Thoughtfaucet » Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

301 Redirect

Glossarist — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:46:41 +0000

301 redirect: A server status code that indicates that the web page or resource has moved permanently to another URL. The 301 redirect is sort of like having the post office forward your mail to a new address.; This kind of redirect is covered in the W3C Status Code Definitions section 10:

The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs.

h2 tag

Gahlord Dewald — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:00:22 +0000

h2 tag: This tag denotes a subhead or secondary heading. As many h2 tags as are required may be used (as opposed to h1 tags, where you really should just have one).

Site speed

Glossarist — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 18:21:38 +0000

Site speed: How quickly a web site responds to web requests. Often measured as a length of time. As of April 9, 2010 Google began using this as a ranking factor for some searches.; Beyond search engine optimization, a site which responds faster to web requests — a site with faster page load times — will be more responsive and provided a better user experience to humans.; Sites with faster site speed will often incur fewer expenses for their owners in terms of bandwidth usage.

Title tag

Glossarist — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:51:45 +0000

Title tag: One of the three absolutely critical on-page search engine optimization technologies that must be utilized well on every page of a site.; This tag is the only tag in the head of an HTML document that shows content in the browser. The title tag content is visible at the very top of the browser, above the address bar.; The content of the title tag is the default link text on search engines such as Google. So, along with the meta-description tag, it should be treated with call-to-action in mind. Unlike the meta-description tag, the title tag is commonly believed to play a large part in ranking algorithms.; The title tag content is the default text for bookmarks and many other machine-driven linking technologies.

h1 tag

Glossarist — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 18:09:13 +0000

h1 tag: The HTML tag that indicates the most important level headline of a document. [w3.org]; Browser default values h1 tags to be the largest text in the viewing area, however, designers sometimes make text which is not tagged as the h1 to be larger, the only way to know if you have h1 tags properly written into your site is to check the code.; Since the h1 tag is supposed to be the most important headline in a document, it is generally held by SEO professionals that having this tag and treating it properly is important to search activities

For more information on the h1 tag, refer to this post in which Gahlord Dewald answers a question about what to do if you don’t have room for an h1 tag on your site.

Meta-description

Glossarist — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:25:46 +0000

Meta-description

One of the meta tags, in the HTML header of a web document that contains a brief description of the contents of the document itself. The meta-description is not normally visible in a web browser while viewing the page it describes–one must “view source” to see it.

The meta-description is visible on a SERP, however. It is often the bit of text below a link on the SERP. Meta-description is not believed to influence the positioning of a page on a SERP, but it may inflence whether a human wants to click the link above it. As such, meta-description is a curious SEO tag that doesn’t focus on machine algorithms but instead effects human factors of search engine optimization.

SERP

Glossarist — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:25:51 +0000

SERP: Acronym of Search Engine Result Page. This is the page that a search engine displays after a person types their keyword into the search engine.; The goal of most search engine optimization campaigns is to appear higher on the SERP, in the belief that the first result is the one that searchers most often click.

Meta-tags

Glossarist — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:01:16 +0000

meta-tags: a series of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tags that carry information about the page. This information is not typically displayed by web browsers and is only visible by viewing the source code of a page.; For search engine optimization (SEO), the most important metatags are the meta-description tag, the title tag and to a lesser extent the meta-keywords tag.

Keyword

Glossarist — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:54:38 +0000

Keyword: Also called search term. This is the word that your audience types into a search engine’s query box.; The words and phrases typed directly by humans into a search query box often represents their only free-form method of communicating the site visitor’s intent. Determining the intent of audiences based on what the audience types into the search engine’s query box is a part of keyword research.