commodity for a profit. As it relates to the search market, many thin content sites laced with an Overture feed or AdSense ads buy traffic from the major search engines and hope to send some percent of that traffic clicking out on a higher priced ad. Shopping search engines generally draw most of their traffic through arbitrage.
See also:

Wolf-Howl: AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets
[audio] Jeremy Shoemaker interviews Kris Jones and part 2
Wikipedia: arbitrage
ASP
Active Server Pages - a dynamic Microsoft programming language.
See also:

ASP.net
Ask
Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they dumped Jeeves in early 2006. Their search engine is powered by the Teoma search technology, which is largely reliant upon Kleinberg's concept of hubs and authorities.
See also:

Ask
Ask Sponsored Listings - Ask syndicates AdWords ads, but also sells internal pay per click ads as well
Ask Webmaster Help
Authority
The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search engines. Five large factors associated with site and page authority are link equity, site age, traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content.
Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority.

Authorities
Topical authorities are sites which are well trusted and well cited by experts within their topical community. A topical authority is a page which is referenced from many topical experts and hub sites. A topical hub is page which references many authorities.
Example potential topical authorities:

the largest brands in your field
the top blogger talking about your subject
the Wikipedia or DMOZ page about your topic
See also:

Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF]
Jon Klienberg's Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment [PDF]
Jon Klienberg's home page
Hypersearching the Web
Automated Bid Management Software
Pay per click search engines are growing increasingly complex in their offerings. To help large advertisers cope with the increasing sophistication and complexity of these offerings some search engines and third party software developers have created software which makes it easier to control your ad spend. Some of the more advanced tools can integrate with your analytics programs and help you focus on conversion, ROI, and earnings elasticity instead of just looking at cost per click.
See also:

If you want to program internal bid management software you can get a developer token to use the Google AdWords API.

A few popular bid management tools are

Atlas OnePoint (formerly known as GoToast)
BidRank
KeywordMax
B
Backlink (see Inbound Link)

Bait and Switch
Marketing technique where you make something look overtly pure or as though it has another purpose to get people to believe in it or vote for it (by linking at it or sharing it with friends), then switch the intent or purpose of the website after you gain authority.
It is generally easier to get links to informational websites than commercial sites. Some new sites might gain authority much quicker if they tried looking noncommercial and gaining influence before trying to monetize their market position.

Banner Blindness
During the first web boom many businesses were based on eyeballs more than actually building real value. Many ads were typically quite irrelevant and web users learned to ignore the most common ad types.
In many ways text ads are successful because they are more relevant and look more like content, but with the recent surge in the popularity of text ads some have speculated that in time people may eventually become text ad blind as well.

Nick Denton stated:

Imagine a web in which Google and Overture text ads are everywhere . Not only beside search results, but next to every article and weblog post. Ubiquity breeds contempt. Text ads, coupled with content targeting, are more effective than graphic ads for many advertisers; but they too, like banners, will suffer reader burnout.Battelle, John
Popular search and media blogger who co-founded The Industry Standard and Wired, and authored a popular book on search called The Search.
See also:

Searchblog - blog about the intersection of search, media, and technology.
The Search - John's book about the history and future of search.
The Database of Intentions - post about how search engines store many of our thoughts
Web 2.0 Conference - conference run by John Battelle.
Battelle's Google speech
Behavioral Targeting
Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or implied intent. For example, if I recently searched for mortgages then am later reading a book review the page may still show me mortgage ads.
Bias
A prejudice based on experiences or a particular worldview.
Any media channel, publishing format, organization, or person is biased by

how and why they were created and their own experiences
the current set of social standards in which they exist
other markets they operate in
the need for self preservation
how they interface with the world around them
their capital, knowledge, status, or technological advantages and limitations
Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of the largest search engines may bias their organic search results toward informational (ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is heavily cited.

Search personalization biases our search results based on our own media consumption and searching habits.

Large news organizations tend to aim for widely acceptable neutrality rather than objectivity. Some of the most popular individual web authors / publishers tend to be quite biased in nature. Rather than bias hurting one's exposure

The known / learned bias of a specific author may make their news more appealing than news from an organization that aimed to seem arbitrarily neutral.
I believe biased channels most likely typically have a larger readership than unbiased channels.
Most people prefer to subscribe to media which matches their own biases worldview.
If more people read what you write and passionately agree with it then they are more likely to link at it.
Things which are biased in nature are typically easier to be cited than things which are unbiased.
See also:

Alejandro M. Diaz's Through the Google Goggles [PDF] - thesis paper on Google's biases
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History - looks at economic, biological, and linguistic history
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky DVD and book about mainstream media bias toward business interests
Comparison of the major search algorithms
Wikipedia: Bias
Bid Management Software (see Automated Bid Management Software)

Black Hat SEO
Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next.
Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

See also:

Black Hat SEO.com - parody site about black hat SEO
White Hat SEO.com - parody site about white hat SEO
Honest SEO - site offering tips on hiring an SEO
SEOConsultants.com - reviewed directory of SEO professionals
SEO Black Hat - blog about black hat SEO techniques
Block Level Analysis
A method used to break a page down into multiple points on the web graph by breaking its pages down into smaller blocks.
Block level link analysis can be used to help determine if content is page specific or part of a navigational system. It also can help determine if a link is a natural editorial link, what other links that link should be associated with, and/or if it is an advertisement. Search engines generally do not want to count advertisements as votes.

See also

Microsoft Research: Block-level Link Analysis
Blog
A periodically updated journal, typically formatted in reverse chronological order. Many blogs not only archive and categorize information, but also provide a feed and allow simple user interaction like leaving comments on the posts.
Most blogs tend to be personal in nature. Blogs are generally quite authoritative with heavy link equity because they give people a reason to frequently come back to their site, read their content, and link to whatever they think is interesting.

The most popular blogging platforms are Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type, and Typepad.

Blog Comment Spam
Either manually or automatically (via a software program) adding low value or no value comments to other sites.
Automated blog spam:

Nice post!
by
Discreat Overnight Viagra Online Canadian Pharmacy Free Shipping
Manual blog spam:

I just wrote about this on my site. I don't know you, but I thought I would add no value to your site other than linking through to mine. Check it out!!!!!
by
cluebag manual spammer (usually with keywords as my name)
As time passes both manual and automated blog comment spam systems are evolving to look more like legitimate comments. I have seen some automated blog comment spam systems that have multiple fake personas that converse with one another.

Blogger
Blogger is a free blog platform owned by Google.
It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Blogspot.com, or to FTP content to your own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website's link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else's website.

Blogger is probably the easiest blogging software tool to use, but it lacks many some features present in other blog platforms.

See also:

Blogger.com
Blogroll
Link list on a blog, usually linking to other blogs owned by the same company or friends of that blogger.
Bold
A way to make words appear in a bolder font. Words that appear in a bolder font are more likely to be read by humans that are scanning a page. A search engine may also place slightly greater weighting on these words than regular text, but if you write natural page copy and a word or phrase appears on a page many times it probably does not make sense or look natural if you bold ever occurrence.
Example use:

words
words
Either would appear as words.

Bookmarks
Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy.
Social bookmarking sites are often called tagging sites. Del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yahoo! MyWeb also allows you to tag results. Google allows you to share feeds and / or tag pages. They also have a program called Google Notebook which allows you to write mini guides of related links and information.

There are also a couple meta news sites that allow you to tag interesting pages. If enough people vote for your story then your story gets featured on the homepage. Slashdot is a tech news site primarily driven by central editors. Digg created a site covering the same type of news, but is a bottoms up news site which allows readers to vote for what they think is interesting. Netscape cloned the Digg business model and content model. Sites like Digg and Netscape are easy sources of links if you can create content that would appeal to those audiences.

Many forms of vertical search, like Google Video or YouTube, allow you to tag content.

See also:

Del.icio.us - Yahoo! owned social bookmarking site
Yahoo! MyWeb - similar to Del.icio.us, but more integrated into Yahoo!
Google Notebook - allows you to note documents
Slashdot - tech news site where stories are approved by central editors
Digg - decentralized news site
Netscape - Digg clone
Google Video - Google's video hosting, tagging, and search site
YouTube - popular decentralized video site
Boolean Search
Many search engines allow you to perform searches that contain mathematical formulas such as AND, OR, or NOT. By default most search engines include AND with your query, requiring results to be relevant for all the words in your query.
Examples:

A Google search for SEO Book will return results for SEO AND Book.
A Google search for "SEO Book" will return results for the phrase SEO Book.
A Google search for SEO Book -Jorge will return results containing SEO AND Book but NOT Jorge.
A Google search for ~SEO -SEO will find results with words related to SEO that do not contain SEO.
Some search engines also allow you to search for other unique patterns or filtering ideas. Examples:

A numerical range: 12...18 would search for numbers between 12 and 18.
Recently updated: seo {frsh=100} would find recently updated documents. MSN search also lets you place more weight on local documents
Related documents: related:www.threadwatch.org would find documents related to Threadwatch.
Filetype: AdWords filetype:PDF would search for PDFs that mentioned AdWords.
Domain Extension: SEO inurl:.edu
IP Address: IP:64.111.97.133
See also:

Search Engine Showdown Features Chart - Greg R.Notess's comparison of features at major search engines.
Brand
The emotional response associated with your company and/or products.
A brand is built through controlling customer expectations and the social interactions between customers. Building a brand is what allows you to move away from commodity based pricing and move toward higher margin value based pricing.

See also:

Rob Frankel - branding expert who provides free branding question answers every Monday. He also offers Frankel's Laws of Big Time Branding™, blogs, and wrote the branding book titled The Revenge of Brand X.
Branded Keywords
Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand. Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle, and are some of the highest value and highest converting keywords.
Some affiliate marketing programs prevent affiliates from bidding on the core brand related keywords, while others actively encourage it. Either way can work depending on your business model and marketing savvy, but it is important to ensure there is synergy between internal marketing and affiliate marketing programs.

Breadcrumb Navigation
Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between pages.
Example breadcrumb navigation:

Home > SEO Tools > SEO for Firefox

Whatever page the user is on is unlinked, but the pages above it within the site structure are linked to, and organized starting with the home page, right on down through the site structure.

Brin, Sergey
Co-founder of Google.
See also:

Wikipedia: Sergey Brin
Broken Link
A hyperlink which is not functioning. A link which does not lead to the desired location.
Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are

a website going offline
linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
moving a page's location
changing a domain's content management system
Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site's links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

Browser
Client used to view the world wide web.
The most popular browsers are Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

Bush, Vannevar
WWII scientist who wrote a seminal research paper on the concepts of hypertext and a memory extension device titled As We May Think.
Business.com
A well trusted directory of business websites and information. Business.com is also a large pay per click arbitrage player.
See also:

Business.com
Buying Cycle
Before making large purchases consumers typically research what brands and products fit their needs and wants. Keyword based search marketing allows you to reach consumers at any point in the buying cycle. In many markets branded keywords tend to have high search volumes and high conversion rates.
The buying cycle may consist of the following stages

Problem Discovery: prospect discovers a need or want.
Search: after discovering a problem look for ways to solve the need or want. These searches may contain words which revolve around the core problem the prospect is trying to solve or words associated with their identity.
Evaluate: may do comparison searches to compare different models, and also search for negative information like product sucks, etc.
Decide: look for information which reinforces your view of product or service you decided upon
Purchase: may search for shipping related information or other price related searches. purchases may also occur offline
Reevaluate: some people leave feedback on their purchases . If a person is enthusiastic about your brand they may cut your marketing costs by providing free highly trusted word of mouth marketing.
See also:

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? - book by Brian & Jeffrey Eisenberg about the buying cycle and Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing.

C
Cache
Copy of a web page stored by a search engine. When you search the web you are not actively searching the whole web, but are searching files in the search engine index.
Some search engines provide links to cached versions of pages in their search results, and allow you to strip some of the formatting from cached copies of pages.

Calacanis, Jason
Founder of Weblogs, Inc. Also pushed AOL to turn Netscape into a Digg clone.
See also:

Calacanis.com - Jason's blog
Canonical URL
Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use PageRank or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.
Webmasters should use consistent linking structures throughout their sites to ensure that they funnel the maximum amount of PageRank at the URLs they want indexed. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL.

Examples of URLs which may contain the same information in spite of being at different web addresses:

http://www.seobook.com/
http://www.seobook.com/index.shtml
http://seobook.com/
http://seobook.com/index.shtml
http://www.seobook.com/?tracking-code
Catalog (see Index)

Catch All Listing
A listing used by pay per click search engines to monetize long tail terms that are not yet targeted by marketers. This technique may be valuable if you have very competitive key words, but is not ideal since most major search engines have editorial guidelines that prevent bulk untargeted advertising, and most of the places that allow catch all listings have low traffic quality. Catch all listings may be an attractive idea on theme specific search engines and directories though, as they are already pre qualified clicks.
CGI
Common Gateway Interface - interface software between a web server and other machines or software running on that server. Many cgi programs are used to add interactivity to a web site.
Client
A program, computer, or process which makes information requests to another computer, process, or program.
Cloaking
Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine.
Cloaking has many legitimate uses which are within search guidelines. For example, changing user experience based on location is common on many popular websites.

See also:

The Definitive Guide to Cloaking - Dan Kramer's guide to cloaking. I also interviewed Dan here.
KloakIt - cheaply priced cloaking software
Fantomaster - more expensive cloaking software
Cluetrain Manifesto, The
Book about how the web is a marketplace, and how it is different from traditional offline business.
See also:

The Cluetrain Manifesto website - offers the book for free online.
Clustering
In search results the listings from any individual site are typically limited to a certain number and grouped together to make the search results appear neat and organized and to ensure diversity amongst the top ranked results. Clustering can also refer to a technique which allows search engines to group hubs and authorities on a specific topic together to further enhance their value by showing their relationships.
See also

Google Touchgraph - interesting web application that shows the relationship between sites Google returns as being related to a site you enter.
CMS
Content Management System. Tool used to help make it easy to update and add information to a website.
Blog software programs are some of the most popular content management systems currently used on the web. Many content management systems have errors associated with them which make it hard for search engines to index content due to issues such as duplicate content.

Co-citation
In topical authority based search algorithms links which appear near one another on a page may be deemed to be related to one another. In algorithms like latent semantic indexing words which appear near one another often are frequently deemed to be related.
Comments
Many blogs and other content management systems allow readers to leave user feedback.
Leaving enlightening and thoughtful comments on someone else's related website is one way to help get them to notice you.

See also:

blog comment spam - the addition of low value or no value comments to other's websites
Comments Tag
Some web developers also place comments in the source code of their work to help make it easy for people to understand the code.
HTML comments in the source code of a document appear as . They can be viewed if someone types views the source code of a document, but do not appear in the regular formatted HTML rendered version of a document.

In the past some SEOs would stuff keywords in comment tags to help increase the page keyword density, but search has evolved beyond that stage, and at this point using comments to stuff keywords into a page adds to your risk profile and presents little ranking upside potential.

Compacted Information
Information which is generally and widely associated with a product. For example, most published books have an ISBN.
As the number of product databases online increases and duplicate content filters are forced to get more aggressive the keys to getting your information indexed are to have a site with enough authority to be considered the most important document on that topic, or to have enough non compacted information (for example, user reviews) on your product level pages to make them be seen as unique documents.

Conceptual Links
Links which search engines attempt to understand beyond just the words in them. Some rather advanced search engines are attempting to find out the concept links versus just matching the words of the text to that specific word set. Some search algorithms may even look at co-citation and words near the link instead of just focusing on anchor text.
Concept Search
A search which attempts to conceptually match results with the query, not necessarily with those words, rather their concept.
For example, if a search engine understands a phrase to be related to another word or phrase it may return results relevant to that other word or phrase even if the words you searched for are not directly associated with a result. In addition, some search engines will place various types of vertical search results at the top of the search results based on implied query related intent or prior search patterns by you or other searchers.

Contextual Advertising
Advertising programs which generate relevant advertisements based on the content of a webpage.
See also:

Google AdSense is the most popular contextual advertising program.
Conversion
Many forms of online advertising are easy to track. A conversion is reached when a desired goal is completed.
Most offline ads have generally been much harder to track than online ads. Some marketers use custom phone numbers or coupon codes to tie offline activity to online marketing.

Here are a few common example desired goals

a product sale
completing a lead form
a phone call
capturing an email
filling out a survey
getting a person to pay attention to you
getting feedback
having a site visitor share your website with a friend
having a site visitor link at your site
Bid management, affiliate tracking, and analytics programs make it easy to track conversion sources.

See also:

Google Conversion University - free conversion tracking information
Google Website Optimizer - free multi variable testing product offered by Google.
Copyright
The legal rights to publish and reproduce a particular piece of work.
See also:

Copyright.gov
Cookie
Small data file written to a user's local machine to track them. Cookies are used to help websites customize your user experience and help affiliate program managers track conversions.
CPA
Cost per action. The effectiveness of many other forms of online advertising have their effectiveness measured on a cost per action basis. Many affiliate marketing programs and contextual ads are structured on a cost per action basis. An action may be anything from an ad click, to filling out a lead form, to buying a product.
CPC
Cost per click. Many search ads and contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is charged a certain price per click.
See also:

Google AdWords - Google's pay per click ad program which allows you to buy search and contextual ads.
Google AdSense - Google's contextual ad program.
Microsoft AdCenter - Microsoft's pay per click ad platform.
Yahoo! Search Marketing - Yahoo!'s pay per click ad platform
CPM
Cost per thousand ad impressions.
Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a website is or has the potential of becoming.

Crawl Depth
How deeply a website is crawled and indexed.
Since searches which are longer in nature tend to be more targeted in nature it is important to try to get most or all of a site indexed such that the deeper pages have the ability to rank for relevant long tail keywords. A large site needs adequate link equity to get deeply indexed. Another thing which may prevent a site from being fully indexed is duplicate content issues.

Crawl Frequency
How frequently a website is crawled.
Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority. Sites with highly artificial link authority scores (ie: mostly low quality spammy links) or sites which are heavy in duplicate content or near duplicate content (such as affiliate feed sites) may be crawled less frequently than sites with unique content which are well integrated into the web.

See also:

Google's Matt Cutts video on Google Crawling Patterns
Matt Cutts post Indexing Timeline - mentions sites with unnatural link profiles may not be crawled as frequently or deeply
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets is a method for adding styles to web documents.
Note: Using external CSS files makes it easy to change the design of many pages by editing a single file. See also

W3C: CSS - official guidelines for CSS
CSS Zen Garden - examples of various CSS layouts
Glish.com - examples of various CSS layouts, links to other CSS resources
CTR
Clickthrough rate - the percentage of people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to measure how relevant a traffic source or keyword is. Search ads typically have a higher clickthrough rate than traditional banner ads due to being highly relevant to implied searcher demand.
Cutts, Matt
Google's head of search quality.
See also:

Matt Cutts blog
Interview of Matt Cutts
SEO Videos by Matt Cutts
Cybersquatting
Registering domains related to other trademarks or brands in an attempt to cash in on the value created by said trademark or brand.
D
Dayparting
Turning ad campaigns on or off, changing ad bid price, or budget constraints based on bidding more when your target audience is available and less when they are less likely to be available.
Dead Link
A link which is no longer functional.
Most large high quality websites have at least a few dead links in them, but the ratio of good links to dead links can be seen as a sign of information quality.

Deep Link
A link which points to an internal page within a website.
When links grow naturally typically most high quality websites have many links pointing at interior pages. When you request links from other websites it makes sense to request a link from their most targeted relevant page to your most targeted relevant page. Some webmasters even create content based on easy linking opportunities they think up.

Dedicated Server
Server which is limited to serving one website or a small collection of websites owned by a single person.
Dedicated servers tend to be more reliable than shared (or virtual) servers. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

Deep Link Ratio
The ratio of links pointing to internal pages to overall links pointing at a website.
A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a legitimate natural link profile.

De-Listing
Temporarily or permanently becoming de-indexed from a directory or search engine.
De-indexing may be due to any of the following:

Pages on new websites (or sites with limited link authority relative to their size) may be temporarily de-indexed until the search engine does a deep spidering and re-cache of the web.
During some updates search engines readjust crawl priorities.
You need a significant number of high quality links to get a large website well indexed and keep it well indexed.
Duplicate content filters, inbound and outbound link quality, or other information quality related issues may also relate to re-adjusted crawl priorities.
Pages which have changed location and are not properly redirected, or pages which are down when a search engine tries to crawl them may be temporarily de-indexed.
Search Spam:
If a website tripped an automatic spam filter it may return to the search index anywhere from a few days to a few months after the problem has been fixed.
If a website is editorially removed by a human you may need to contact the search engine directly to request reinclusion.
Del.icio.us
Popular social bookmarking website.
See also:

Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us Recently Popular
Demographics
Statistical data or characteristics which define segments of a population.
Some internet marketing platforms, such as AdCenter and AdWords, allow you to target ads at websites or searchers who fit amongst a specific demographic. Some common demographic data points are gender, age, income, education, location, etc.

Denton, Nick
Publisher of Gawker, a popular ring of topical weblogs, which are typically focused on controversy.
See also:

Nick Denton.org - official blog, where Nick often talks about business and his various blogs.
Description
Directories and search engines provide a short description near each listing which aims to add context to the title.
High quality directories typically prefer the description describes what the site is about rather than something that is overtly promotional in nature. Search engines typically

use a description from a trusted directory (such as DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory) for homepages of sites listed in those directories
use the page meta description (especially if it is relevant to the search query and has the words from the search query in it)
attempt to extract a description from the page content which is relevant for the particular search query and ranking page (this is called a snippet)
or some combination of the above
Digg
Social news site where users vote on which stories get the most exposure and become the most popular.
See also:

Digg.com
Directory
A categorized catalog of websites, typically manually organized by topical editorial experts.
Some directories cater to specific niche topics, while others are more comprehensive in nature. Major search engines likely place significant weight on links from DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory. Smaller and less established general directories likely pull less weight. If a directory does not exercise editorial control over listings search engines will not be likely to trust their links at all.

DMOZ
The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL, and is primarily ran by volunteer editors.
See also:

DMOZ.org
Submitting a Site to the Open Directory Project
DNS
Domain Name Server or Domain Name System. A naming scheme mechanism used to help resolve a domain name / host name to a specific TCP/IP Address.
Domain
Scheme used for logical or location organization of the web. Many people also use the word domain to refer to a specific website.
Doorway Pages
Pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other advertisements.
Some webmasters cloak thousands of doorway pages on trusted domains, and rake in a boatload of cash until they are caught and de-listed. If the page would have a unique purpose outside of search then search engines are generally fine with it, but if the page only exists because search engines exist then search engines are more likely to frown on the behavior.

Dreamweaver
Popular web development and editing software offering a what you see is what you get interface.
See also:

Dreamweaver official site
Duplicate Content
Content which is duplicate or near duplicate in nature.
Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of similar content. For example, printer friendly pages may be search engine unfriendly duplicates. Also, many automated content generation techniques rely on recycling content, so some search engines are somewhat strict in filtering out content they deem to be similar or nearly duplicate in nature.

See also:

Duplicate Content Detection - video where Matt Cutts talks about the process of duplicate content detection
Identifying and filtering near-duplicate documents
Search Engine Patents On Duplicated Content and Re-Ranking Methods
Stuntdubl: How to Remedy Duplicate Content
Dynamic Content
Content which changes over time or uses a dynamic language such as PHP to help render the page.
In the past search engines were less aggressive at indexing dynamic content than they currently are. While they have greatly improved their ability to index dynamic content it is still preferable to use URL rewriting to help make dynamic content look static in nature.

Dynamic Languages
Programming languages such as PHP or ASP which build web pages on the fly upon request.

Unethical SEO Practices are not a part of SEO Business Solutions

Unfortunately for the website owner, there are many SEO companies in the market that engage in unethical SEO practices. However, SEO Business Solutions is not one of these companies. In the last few days, we have been posting articles on our blog which will actually guide you in selecting your SEO company and have listed some of the unethical practices that some SEO companies engage in. We will continue our discussion with some of the most common unethical practices and abuses.

What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

What are some other things to look out for?

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

*owns shadow domains
*puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
*offers to sell keywords in the address bar
*doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
*guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
*operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
*gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
*has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580

Or, instead of wasting your time with these unethical SEO companies, you can go the the SEO Business Solutions website, look at what we offer and allow us to get your website where you want it to be on the search results of the major search engines. Only SEO Business Solutions will be open with you and tell you exactly what we will do for you at a very competitive price. Go to our contact us page and ask for a free quote.

Ethical Search Engine Optimization

SEO Business Solutions is an ethical Search Engine Optimization company. What exactly does this mean? First and foremost, we refuse to engage in any practices that might harm your website, and this most certainly includes any and all SEO practices that will get your site black listed or blackballed. It makes no sense for you to see your website on the first page of the major search engines for a month, and then watch it disappear.
Secondly, we have been in the SEO business long enough to know exactly what it takes to get your website where you want it to be. It takes time, effort and patience. We cannot guarantee you a number one overall in the search engines. We would caution you to check very carefully if any SEO website offers you placement on the first page of a major search engine as #1 overall.
Some SEO companies will guarantee you placement on the first page of search results in Lycos, AlltheWeb and many other search engines which are nearly irrelevant.
The most important search engines are the ones that have captured most of the search market. These search engines are: Google.com, search.Yahoo.com and search.MSN.com. Together they account for over 94% of all searches. Look at the statistics according to Hitwise:
Domain Mar.-08 Feb.-08 Mar.-07
www.google.com 67.25% 66.44% 64.13%
search.yahoo.com 20.29% 20.59% 21.26%
search.msn.com 6.65% 6.95% 9.01%
Add ask.com, and you have accounted for 98.28% of all searches in the USA. What goes does appearing #1 in AllTheWeb do you? In addition, most unethical SEO companies will not even tell you that most of the other search engines are powered by one of the major search engines and almost mirror the results of the major search engines. Therefore, be careful if an SEO company gurantees you a first page position in a search engine such as AOL because AOL is powered by Google and nearly mirrors the results in Google with some variations.
In Conclusion, let SEO Business Solutions optimize your site and place it where you want it to be. We will not try to deceive you or deal unethically with you, and we will work with you every step of the way.

SEO Business Solutions does not use unethical SEO practices

So, just what are some of those unethical practices?

Network Solutions displays a real talent for tripping itself up with unethical behavior. Sometimes it gets caught and called on the conduct quickly, as happened when it engaged in domain name tasting. Other times, though, it can continue for months before enough people catch on to make a real stink.
Ordinarily, we'd publish a story about Network Solutions on our Web Hosters web site. As a domain name seller and registry, the company goes back to the early days of the web, before the US government bowed to the pressure to allow competition in domain name registration. This move drove down the price of domain names from $35 per year per name to as little as $6 or less.
You can read about one of the ways that Network Solutions unethically tried to gain greater control of the market here. Basically, every time you visited NetSol's web site and performed a domain name search using its Whois tool, the company bought the domain name itself if it wasn't already owned. If you didn't buy the domain name immediately, you would come back later to discover that Network Solutions was the owner of record. You could only buy the domain from NetSol - and the company's prices for domain names were and are significantly higher than many other registrars' prices. NetSol gave the dubious justification that it was trying to protect its customers from domain tasters - but the fact that it was doing so by domain tasting itself escaped no one.
You can read the rest of the story at the link I provided; this article is not about that lovely debacle. It's about a matter that is even closer to the hearts of the SEOs and web site owners: ethical SEO practices. Or more precisely, it's about the unethical SEO practices in which Network Solutions is engaging.
If you haven't received a letter from them yet, this may come as a surprise to you; I only heard about it myself in early March, and Network Solutions has been offering SEO services at least since the middle of last year (and probably longer). In this article, I'm going to look at Network Solution's apparent guarantee, the fine print on the promise, and the ways in which it violates the principles of ethical SEO. By the time I'm finished, you'll be well-armed whether the company makes the offer directly to you, or a client tells you that they've heard "Network Solutions will do the same thing for me that you're promising to do - and for less money."
I can guess what you're thinking: first Sam's Club gets into the SEO business, and now this. Network Solutions' packages look a little different from those Sam's Club offers, however; at the very least, they're more expensive. Here's a bulleted list of their packages and pricing:
• For 10 keywords and no guarantee, you pay $1800.
• For 20 keywords and a guarantee for five listings, you pay $2800.
• For 30 keywords and a guarantee for 10 listings, you pay $3800.
• For 50 keywords and a guarantee for 20 listings, you pay $5800.
So what is this "guarantee" to which I'm alluding? Here is an image taken from Network Solutions' own web site:

If you look just under the orange bar, even with my having to reduce this image, you can clearly see the headline "Top 10 Search Results" and just below it "Get your site on the first page of search engines guaranteed." That's a pretty remarkable guarantee for a relatively low price!
It's also the kind of guarantee to make anyone knowledgeable about SEO rather suspicious. Chris Silver Smith recently blogged about a letter he received from Network Solutions that promised "Guaranteed Top 10 Rankings on Major Search Engines." Here's part of the problem: despite its standing as a registrar, Network Solutions does not have an "in" with any of the major search engines; no SEO does. In fact, NetSol's behavior raises at least two flags on the list of guidelines that Google gives for choosing an SEO: "Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue" and "Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings."
Network Solutions makes certain specific exceptions to its guarantee. It doesn't cover web sites that are all Flash, contain frames/layers or adult content. Web sites with downtime of more than a day void the guarantee; so do web sites that have been altered after NetSol has optimized them or that do not use 301 redirects.
Here's the specific text of the guarantee, taken from Network Solutions' web site: "For optimization packages ("To 10 Search Results service"), Network Solutions guarantees a minimum number of top 10 listings in one or more of 12 search engines within 10 months from completion date...Network Solutions will only submit keywords to search engines in the United States. The search engines included are: AOL, Alltheweb, AltaVista, Ask.com (formerly known as AskJeeves.com), Google, Hotbot, Looksmart, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo!."
Does anyone want to make any guesses as to what percentage of search traffic Hotbot receives these days? Or AlltheWeb? It can't be very much. In early March, Hitwise reported the percentage of US searches among the leading search engine providers (remember, Network Solutions only submits keywords to search engines in the US). At that time, Google saw a little over 66 percent of this traffic. Yahoo saw close to 21 percent. MSN saw nearly seven percent. Ask was down to four percent. When you add up these figures, you get 98 percent.
What does this mean? By simple math, it means that the rest of the search engine market is wrestling over the remaining two percent of search traffic. So Network Solutions could get you top listings on AlltheWeb, Hotbot, and Lycos, where the link to your web site would see less than two percent of search traffic, and still have fulfilled its "guarantee." Maybe it isn't so unethical after all; that's not exactly much of a guarantee.
There is something else to note about NetSol's guarantee: "This service(s) does not guarantee any sales or traffic to your web site." Additionally, there is no mention in Network Solutions' guarantee of how long your site will stay in the top 10 results. So in theory, the company could take 10 months to get your site listed in the top 10 search results on Lycos (for example) and if the listing stayed there for one month, it would have fulfilled its end of the contract - regardless of whether you received more traffic or conversions from the listing.
Network Solutions explains the process it goes through to optimize a web site. It seems to understand that 10 months is a long time for some people, and notes that "many of our customers see their sites listed within the top 10 results within 3 months." However, it adds that "To accelerate the process, you may want to consider a Link Building Service Package in conjunction with a Top 10 Search Results package." Right up front, it admits that link building is not part of its SEO package.
I don't need to tell anyone who makes their living doing SEO just how vital link building is. You can technically separate SEO into on-page and off-page optimization, and classify link building as part of off-page SEO optimization. Nevertheless, it's surprising that it isn't already a part of a package that guarantees top 10 results. Links play a very important role in many search engines' algorithms (especially Google's!).
Let's take a look at what you DO get. The first step is keyword analysis. Netsol reviews your site and conducts research to develop a list that is relevant to your site, your business, and your industry. The keywords will be terms that are frequently used and specific enough to your web site "that clicks from the search engines will be highly targeted leads." You get to approve the list, and the company will revise its list up to three times to ensure it has focused on the right ones.
In the second step, site analysis, NetSol looks at your site's code, text, and links to make sure they are up to snuff. These are important checks that any site owner and/or SEO should perform regularly in any case. NetSol checks for broken links, problems with your site's server status, and may make minor adjustments to your home page's code to make it easier for the search engines to crawl your site's content.
In the third step, content development, NetSol's professional writers/editors create additional content for your site based on the final list of keywords from step one. The content is then integrated into your optimized pages. Again, there's nothing here that's particularly controversial, though one wonders how much content can be bought - and of what quality - for the prices listed on the packages. Some really good writers will charge as much as $300 or more for an article of a decent length. Additionally, search engines love new content; will Network Solutions spread out the new content over the entire period so the spiders will keep coming back?
For the fourth step, search engine submission and reporting, Network Solutions will submit your domain name to major search engines and directories. I have to wonder why NetSol is doing this, since it hasn't been a meaningful practice for quite some time (with the possible exception of the DMOZ directory). I could see building a site map, which is one of the things NetSol says it does in this step, but submission? It's interesting to note here that the company says in its guarantee that its services for this package "do not include the paid submission fees that some engines charge for inclusion...Additional fees may apply for changes, modifications, updates, and optimization alterations that exceed the scope of these optimization services."
The final step, reporting, provides the customer with "submission reports, ranking reports, and additional tips for keeping your site optimized for search engines." You receive a final report when your site reaches the guaranteed number of listings (which could be as early as three months). As previously noted, though, the packages don't include any kind of maintenance; in fact, Network Solutions engages in a bit of up-selling at this point in its explanation of what it does by suggesting a maintenance package to "help extend the life of your site's high rankings."
So is this a scam, or is it worth the money? The package arrangements come with enough loopholes to make one wonder. It seems to be slightly less of a scam than the typical SEO spam email, simply because Network Solutions is relatively up front about what it is and isn't offering. But how many of their prospective customers are going to read the fine print? I mean that metaphorically, by the way; when I clicked through to the links the company provided to its guarantee and explanations of what it did for the packages, the font was all in a normal size.
Even so, the SEO deals offered by Network Solutions seem like the kind of thing you'd see from someone trying to take advantage of not-too-knowledgeable customers. As with any service, if you're thinking of signing up for what they offer, I'd suggest you check with other customers who bought the same package and find out what their experience was like. Good luck!

DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by SEO Business Solutions. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. Thanks to SEOChat for a wonderful and informative article.

Take a look at SEO Business Solutions. Our prices are competitive and we do not engage in decietful or unethical practices. We deliver. Our guarantee is that if you follow all of our tips on the Search Engine Optimization of your site, you will soon see your site moving up in the search results until it ends up on the first page of the major search engines. We can not guarantee you a number one ranking and would tell you again to be wary of any SEO service guaranteeing you a number one ranking on any search engine, much less Google, Yahoo and MSN, who account for over 90% of all the searches in the Unites States.