SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves numerous terms and acronyms that many people are unfamiliar with. Some of them are also used with regard to internet marketing in general. The following SEO Cheat Sheet briefly explains each of the important terms’ meanings.

ALT Tag: Usually applied to graphics; text-only browsers and search engine spiders/robots see these tags instead of the images they are associated with.

Backlinks: These are simply external links from other web sites and blogs that link to the site in question. Some sites have free backlink-checking features.

Black Hat: Manipulative SEO techniques which try to cheat search engines and competitors by artificially making pages appear relevant to certain unrelated keywords.

Blogroll: This is a list of links to other blogs/sites which appears in the left or right sidebar of many blogs. Getting listed is good for SEO.

CTR: Click Through Rate. This is the percentage of internet users who click on a particular link or another type of online advertisement.

FFA: Free For All link pages. Although these may have had some SEO benefit many years ago, using them can severely harm search engine rankings.

Keyword Density: How often keywords appear throughout a page. Search engines may penalize attempts to cheat, such as putting a long list of keywords at the end.

Link Bait: Such “bait” is a web page that uses a title and/or content which “baits” other sites to link to it. It is very desirable for SEO.

META Tags: This refers to the keyword, description, and title tags used by many web pages. They affect how search engine results appear.

NoFollow: The “nofollow” tag/attribute, when added to a link, prevents the site being linked to from receiving (or losing) any SEO benefit.

PageRank (PR): A ranking system used by Google, which affects how close to the top of Google search and directory results a web site will appear.

Robots/Spiders: Automated computers which explore the WWW, looking for new pages and collecting information for the search engines to index.

Sandbox: A theory that Google puts new web sites at a significant disadvantage in search results for months after they are indexed.

SEM: This acronym refers to Search Engine Marketing, which encompasses SEO, paid inclusion, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Site Map: A page on a web site which links to all of the other pages. This makes it easier for “spiders” to find and index them.

See our other entries for more details on each of the terms listed in this SEO Cheat Sheet, and consider printing out this page for future reference.

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1. See Your Website With the Eyes of a Spider