Glossary Terms
L
Landing Page
The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.
Landing Page Quality Scores
A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of their AdWords program.
When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market, but
as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to try to
keep their ads relevant.
Link
A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document.
Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.
Link Baiting
The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality
links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media and bloggers.
See also:
SEO Book Search: Link Bait
Link Building
The process of building high quality linkage data that search engines will evaluate to trust your website is
authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy.
A few general link building tips:
build conceptually unique linkworthy high quality content
create viral marketing ideas that want to spread and make people talk about you
mix your anchor text
get deep links
try to build at least a few quality links before actively obtaining any low quality links
register your site in relevant high quality directories such as DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com
when possible try to focus your efforts mainly on getting high quality editorial links
create link bait
try to get bloggers to mention you on their blogs
It takes a while to catch up with the competition, but if you work at it long enough and hard enough eventually
you can enjoy a self-reinforcing market position
See also:
101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 - 101 ways you should and should not build links
Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] - Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing
Link Bursts
A rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing at a website.
When links occur naturally they generally develop over time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral
articles receive many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of quality as well, such as:
increased usage data
increase in brand related search queries
traffic from the link sources to the site being linked at
many of the new links coming from new pages on trusted domains
See also:
Information retrieval based on historical data
Link Churn
The rate at which a site loses links.
See also:
Information retrieval based on historical data
Link Equity
A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity and the authority of the sites providing
those links.
Link Farm
Website or group of websites which exercises little to no editorial control when linking to other sites. FFA pages,
for example, are link farms.
Log Files
Server files which show you what your leading sources of traffic are and what people are search for to find your
website.
Log files do not typically show as much data as analytics programs would, and if they do, it is generally not in a
format that is as useful beyond seeing the top few stats.
Link Hoarding
A method of trying to keep all your link popularity by not linking out to other sites, or linking out using JavaScript
or through cheesy redirects.
Generally link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons:
many authority sites were at one point hub sites that freely linked out to other relevant resources
if you are unwilling to link out to other sites people are going to be less likely to link to your site
outbound links to relevant resources may improve your credibility and boost your overall relevancy scores
"Of course, folks never know when we're going to adjust our scoring. It's pretty easy to spot domains that are
hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like
score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to
bear in mind." - Quote from Google's Matt Cutts
See also:
Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (Or Understanding Value In A Post-Madonna World) - article about how being a
platform (ie: someone who freely links out) makes it easier to become an authority.
Link Popularity
The number of links pointing at a website.
For competitive search queries link quality counts much more than link quantity. Google typically shows a smaller
sample of known linkage data than the other engines do, even though Google still counts many of the links they
do not show when you do a link: search.
Link Reputation
The combination of your link equity and anchor text.
Link Rot
A measure of how many and what percent of a website's links are broken.
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.
See also:
Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.
Live.com
New search platform provided by Microsoft.
See also:
Live.com
Long Tail
Phrase describing how for any category of product being sold there is much more aggregate demand for the
non-hits than there is for the hits.
How does the long tail applies to keywords? Long Tail keywords are more precise and specific, thus have a
higher value. As of writing this definition in the middle of October 2006 my leading keywords for this month are
as follows:
#reqs search term
1504 seo book,. 512 seobook, 501 seo, 214 google auctions, 116 link bait, 95 aaron wall, 94 gmail uk,
89 search engine optimization, 86 trustrank, 78 adsense tracker, 73 latent semantic indexing, 71 seo books,
69 john t reed, 67 dear sir, 67 book.com, 64 link harvester, 64 google adwords coupon, 58 seobook.com
55 adwords coupon, 15056 [not listed: 9,584 search terms]
Notice how the nearly 10,000 unlisted terms account for roughly 10 times as much traffic as I got from my core
brand related term (and this site only has a couple thousand pages and has a rather strong brand).
See also:
The Long Tail - official blog, The Long Tail - the book
Looksmart
Company originally launched as a directory service which later morphed into a paid search provider and vertical
content play. No longer offers search services.
See also:
Looksmart.com
LSI
Latent Semantic Indexing is a way for search systems to mathematically understanding and representing
language based on the similarity of pages and keyword co-occurance. A relevant result may not even have the
search term in it. It may be returned based solely on the fact that it contains many similar words to those
appearing in relevant pages which contain the search words.
See also: Quintura Search - free LSI type keyword research tool.
Patterns in Unstructured Data - free paper describing how LSI works
SEO Book articles on LSI: #1 & #2 (Google may not be using LSI, but they are certainly using technologies with
similar functions and purpose.)
Johnon Go Words - article about how adding certain relevant words to a page can drastically improve its
relevancy for other keywords
M
L
Landing Page
The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.
Landing Page Quality Scores
A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of their AdWords program.
When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market, but
as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to try to
keep their ads relevant.
Link
A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document.
Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.
Link Baiting
The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality
links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media and bloggers.
See also:
SEO Book Search: Link Bait
Link Building
The process of building high quality linkage data that search engines will evaluate to trust your website is
authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy.
A few general link building tips:
build conceptually unique linkworthy high quality content
create viral marketing ideas that want to spread and make people talk about you
mix your anchor text
get deep links
try to build at least a few quality links before actively obtaining any low quality links
register your site in relevant high quality directories such as DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com
when possible try to focus your efforts mainly on getting high quality editorial links
create link bait
try to get bloggers to mention you on their blogs
It takes a while to catch up with the competition, but if you work at it long enough and hard enough eventually
you can enjoy a self-reinforcing market position
See also:
101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 - 101 ways you should and should not build links
Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] - Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing
Link Bursts
A rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing at a website.
When links occur naturally they generally develop over time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral
articles receive many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of quality as well, such as:
increased usage data
increase in brand related search queries
traffic from the link sources to the site being linked at
many of the new links coming from new pages on trusted domains
See also:
Information retrieval based on historical data
Link Churn
The rate at which a site loses links.
See also:
Information retrieval based on historical data
Link Equity
A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity and the authority of the sites providing
those links.
Link Farm
Website or group of websites which exercises little to no editorial control when linking to other sites. FFA pages,
for example, are link farms.
Log Files
Server files which show you what your leading sources of traffic are and what people are search for to find your
website.
Log files do not typically show as much data as analytics programs would, and if they do, it is generally not in a
format that is as useful beyond seeing the top few stats.
Link Hoarding
A method of trying to keep all your link popularity by not linking out to other sites, or linking out using JavaScript
or through cheesy redirects.
Generally link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons:
many authority sites were at one point hub sites that freely linked out to other relevant resources
if you are unwilling to link out to other sites people are going to be less likely to link to your site
outbound links to relevant resources may improve your credibility and boost your overall relevancy scores
"Of course, folks never know when we're going to adjust our scoring. It's pretty easy to spot domains that are
hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like
score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to
bear in mind." - Quote from Google's Matt Cutts
See also:
Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (Or Understanding Value In A Post-Madonna World) - article about how being a
platform (ie: someone who freely links out) makes it easier to become an authority.
Link Popularity
The number of links pointing at a website.
For competitive search queries link quality counts much more than link quantity. Google typically shows a smaller
sample of known linkage data than the other engines do, even though Google still counts many of the links they
do not show when you do a link: search.
Link Reputation
The combination of your link equity and anchor text.
Link Rot
A measure of how many and what percent of a website's links are broken.
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.
See also:
Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.
Live.com
New search platform provided by Microsoft.
See also:
Live.com
Long Tail
Phrase describing how for any category of product being sold there is much more aggregate demand for the
non-hits than there is for the hits.
How does the long tail applies to keywords? Long Tail keywords are more precise and specific, thus have a
higher value. As of writing this definition in the middle of October 2006 my leading keywords for this month are
as follows:
#reqs search term
1504 seo book,. 512 seobook, 501 seo, 214 google auctions, 116 link bait, 95 aaron wall, 94 gmail uk,
89 search engine optimization, 86 trustrank, 78 adsense tracker, 73 latent semantic indexing, 71 seo books,
69 john t reed, 67 dear sir, 67 book.com, 64 link harvester, 64 google adwords coupon, 58 seobook.com
55 adwords coupon, 15056 [not listed: 9,584 search terms]
Notice how the nearly 10,000 unlisted terms account for roughly 10 times as much traffic as I got from my core
brand related term (and this site only has a couple thousand pages and has a rather strong brand).
See also:
The Long Tail - official blog, The Long Tail - the book
Looksmart
Company originally launched as a directory service which later morphed into a paid search provider and vertical
content play. No longer offers search services.
See also:
Looksmart.com
LSI
Latent Semantic Indexing is a way for search systems to mathematically understanding and representing
language based on the similarity of pages and keyword co-occurance. A relevant result may not even have the
search term in it. It may be returned based solely on the fact that it contains many similar words to those
appearing in relevant pages which contain the search words.
See also: Quintura Search - free LSI type keyword research tool.
Patterns in Unstructured Data - free paper describing how LSI works
SEO Book articles on LSI: #1 & #2 (Google may not be using LSI, but they are certainly using technologies with
similar functions and purpose.)
Johnon Go Words - article about how adding certain relevant words to a page can drastically improve its
relevancy for other keywords
M
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