An understanding of search engines and positioning requires
an understanding of some basic terminology. We've compiled
a list of search engine and promotion related terms to help,
but if you don't find what you're looking for just
ask
Click popularity: a measure of how often
a listing presented by a search engine is clicked. Some
search engines and directories will rank a site higher on
their results pages if the site proves to be popular among
searchers.
Cloaking: also known as "stealth,"
involves serving a specific page to each search engine spider
and a different one to human visitors. In most cases, frowned
upon by search engines.
Comment tag: html code that describes
or documents content. Most search engines ignore the content
of comment tags.
Directory:
directories are built from submissions made by website owners,
and generally arrange site listings hierarchically. Yahoo!
is the best known example.
Doorway page: a web page created solely
to achieve high ranking in search engines for particular
keywords, and perhaps for a specific engine. Today's doorway
pages should contain valuable and useful content related
to your site, and be fully linked to the site, and so are
often referred to as "information pages."
Dynamic html: web pages generated on demand
by data in databases or using similar technology. Can create
ranking problems because a search engine's spider may not
retrieve relevant content.
FFA Site: A so-called "free for all
links" page, which is created for the sole purpose
of compiling links. Submission software or companies that
claim to submit your site to hundreds or thousands of "search
engines" actually use these for most of that number.
FFA sites are essentially worthless in terms of generating
traffic, and links from them will count nothing towards
your site's link popularity. Basically, they're a waste
of time.
Frames: using frames allows the division
of a visible web page into separate scrolling regions. Can
cause both navigational and ranking problems as search engine
content.
Hidden text: see invisible text
Hit: relating to a search engine, the
number of sites or pages that are returned in response to
a given query. Relating to site traffic, a hit is counted
each time an individual file (document, image, multimedia
file, etc.) is served in response to a visitor's request.
Informational page: a content-filled web
page created to focus on particular keywords. Differs from
a "doorway page" in that is wholly integrated
into the site and is useful to human visitors, while a traditional
"doorway page" is aimed only at search engines.
Invisible text: using a font color the
same or close to the color of the background of a page,
in an attempt to allow the content to be indexed by search
engines while not being visible to humans. To search engines,
this is spam.
IP delivery or IP-based delivery: the
technique of serving a particular page in response to a
page request from a specific IP address. Used in cloaking;
a search engine is identified by the IP address it is using,
and a page customized for that search engine is served.
Keyword density: the ratio of the number
of occurrences of a particular keyword or phrase to the
total number of words in a page. One element of search engine
optimization.
Link popularity: essentially a measure
of how many other sites indexed by the same search engine
have links to your site. Link popularity is essentially
simply a count of links to a particular site; see also link
analysis.
Link analysis: a measure of the quality
and relevance of the set of links pointing to a given site;
contrast with link popularity.
Link Farms: sites created and maintained
solely for the purpose of constructing links between member
sites. Should be avoided as a violation of most search engines'
policies; their use won't build your site's link popularity,
and may result in a ranking penalty.
META refresh tag: automatically replaces
the current page with a different one within the website,
or possibly offsite. In general, use of refresh tags is
discouraged or penalized by search engines.
META tag: html tag in the header section
of a web page, intended to offer content to search engines.
Among them are the keyword and description tags, but these
days most true search engines de-emphasize or completely
ignore META tags.
Relevancy: how closely related a particular
page is to the search term requested.
Reputation: related to link popularity,
a page will score highest for reputation when it is linked
to by pages from other sites which themselves are highly
ranked. Well-known sites recognized as "authoritive"
are given high reputation scores on their own; it's for
this reason that a link to your site from something like
cnn.com would be very valuable.
Search
engine: one of the internet's searchable databases
of web pages, generally built by using "spiders"
to locate and read pages.
Search engine marketing:
encompasses several forms of marketing products and services
on the internet through management of information presented
by search engines and directories. Included are such elements
as site optimization, and the purchase and placement of
advertisements.
Search
engine optimization: the process of developing
web pages or web sites in such a way as to achieve favorable
placement in search engines and directories.
Search engine
positioning: the process of managing a page
or site's positioning in the search engines.
Selective delivery: the technique answering
browser's page request with a specific page selected via
an automated process based on some piece of information
gained from the browser. For example, reading the browser's
language setting may allow a page in that language to be
served. Similar to IP-based delivery.
SERP: A "search engine results page,"
the page of site listings that a search engine returns in
response to a user's entry of a search query. Often used
in discussion of the way such a page is laid out, for example:
"Overture listings are the first sites presented on
Yahoo's SERPs."
Spam: as it applies to search engines,
any attempt to submit or place deceptive information, or
to "trick" the search engine into placing a page
in an inaccurate position.
Spider: a program that traverses the web,
following links from page to page. Also called a robot.
Stop word: common words, or words considered
by search engines to be irrelevant, are left out by search
algorithms. Examples are "and," "the,"
etc. Generally, a stop word in a query is treated as a "wild
card;" that is, the returned results usually won't
be exactly the same as if the word had been left out of
the query entirely.
Theme: a relatively recent change in search
engine ranking algorithms, theme-based engines essentially
try to determine what a page is "about" — and
to compare it to other pages that seem to be related to
the same topic — and rank it highly for certain keywords
that are determined to be related to that page theme.
Word stemming: a practice used to some
search engines in which searches will return results for
words based upon a particular stem. For example, a search
for "develop" might return pages containing the
words "development" or "developer."
