Search Engine Optimisation Glossary

Landing Page

A landing page is the location that a user is taken to after following a search engine listing. Marketers attempt to improve conversion rates by experimenting with different creatives in an attempt to improve user experience and shorten conversion paths.

Larry Page

Lawrence “Larry” Page is the co-founder of Google. Page met Google co founder, Sergey Brin, whilst studying for a Ph.D in computer science at Stanford University. Page discovered the now world famous PageRank when researching his dissertation into the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, and understanding the link structure as a huge graph.

Link Building

Link building is the process of developing a network of hyperlinks into your website from other topically relevant online resources. This process of interlinking a core part of any SEO strategy, helping to boost your site’s ‘credibility’ in the eyes of search engines.

Long Tail

Long tail describes keyphrases that consist of numerous keywords. Although search volumes for long tail keyphrases are lower and hence lower traffic potential, they are very highly targeted and generally have higher conversion rates than broader, more generic keyphrases.

Meta Data

Information used to classify and identify specifics regarding any given web document. Each META element specifies a property/value pair. Meta Data can be used to define a website and through the correct use of Meta data, you can declare the title, keywords and description of a page or pages, which help achieve placement in search engines. The name attribute identifies the property and the content attribute specifies the property's value. For example, the following Meta Data Element identifies the author of the document: John Foliot

MSN

Acronym for Microsoft Network, Microsoft's online service. Like competing services such as America Online, MSN offers e-mail, topic-related forums, and full access to the World Wide Web via a search facility.

No Follow

A no follow link is a link that has a command in its code that prohibits a search engine spider from crawling a specified link. This is most often used when a website has been duplicated for the purposes of tracking a PPC campaign.

Online PR

Online PR seeds information about a company through various review, news and industry specific sites and provides an added benefit to social media initiatives. Online PR is a useful method for promoting brands or products online, using PR sites to inform target markets of new product releases or developments within an organisation.

PageRank (PR)

PageRank or PR is a numeric value between one and ten that represents how ‘credible’ or ‘important’ a web page is on the internet. Exclusive to Google and named after Larry Page (Google’s co-founder), PR is based on a mathematical algorithm, incorporating numerous factors such as Domain age and the volume and quality of inbound links.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay per click in search engines is an advertising model in which advertisers pay the host only when a user clicks on their advert. The cost per click (CPC) is defined primarily by using an auction system, whereby advertisers bid on specific key-phrases, with the higher bidders receiving top positions and the lion’s share of visitors.

Performance SEO

Performance search engine optimisation (SEO) is a service pioneered by Mediarun Search LTD, which focuses on the delivery of pre-defined, mutually agreed results. Performance metrics are defined by keyword rankings, traffic growth and Conversion rate improvement.

Personalised Search

Previously only available to logged in users, personalised search remembers a user’s preferred websites and considers these personal preferences in results pages. For example, if an individual regularly searches for ‘clothes’ and always clicks on newlook.co.uk, Google might rank newlook.co.uk higher on the results page the next time the same user repeats the search. This way, Google is returning what they consider to be the most relevant results to that particular user.

Real Time Search

Google real-time search updates as events occur around the world and are reported on the Web — for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages now stream on the organic search results pages for search queries. Essentially, Google’s search results have become more reactive and up to date, as events are reported almost instantaneously.