Search Engine Glossary - Search Engine Terminology You should
Know
home >
resources >
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.
O - Search Terms
Open Directory Project
A directory project run by thousands of volunteer editors. In principal,
this is a very exciting and powerful way to organise the web. In
practice, there have been some problems with the behaviour of some
of the editors, which has caused some initial difficulty for the
organisers. Initially known as NewHoo, the project is now part of
Netscape (and therefore of AOL). See http://dmoz.org.
Open Text
A large business-only directory. The URL is http://www.opentext.com.
Optimization
Changes made to a web page to improve the positioning of that page
with one or more search engines. A means of helping potential customers
or visitors to find a web site. Optimization may involve design/layout
changes, new text for the title-tags, meta-tags, alt- attributes,
headings, and changes to the first 200-250 words of the main text.
A large image map at the top of a page should be moved further down
the page. Frames should be avoided (unless navigational links are
also provided within the frames).
P - Search Terms
Page Popularity
A measure of the number and quality of links to a particular page
(inbound links). Many search engines are increasingly using this
number as part of the positioning process. The number and quality
of inbound links is becoming as important as the optimization of
page content. To measure your Page/Link
Popularity, use our free SEO
tools.
Page Rank
The heart of the Google search engine is PageRank, a system for
ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey
Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers
working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank
continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by
using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's
value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page
B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than
the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes
the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves
"important" weigh more heavily and help to make other
pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which
Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important
pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google
combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to
find pages that are both important and relevant to your search.
Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page
and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content
of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for
your query.
Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with
our results extremely difficult. And though we do run relevant ads
above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within
the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank).
A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality
websites with information relevant to your search.
To measure your Page Rank,
use our free SEO tools.
Page View
Used in site statistics as a measure of pages viewed rather than
server hits. Many server hits may be made to access a single page,
causing many separate log file entries. Analysis software can determine
that these server hits were generated when a visitor viewed a single
page, and group them together to provide this more useful method
of counting visitors. See also Hit and Unique Visitor.
Placement
See Positioning.
Politeness Window
In order not to overburden any particular server, most search engine
spiders limit their access to each server. If your page is hosted
on the same server as thousands of other pages, the spider may never
get the time to reach (and index) your page. This can be a powerful
argument for having your own server.
Portal
See Gateway page. Can also mean Portal Site.
Portal Page
See Gateway page.
Portal Site
A generic term for any site which provides an entry point to the
internet for a significant number of users.
Examples are search engines, directories, built-in default browser
or service provider homepages, sites hardwired to browser buttons,
sites offering free homepages, e-mail or personalised news and any
popular (or heavily advertised) sites that significant numbers of
people may bookmark or set as default pages.
Positioning
The process of ordering web sites or web pages by a search engine
or a directory so that the most relevant sites appear first in the
search results for a particular query.
Positioning Technique
A method of modifying a web page so that search engines (or a particular
search engine) treat the page as more relevant to a particular query
(or a set of queries).
Q - Search Terms
Query
A word, a phrase or a group of words, possibly combined with other
syntax used to pass instructions to a search engine or a directory
in order to locate web pages.
R - Search Terms
Ranking
See Positioning.
Referrer
The URL of the web page from which a visitor came. The server's
referrer log file will indicate this. If a visitor came directly
from a search engine listing, the query used to find the page will
usually be encoded in the referer URL, making it easy to see which
keywords are bringing visitors. The referer information can also
be accessed as document.referrer within JavaScript or via the HTTP_REFERER
environment variable (accessible from scripting languages).
Refresh Tag
See the paragraph about HTTP_EQUIV under Meta Tag.
Registration
The process of informing a search engine or directory that a new
web page or web site should be indexed.
Relevancy Algorithm
The method a search engine or directory uses to match the keywords
in a query with the content of each web page, so that the web pages
found can be ordered suitably in the query results. Each search
engine or directory is likely to use a different algorithm, and
to change or improve its algorithm from time to time.
Re-submission
Repeating the search engine registration process one or more times
for the same page or site. Under certain circumstances, this is
regarded with suspicion by the search engines, as it could indicate
that someone is experimenting with spamming techniques.
Robot
Any browser program which follows hypertext links and accesses web
pages but is not directly under human control. Examples are the
search engine spiders, the "harvesting" programs which
extract e-mail addresses and other data from web pages and various
intelligent web searching programs. A database of web robots is
maintained by Webcrawler.
robots.txt
A text file stored in the top level directory of a web site to deny
access by robots to certain pages or sub-directories of the site.
Only robots which comply with the Robots Exclusion Standard will
read and obey the commands in this file. Robots will read this file
on each visit, so that pages or areas of sites can be made public
or private at any time by changing the content of robots.txt before
re-submitting to the search engines. The simple example below attempts
to prevent all robots from visiting the /secret directory:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /secret
SalientMarketing is Search Engine Marketing and Market Research Firm.
Our staff of marketing and technology professionals deliver services that maximize
the return on investment (ROI) for online and offline marketing
initiatives. Our process of implementation is rooted in upfront research followed
by a measurement of success, ensuring that our strategies are on target and
exceed expectations. It's all about taking the guesswork of business success.
>> Click here for our list
of services or solutions that we provide
|
