Glossary

Online, lag time refers to the amount of time a user has to wait between submitting a request and receiving a response. Reducing lag time is a primary goal of web engineers because excessive lags hinder functionality.

Pages created for specific audiences, on specific topics, intended to be the first page a visitor sees on a site. Landing pages may be used for either paid search advertising or search engine optimization. The content of each landing page must be truly unique, or a site runs the risk of receiving the Google Death Penalty.

Sometimes confused with doorway pages or gateway pages.

Co-founder of Google with Sergey Brin. In 2007, Page was cited by PC World as the #1 most important people on the web.

A lead is created when a website visitor submits correct, contactable information via a webform.

An item added to a Web site to encourage a site visitor to provide their contact information. The identity of the user and their contact information are the “lead.� This information is used to establish contact for the purpose of generating sales.

The idea of lead baiting is to entice the visitor into exchanging contact information for something valuable, such as a white paper. This ensures that it is a mutually beneficial exchange.

Similar in concept to link bait.

A URL that has been embedded on a webpage. Users can click-through to be taken to another webpage or website.

The internal linking of a website. This structure is what connects the various pages of a website to each other.

Link architecture includes navigation menus, sitemaps and internal linking via anchor text, among others.

Effective internal linking helps search engines crawl the entirety of your website and helps users easily navigate your website.

An item added to a website to encourage linking from other websites. In many cases, the more controversial the link bait is, the more effective it might be.

The process of getting quality websites to link to your sites to improve search engine rankings. Techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

A web tool used to verify the validity of links. The W3C website can check the links on a page when the page URL is entered.

A nickname for the NoFollow tag.

Also known as banner exchange.

A website which posts huge numbers of unrelated links on its pages. Such links are at best worthless, and are potentially dangerous, particularly when a reciprocal link is given to the link farm.

Refers to the quality of a website's link power, as in PageRank, that are obtained from inbound link.

Two individual websites that link only to each other. Generally, search engines do not see these as high value links.

Refers to the total number of links pointing to any particular URL. The two types are internal and external. If one site has more links than their competitors they are said to have link cardinality or link superiority.

A term used to describe when web pages that were previously available at a URL are now no longer reachable at that URL. This could be caused by deletion or movement of web pages on a site. Link rot decreases the functionality of a webpage.

An alternative name for anchor text.

A business-oriented social networking companies.

Company and personal profiles enable employee and job searches and the monitoring professional networks. Additional features like LinkedIn Answers allow companies and professionals to manage and grow industry knowledge.

Similar to PageRank, Local Prominence is the likely score given to a website by Google in determining its ranking for local search. The factors that affect a sites Local Prominence score likely include the number and quality of incoming links, appearance of the business' address on site, citations and reviews among others.

Any of a number of search engine marketing techniques that cater to geographically specific businesses (e.g. plumbers, accountants and restaurants). Local search can be either paid search advertising or natural search listings.

Some people have claimed that local search has a disappointingly low conversion rate, but Apogee Search's experience does not bear this out.

Records and stores information about a website's incoming and outgoing activity. The log file is generally found in the root directory but can also be located in a secondary folder.

A type of statistical distribution where a high-frequency population is followed by a low-frequency population which gradually "tails off". The events at the far end of the tail have a very low probability of occurrence. Long tail keywords utilize this concept.

A concept in paid search advertising that the keywords with the highest ROAS the more specific, lower traffic keywords, as they often have a higher conversion rate and a lower cost per click. See Long Tail for statistical foundation.

A specific, targeted search query usually containing at least two words.

Long tail search queries will have low search volume, but because the searcher will typically know exactly what they're trying to find, these queries will also have an extremely high conversion rate.

One of the very earliest search engines, Lycos was created in 1994.