A domain is a hierarchical system use to define an Internet location or set of addressable computers.

The first part of a domain name is called the Top Level Domain (TLD). This is typically the last two or three letters that represent the geographical or section of the Internet.

Major domain suffixes are:

• .edu – Educational Institutions;
• .gov – US Government;
• .com – Commercial (business);
• .net – Network Infrastructure organizations;
• .org – Non-profit organizations;
• .mil – military organizations

and there are country codes such as .ca for Canada, .fr for France, and .jp for Japan.

The second part of a domain name is called the Low Level Domain (LLD). This is what people commonly refers to as site name or domain name. In our case, our domain name is “blogthority”.

The third part is an optional part of a domain calle the subdomain. Subdomain allows web site administrator to organize a larger web site into smaller logical unit, such as, “http://subdomain.yourdomain.com”. In this examples, “subdomain” is a subdomain of “yourdomain”.

The description of a web site in a web directory or search engine. Human-edited web directories usually compose a description after reviewing the site. Crawlers may use the description embedded in the page’s code or meta description tag.

Deep linking is a direct link to any web page that is not the start page (index page, or home page) within a web site. This technique bypasses the usual “access route”, and some site administrator do not like this — i.e., advertisment pages are bypassed.

However, deep linking, in combination with keywords rich anchor text is a beneficial SEO technique to help achieve better search engine ranking.

Conversion ratio is the ratio of visitors from your web site that are “converted” into a sale or a lead. A conversion ratio of 5% would mean that for every 100 visitors to your site, 5 would click-through and turn into a sale or a lead.

Many factors will influence the conversion ratio, including the product of service itself, how targeted the traffic that is coming to your site, the link to the product or service, the visual or graphic, overall site design and usability, the price and value of the product or service being promoted, and the overall effectiveness of web site to drive sales or leads.

In search engine result pages, clustering is the grouping of multiple web pages from the same web site into one or two listings in order to improve search result by preventing a particular web site to dominate the search result. This also makes the list of results clearer and more useful to the user, while providing the user an option to explore a particular web site in greater detail. For instance, with Google, you can click on the “More results from www.yourdomain.com” to see all the results in the cluster.

Blind link is a link, either text or banner, that misleads the consumer — i.e., it takes you to some destination other than what you had expected. A common example is the “Choose your favorite color” or “Punch the monkey” banner.

See Link Text.

Link text is the clickable portion of text displayed (usually as blue, underlined text) for a link. Also known as anchor text.

Algorithm is a pre-defined set of computational operations that takes many factors into consideration to determine the search engine ranking of a web page for a specific key word or key phrase. One of Search Engine Optimizers biggest challenge is to figure out the algorithm of large search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN so that the web sites they are optimizing will have better search engine results page ranking.

Since search engine companies keep their search algorithm a secret, figuring out a search engine algorithm is basically a trial and error process where SEO experiments with different strategies and observe the changes in result. However, a webmaster can gain insightful information from different sources on the Web, including the Patent Database — for example Google Application for US Patent.

Cloaking is a technique used by some web sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing (or a page for each search engine for even more optimization), while serving an entirely different page to human visitors. Usually, this is an attempt to get higher search engine ranking.

There are opposing views as to whether or not cloaking is ethical. Opponents see it as a bait-and-switch, where a web server is scripted to look out for search engines that are spidering in order to create an index of search results. The search engine thinks it is selecting a prime match to its request; however, the search result is misleading because the page that the spider sees does not correspond to the page that human visitors see.

Some search engines, such as Google, ban cloaked web sites in attempts to improve the quality of its search results.

A web page is a document created with Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that is part of a group of hypertext documents or resources available on the World Wide Web. Every web page is identified by a unique Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

Collectively, these documents and resources form what is known as a web site. You can read HTML documents that reside somewhere on the Internet or on your local hard drive with a piece of software called a web browser. Web browsers read HTML documents and display them as formatted presentations, with any associated graphics, sound, and video, on a computer screen.

A web page can contain hypertext links to other places within the same document, to other documents at the same web site, or to documents at other web sites. They also can contain fill-in forms, photos, large clickable images (image maps), sounds, and videos for downloading.

UNIX is a computer operating system (the basic software running on a computer, underneath things like word processors and spreadsheets). It is the most common operating system for web servers on the Internet.

For more information, please visit What is UNIX? by the Open Group and UNIX Tutorial for Beginners.

Below the fold refers to content of a web page that is not seen immediately unless the user scrolls down.

Related terms: Above the Fold.

The term blog came from the phrase “Web Log”. A blog is basically a journal that is available on the Web. The activity of updating a blog is blogging and someone who keeps a blog is a blogger. Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in chronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominently.

Popular Blog software includes:

• WordPress
• Movable Type
• Live Journal

Popular Blog services includes:

• Blogger
• Wordpress.com
• Type Pad

Blind Traffic is low quality traffic generated by misleading banners or misleading spam. Blind traffic by nature is not targeted traffic.