dgm university

Term

Definition

Reciprocal linking

The practice of trading links between websites.

Redirect

Where the Internet user is automatically taken to another web page address without him/her clicking on anything. Redirects are generally not good for search engine rankings, as they dilute PageRank. There is also the risk that the search engine spider will not follow your redirect.

Referrer

A web page, containing a link to your web page that delivered your visitor to your web page.

Relevance

The likelihood that a given web page will be of interest or useful to a search engine user for a keyword search. 

Render

Format and stylize HTML source code into the final format for the visitor's screen. For example, text within <b> tags will be made bold.

Replica

A copy of a dynamic web site or a group of web pages from a dynamic site, saved as static HTML files. 

Resubmitting

Submitting your web page address(es) to search engines after you've already submitted those addresses previously or after the search engine has already included your site in its index. Search engines don't like it when you resubmit as it simply clutters their queue with duplicate requests.

Results

Can refer to SERPs 

Rewrite

As in "URL rewriting"

Robot

see "spider"

Robot.txt

Text file placed in a websites root directory and linked in the html code.

Allows for SEO's to control the actions of search engine spiders on the site or even deny them access.

Search engine

A web site that offers its visitors the ability to search the content of numerous web pages on the Internet. Search engines periodically explore all the pages of a website and add the text on those pages into a large database that users can then search. With a search engine, publishing web pages that incorporate relevant key phrases, prominently positioned in particular ways, is critical. Contrast this with directories, which don't siphon content out of the HTML of a site's constituent pages, but instead are comprised solely of site names and descriptions written or edited by human reviewers.

Search engine Marekting (SEM)

Strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines.

Search Engine Optimsation (SEO)

Strategies and tactics undertaken to influence the rankings of web pages in the search engines.

Search engine results page (SERP)

A page of search results delivered by a search engine.

Search term

A keyword, or phrase used to conduct a search engine query 

Search term popularity

see "keyword popularity" 

Select list

see "pull-down list"

SEM

Acronym for Search Engine Marketing 

SEO

acronym for "search engine optimization" and/or "search engine optimizer

SERP

An acronym for Search Engine Results Page.

SERPs

plural for SERP (search engine results pages)

Session

see "user session"

Sniffer script

a small program or script that detects which web browser software an Internet user is using and then serves up the particular browser-specific cascading style sheet to match. Sniffer scripts are also used to detect whether a user has the Macromedia Flash plug-in installed, and if so, a Flash version of the page is displayed.

Spamglish

keyword-rich gibberish used as search engine fodder instead of thoughtfully written, interesting content. Spamglish often includes meaningless sentences and keyword repetition.

Spamming

As in "spamming the search engines". Spamming is most commonly associated with the act of sending unsolicited commercial email, but in the context of search engine optimization, spamming refers to using disreputable tactics to achieve high search engine rankings. Such spamming tactics include bulk submitting spamglish-containing doorway pages.

Spider

Also known as a bot, robot, or crawler. Spiders are programs used by a search engine to explore the World Wide Web in an automated manner and download the HTML content (not including graphics) from web sites, strip out whatever it considers superfluous and redundant out of the HTML, and store the rest in a database (i.e. its index).

Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, recursively browsing the Web according to a set of policies.

A spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalog websites on the internet. When a spider indexes a particular website, this is known as 'being spidered'.