Search Engine Glossary - Search Engine Terminology You should
Know
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search engine glossary
Here is an ever growing list of search engine terms you should
know. The search engine gloassary has been organized alphabetically.
If you would like to add a term to the list please email us at info@salientmarketing.com.
J - Search Terms
Java
A computer programming language whose programs can run on a number
of different types of computer and/or operating system. Used extensively
to produce applets for web pages.
Javascript
An 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.
K - Search Terms
Keyword
A word which forms (part of) a search engine query.
Keyword Density
A property of the text in a web page which indicates how close together
the keywords appear. Some search engines use this property for Positioning.
Analysers are available which allow comparisons between pages. Pages
can then be produced with the similar keyword densities to those
found in high ranking pages.
Keyword Domain Name
The use of keywords as part of the URL to a website. Positioning
is improved on some search engines when keywords are reinforced
in the URL.
Keyword Phrase
A phrase which forms (part of) a search engine query.
Keyword Stuffing
The repeating of keywords and keyword phrases in META tags or elsewhere.
L - Search Terms
Link Popularity
See page popularity.
Log File
A file maintained on a server in which details of all file accesses
are stored. Analysing log files can be a powerful way to find out
about a web site's visitors, where they come from and which queries
are used to access a site.Various software packages are available
to analyse log files, and some are listed below.
Salient Marketing can analyze your log files. You log files contain
a wealth of visitor behaviour information which can help you make
decisions about usability, campaign management and advertising options.
Call us at 613-266-9812 or email us at info@salientmarketing.com
for more information.
LookSmart
A medium-sized directory. The URL is http://www.looksmart.com.
Lycos
One of the largest search engines, Lycos appears to be moving towards
becoming a directory and is using the Open Directory for some search
results. It can be slow to index new sites. The lycos spider ignores
meta tags in pages. Lycos can be found at http://www.lycos.com.
M - Search Terms
Metacrawler
A meta search engine found at http://www.metacrawler.com.
Results from various search engines are summarised in an easy to
read form.
Metafind
A meta search engine found at http://www.metafind.com.
Meta Search
A search of searches. A query is submitted to more than one search
engine or directory, and results are reported from all the engines,
possibly after removal of duplicates and sorting. Also the meta
search engine of the same name, found at http://www.metasearch.com.
Meta Search Engine
A server which passes queries on to many search engines and/or directories
and then summarises all the results. Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, Infind,
Metacrawler, Metafind and Metasearch are examples of meta search
engines.
Meta tag
A construct placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing information
which is not visible to browsers. The most common meta tags (and
those most relevant to search engines) are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION.
The KEYWORDS tag allows the author to emphasise the importance of
certain words and phrases used within the page. Some search engines
will respond to this information - others will ignore it. Don't
use quotes around the keywords or keyphrases.
The DESCRIPTION tag allows the author to control the text of the
summary displayed when the page appears in the results of a search.
Again, some search engines will ignore this information.
The HTTP-EQUIV meta tag is used to issue HTTP commands, and is frequently
used with the REFRESH tag to refresh page content after a given
number of seconds. Gateway pages sometimes use this technique to
force browsers to a different page or site. Most search engines
are wise to this, and will index the final page and/or reduce the
ranking. Infoseek has a strong policy against this technique, and
they might penalize your site, or even ban it.
Other common meta tags are GENERATOR (usually advertising the software
used to generate the page) and AUTHOR (used to credit the author
of the page, and often containing e-mail address, homepage URL and
other information).
Want to test your meta-tags or create your meta-tags, use Salient
Marketing's automated search engine
tools.
Mirror Sites
Multiple copies of web sites or web pages, often on different servers.
The process of registering these multiple copies with search engines
is often treated as spamdexing, because it artificially increases
the relevancy of the pages. Filters such as the Infoseek Sniffer
now remove multiple mirrors from the indexes.
Misspellings
People quite often spell words incorrectly when using search engines.
Pages which use common misspellings will quite often receive extra
hits, so it is a useful technique to include common misspellings
of words in alt tags, keywords, page names and titles. A similar
effect occurs when spaces are missed out and words are accidentally
joined together.
Multiple Domain Names
The use of several extra domains to provide gateway pages or gateway
sites to the main site.
Multiple Keyword Tags
The use of more than one Keywords META tag in order to try to increase
the relevancy of the best keywords on a page. This is not recommended.
It may be detected as a spamming technique, or all but one of the
tags may simply be ignored.
Multiple Titles
It used to be possible to repeat the HTML title tag in the header
section of a page several times to improve search engine positioning.
Most search engines now detect this trick.
N - Search Terms
Netfind
See AOL Netfind.
Northern Light
A search engine with an additional "pay to access" special
collection of business, health and consumer publication articles.
The first search engine to ban meta search engines from its database.
The URL is http://www.northernlight.com.
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