Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Social Networking: This refers to sites such as facebook, myspace, wordpress, digg, technorati and hundereds of others.  Each site enables users to participate in a community and/or create one of their own.  These are important because they enable users to connect to you and your content and check back often.  It also allows them to build links to you which can help in the Search Engines.

AdWords: These are your keywords that you wish to target with a Cost Per Click (CPC) campaign through google.  You pay x amount for each keyword and are charged each time someone clicks one of your paid links.

Algorithm: This is a mathematical function that search engines use in order to search the internet and bring results back to a search engine result page.  These algorithms pick up content, links, keywords, code, and many other aspects of a web site in order to decide where it ranks for a particular search.  These algorithms are constantly evolving and are highly protected by their developers. 

Alt Tag: An HTML tag used to give text, usually to images, that would not otherwise have any text value.  These are important because they provide more space to include descriptions or keywords .  These do not show up on the page, but instead are hidden in the code in the background.

Backlink:  This is a link from one website to another.  The amount of backlinks  a page has can determine page rank and how search engines determine the pages relevance.

Blog: A web blog or blog is a website that is usually maintained and updated frequently with current events and happenings, industry news, photos, videos, and other types of media.  They are used by their owners to keep their viewers up to speed on the goings on of the websites owner.  They can create a community of followers and are a great way to keep visitors and clients updated on current information.

Black Hat: This term refers to attaining search engine ranking by using methods that are considered tricky and cheap.  These are things such as using link farms or hiding text in backgrounds and many others.  Beware of SEO companies that use these techniques because you are responsible for your website, and if they make the Search Engines angry, it will be your site that is taken down.

Cost-per-click:  These are ads that people pay search engine companies for in search engine rankings.  Search engines will place the client ads in search engine result pages that used relevant keywords and if they are clicked by a user, the client pays x amount of money for each click.

Hits: How many times your website or page has been visited.

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language.  This is the code used to create pages on the internet.  To view a sample simply right click on any website and click View Source.

Keyword: These are the words that most accurately describe your website or business.  You want to be sure that your main keywords are searched frequently.  Also, it helps to do some research on your competition to see what keywords they are using so you can compete. Example: If you are a web design company in Denver, then you may want to use “Denver web design.”

Keyword Density: This is simply how often your keywords show up on your website in relation to the other text.  You want your main keywords to range anywhere from 2%-10% in order for search engines to recognize the relevancy of your site.               

Meta Description Tag: Part of the code that is not visible to a user, but describes what the website is about.  This is highly searched by search engines.

Meta Keywords Tag:  This too is part of the code that is not visible to a user.  This is where you include the keywords that you want to be searched for.   Search engines look at this and use it to determine the relevance of your keywords in comparison to a users search.

PageRank: This is a value from 0-10 assigned by Google to a page depending on the page’s content, traffic, back links and some other