Glossary of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Terms

Affiliate Marketing
A search engine marketing model in which an advertiser provides financial compensation to an affiliate for channeling event-driven traffic to their site. An event is basically a successful order on the advertisers' site. The amount paid to an affiliate is based on commissions for every completed transaction.
Anchor Tag
An HTML tag that enables you to make a link within the current web page to another document or web page or to a bookmark page.
Black Hat SEO
Search engine optimization tactics that are considered unethical yet widely used by some SEO practitioners to rapidly improve search engine ranking of their web sites. Search engine optimizers who use black hat SEO tactics as their search engine marketing strategies run the risk of being banned and having their rankings disappear completely.
Blog
A shortened form of the term "Web Log." A blog functions like an online journal.
Bot
A program specifically designed to automatically and thoroughly check the Internet for various purposes, which includes indexing of web pages, spamming, etc. Bots are also known as spiders, web crawlers, web robots, and Internet bots.
Conversion - Web traffic that practically performs a fixed goal.Conversion
Web traffic that practically performs a fixed goal of the website owner, like closing a deal or participating in an online survey, etc.
Invisible Keywords
A black hat SEO tactic used to improve search engine ranking by placing on the web page white font keywords against a white background. The color of the font and the background will make the keywords invisible to users but can still be crawled by spiders, prompting search engines to give a website a high ranking in the results pages.
Link Building
An off-site SEO strategy that entails directing external links from other websites to one's own to improve search engine ranking and increase link popularity.
Reciprocal Linking
A form of link building in which a website requests a link exchange with another related website. Also known as link exchange and link swapping.
Splash Page
An introductory web page loaded with attractive graphics with little quality content. A splash page is designed mainly as an attention grabber.
White Hat SEO
SEO Tactics that are considered standard and ethical in obtaining quality traffic and increasing page rankings.