Search Marketing Times

Anchor Text
Text used within a link on a webpage. This is the visible text, not the HTML code.

Anchor Text Optimization
Search engines give value to keywords used in anchor text. By placing keywords in the anchor text of your incoming links you will rank better for those keywords.

Backlinks
Refers to links which point to your site. These are also called “Inbound Links” or “In Links”.

Image Link
A hyperlink attached to an image.

Inbound Links
Links which point to your site from other websites. Also sometimes called “Backlinks” or “In links.”

Landing Page
A landing page is a page specifically designed for users to “land on”. Typically this user would arrive from a placed ad such as Google AdWords or possibly from an email campaign. The page typicaly is optimized around a keyword or set of keywords. Oftentimes, these pages are highly designed to prompt a call to action from the viewer.

Link Aging
Search engines may now place a penalty on new links to your site. This is to prevent link abuse.

Link Baiting or Link Bait
Refers to content or tools that generate a high amount of external interest causing many sites to link to your site. Some link bait can be useful, some controversial, some ineffective. If you keep the user in mind when designing Link Bait, it can work out well.

Link Building
The effort to create numerous external links pointing to your site. Numerous methods can be used to do this. See more information here on Link Building.

Link Farming
The practice of building links in large numbers, typically through artificial or false methods.

Link Popularity
This term is used to describe how popular your site may be by measuring how many inbound links it has. Links from popular, relevant authority sites count more than non-relevant, low traffic sites.

Link Relevancy
Relevant links are links from related or sites of similar topics. Having other sites in the same category as you site link to your site can help attach relevance and keywords to your site.

No follow tag
Stops a search engine from following a link.

One-way links
Links whereby a site “A” points to another site “B” without a link on the other site pointing back.

Reciprocal links
If websites trade links with each other – this is reciprocal linking.

Sandbox
Search engines may place a new website in a virtual “sandbox” to spend time evaluating the site content, links, and keywords. This is to see if the site is worthy of traffic. By building authoritative links from other sites to your site you can get out of the sandboox quicker. Google is the main engine where this is evident.

Serps
Serp(s) means Search Engine Results Page and it refer to the search results that are retrieved after you conduct a keyword search in a search engine.

Text link
Hyperlinks which appear around text found within content on a website.