SEO Information Glossary
Frequently Used Search Engine Optimization Terminology
AB - C D - E F G - H I - J K L - M N - O P Q - R S - T U - V W X Y Z
R
Ranking – See Positioning for more page search engine ranking info.
Reciprocal Link – The practice of trading links between websites
Redirect – A redirect happens when the Internet user taken to another URL without any action performed by the user. A redirect can be seen as a spam tactic used to send a visitor to a different page to the one found in the search results
Referrer – A referrer is the internet address or URL of the web page from which a visitor initiated and is indicated on the server's referrer log file.
Registration – There are two distinct registrations on the internet. The first is the registration of a domain name. The second is the registration of domain pages with a search engine or directory in order to obtain listings.
Relevance – The measure of similarities between a search requests based on a keyword or phrase and the content of a websites pages. Search engines commonly return results based on content relevance.
Replica - A copy of a dynamic web site or a group of web pages from a dynamic site, saved as static HTML files.
Re-submission – Any page or site can be re-submitted to a search engine or directory. Re-submission of critical pages at given accepted intervals is necessary for some search engines; however, with most directories, once the domain has a listing, it should not be re-submitted.
Robot – A search engine spider is one example of a robot. Spider robots follow hypertext links and access web pages without human control. When a page is ‘spidered’ the robot scans the page for its content, places information into its database and at a later date the pages are ranked and added to the database that supplies search results.
Robots.txt – A text file used to control some spiders that visit your website. This file allows some access control with certain folders, file types, and specific files depending on the robot accessing the site.
ROI – Acronym for ‘Return On Investment’.
S
SE – Acronym for ‘Search Engine’.
Search Engine – A search engine is a searchable index that houses millions of URLs. The term Search Engine is commonly used to describe both directories and search engines. As a server or a collection of servers, search engines are dedicated to indexing and storing internet web pages and providing internet searchers with an ordered list of pages that match a particular query. These indexes are normally generated using indexing spiders. Yahoo is commonly mistaken as a search engine but is actually a directory.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines to maximize ROI from search engines.
Search Engine Optimization – See Optimization for more info on search engine optimization.
Search Engine Promotion – There are many aspects of Search Engine Promotion, including the optimizing of website pages and creating content rich pages to target specific keyword phrases. This is done to increase a websites visibility within Search Engine Rankings.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – the actual results returned to the user based on their search query.
Search Query – the process of searching for relative information when entering a ‘Search term’ using a search engine
Search Term – a keyword or phrase used when performing a search engine query
Search Term Popularity – see ‘keyword popularity’
SEM – Acronym for ‘Search Engine Marketing’.
SEO – Acronym for ‘Search Engine Optimization’.
SERP – Acronym for ‘Search Engine Results Page’
Server – Servers house Internet web pages. Web pages are provided to the searcher through the host server.
Site Hit – See ‘Hit’.
Site Map – This is a web page that establishes links to all pages found on your website in an intelligent and coherent manner. The site map gives a search engine quick access to spider all pages found within a website.
Site Submission – the process by which a site is submitted directly to a search engine for inclusion into their database. Some search engines charge a fee for 'guaranteed inclusion' into their search index. .
Spamglish – keyword-rich gibberish used as search engine fodder instead of thoughtfully written, interesting content. Spamglish often includes meaningless sentences and keyword repetition
Spamming – Spamming generally refers to the sending of unsolicited bulk electronic mail. It is also a term used by search engines to refer to methods that they consider unacceptable for increasing page relevancy to better ranking position.
Spider, Spyder – A spider is a robot program that surfs the web to index keywords and page text and then rank and order web pages according to what it deems most relevant. Web pages are then stored for access by internet queries. See also Robot.
Spider Trap – A dynamic website with constantly changing URL’s can cause an infinite loop that a spider may get caught. For this reason, search engines are very cautious when indexing dynamic website and will often limit the extent to which they will index a website.
Spidered – A term used to indicate that a website was visited by a search engine spider.
Spidering – The process used by a Spider to surf and index the web. Due to the ever-changing volume of available data, even the largest search engines are unable to spider all of the internet's pages. As a result, search engines compromise in a number of ways. They may index only home pages for example, or only spider pages that have been submitted to them.
Splash Page – Considered a form of ‘spam’ by most search engines, a splash page provides an initial display for viewing before a searcher can reach the main page. It is similar to a gateway page but with an added step.
Spoofing – The practice of deliberately tricking a search engine spider to increase search engine rankings or to rank for words that are not related to site content. Please refer to spamming and cloaking for more information.
Standards Complaint – Sites that are more accessible and usable to both humans and spiders alike thus, they tend to rank better in search engines than non-compliant sites. Standards Complaint sites use valid XHTML and CSS to separate the content layer from the presentation layer.
Static – A "static web page" is a web page that was not created dynamically from a database, but instead previously created and saved as a HTML file
Stemming – The automatic expansion of terms to include variants of the term based on different plural endings for words. Used by some search engines and directories to recognize common variations of a word. An example of word stemming is "act, acting, actor, acts, and actress". If a query for actor is used, pages that have actress, acting or act could also be displayed.
Stop Character – Certain characters that can be found in a web page's URL that suggest to a search engine that the page in question is dynamic. Characters such as ampersand (&), equals sign (=), and question mark (?) are all examples of a Stop Character.
Stop Word – certain words like single letter, two-letter and three-letter words (a, the, of, and, but) that search engines are instructed to ignore. These common words do not contribute to relevancy and are not recognized in a query.
Streaming Media – audio-visual content that allows an Internet user to begin viewing or listening to the file as it downloads rather than having to wait for the entire file to download first.
Submission Service – There are different types of submission services available. Submissions to search engines, directories, classified ad sites and newsgroups are done through submission service providers. The benefit of a submission service is the time saving aspect and the broad scope of targets available.
Supplemental Pages – Also known as Supplemental results, these pages usually only show up in the search index after the normal results. They allow Google to expand their database with content it deems as questionably related to the search.
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