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Above the fold
A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the
fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.
Absolute link
A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the
href tag.
Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.
Add URL
An add url service is offered, usually by the search engine themselves, for you to add a URL to the submission queue.
This is sometimes assumed to be the only way to join the submission queue, but this is not always the case.
AdOutlet
An AdOutlet refers to a pay-per-click search engine, comparison shopping search engine or paid-inclusion search engine.
These can be seen in use by the major search engines each of which has its own advertising system.
Adsense
Google Adwords PPC ads are appeared not only on Google but on many content-based
websites also.
These websites are participating in the Adsense program, which is Google's syndication network for displaying the Adwords.
Adwords
Adwords is a PPC service provided by Google. If you carry out almost any search on Google, you will find boxes to
the right hand side of the normal search results, containing short text adverts for websites. These are the Adwords.
Occasionally, some are "promoted" to appear as full advertisments across the top of the results. They are always labeled as sponsored results.
Google's Adwords are also syndicated across site that earn a fee in return for displaying them.
Alexa
Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic. Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.
Algorithmic Search Engine
An algorithmic search engine spiders your website and displays relevant listings based on the search criteria entered by a visitor.
Also referred to as 'natural' or 'organic' search. This style of search engine takes many factors into affect and the major players in the UK currently are Google and MSN. Each search
engines take into account onscreen and offscreen factors to determine the overall positioning of a website. The algorithm is built from many separate pieces
of code each of which will affect the positions of a web document for no particular query.
These algorithms are built to ensure that the sites that are returned for a search query are as relevant as possible. Every Algorithmic Search Engine determines relevancy in different terms.
Alt Attribute
The alt attribute is used to provide a short text description of an image.
Its primary purpose is for speaking browsers for use by the visually impaired, but it is also used to an extent by search engines.
Alt attribute are commonly mis-refered to as alt "tags".
Analytical Software
Analytical software is any software that allows one to analyze and report on something.
In relation to SEO it generally falls in to one of two categories, those which analyze keywords or search engine listings on one hand, and those which analyze actual traffic on the other.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the actual display text of a link.
Many search engines place considerable importance in the contents of anchor text through a website.
Apache Web Server
Apache is a free, usually Linux-based web server application.
It is generally considered to be the most used server software currently in use, although Microsoft's IIS web server is a close second.
Auto Bid
Overture, FindWhat and Google use some form of Auto Bidding. With each of these PPCSEs you set a not-to-exceed price (Max Bid) and the search engine will adjust your actual bid each time a keyword is searched so that you will only pay $0.01 above the bid below your bid. This can help you to maximise the potential returns from your site by ensuring that your website has the potential to appear as high as possible within the search engine index.
Automated Submission
Automated submission is carried out by software, which submits your website to a number of add-url services.
It is discouraged by search engines to the extent that those to which it is still possible to auto submit are likely to ban persistent abusers from their databases entirely.
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