|
|
|
|
|
|
Glossary
Agent: A browser, or any other piece of software that can approach web servers and browse their content. For example: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape and Search Engine Spiders.
Algorithm: The way in which the search engine is "tuned". An algorithm is the way the search engine will determine ranks - it is the way the search engine is programmed to determine ranks. An algorithm may take only certain things into account - like keywords in the title.
Applet: A small piece of software which usually runs in a web browser as part of a web page. Using applets can disrupt robots and spiders/crawlers to search for keywords on the site.
Authentication: Procedure used to confirm the identity of the other party while a data transmission is in process.
Automatic Update: When the spider returns to your pages at periodic intervals to check to see if you have made any changes.
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.
Breadcrumb: Breadcrumb navigation (sometimes called a ‘breadcrumb trail’) locates the current webpage in the context of a navigation path.
Breadcrumb navigation for this glossary entry might look like this: Home > About Us > Profile
Client: A computer, software or process which makes requests for information from another computer, program or process. Web browsers are client programs.
Cloaking: A method to deliver different content to different agents. Used to send optimized pages to specific search engines. A very dangerous tool, that can cause a spam flag by the engines (They hate it).
Clustering: Listing of one page from each website within a search engine or directory. This avoids occupation of all the top results by a small number of web sites and makes the list of results clearer and more useful to the user.
Cookies: The purpose of cookies is to identify users and possibly prepare customized Web pages for them. When you enter a Web site using cookies, you will be asked to fill out a form with personal information. Then it will be packaged into a cookie and sent to your Web browser which stores it for future uses. The next time you go to the same Web site, your browser will send the cookie to the Web server.
CPC: An abbreviation for Cost-per-click, meaning you pay each time a user clicks on your advertisement.
Dead Link: An internet link which does not lead to a page or site, probably because the server is down, the page has moved or no longer exists.
DNS: Abbreviation of "Domain Name System” that translates numeric - IP (Internet Protocol) addresses into words.
Domain Name: The only name that identifies an Internet site. Domain Names have 2 or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the most specific, and the part on the right is the most general.
Domain Server: Contains the DNS information for a domain. There use to be 2 lines of DNS information: The site’s primary DNS information. And the second should contain back-up information.
Dynamic Content: Information on web pages, based on database content or user information. Sometimes it is possible to spot that this technique is being used, e.g. if the URL ends with .asp, .cfm, .cgi or .shtml. Search engines currently index dynamic content in a similar fashion to static content.
FAQ: Frequent Asked Questions are lists of answers for common questions on a particular subject. FAQ’s are usually written by people who are tired of answering the same question over and over, or by sites that want to make it easier for their visitors to understand all related terms.
Font and Background Spoofs: Various techniques used to place invisible text in a web page, to improve positioning without affecting the appearance of the page. These are mostly based on setting the font and background colors to the same value. Most search engines now detect these tricks.
Frames: A technique for combining separate HTML documents within a single web browser screen. A framed web site might cause problems for search engines, and may not be indexed correctly, yet some search engines do support framed pages.
Hosting: The service provided by an internet server given to web sites and domains for the purpose of storing there website.
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language. Language used to create Hypertext documents for use on the www (World Wide Web). HTML files should be viewed using a Web Browser.
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol - the (main) protocol used to communicate between web servers and web browsers (clients).
Inbound Links: A hypertext link to a particular page from elsewhere, bringing traffic to that page. Inbound links are counted to produce a measure of the page popularity.
Indexing: When the search engine takes the pages from the database that the spider has created and places them in an order based on the algorithms of that engine. All search engines have a different indexing process.
IP Delivery: This is A technique to present different content depending on the IP address of the client, for example different content according to your geographical location.
JavaScript: A simple interpreted computer language used for small programming tasks within HTML web pages. The scripts are normally interpreted (or run) on the client computer by the web browser. Some search engines have been known to index these scripts, presumably erroneously.
Keyword: A word, a phrase or a group of words, possibly combined with other syntax used to instruct a search engine or a directory in order to identify specific web pages.
Keyword Phrase: A phrase which forms (part of) a search engine query. This may contain one word or many words.
Keyword Stuffing: The repeating of keywords and keyword phrases in META tags or elsewhere on the page in order to advance search engine positioning.
Link Farm: A link farm is a group of separate websites for the purposes of artificially inflating link popularity (or Page Rank). Link farms are a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Link Popularity: Denote the number of sites referring to a particular site. Many search engines use link popularity as the main factor to determine the ranking of a web site.
No Frames: Spiders find frames more difficult to read than text, To avoid this put content within the inner frame, which the spider can read.
Parking: Please look at Hosting.
PPC: An abbreviation for Pay-Per-Click.
Proximity Search: A search where users can specify that documents returned should have the words near each other.
Recall: Related to precision, this is the degree in which a search engine returns all the matching documents in a collection. There may be 100 matching documents, but a search engine may only find 80 of them. It would then list these 80 and have a recall of 80%.
Robots: Any browser program which follows hypertext links and accesses web pages but is not directly under human control. Examples are the search engine spiders and "harvesting" programs which extract e-mail addresses and other data from web.
Search Query: A string that contains one word or more, sent to a search engine by the users.
SEO: Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a method to help search engines index web sites, find its content and links and rank higher in the search results for the desired search terms.
Spider/Crawler: A spider/crawler goes to your site and finds (=crawls) your pages. It then stores those pages in a database for future retrieval by the search engine.
Stemming: The ability for a search to include the "stem" of words. For example, stemming allows a user to enter "swimming" and get back results also for the stem word "swim."
Stop Words: Conjunctions, prepositions and articles and other words such as AND, TO and A that appear often in documents yet alone may contain little meaning.
Sub Domain: A web site that is hosted under a bigger domain. Mostly used by small companies who did not buy a private domain name.
Traffic: The number of visitors or hits that a web page gets in a certain period.
The article is sponsored by Compucall Web Marketing |
|
|
|
|
|
|
