SEO glossary entries for ‘H’
- Head Words
- A Head Word is, generically, a word under which a set of related index, dictionary, or encyclopaedia entries are listed, i.e. it is the word used to locate a top-level entry in such a document. Variations, synonyms, etymologies, and related words or phrases, etc. are typically detailed in such entries. In SEO, a head word is a target ‘Keyword’ under which a whole range of variations and closely-related keywords are categorised.
- Header Tag
- An ambiguous term which could refer to either: 1. A tag of the HTML
<head>element, 2. A tag of the HTML5<header>element, 3. A<h1>–<h6>heading tag, 4. The whole HTML<head>element, 5. The whole HTML5<header>element. You will make yourself better understood, if you use one of those five expressions instead. - Heat Map
- A graphical representation of how visitors use web sites, e.g. of how the eye travels across a page, how users click certain page components and not others.
- Heuristics
- Rules of thumb that people follow in order to make judgments quickly and efficiently.
- Loose term. May refer to ‘Gateway Pages’ or ‘Cloaked Pages’ in either case it refers to pages which are not seen in or accessible through the normal navigational structures and links on a site.
- Hilltop algorithm
- The Hilltop algorithm is an algorithm, apparently used by Google and others, to find the web resources they consider to be most relevant to the topic represented by a search expression. In essence, it uses an index of ‘Expert Pages’ to rank search results, by comparing the search expression with the relevant anchor text on expert pages pointing to a given result page. Websites with ‘Backlinks’ from the top expert pages are considered ‘Authoritative’ and rank highly.
- Hit Rate
- Ambiguous term. May refer to the number of ‘Hits’ per ‘Page Impression’. Is more likely to refer to the ‘Conversion Rate’, i.e. desired outcomes as a percentage of total site or total page activity.
- Hits
- Any action by users or software that results in a HTTP request, i.e. a browser request for a web resource. Marketing-speak relic from the early days of the web, when non-technical marketers had not grasped the difference between meaningful and meaningless HTTP requests.
- hl
- Is a Google web search parameter which specifies the natural language of the user's interface.
- Homepage
- An index and summary of site content and news which the site owners consider important. It may be the most common entry page for repeat and habitual visitors, but is unlikely to be the first point of entry for new visitors; unless you have completely screwed up your SEO strategy by concentrating all of it on promoting the content-light homepage alone.
- Hot Linking
- A term used by traditional media folk for embedded images and media on a web page, which are served from another site's web server and are owned by someone else. Doing this without the media/server owner's permission may constitute theft of the media and of the bandwidth used to serve it. But that would depend on the licensing terms under which the media were created and published/distributed, e.g. the practice is entirely legal if the media are open sourced or copyleft and the server owner permits you to link to their server. This is exactly how a huge proportion of perfectly legal YouTube content is distributed.
- HTML email
- See ‘HTML-formatted Email’.
- HTML-formatted Email
- An e-mail message whose content is formatted using hypertext markup language, rather than plain text.
- See ‘Cookie’.
- Hub Pages
- Hub Page is a loose term to describe pages which are extremely popular for a given topic. Hub pages may or may not also be ‘Expert Pages’ or ‘Authority Pages’. They will not be considered expert if their owners have a significant private interest in many of the target pages they link to. They will not be considered authority pages if few of their in-bound links come from ‘Expert Pages’
- Hummingbird
- Hummingbird is the code-name given to Google’s overall ranking algorithm. It’s component algorithms include: ‘Panda’, ‘Penguin’, ‘Payday’, ‘Pigeon’, ‘Top Heavy’ ‘Mobile Friendly’ and ‘Pirate’