SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

Bounce The term that’s used to describe how a web-

site visitor lands on a web page and immediately

clicks away from it.

Brand keywords Keywords that are associated with

a well-known brand.

Bread-crumb trail A text-based navigation strategy

that shows where in the site hierarchy the currently

viewed web page is located and your location within

the site, while providing shortcuts to instantly jump

higher up the site hierarchy.

Broken links URLs or text-based links that do not

lead to the expected page.

Buzz The “talk” that is going around the Internet

about a product or service.

Cascading style sheet (CSS) CSS is a style-sheet

language used to describe the presentation of a

document written in a markup language. Its most

common application is to style web pages written

in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be

applied to any kind of XML document.

Click bots Software applications that run auto-

mated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform

tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive,

at a much higher rate than would be possible for a

human editor alone.

Click fraud A type of Internet crime that occurs

in pay-per-click online advertising when a person,

automated script, or computer program imitates a

legitimate user of a web browser by clicking on an

ad, for the purpose of generating a cost per click

without having actual interest in the target of the

ad’s link.

Click-through rate A way of measuring the success

of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained

by dividing the number of users who clicked on an

ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was

delivered.

Closing tag An HTML tag that indicates that a pre-

viously executed command should stop.

Code jockey A person who is highly trained in

computer languages and writes programming code

full time.

Constraint satisfaction search The process of

finding a solution to a set of constraints. Such con-

straints express allowed values for variables. A solu-

tion is therefore an evaluation of these variables that

satisfies all constraints.

Container tags A set of HTML tags that “contains”

a full command. Usually indicated by the opening

and closing tags (that is, <b>Bold</a>).

Content management systems A software system

used for content management. Content management

systems are deployed primarily for interactive use by

a potentially large number of contributors.

Content-rich doorways Doorway pages that con-

tain lots of heavily keyword-optimized content.

Content scraping A technique in which a computer

program extracts data from the display output of

another program.

Contextual targeting The term applied to adver-

tisements appearing on web sites or other media,

such as content displayed on mobile phones, where

the advertisements are selected and served by auto-

mated systems based on the content displayed by

the user.

Cookies Parcels of text sent by a server to a

web browser and then sent back unchanged by

the browser each time it accesses that server.

Copyright infringement The unauthorized use of

material covered by copyright law, in a manner that

violates one of the original copyright owner’s exclu-

sive rights, such as the right to reproduce or per-

form the copyrighted work, or to make derivative

works that build upon it.

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