Black Hat SEO – using findability techniques that are not endoresed by major search engines; misrepresenting content to search engines for the only reason of gaining higher search engine rankings. Example is keywords of white text on a white background. Now considered unethical.
Click Fraud (also known as Internet fraud) – clicking on an advertisement a multitude of times in order to incur cost for that advertiser.
Findability – the ability or likelihood of being found
Folksonomy – when social tagging is used and categories start to emerge, without the influence of the Information Architect. Term introduced by Thomas Vander Wal.
Keyword – a word that is descriptive and representative of the content. Keywords should appear naturally in the content. They are used to target the types of audiences you wish to attract in search results.
Keyword density – number of keywords divided by the total number of words. An acceptable level of keyword density is around 5 – 9 %; anything higher is suspicious of black hat techniques.
Microformats – from microformats.org: “…set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” Essentially, it’s little bits of XML stored in sites that are readable by agents.
Online Marketing – using the Internet to sell merchandise. Includes pay per click and banner ads methods as well as general e-commerce sites.
Organic Results – Search results from a search engine that are not from advertisers that paid money to get in the top ranks.
Pay Per Click (also known as cost per click, sponsored ads, sponsored links, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing) – When an advertiser pays for keywords to ensure their site will be guaranteed a top ranking in search results, and is usually highlighted and displayed to the right of the normal (organic) search results. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or link.
Rich email campaign – direct marketing via html emails sent to a subscriber list. Statistics can be tracked via services like mailchimp.com.
Semantic Web – separating presentation from content on the Internet in an effort to make the content more accessible and findable by people and machines.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization; using techniques (white hat, black hat) that specifically aim towards gaining higher rank in search engine results. The higher the ranking, the more findable it is.
Spider bot – (also known as Internet bot, robot, web crawler, spidering, crawling, crawler) an automated process of scanning the Internet to index content in order to later provide search results, usually by a search engine.
Social tagging – users of data (not just the Information architect) create metadata, making it more useable and findable.
Taxonomy – organizing information into categories that evolve into a universal organization system.
Traffic Analysis – using statistics packages that analyze visitors of your site and gather statistics about them and their usage of your website.
White Hat SEO – using proper techniques to gain the favor of search engine rankings. Example is using web standards, microformats, and keywords that happen naturally in the content.