SEO glossary entries for ‘I’

IDF: See ‘Inverse Document Frequency’.
IE: Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser.
ie (lowercase): Is a Google web search parameter which specifies the input encoding, i.e. the character set being used by the input device.
IE10: Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, version 10.
IE6: Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, version 6.
IE7: Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, version 7.
IE8: Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, version 8.
IE9: Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, version 9.
IM: See ‘Instant Messaging’.
Impression: See ‘Page Impression’.
In-bound Link: See ‘Inbound Link’.
In-page links: Hypertext links from one part of a page to another part of the same page. Unless they are clearly labelled, such links can mislead or surprise users who expect that clicking on a link will take them to the top of another page — i.e. the normal case.
Inbound Link: An inbound link (IBL) is a hypertext link targeted on the page under scrutiny, i.e. that when activated will bring ‘inwards’ traffic to the page. Typically used only to mean links inbound from another site.
Index Size: The number of entries in a database index. For universal search engines that seek to map the entire web, ‘size matters’. Since it is impossible to compare page content that you have discovered and indexed, with page content that you have not discovered and indexed, the primary means for improving the quality of universal search engine indexes is to acquire a bigger dataset, i.e. as your sample increases as a proportion of the target population the more confident you can be about the representativeness of the sample and the analyses that you have done upon it. The notion that a late-comer to the search engine business may gain some advantage from a smaller, but cleaner, index has some plausibility — e.g. by using more modern and sophisticated to prevent ‘dirty data’ getting into their index in the first place. However, this is not an hypothesis that is possible to test under acceptably controlled conditions. Anecdotally, the fact that Google continues to increase its share of the universal search market, despite having an older and larger index, suggests either that this hypothesis is not well-founded, or that market share is not exclusively linked to the quality of search engine results. In either case, the virtuous circle of ever more users providing an ever larger sample size, may render any advantages of pre-filtering over post-indexing clean-ups, entirely moot.
Indexation: Uncertain meaning. Looks like it may simply be a mistaken expression for ‘indexing’. See ‘indexing’.
Indexing: The process of placing an item of data in a database index. Various factors will influence that placement, e.g. likely frequency of retrieval and editing or which other items it should be associated with.
Informational Page: A web page that concentrates on conveying information, rather than carrying out transactions or trying to influence its readers emotionally — in the way that a sales, brand-management or entertainment oriented page might. Informational pages are often contrasted with ‘Transactional’ ones. Informational pages — especially long ones with lots of authoritative content — are more likely to match the search expressions and terms typed by users into search engines. This is mainly, because they usually contain many more nouns identifying substantial, real-world, concrete objects, i.e. exactly the kind of words users build queries around. Emotionally affective content is much less likely to match typical queries, since the adjectives and adverbs that they specialise in, tend to be generic and non-specific, e.g. an adjective like ‘best’ can be applied to any manner of thing, where as a noun like ‘motorbike’ can only apply to a relatively restricted category of things. See ‘Transactional Page’.
Informed Search: A normal search with directing, hinting, or cueing properties.
Internal Link: A link between pages within the same site, or subsite.
International SEO Backlink Analysis Tool: A tool that analyses backlinks to a page and identifies the language they are written in. Written by Tom Anthony.
Interruption marketing: The opposite of ‘Permission Marketing’, i.e. the advertiser pushes messages out to target audiences, so that successful transmission interrupts the audience while it conducts other business. Most traditional advertising falls into this category, so the term is often used as a pejorative synonym for ‘old school’, ‘pre-web’, ‘non-interactive’ advertising.
Inverse Document Frequency: (IDF) is a statistical metric which captures the importance of a given word or phrase to a document, within a larger in a collection of documents. It is typically used as a weighting factor in the content analysis software used by search engines and data mining packages. In other words, IDF is used to measure the extent to which the keywords used in a document match or diverge from the norm for a given topic.