Catching Up With Website SEO Lingo

Catching Up With Website SEO Lingo

Websites for Accountants SEO for Accountants

Just like the lingo associated with instant messaging, social media, text messaging, and talking with your children, internet marketing, website development, and SEO has its own brand of lingo that is difficult to grasp.

With text messaging, I clearly know OMG, WHA, LOL, PITA and G2G along with some of the basics. Terms like HAND, TIC, TUVM, ICCL always throw me.

Here are a few to internet marketing terms to help you catch up on the lingo.

SEO Terms for Accounting Websites

Google Bomb (aka - link bomb) - Internet slang for an attempt to influence the ranking of a web site page within Google's search engine, often with political undertones or humor. Common examples of Google bombs have been performed on Microsoft, George Bush and Al Gore. For example, the key words "miserable failure" and "failure" were associated with George W. Bush under a massive Google bomb, which had number one search engine placement on the top three search engines. To test it, type in "miserable failure" into Google, Yahoo and MSN to see what the results are...

Google Sandbox effect - A theory used to explain why newly-registered website domains or frequent ownership changes are placed in a sandbox (holding area, quasi-penalty box) until your worth has proven itself over time. Frequent nameserver changes (changing web hosting providers) also qualify. In other words, your search engine rankings will be poor for a new domain address or frequent web site provider changes.

Search Engine Spider (aka - web crawler, web robot) - A program or automated script which browses the web in a methodical, automated manner. This program helps search engines index and store website pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used to check links, validating HTML code, and unfortunately harvesting email addresses (usually for spam).

Search Engine Friendly - A web site designed, written, and formatted to rank well in the search engines.

Black Hat versus White Hat SEO - The divide within the SEO community between playing by the rules (ethical) and organically grow sites over years and years as a white hat. Versus using black hat techniques to game the search engines, winning today regardless of the implications/penalties and making money today. The leading edge black hats manage SEO for porn, prescription drugs (Viagara), and online gambling type web sites.

Link Farms (aka spamdexing) - A group of web sites that all hyperlink to each other with little regard to whether each website is relevant to the other website.

Keyword Stuffing - Considered an unethical SEO tactic. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is overloaded with certain keywords in the meta tags and website content.

Page Rank - A link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to the relative value of each inbound and outbound web site link. This was developed by Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, and became integral into their search engine. The trade name belongs to Google and patent belongs to Stanford University, because Larry was a student when he developed this concept.

Reciprocal Links - A mutual link between two web sites in order to provide mutual traffic and possibly improve their organic search engine rankings.

Organic Search Engine Rankings (aka - natural search engine rankings) - The process of improving traffic from search engines free of charge and without using pay-per-click advertising.

Spamming - The abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. Spamming applies to email, instant messaging, search engines, faxing, and cell phone messaging.

Banned from Search Engines (aka - Google Death Penalty) - The major search engines will remove web sites from their search engine results if the web site violates webmaster guidelines, deploys deceptive tactics and using black hat techniques. The famous example of this is when Google banned BMW's and Ricoh's web sites because they were using deceptive SEO techniques. News of this spread across bloggers and media outlets so BMW and Ricoh corrected the faulty pages but damage was done. Google demonstrated that no matter how big the company is, the violator can be removed from Google's search engine results entirely.

Supplemental Results - Google's secondary index of web pages it doesn't consider worthy of being in the main index.

Splash Page - Typically, an introductory web page that is graphics heavy for attention-grabbing purposes only (eye candy). Not content rich and will rank poorly in the search engines.

Dynamic Website - A web site whose content is not fixed. Usually used with larger web sites.

CSS - Cascading style sheets. A language used to describe how a given web page will look graphically. Used to control font styles, layouts, color, etc.

Cloaking - Showing a different web page to a search engine spider than what is seen by a human web site visitor. This is a black hat SEO technique to game the search engines.

Invisible Text (aka hidden text) - A black hat SEO technique to load a web page with keywords and keyword phrases that the web site visitor can not see. For example, the font color could be white text on a white background so the web site visitor can not read the text.

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Catching Up With Website SEO Lingo
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Hugh Duffy, BYF CEO and Co-Founder

Hugh is the consummate marketing coach for accountants and takes pride in the impact that it has on their practice, and lives. Since 2003, he has been teaching accountants how to improve their marketing and instrumental in the Outsourced Marketing Program.

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