Glossary of search engine optimization terms

About - human edited directory, mostly geared towards consumers; inclusion depends on Guides who act as editors for assorted categories

Ah-Ha - search engine and provider of advertising solutions; members of their program can have their listing appear in results on Excite, Dogpile, and Verizon; paid inclusion and free submissions offered

All The Web - search engine powered by FAST with an index of over 3 billion webpages; includes Boolean searches in its queries; closest to Google in terms of index size; paid inclusion and free submissions offered; owned by Yahoo!

Alta Vista - search engine; paid inclusion (two day turnaround), trusted feed (CPC), and free submissions (four to six weeks to be indexed) offered; owned by Yahoo!

ALT tags - defines the text to display for a graphic if the user has graphics turned off in their browser; visible when a cursor is placed over an image in Explorer, or in the source code

AOL Search - directory using DMOZ results enhanced by Google

anchor text - text on a webpage that is a link itself; some search engines consider that text relevant for describing the page being linked to

Ask Jeeves - natural language search engine; see also Teoma

ASP - active server pages; dynamic pages which allow user interaction and database connectivity for such applications as shopping carts, newsgroups and discussion forums

Boolean search - a search allowing the inclusion or exclusion of documents containing certain words through the use of operators such as "and," "not" and "or"

cloaking - delivering one version of a page to one user, and a different version to other users; it's purpose can be to provide custom language delivery, achieve geo-targeted advertising, or thwart page thieves from stealing ("code-jacking") optimized pages; unethical marketers have also used this strategy to spam search engines

comment tags - HTML tags used to hide text from browsers; some search engines ignore this text, but others index it as if the comment tags were not there

cost per click (CPC) - a paid placement method in which an advertiser will pay a specified amount (often determined through bidding) for each time that a web surfer clicks on an search engine result or banner ad

crawler - see spider

Direct Hit - see Teoma

directory - organized website listings categorized by human editors; different from search engines in that there is a navigable structure and listings are generally alphabetical rather than automated

DMOZ - see Open Directory Project

doorway page - a webpage created specifically to place well in search engine results, in theory serving as an alternative entry point to one's site; also known as bridge pages, gateway pages, entry pages, or portal pages

dynamic pages - automatically generated webpages with content that will vary depending upon database content or user input

entry page - see doorway

Excite - meta search engine; compiles results from Google, FAST, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, About, Looksmart, DMOZ, Overture, FindWhat, Sprinks, and others

FAST - search technology behind AllTheWeb.com; purchased by Overture, which was in turn bought out by Yahoo!

Flash - multimedia technology developed by Macromedia; allows designers to create visually appealing, interactive elements with relatively small file size, though Flash is another design technique that does present problems for SEO

frames - design technique for combining two or more independent HTML documents within a single web browser screen; loading times and site navigation can be improved with frames, however, they do present problems with search engine indexing, bookmarking pages, and deep linking

gateway page - see doorway

Google - world's most popular search engine, with an index of over 3 billion webpages; refreshes Web index about once a month

Google Dance - term used to describe the shake-up that occured when Google did monthly updates of their index; it is now believed, however, that Google continuously updates their index

Go To - see Overture

heading - pronounced text on a webpage, much like the headings of articles in print; search engines have been known to give more weight to keywords found within heading tags

hits - request of a file from a server; very frequently misused to mean page views or unique visitors; a request for a page counts as a hit, but so does a request for a graphic on that same page, meaning a user visiting a page with ten separate navigation graphics will count as 11 hits on the server

Hot Bot - formerly a search engine with its own index, Hot Bot now offers search results from Google, FAST, Inktomi, and Teoma

HTML - HyperText Markup Language; the main language used to write webpages

HTTP - HyperText Transfer Protocol; the main protocol used to communicate between web servers and web browsers

inbound link - a link to your site from another site; they are counted as a measure of page popularity

index - the searchable catalog of documents maintained by search engines and directories

Inktomi - search syndication service providing information to numerous sites; powers in part About, Hot Bot, Looksmart, MSN, Overture, and others; free submission and paid inclusion opportunities

iWon - portal offering Google search engine results

Javascript - computer language which runs scripts on the client-side to create interactive elements within HTML pages; supported by both MS Internet Explorer and Netscape, though not necessarily the same way

keywords - word which is part of a search query

keyword density - measurement of the frequency and positioning of keywords on a page; varies greatly between search engines depending on what a spider considers to be a "word"and which tags are supported; should be great enough so that a keyword is recognized as more than incidental, but low enough so that the page is not considered to be part of a spamming effort

link exchange - see reciprocal linking

link popularity - a measure of the quantity and quality of links to your site; the quantity, in theory, adds impartiality to the computation of results in that good sites will naturally attract more links than poor ones; the quality is determined by the source of the inbound link (a major directory will carry more weight than an an obscure personal home page)

link text - see anchor text

Looksmart - web directory; claims to reach 77% of U.S. Internet users through their search partners, which include About.com, Alta Vista, Netscape Netcenter, InfoSpace (Excite, Dogpile, MetaCrawler, WebCrawler), CNET's Search.com, and others; formerly the most significant source of MSN's search results, their relationship will cease in January 2004

Lycos - portal with search function powered by own index; free URL submission and paid inclusion (3 day turnaround guaranteed) available

machine names - an extension of your domain which can be found at the same IP address; for example, database-development.chicagointernet.com is a machine name of the primary domain www.chicagointernet.com

meta search engine - search engine which compiles its results by querying other search engines; dogpile.com, metacrawler.com, mamma.com, and search.com are all examples

META tags - metadata (data that describes other data) in the HTML header of a webpage, unseen to a site visitor; the most commonly used forms are the description and keyword tags which are used to suggest summary text and keyword themes, respectively, to search engine spiders (which may or may not ignore this information)

mirror sites - multiple copies of a website or webpage, usually hosted on separate servers; registering these sites with search engines is considered spamming as it artificially inflates these pages' relevancy

MSN - portal with search function powered in part by Looksmart (until 2004); most likely powered by internal Microsoft resources thereafter

Netscape - portal with search function which allows users to access results from Google, Ask Jeeves, Looksmart, Lycos, Overture, or the site's own index

Northern Light - search engine geared towards business and research users; now defunct as public Internet search engine, but will possibly return someday

Open Directory Project - the largest human directory on the Web, constructed and maintained by volunteers from around the world; after submitting a URL it can take two weeks to several months for a site to be included, depending on editor

optimization - process of choosing keywords, then making changes to a webpage for the purpose of improving it's position in the SERPs when those keywords are part of a query; may include alterations to the design, navigation, headings, content, ALT tags, META tags, or a number of other site elements

Overture - world's largest provider of pay per performance search; advertisers bid for placement in search results for keywords relevant to their business; results are screened for relevance then distributed to search partners such as MSN, Yahoo!, and Lycos; they purchased Alta Vista & FAST Web Search in 2003, then were bought out by Yahoo!

page title - text that appears at the top of a browser window; one of the most important tags in the eyes of search engines, sometimes used as the title of a page in the results; keywords used in the page title are generally given more weight

pageviews - request to load a single HTML page; a more accurate way of tracking visitor traffic than page hits

PageRank - system for ranking webpages utilized by Google, and the source of much controversy in the SEO world; a measure of a page's relevancy by looking at the number and importance of the pages that link to it, and the number and importance of pages that link to those pages, and so on; Google detractors argue whether PageRank is actually a subjective or objective measure

paid inclusion - paying a search engine for a guarantee that a specific URL will be included in their index; especially beneficial for sites with frequently changing content, as most paid inclusion programs will revisit a site every two or three days

paid submission - paying a search engine or directory for a (usually expedited) review of your site; acceptance into their index is not guaranteed

PHP - script language and interpreter used primarily on Linux web servers; an open source alternative to ASP technology

portal - any site which serves as a entry point to the Web or a niche topic; often these sites offer a search engine or directory, e-mail, stock quotes, news, shopping, and other customizable options

PR - abbreviation for Google's PageRank

reciprocal linking - links between two sites, usually created through an agreement between the site owners

robot - browser program, not under human control, which follows hypertext links to access webpages; examples include search engine spiders and "harvesting" programs which extract e-mail addresses and data from websites

robots.txt file - text file stored in the top level directory of a website to deny access by robots to certain pages or sub-directories; only robots which comply with the Robots Exclusion Standard will obey the commands in this file

search engine - software that indexes documents, then provides matching results to queries; most commonly used in reference to programs which index the Web, though other types do exist

SEM - search engine marketing; see optimization

SEO - search engine optimization, or search engine optimizer (refering to the person who does the optimization work); see optimization

SERPs - search engine result pages

spamming - the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail; also can be a reference to any action with the intent to deceive search engine spiders (i.e., unethical alterations to a webpage or frequent URL submission), sometimes called "spamdexing"

spider - search engine software that scans documents by following links, then adds them to an index

Subject-Specific Popularity - proprietary search filter developed by Teoma; system of ranking a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity

submitting (a site) - inviting a search engine spider to visit your site by providing it with a URL

static pages - webpages which remain the same unless changed by the webmaster, as opposed to dynamic pages which are created by queries to a database

stop words - words which appear often in documents, yet alone may contain little meaning, and thus are often ignored in search engine queries; examples include conjunctions, prepositions, and articles ("and," "to," and "a"), as well as general words ("you," "on," and "I")

Teoma - search engine (formerly known as Direct Hit) which uses Subject-Specific Popularity to determine relevancy; offers paid inclusion within seven days to a database which also powers Ask Jeeves

title tag - see page title

trusted feed - paid inclusion program aimed at businesses with large websites or sites with mostly dynamic pages, giving them a great deal of control over how their listing in the results appears; companies are able to submit many URLs, each with its own custom titles, keywords, and descriptions; service generally provided on a CPC basis

unique visitor - real visitor to a site within a specified time period, determined by examining IP addresses; someone who navigates through 20 pages of your site in a day will count as 20 page views, but only 1 unique visitor because all the pages were requested by the same IP address

URL - universal resource locator; the location of a resource on the Internet, including the protocol (i.e., http, ftp, telnet), domain name (or IP address), and additional path information (file, folder, etc.)

Webcrawler - formerly important search engine which now mirrors Excite results

Yahoo! - portal with search function powered by own directory and third party search engines (mainly Google), as well as one of the most popular sites on the Web; nonprofit sites can be submitted to directory free of charge, with expedited review (seven business days) also available for $299 (required for commercial sites); now owns Inktomi and Overture

Zeal - directory owned by Looksmart; community driven in that Internet enthusiasts from around the world (who must first pass a proficiency test) help professional editors compile the sites that are accepted; listings will appear in results on queries made at Looksmart, MSN, Excite@Home, Alta Vista, media companies such as Time Warner, and more than 370 Internet service providers