IntroductionOne of the pillars of learning is first understanding the language, and search engine optimization is no different. Because there are so many terms and phrases associated with the optimization process, we have compiled this collection of common terms and definitions so you can better understand what goes into optimizing your website.

AAffiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing is used to generate money from a website or blog.

An affiliate marketer suggests related links to their visitors which lead to online stores, such as

Amazon. If the visitor then purchases something from the store, the affiliate marketer gets a

percentage of the sale. Many black hat search engine optimizers use affiliate marketing schemes

to generate personal revenue.

Alt Tag (also called Alt Attribute) – When search spiders crawl your website to index your

content and rank you accordingly, they cannot see images or videos. The alt tag is meant to be

the “alternative” description for content in cases where such content cannot be displayed. Alt tags

describe the element textually, so search engines can take the images, video, etc. into account

when determining your page’s ranking.

Additionally, alt tags allow those listening to the content of the page (i.e. visually impaired users) to

interact with and understand the visual elements.

Be as descriptive as possible so search engines and

visually impaired patients can clearly visualize what the

image, video, etc. is depicting.

Analytics – Analytics software allows you to track how

Internet users interact with your website. It also allows you

to evaluate the effectiveness of your website with data

indicating total website traffic, how and where each visitor found your site, and how long they

stayed on your website.

Many webmasters prefer to use Google Analytics, because

it’s free and easy to integrate into any website.

The alt text for this image might be: “Doctor Smith rests her hand on her patient’s shoulder and smiles as the patient sits in the dental exam chair, awaiting her teeth cleaning.”

BBacklink (also called Incoming Link or Inbound Link) – Backlinks are links to your website

from other websites, directories, forums, or blogs. These links help search engines determine the

credibility and authority of your website in relation to other websites that share similar information.

Essentially, backlinks serve as a vote of confidence that tells search engines your website is so

useful that other webmasters want to share your site with their visitors.

Black Hat – Black hat refers to the practice of using disreputable optimization techniques to

improve a website’s ranking in search engine results. Using black hat methods of SEO can results

in a website getting banned from search engine results pages. Some of these unethical techniques

include: affiliate marketing, keyword stuffing, cloaking, doorway pages, and purchasing backlinks.

Bounce Rate – Your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your website

and leave without visiting any other pages within your site.

Two different examples of bouncing:

• Visitor 1 finds your website in their search results and clicks to view your page. After less than

a second, Visitor 1 hits the “Back” button in their browser, determining your website wasn’t

what they were looking for. This is a bounce.

• Visitor 2 finds your website in their search results and clicks to view your page. After 15

minutes, they’ve found the information they needed and hit the “Back” button in their browser.

This is also a bounce.

It is hypothesized that only the fast bounce performed by Visitor 1 has negative search

ranking implications, while Visitor 2’s bounce may help your search ranking.

CClick Through Rate (CTR) – Click through rate is one method of determining the success of

your online advertising (i.e. Google AdWords or mobile ads) or email campaigns. CTR measures

the proportion of visitors who perform an action because of your advertisement. An action

could be clicking the link provided or subscribing to your email newsletter; actions are any sort of

engagement with the ad.

Click through rate can be calculated by dividing the number of times an ad is clicked by the total

number of impressions the ad had multiplied by 100.

Cloaking – When search spiders index your site, they look at all of the content you supply them

with to determine your ranking. Cloaking is the black hat method of supplying search engines with

webpages that are optimized for specific popular search terms, while supplying actual web visitors

different webpages entirely. Essentially, cloaking is a bait and switch technique that deceives

spiders into thinking your webpage is an authority on a topic that it has nothing to do with.

Black hat SEOs will use cloaking to get websites to rank well for extremely popular search terms

that they are unrelated to.

Conversion Rate – A conversion is getting an Internet user

to interact with your practice beyond simply viewing your

webpages, such as calling your practice or scheduling an

appointment. Your site’s conversion rate is the percentage of

total website visitors that perform a conversion.

The ultimate goal of your website should be to increase

conversions – turning website visitors into new patients.

Crawling – This term is often used in the context of a search

engine “crawling your site.” This is essentially the process

whereby a search engine spider scans your webpages, indexing links, sitemaps, and content.

Every time you add new content to your website, it will trigger search engines to re-crawl your

website.

DDoorway Pages (also called Bridge Pages, Portal Pages, or Jump Pages) – Doorway pages are

another black hat optimization technique that tricks Internet searchers into visiting your website.

This tactic was established primarily so affiliate marketers could make money off of unsuspecting

users who landed on their page.

The problem with doorway pages is that most visitors bounce when they land on a doorway page,

never clicking over the optimized website. Disreputable SEO firms, however, will still report a visit to

a doorway page as a website visit, misleading their clients to believe their website receives more

traffic than it actually does.

Example:

Google Dance – When first showing up on Google’s search results, pages change rank frequently,

until the site’s authority is reconfigured. Once Google develops a solid understanding on the page’s

relevancy, where the page appears in search results will fluctuate. This shifting up and down in rank

is known as the “Google Dance”. Typically only new websites dance, but all webpages are capable

of dancing when Google releases a large-scale algorithm update, such as with Panda and Penguin.

G

Headings – When search spiders crawl your site, they determine which elements are most

important on each page. One of the elements that they look at is headings. Headings are attributes

that give visitors an idea of what the page is about. Headings are numbered in size from 1 to 6,

with an h1 being the largest and an h6 being the smallest.

Headings should be in order of importance and size with h1s describing the overarching subject of

the page and getting more specific as the headings get smaller.

An example of headings for your page might be:

<h1> Family Dental Practice – Los Angeles, CA </h1><h2> Adult and Teen Cleanings and Exams </h2><h2> Pediatric Dentistry </h2><h3> Eruption of Baby Teeth </h3><h4> When Should My Child Have Their 1st Dental Exam? </h4>

H

Hummingbird – The Hummingbird Algorithm is Google’s latest release and has affected 90%

of search results worldwide. Hummingbird places greater importance on high-quality, relevant

content and promises to provide a better search experience for the Internet user.

Hummingbird also places less emphasis on the keywords used in the search query and more

emphasis on the meaning of the query as a whole.

Impression – An impression is the number of times any link to your website (whether it be an

advertisement or search results) is displayed on a webpage.

An example would be:

A practice in Los Angeles is running an AdWords campaign for the phrase “dentist Los

Angeles”.

Within one hour, the term “dentist Los Angeles” was searched 400 times. Of those 400

searches, the L.A. practice’s ad appeared 238 times. This means the practice had 238

impressions within the hour.

Indexed Pages – Once a search engine spider analyzes the content on one of your pages, that

page is indexed, or stored on their servers. Without being indexed, a webpage will not show up in

search engine results, as the search engine does not yet know the page exists or what it contains.

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Keyword (or Keyword Phrase) – Keywords are the individual words that make up an Internet

user’s search query. When the same keywords or keyword phrases are incorporated in the meta

data and content of your website, search engine algorithms may potentially rank your site well for

the given query.

K

Website is optimized for “Los Angeles Family Dentist”

User searches “Family Dentist in Los Angeles”

Website shows up on Googlefor that query.

Keyword Density – When you optimize your website content for particular keywords or phrases,

the number of times that word appears on the page when expressed in the form of a percent, is

the keyword density for that word.

For example:

You’ve optimized your Cosmetic Dentistry page for the term “teeth whitening”. “Teeth

whitening” appears within the content of that page 5 times. The total number of words on the

page is 351. This means your keyword density for “teeth whitening” is 1.4%.

Most SEOs believe the ideal keyword density is said to be between 1 and 3%.

Keyword Stuffing – While a few of the same keywords can help your optimization, overusing a

keyword in an attempt to rank better for that keyword is a black hat optimization technique known

as keyword stuffing.

In some cases, stuffed keywords appear everywhere on the page, not just within the content. Black

hat optimizers will even go as far as coloring text the same color as the background so as to hide

the keywords from a visitor’s view. Unfortunately, search engine bots are more clever than this and

can detect (and penalize) keyword stuffed pages.

Landing Page – A landing page is any page on your website that an Internet user found via search

engine, email message, social media post, link, or advertisement. When accessing your website,

whichever of your webpages a user ended up on is a landing page. Depending on how your

website is optimized, every page may be considered a landing page.

Link Bait – When you have content that encourages other blogs and websites to give you an

inbound link, that content is called link bait, as it lures a backlink. Blogs are an excellent form of link

bait, and as you post interesting articles, others are more inclined to share the information on their

social profiles, websites, and blogs.

L

Long Tail Keyword – When an Internet user searches a large query, this query is known as a long

tail keyword. Often, searchers use long tail keywords in an attempt to narrow their search results to

more specific options.

Example:

A prospective patient wants to find a dentist in Los Angeles that will see both children and

adults. In their initial search, they input:

“family dentist Los Angeles”

With over 16 million search results returned, the prospective patient became too overwhelmed,

so they adjusted their query to a long tail entry:

“family dentist Los Angeles general pediatric sees kids and adults”

With just 3 million search results, the prospective patient has cut their options by nearly 20%,

allowing them to find a provider that will better meet their needs.

MMeta Description – When search engines display their results, they provide a brief snippet below

the link to each result. This short description is the site’s meta description, a summary of what the

website is about or offers.

This is your site’s meta description.

Meta Keywords – Meta keywords are a brief bank of words, integrated into the meta data of your

website, that help search engines define what your website pertains to. While keywords used to

have a huge influence on search engine rankings, there are now many other factors that determine

rank, so keywords have less influence than they once did.

Meta keywords cannot be seen on the webpage itself or in search results. They reside within the

coding of the website and are relevant to search spiders.

Meta Tags (also called Descriptive Meta Data) – Meta tags are the “hidden” elements that help

describe the content of your website to search engines. Meta tags include your meta keywords,

meta title, and meta description.

A note regarding meta tags: Your webpages can each have their own meta tags, which will cause

your site to render differently in search results.

For example, these results are for two different webpages within the same website. One is a dental

implants page; the other is a contact page.

Each page has a different title and different meta description that relates to the topic of the individual page.

Meta Title – When a search engine displays results, the clickable link that leads to a webpage is

the meta title.

This is your site’s meta title.

Organic Link – An organic link is a backlink that you did not solicit or request. These links are from

other webmasters who find your website relative to their audience and wanted to share your site

with their visitors.

O

PPageRank – PageRank is the name given to Google’s algorithm that analyzes links. It values

and weighs links going to and coming away from your website to determine how important your

information is to others. PageRank is believed to work off a probability distribution that determines

the likelihood of a visitor randomly clicking on links to arrive at any particular page.

Since the implementation of PageRank, Google has added Panda, Penguin, and Penguin 2.0, new

algorithms that augment PageRank.

Panda – Panda is a Google algorithm implemented in February of 2011. It complemented

PageRank by focusing on ranking sites with fresh, relevant content higher than “thin” sites

comprised primarily of advertisements.

Panda caused one or two poorly constructed pages to deplete the ranking of entire sites,

emphasizing the fact that quality sites which continue to update pages will outrank those that sit

stagnant.

Penguin – Penguin was another algorithm update implemented to compliment PageRank and

Panda in April of 2012. Penguin was intended to penalize sites that violated Google’s Webmaster

Guidelines, namely those that implemented black hat SEO techniques.

Penguin 2.0 – Penguin 2.0 updated the initial Penguin algorithm in June 2013. With this update,

many websites drastically dropped in ranking, as websites involved in black hat link building were

targeted. Link farms and paid link services disappeared from SERPs almost entirely.

Query – The words or phrases that an Internet user puts into a search engine is a query. Often,

websites are optimized with specific and highly searched queries, in an effort to gain more traffic to

the website.

Q

Reciprocal Link – When two webmasters have a mutual agreement to give each other a backlink,

it is known as a reciprocal link. A single webmaster could also integrate reciprocal links between

two of their own websites.

To prevent reciprocal links from appearing as spam, it is important to keep them between related

websites. For example, linking between your spouse’s legal services website and your dental

website seems unrelated and may raise a red flag; however, linking between your dental website

and your referring periodontist’s website appears more natural to search spiders.

Referring Site (or Referrer) – When a user visits your website, whatever page they were previously

on is a referring site. Being so, any webpage that includes a link to your website could be a referring

site.

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SSandbox – When taking a website live for the first time, it could take a few days or a few months

for Google spiders to start crawling the site. During this waiting period, it will not show up on

search engine results pages, as Google can’t rank something it doesn’t yet understand. This is

referred to as being “in the sandbox,” or “being sandboxed.”

Sometimes, “being sandboxed” is also used to describe a website that has been dropped from

the top results, which occurs because the site was aggressively optimized, suggesting black hat

techniques were implemented.

You will often hear a SEO refer to a new website as “sitting in the sandbox,” or a penalized site

referred to as being “sandboxed”.

Search Algorithm – Search algorithms are the mathematical formulas that analyze the qualities

and properties of webpages, comparing them to other similar pages and determining an authority.

Each time a user enters a search query, algorithms scan a search engine’s entire index, comparing

them side-by-side, and displaying results by rank, accordingly.

Google’s most notable and talked about algorithms include PageRank, Panda, and Penguin.

Search Bot (also called Spider or Web Crawler) – Search bots or spiders are computer software

that follow links throughout the Internet, grabbing content, indexing it, and adding it to search

engine databases. The most commonly referenced spider is Google’s which is referred to as

“Googlebot”. Often “Googlebot” will be used in place of “search bot, spider, or web crawler”.

When a search is conducted, the results are displayed based upon what search bots found and

how the findings were valued within the engine’s algorithms.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – After performing a

search, you are taken to a page that lists all the results for your

query. This page is the search engine results page or SERP.

SEM – SEM is the abbreviated form of Search Engine Marketing. Different from SEO, search engine

marketing focuses on optimizing all online aspects that could influence a higher ranking, including

social media, paid advertisements, and content marketing through blogging.

Semantic Markup – By implementing additional code into your website’s structure, you can trigger

search engines to display additional information about your practice within their search results.

This additional information could be a photo of your practice, testimonials and reviews, or even

coupons and offers. By adding a semantic markup to your website, some SEOs believe you can

potentially draw more attention from searchers, as you provide them more information than your

competitors.

This result has a semantic markup within the coding of the site to make the doctor’s photo appear next to his search result.

SEO – SEO is the abbreviated form of Search Engine Optimization. SEO is one part of SEM and

involves the process of using optimization techniques to get a website ranked higher in search

engine results. SEO focuses entirely on marketing your website as an authority in your industry.

Some common SEO strategies include competitive analysis, building credible backlinks, onsite

optimization, and implementing meta tags.

Sitemap – When search bots crawl your website, a sitemap provides the bot with a detailed outline

of how to crawl your site. This roadmap enables bots to see exactly how many pages your website

contains and allows them to thoroughly index every page on your site.

Title Tag – Title tags are part of your website’s coding that informs visitors of your page’s content.

This way, when a visitor has multiple tabs open in their browser, they can identify which website

is yours.

When you hover over the tab containing a page title, a pop-up box expands to display the full title,

as well as the page’s URL.

T

Page title

Pop-up box that shares more information

Unique Visitor – Each time a user visits your website, your analytics software will track their

IP address. Upon their first visit, they are counted as a unique visitor. Each time they visit your

website with that same IP address thereafter, they are no longer counted as unique.

If that same user visits your page from a different IP address or after an extended period of time,

they can again be counted as a unique visitor.

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White Hat – The process of optimizing websites using search engine approved techniques

and strategies.

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Conclusion

Now that you have a better understanding of the realm of search engine optimization, you can make more informed decisions when hiring an agency to perform your optimization for you.

If you have any questions about our search engine optimization services, please contact one of our website consultants at (888) 932-3644.