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SEO Glossary of Terms

Search Engine Optimization – Definitions

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Cache
Copies of web pages stored locally on an Internet user's hard drive or within a search engine's database. A cache is the reason why web pages load so quickly when a user hits the Back button in their web browser; the page is not being re-downloaded off of the Internet. Google is unusual among search engines in that it allows Internet users to view the cached version of web pages in its index. Simply click on the word "Cache" next to the search result of interest, and you will be taken to a copy of the page as Googlebot discovered and indexed it. This feature of Google makes it easy to spot cloaking.

Click-through
The action of clicking on a link to visit a web page.

Click-through-rate (CTR)
The number of times a link is clicked on divided by the number of times that same link is displayed (called an impression).

Cloaking
Serving one version of a page to a human visitor and a different version of the same page to the search engines. This is usually done to "fool" the search engines into giving the page a higher rank than it would normally receive, while making sure the human visitor sees a useful and attractive page. Cloaking is considered unethical by many search engines and could result in your site to be banned.

Clustering
Clustering is limiting each represented website to one or two listings within an engine’s results page.

Comment tags
Used in a web page's HTML source code to indicate certain information about a section of the page code. Some search engines will consider keywords contained in comment tags for keyword density purposes, others (including Google) will not.

Example:

Custom error page
A well optimized, custom-designed 404 “File Not Found” error page has a friendly message explaining that the page they requested doesn't exist at the location, a site map to encourage the user to continue exploring the site, a search box so the user can conduct a search, and a look-and-feel that matches the rest of the site, including navigation.

Crawler
A program used by search engines to "crawl" the web by following links from page to page. This is how most search engines "find" the web pages that they place in their index. Also referred to as a “spider” or “robot”.

Crawling the web
Search engines use crawlers to move between web pages by following the links on the pages. The pages "found" are then ranked using an algorithm and indexed into the search engine database.

Cross linking
Two or more websites link together in order to boost their search engine rankings. If detected, cross linking often incurs a penalty from the search engine. An owner of more than one domain can interlink them in order to inflate their link popularity.

CSS
Cascading Style Sheets. Used to easily manage and manipulate the design of a website.