Optimize My Web Site Dictionary

Dayparting - Turning ad campaigns on or off, changing ad bid price, or budget constraints based on bidding more when your target audience is available and less when they are less likely to be available.

Dead Link - A link which is no longer functional.

Most large high quality websites have at least a few dead links in them, but the ratio of good links to dead links can be seen as a sign of information quality. See Broken Link.

Dedicated Server - Server which is limited to serving one website or a small collection of websites owned by a single person.

Dedicated servers tend to be more reliable than shared (or virtual) servers. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

Deep Link Ratio - The ratio of links pointing to internal pages to overall links pointing at a website.

A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a legitimate natural link profile.

Deep Linking - Linking to a page that is one or more levels removed from the home directory. Deep linking is often desirable to build PageRank to a specific page on a website.

Example:

http://www.yoursite.com/tutorials/diy-seo.html

De-Listing - Temporarily or permanently becoming de-indexed from a directory or search engine.

De-indexing may be due to any of the following:

Del.icio.us - Popular social bookmarking website.

See also:

Demographics - Statistical data or characteristics which define segments of a population.

Some internet marketing platforms, such as AdCenter and AdWords, allow you to target ads at websites or searchers who fit amongst a specific demographic. Some common demographic data points are gender, age, income, education, location, etc.

Denton, Nick - Publisher of Gawker, a popular ring of topical weblogs, which are typically focused on controversy.

See also: Nick Denton.org - official blog, where Nick often talks about business and his various blogs.

Description - Directories and search engines provide a short description near each listing which aims to add context to the title.

High quality directories typically prefer the description describes what the site is about rather than something that is overtly promotional in nature. Search engines typically

Description Meta Tag - A meta tag that describes the content of the web page in which it is found. Used by some search engines for keyword density purposes. Also, some SE's will use the description meta tag for the description provided to a user when the page is returned in a listing of search results. It is recommended that you use a couple of your targeted keywords in the description meta tag.

Example:

<META NAME=Description CONTENT=This sentence describes the content on this page.>

Digg - Social news site where users vote on which stories get the most exposure and become the most popular.

See also: Digg.com.

Directory - A categorized list of websites that is maintained by human editors instead of crawlers. Yahoo.com is the most widely recognized directory on the web, but there are literally thousands of others.

Domain - The human-friendly address, or URL of a website. When a user types a URL into a web browser, a dedicated computer somewhere on the web known as a Domain Name Server, or DNS translates the URL into a discrete IP address which is then used to find the actual website being requested.

In the URL http://www.roadsidemultimedia.com, roadsidemultimedia.com is the domain.

Domain Name Servers (DNS) - These are special computers that translate human-friendly URLs into computer-friendly IP addresses. This process takes place every time a user requests a page from a website.

DMOZ (The Open Directory Project) - is the largest human edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL, and is primarily ran by volunteer editors.

See also:

DNS (Domain Name Server or Domain Name System) - A naming scheme mechanism used to help resolve a domain name / host name to a specific TCP/IP Address.

DNS Propagation - Every time a new domain name is registered (or an existing one is transferred to a new DNS), the information about the domain and the DNS that hosts it must make its way around the entire internet. This process usually takes around 24 hours, during which time the domain will be inaccessible to users.

Doorway Page - A page that is usually optimized for a particular search engine and search term. Multiple doorway pages are often used to help ensure that the same basic content is ranked well on several different search engines. The use of doorway pages for this purpose is frowned upon by most larger search engines, including Google.

Doorway Pages - Pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other advertisements.

Some webmasters cloak thousands of doorway pages on trusted domains, and rake in a boatload of cash until they are caught and de-listed. If the page would have a unique purpose outside of search then search engines are generally fine with it, but if the page only exists because search engines exist then search engines are more likely to frown on the behavior.

Dreamweaver - Popular web development and editing software offering a what you see is what you get interface.

See also: Dreamweaver official site.

Duplicate Content - Two or more separate web pages that contain substantially the same content are said to contain duplicate content.

Google and other top search engines have set up filters to detect duplicate content when their crawlers are active on the web. When pages containing duplicate content are detected, they are often assessed a duplicate content penalty which means a lowering of the page's ranking from what it would have received naturally.

See also:

Dynamic Content (dynamic pages) - Web pages that are often generated from database information based upon queries initiated by users. Dynamic pages often include the ? character in the URL.

The URLs of dynamic pages often use these extensions: .asp, .cgm, or .cgi. Most search engines don't index dynamic content very well (or at all). Google has recently been doing a better job at indexing them however.

Dynamic IP Address - An IP address that changes every time a computer logs on to the internet. See also Static IP Address.

Dynamic Languages - Programming languages such as PHP or ASP which build web pages on the fly upon request.