Optimize My Web Site Dictionary

Landing Page - The page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on a link or advertisement.

Landing Page Quality Scores - A measure used by Google to help filter noisy ads out of their AdWords program.

When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market, but as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to try to keep their ads relevant.

Link - A citation from one web document to another web document or another position in the same document.

Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.

Link Anchor Text - The clickable part of the link structure. Using keywords in the link anchor text of your inbound links will help your search engine rankings for those keywords.

Example:

<a href=http://www.yoursite.com>This is the link anchor text for this link</a>

Link Baiting - The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media and bloggers.

See also: SEO Book Search: Link Bait.

Link Building - The process of building high quality linkage data that search engines will evaluate to trust your website is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy.

A few general link building tips:

See also:

Link Bursts - A rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing at a website.

When links occur naturally they generally develop over time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral articles receive many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of quality as well, such as:

See also: Information retrieval based on historical data .

Link Churn - The rate at which a site loses links.

See also: Information retrieval based on historical data .

Link Exchange - Placing a link to another website on your own site in exchange for a return link back. Also known as reciprocal linking.

Link Equity - A measure of how strong a site is based on its inbound link popularity and the authority of the sites providing those links.

Link Farm - A web page created solely for search engine ranking purposes that consists almost entirely of a long list of unrelated links. These types of pages are penalized by almost all search engines, including Google.

Link Hoarding - A method of trying to keep all your link popularity by not linking out to other sites, or linking out using JavaScript or through cheesy redirects.

Generally link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons:

"Of course, folks never know when we're going to adjust our scoring. It's pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in mind." - Quote from Google's Matt Cutts

See also: Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (Or Understanding Value In A Post-Madonna World) - article about how being a platform (ie: someone who freely links out) makes it easier to become an authority.

Link Popularity - A measure of how popular a web page is on the internet as measured by the number of inbound links pointing to your web page. Link popularity is one of the main factors used to help determine search engine rankings.

Link Reputation - The combination of your link equity and anchor text.

Link Rot - A measure of how many and what percent of a website's links are broken.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are:

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site's links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

See also: Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

Linking - Placing a link to another web page (usually on another web site) on one of your own web pages.

Links - URLs placed within a web page so that when they're clicked on the browser is served with a different web page, often on a completely different web site.

Live.com - New search platform provided by Microsoft.

See also: Live.com

Log Files - Files that are constantly and automatically created and updated on your web server that provide very specific details about the activities taking place on your web site.

This includes referring URLs, IP addresses, pages visited, errors generated, number of unique visitors, total page views, total hits, and much more. Carefully reviewing your log files can provide valuable information about your site's performance and visitors.

Looksmart - Company originally launched as a directory service which later morphed into a paid search provider and vertical content play.

See also: Looksmart.com.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) - is a way for search systems to mathematically understanding and representing language based on the similarity of pages and keyword co-occurance. A relevant result may not even have the search term in it. It may be returned based solely on the fact that it contains many similar words to those appearing in relevant pages which contain the search words.

See also: