Here’s a list of a 10 common abbreviations thrown around when SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is talked about.

BL - Backlink - A link from another site to yours

DC - Data Center - In SEO terms this usually refers to one of Google’s many datacenters around the world that coordinate their search engine activity.

LSA/LSI - Latent Semantic Analysis or Latent Semantic Indexing - This complex natural language processing algorithm is used, in part, by Google to analyze and rank the content of a site.

OBL - Outbound Link - A link going from your site to another site

PR - PageRank - The 1-10 measure of the popularity, age, trustworthiness and usefulness of a site that appears in the Google browser toolbar. It is used to determine advertising pricing in some cases. New sites are generally not ranked until the next export of data by Google which is only done a few times a year.

SE - Search Engine - Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, and others.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing - The use of search engine results to market a product vs. using online advertising.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer - The act of optimizing a web page in order to have it rank higher in search engines. It may also refer to a person who does this optimization.

SERP - Search Engine Results Page - The page number and position of a target site or page in the search engine results. Getting in the top 10 results for a common keyword is considered good while getting the in the top 3 positions is considered excellent, particularly if it displaces a Wikipedia entry.

SWL - SiteWide Link - A link that appears on all non-trivial pages of a site.

Do you have some more suggested SEO abbreviations? Feel free to leave a comment with them if you like.

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