Website terminology

Want some help with website terminology? Find information on some of the more common abbreviations used by web developers and online marketers

If you've been looking in to website design and search engine optimisation you will have come across a wide range of acronyms for example SERP's, CTR, PPC. What does it all mean?

Below is an A-Z of some of the most popular acronyms found...

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink, this is the text that is usually highlighted on a page in a menu, tag cloud and in a paragraph of text. The anchor text will usually stand out from the surrounding text to draw your attention to it and to indicate that there is a link on the word that will direct you to more information on that topic.

Anchor text is a key part of On-page SEO and the internal navigation structure of a website.

Back Links

Back links are links to you site from other websites, blog, social network and directories. Gaining back links will increase your online presence and page rank with Google and other search engines.

Bot

Bots (also known as spiders and crawlers) are robots that search engines and other programs including spam farms send out on to the internet to crawl your website. Google will craw your website regularly and then index your web pages and categories them.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the process of showing a different page to a search engine bot as you show to a human. This is a black hat method of keyword stuffing a website so it looks more relevant to search engine for selected keywords and phrase but then showing a different page to a human that has clicked on a link to your website.

This is a definite no no and should be avoided at all cost, the black hat technique may work (if you're lucky) for a very short time, but will lead to your entire website being removed and banned from Google and other search engine.

Conversion Rate

You conversion rate is key to your websites return on investment (ROI) and is the process of converting a visitor in to a customer.

CPC

CPC is the Cost Per Click you would pay when a person clicks on an ad you have displayed on another website or using the Google Adwords sponsored listings.

CTR

Click Through Rate (CTR) is a calculation for your CPC campaign and provides you with the number of times your website ad was clicked compared to the amount of times it was seen (impression rate)

Keywords and phrase

Keywords and phrase are what a human types in to a search engine (Google) to find information on a specific product or service.

PPC

Pay Per Click (PPC) the same as CPC paid advertising on search engines and websites where you pay a set amount per click received.

PR

Page Rank (PR) is a form of site ranking that Google uses, page rank is measured from 0-10 with 0 being the lowest rank and 10 the highest.

Robots.txt

Robot.txt are files that can tell search engine crawlers what pages they can and can't search. You can block search engines from crawling and indexing specific pages but it can have a negative effect on your website.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a combination or search engine optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising to maximise your websites visitor numbers.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making a website look as professional to a search engine as it does to a human. Search engine optimisation is all about getting you website as high up in the SERP's as possible for your selected keywords and phrases. There are two main parts to search engine optimisation, On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.

SERP

Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page/Positioning. This refers to the organic (excluding paid listings) search results for a given query.

Spider

Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.