Optimize My Web Site Dictionary

Earnings Per Click - Many contextual advertising publishers estimate their potential earnings based on how much they make from each click.

Editorial Link - Search engines count links as votes of quality. They primarily want to count editorial links that were earned over links that were bought or bartered.

Many paid links, such as those from quality directories, still count as signs of votes as long as they are also associated with editorial quality standards. If they are from sites without editorial control, like link farms, they are not likely to help you rank well. Using an algorithm similar to TrustRank, some search engines may place more trust on well known sites with strong editorial guidelines.

Emphasis - An HTML tag used to emphasize text.

Please note that it is more important that copy reads well to humans than any boost you may think you will get by tweaking it for bots. If every occurrence of a keyword on a page is in emphasis that will make the page hard to read, convert poorly, and may look weird to search engines and users alike.

<em>emphasis</em> would appear as emphasis

Entry Page - The page which a user enters your site.

If you are buying pay per click ads it is important to send visitors to the most appropriate and targeted page associated with the keyword they searched for. If you are doing link building it is important to point links at your most appropriate page when possible such that

Ethical SEO - Search engines like to paint SEO services which manipulate their relevancy algorithms as being unethical. Any particular technique is generally not typically associated with ethics, but is either effective or ineffective.

Some search marketers lacking in creativity tend to describe services sold by others as being unethical while their own services are ethical. Any particular technique is generally not typically associated with ethics, but is either effective or ineffective.

The only ethics issues associated with SEO are generally business ethics related issues. Two of the bigger frauds are

As long as the client is aware of potential risks there is nothing unethical about being aggressive.

Everflux - Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux.

In the past Google updated their index roughly once a month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a constantly updating index Google no longer does what was traditionally called a Google Dance.

See also: Matt Cutts Google Terminology Video - Matt talks about the history of Google Updates and the shift from Google Dances to everflux.

Expert Document - Quality page which links to many non-affiliated topical resources.

See also: Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents.

External Link - Link which references another domain.

Some people believe in link hoarding, but linking out to other related resources is a good way to help search engines understand what your site is about. If you link out to lots of low quality sites or primarily rely on low quality reciprocal links some search engines may not rank your site very well. Search engines are more likely to trust high quality editorial links (both to and from your site).