Hallway page - A hallway page is a page that links to other pages located deeper in a site structure. A sitemap, a page that lists all categories from a site or a page that lists all products from a category are all examples of hallway pages; also almost any page within a directory (except the final pages) are hallway pages. The general idea is that once the hallway page is indexed by search engines soon enough search engines’ robots will follow all those links and index the linked pages as well.
Heading tag – In fact there is not only one heading tag, but seven of them (from the most important to the least important: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, H7). Normally the heading tag is used for titles and subtitles and, if there is no CSS formatting in place, it is considerably bigger than the regular text. Search engines give more importance to the text which is used within a heading tag (again the importance goes down from H1 to H7). Optimizing heading tags is one of the most important in-page SEO factors.
Hidden text – Using hidden text (text that it is visible for search engine bots, but not visible to human visitors - for example white text on white background or text in an invisible table cell or frame) was one of the most efficient black hat SEO tactics in the past, but nowadays it’s not working anymore and in most cases sites that use this technique end up banned by search engines.
Hijacking of websites – The process of hijacking a website is based on the fact that search engines don’t like sites that duplicate other sites content and if they found two sites with similar content they will keep only the site that they feel is the original one (generally the older, more trustful, more popular one) and ban or move to the supplemental index the other site. Website hijackers create a site similar with the one they want to hijack on an old, trustful, popular domain and apply certain tactics to assure that search engines will consider their site as the original one and bad / move to the supplemental index the hijacked site. This is quite an effective black hat SEO tactic when it comes about hitting a web site, but if the offender site is reported it will most likely be completed banned from search engines.
Hits – Every access / download of a file (not resuming to html pages, but also including images for examples) counts as a hit. Therefore counting the total number of hits was the first and easiest way to tracking the traffic of web sites. However it is a very inaccurate statistic, because it doesn’t give any real information about the number of visitors, and not even of the total number of visits on a single page. And here’s why – for example if we have 25 images on a web page and somebody access that page than his visit will be counted as 26 hits (25 hits for the images and 1 hit for the web page); so if someone navigates a few minutes on a site with quite a lot of images he can easily generate a few hundred hits, while in fact it’s about a single visitor.
Homepage – The homepage is the main page of a website, usually defined as www.domainname.com. Since it is the page that gets most back-links and is the first one to be optimized it tends to be the one that has the highest PR (page rank) from the whole site and ranks best in search engines. Because of this it is highly recommended to have the homepage optimized for the main key phrase and linking to the most important inner pages. On the same note, one of the biggest mistake someone can make when it comes about creating a web site is to have only an intro on the main page since this way their home page will most probably never rank high enough in search engines to deliver a decent number of visitors. It is also called index page.
HTTP 301 error code – A HTTP 301 error code inform the user / browser that the page that is trying to be accessed was „moved permanently” to another URL. When a page is moved to a new location or when it is renamed it is a very good idea to create a 301 redirect from the old page name to the new one so the new page will receive all benefits (including the page rank and backlinks) of the old page.
HTTP 302 error code – A HTTP 302 error code informs the user / browser that the page that is trying to be accessed was “moved temporarily” to another URL; please note that a 301 redirect is better than a 302 redirect in terms of search engine optimization. HTTP 400 error code– A HTTP 400 error code informs the user / browser that the server was unable to perform its request.
HTTP 401 error code – A HTTP 401 error code informs the user / browser that the access to the file was not authorized; this error is common when a file is password protected and it requires the user /to authentificate before accessing the file.
HTTP 403 error code – A HTTP 403 error code informs the user / browser that the access to the file was forbidden by the server. HTTP 404 error code– A HTTP 404 error code is the most common error code and it informs the user / browser that the page he’s trying to access is no (longer) existing on the server. HTTP 410 error code– A HTTP 410 error code is the most common error code and it informs the user / browser that the page he’s trying to access was removed permanently from the server.
HTTP 500 error code – A HTTP 500 error code informs the user / browser that the document generated an internal server error (this can happen when accessing dynamic pages like php or asp and not when accessing simple HTML files).
HTTP 501 error code – A HTTP 501 error code informs the user / browser that the access to the server is not able to handle that type of documents.
Hub – A hub is a trusted site that is highly focused on a certain filed of activity and that links to a lot of authority sites which contain content which is relevant to its theme. Please note that a site can be a hub and an authority at the same time. Hyperlink – A hyperlink is a web page element (text, image) which when it’s clicked will redirect the browser to a different web page. It is also called a link.
