TechDuke

We have made a list of definitions or meanings for the words often used in Search Engine world.

Algorithm - The Long, complicated, secret set of formulas that a search engine uses to rank web pages or websites. It also determines how a web page will rank in the search results pages of a search engine. Every search engine has a different approach towards the factors involved, keywords, links etc.

Backlink or Inbound Link - Any link from another web page to your own (aka Incoming link).

Blind Traffic - Low quality traffic generated by misleading banners or Spam.

Crawling (aka Spidering) - The act of a spider following links and gathering the data from the pages it visits.

Conversion Rate - The ratio of visitor who takes the action you want, to the total number of visits.

CPA - Cost Per Action

CPC - Cost Per Click

Content - In this regard, the text of a web page, visible or not, examined by search robots.

Crawler or Robot - A programme used by a search engine to roam the web, finding, ranking, and indexing web pages. (aka spider, webcrawler, crawler, web-bot, bot).

Dead or Broken Link - The Target page of the link has been deleted or moved; disliked by search engines.

Directory - A categorized list of websites, maintained by human editor instead of robots. Yahoo is the most widely recognized directory on the web.

Indexed - How we refer to sites that are in a search engine’s database. If your site could come up in a search even if it’s on page 1000, you’re indexed.

Googlebot - The crawler Google uses on a daily basis to find and index new web pages.

keywords - Search terms that a webmaster wants to rank well for. A “keyword” is usually actually a short 2 to 4 words phrase.

Keyword (Key Phrase) - A word (or Phrase) typed into a search, producing web pages that contain that word or phrase.

Keywords Meta Tag - An HTML tag that lists all of the main keywords and key phrases that are contained on that web page. Some search engines pay attention to this tag, some do not.

Outbound Link - A link from a page of your site to another site

PageRank (PR) - Google’s measurement of how important a page is. Usually a score out of ten is assigned by Google to each indexed web page. This is the PageRank.

Pay Per Click (PPC) - A Search Engine or directory places your link in their database and charges you a fee every time your URL comes up in a search and is clicked on. The two largest PPC schemes are Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture) and Google Adwords.

Relevancy - How well a page matches a user’s query.

Sandbox - The imaginary place where new sites are held in Google before they start ranking well in the SERPs for competitive phrases, which is if they ever start ranking well at all.

Search Engine - The program(s) used to provide internet users with a search facility. Nowadays, mega corporations that own the engines have the same name.

Search Engine Friendly - A web page designed and optimized for high search engine rankings. Such pages are rich in keywords and structured for ease of crawling.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization.

SEM - Search Engine; encompasses SEO and further marketing methods, e.g. paid advertising options.

SERP - Search Engine (Search) Results page.

Spider - An automated robot program that follows the links from the pages on the web and gathers the data. Google’s spider is called Googlebot.

Stemming - Word variations. For example, if I entered the query “swim”, a search engine that supports stemming might return results that include “swimming or “swims”.

Stop Word - A small common word (a, as, the) which is ignored by search engines in a query when indexing web pages and processing search queries. This is because the word is so commonly used that it makes no contribution to relevancy. Examples are common net words such as computer and web, and general words like a, as, the get, I, me, and you.