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SEO Glossary of Terms

Search Engine Optimization – Definitions

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Database-driven
Indicates that the website is connected to a database, and web page content is based in part on information extracted from those databases.

Database-generated
Indicates that a web page is created dynamically 'on-the-fly' from a database, in contrast with a static HTML page.

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 for a specific page on a website.

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

Deep submitting
The submission of pages, with URLs buried deep within your site, to the search engines. For example, if a webmaster of 200-page website would submits each of those 200 pages to an engine. This tactic is frowned upon by some search engines because it unnecessarily clogs up their submission database when the search engine spider could find those pages on its own by exploring links starting at the home page.

Delisting
A site or page may be delisted (removed) from a search engine or directory due to SPAMming or copyright violation, or an assortment of other reasons.

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.">

Directory
A categorized list of websites that is maintained by human editors instead of crawlers. Yahoo.com is the most widely recognized of the thousands of directories on the Internet.

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

Doorway page
A web page designed to draw Internet traffic in from search engines, and then direct this traffic to another website. The page is usually optimized for a particular search engine and search term. When a surfer visits the page it will either detect their IP address and redirect them to the correct page (cloaking) or it will have a large link for them click through to the full site. 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.

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 resulting in a lowering of the page's ranking from what it would have received naturally.

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. They also frequently use the following extensions: .asp, .cgm, or .cgi. Most search engines do not index dynamic content well, if at all. Google has recently improved their indexing of dynamic content.

Dynamic IP address
An IP address that changes every time a computer logs on to the Internet. See also “Static IP Address.”