I will update this glossary with terms as they come up in my posts.
Adsense
A Google program for site and blog owners to generate income from their business or personal web site or blog. It consists in placing contextual Adwords ads on one’s site and share revenue with Google.
Adwords
Adwords is the SEM tool that is Google’s main source of income. It comes in the form of pay-per-click text ads or site-targeted image ads.
Algorithm
An algorithm is the set of factors search engines use to serve their users with the web sites that best fit the query. The algorithm determines a web site’s relevance for certain keywords and phrases. The factors used in the algorithm are numerous, and apply both to on-page and off-page data.
Anchor Text
The anchor text is clickable text that is a link. It is often underlined.
Black-hat SEO
Black-hat SEO is optimizing web pages using dubious techniques that violate search engine guidelines, such as sneaky redirects, cloaking and invisible text. Black-hat SEO is often practiced in order to rank high by deceiving the search engines into thinking that your page is more relevant to a certain query than it really is. Search engines are fighting black-hat techniques by constantly updating their algorithms so that they can more easily detect these web sites. Black-hat SEO may result in rank loss or even exclusion from the search engine’s database, i.e. not showing up in the SERPs at all. Black-hat SEO is also referred to as SPAM. If you think a certain result for your query is spammy, you can file a spam report.
Cloaking
Cloaking is the black-hat practice of serving one page to a human visitor and another to a crawler. The crawler sees a page that has been designed specifically to be crawled by the search engines in the hopes that it might seem more relevant to the targeted keywords than the real page is. Humans get served the real page. Cloaking is strongly disapproved of by the search engines and is considered serious spam. Cloaking is similar to the black-hat technique of using doorway pages.
CPC
Cost per Click
Crawler
A crawler is a search engine robot that surfs the web, following links and indexing pages. Google’s crawler is called Googlebot. Google Adsense’s crawler is referred to as Media Bot. Crawlers follow links from one page to another within a site and / or from one site to another site. A crawler will typically look for a file called robots.txt, a robots exclusion protocol that webmasters can use to tell a robot not to index a certain page or not to follow the links on a certain page. Read more about robots exclusion. Read more about Googlebot.
Doorway page
A doorway page is a page that is designed to be crawled by search engines and usually contains keyword stuffing. A visitor to the site (both human and robot) gets redirected to the real page (usually on another domain) in about 1 second, the time it takes for a robot to crawl the page. The redirect is so fast that the human visitor will probably not notice. The use of doorway pages is strongly disapproved of by the search engines and is considered serious spam. Using doorway pages is similar to the black-hat technique of cloacking.
Googlebombing
An attempt to rank higher by using consistent anchor text from a lot of different sites in order artificially boost the number of inbound links to a page associated to certain keywords and the ranking for those keywords.
Googlebot
See “Crawler”
GoogleBowling
Sending links to your competitor’s web site from bad neighbourhoods in order to harm their ranking on Google.
IP
Internet Protocol, i.e. a format that allows for data to travel on the Internet towards its destination. Every computer on the Internet has its own unique IP number that identifies it.
Link Churn
Link Churn is the changes in links on a page over time. This means changes in where the link points to, its anchor text etc. Link Churn may result in a penalization from google if it is above a certain threshold. This is because changing links frequently is a method used by some blackhat SEO companies.
Organic Search Results
Organic results are the list of “natural” results that comes up when a search is done, as opposed to sponsored (or paid) results that usually come up next to or above the organic results and are clearly labeled as being paid results.
PPC
Pay per Click
SEM
Search Engine Marketing, usually in the form of paid listings in pay-per-click, banner advertising and site-targeted ads. Good web site promotion would be a combination of SEO, SEM and offline traditional marketing with brand awareness.
SERP
Search Engine Results Page, i.e. the list of URLs that is returned when a search is performed.
Spam
See “Black-hat SEO”
URL
Uniform Resource Locator, i.e. the address of a resource on the Internet
White-hat SEO
White-hat SEO is practiced by SEO’s and webmaster who follow search engine guidelines, like myself :),using techniques that search engines approve of. It is a simple matter of enhancing the features of a web page that make it easier for search engines to find them and to determine their relevancy to a certain search. I like to compare it to getting dressed up for a date: it’s still you, enhancing your features. In this context, I would compare black-hat SEO to wearing giant fill-ups in your bra so that your romantic interest is tricked into believing you have features that you don’t. 
Obviously I’m kidding, no offence.
