For business owners and others who are just starting to learn about SEO, here are some of the most common terms in the industry, and what they mean.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - The act of making your website relevant and focused so that it earns top positioning for a particular word or phrase.

Keyword / Key Phrase - These are words or groups of words that potential customers type into a search engine when they think of your product or service.

Backlink - A hyperlink or link pointing back to a page on your website. This could be on a directory or on another web page. More info here

Adsense - Google Adsense is a program that allows website owners to place small ads on their sites. When visitors click on them, the website owner makes money. (there are ads on this page)

Meta Tags - Part of the code on a web page that tells the search engine what your site is about. Many site owners put keywords into their meta tags.

Page Rank - Created by Google, it measures their view of how important a website is. Download the Google Toolbar and you can see page rank on any web page that you visit.

Crawl - This term is used to identify that a web crawler or spider has visited a web page and possibly indexed it.

Indexing - Each search engine has a database of all the sites that they have visited (crawled). This is where the search results come from.

Keyword Density - A measure that is used to say how often a particular keyword or key phrase has been used on the web page.

Anchor Text / Link Text - The actual text of a hyperlink.

Organic Search Results / Traffic- This means that the webmaster did not have to pay for this traffic. It happened automatically through the search engines.

PPC (Paid Per Click) - Obviously, paid for traffic.

Site Map - A page on your website that has links to all of your pages.

If you would like to add more, feel free to post a comment or contact me (javancorp AT gmail DOT com.) and I will add the term to the list.