Link Building Glossary

A

Article Marketing - Writing articles for other websites to gain backlinks to your own.

Anchor Text - The visible text on a hyperlink.

Authority - Refers to a user or website which has become influential in its niche.

Alt Text - The non-visible text used to describe images to search engines.

B

Backlink - Any link pointing to your site. Also known as an ‘incoming link’.

Blog - Blogs allow the owner to post in a chronological order easily, and also allow comments from visitors, Wordpress is a blogging platform.

Blackhat - Someone who uses tricks that don’t conform to search engine rules to manipulate site rankings.

C

Commentluv - A plug-in used on blog comments to show the comment authors latest blog post.

Contextual Links - A link which relates to the information surrounding it.

Craigslist - A huge site of classified ads.

D

Deep Linking - Linking to an internal page rather than the homepage.

Directory - A list of websites sorted by category.

Domain - The name that identifies a website on the Internet.

Duplicate Content - When two different web pages contain closely identical content.

Digg - One of the large social networking sites, users can vote stories up or down.

Dofollow - A link without the rel=”nofollow” being used.

E

Ezine - Short for electronic magazine.

F

Forum - A site which allows users to participate in discussions using threaded discussions.

Forum Posting - The technique of posting on forums with the intention of promoting your own site or product.

G

Google - Currently the leading search engine in terms of market share.

H

Hyperlink - Text or images linked to another page using a markup in HTML.

I

Inbound Links - A link pointing to your website, also known as a backlink

L

Link Popularity - The number of links pointing to a website.

Link Juice - A term used to measure the amount of PageRank given from a link.

Link Exchange - When two sites swap links, so each one is pointing to the other. Also known as reciprocal linking.

Nofollow - An attribute used in hyperlinks to tell spiders to follow the link. rel=”nofollow”

PageRank - Abbreviated to PR, Pagerank is the value assigned to a page by Google’s PageRank Algorithm.

Press Release - An article or statement sent to the media in an attempt to gain attention.

U

URL - Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a page on the World Wide Web.

R

Reciprocal Linking - When two sites swap links, so each one is pointing to the other. Also known as a link exchange.

RSS Feed - An XML file which contains either a summary or full content with links back to the original.

S

Social Bookmarking - Similar to normal bookmarking but with the ability to share your finds with others.

Social Networking - Websites which allow you to connect to friends, family, colleagues and more online.

Spam - Using techniques which violate the search engines terms and conditions.

Supplementary Index - A collection of pages unsuitable for the main index.

Squidoo - A website which aims to allow anyone to easily set up a lens(page) about any given subject.

Site wide Link - A link spanning across every page of a site.

StumbleUpon - A web browser plug-in which allows you to rate web pages for other users to see.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization, making a website more valuable to search engines.

SE - Short for Search Engine.

T

Trackback - A notification to a blogger when someone has linked to there post.

Technorati - A search engine designed specifically for blogs.

W

Whitehat - An ethical form of SEO.

Wordpress - A popular blogging platform created by Matt Mullenweg.

Y

Yahoo - A competitor of Google, Yahoo also has a large directory.