Glossary

Here are some key terms used when talking about Search Engine Optimization.

Algorithm
A step-by-step procedure used by search engines to complete a search query.

Cloaking
Server-side technology that delivers different Web pages depending on whether the IP address is from a known search engine spider or someone else. If a search spider, the server feeds an optimized page. Otherwise a regular page is served. Search engines object to this technique and routinely toss cloaked pages, and in some cases ban the site entirely. This technique is also called IP spoofing.

Directories
A human edited index of Web sites categorized for easy searching. Yahoo, Open Directory and Look Smart are the most popular.

Doorway pages
Web pages designed to score high positions with search engines.

Dynamic content
Web pages with content generated by a database. They are not static html pages. They change when the database details are changed. Most e-commerce sites use dynamic content. Search engines a hard time indexing these pages and holding them in cache because they have URLs with a question mark, CGI or Session ID tag.

Frames
A Web browser feature that divides the Web page into sections. Each frame's contents come from a different Web page. Some search engines cannot read content frames. These search engines require special strategies such as doorway pages to gain search positions.

Hidden text
Putting text in the same color as a Web page’s background color. Once effective at gaining high search positions, but now the search engines penalize pages using this technique.

Information pages
Doorway pages developed to generate high positions on search engines.

IP spoofing
See "cloaking."

Key phrase density
The total number of keywords on a given Web page.

Keyword
A word that is relevant to a company’s products or services.

Link popularity
The number of other related Web sites that link to your site. In terms of search engine positioning, quality links are more important than the number of links. Search engines are now nullifying or penalizing sites using some link farms and link exchanges such as FFA (Free For All) sites popular with mass search engine submission programs.

List serve
E-mail management software that allows you and/or the subscribers to send email to the list. Includes the means to subscribe and unsubscribe.

Meta-tags
HTML code hidden from the browser that provides a variety of identifying information. There are over 30 different meta-tags. The ones that concern search engine optimization are the title, description and keywords. The title is shown at the top of the browser. Search engines often pick up the description when showing search results. Keywords should list the most important words relevant to the site and that Web page. However, today most search engines do not consider meta keywords for positioning.

Primary key phrase
The phrase that is the primary focus on a doorway page.

Query
A word or set of words that requests information from a database such as a search engine.

Search engine optimization
The practice of gaining high search engine position results for a website using specific search terms.

Search engines
Software programs that retrieve requested information from a database of indexed Web pages.

Search engine spiders
Software robots that "crawl" Web pages, reading text and following links to gather information for search engine databases.

Search index
The database of Web page contents that a search engine has collected.

Search relevancy
How each individual search engine determines how important a Web page or site is for a particular search query. Content, click-thru popularity and links are among the criteria.

Secondary key phrases
Additional phrases targeted in E-Power doorways. We find that by carefully selecting key phrases that are relevant to each other, we can be successful with more than one key phrase. Whether a key phrase is "Primary" or "Secondary" has to do with how it is used on a page. The "Primary" has the most important positions. The "Secondary" key phrases are used elsewhere on the page.

Spamming
Search engines consider over submission of Web pages, hidden text, creating many pages or sites with basically the same content, and repeating keywords as "spam." Search engines penalize or ban pages and sites using these techniques.

Spiders
The nick-name given to the automatic robots that each search engine has to do their search queries for them.

URL submission
A request to a search engine using online forms that a URL be indexed.

Unique visitor
Web site traffic measurement where each person's individual IP address visiting a particular Web site is counted only once, regardless of how many times it visits that particular site in a given day.

Web traffic
The number of visitors to a Web page.

Yahoo
The most visited site on the Web and consistently the biggest generator of Web site traffic. Yahoo differs from a search engine because human editors preside over Web site submissions and make the final decision on a Web site's listing within the directory. Yahoo is particular about the quality of Web sites it indexes. Its editors object to broken links or attempts at multiple listings of the same site. Automated submissions do not work with Yahoo, though some services still make the claim. And once a site is listed, it is not easy to change the category or description. After the Yahoo directory, Google feeds search results in the area known as Yahoo Web Pages. You can tell whether you are in Google by seeing its logo in the upper left hand corner. If your site is not listed with a Yahoo category, then you are not in the Yahoo directory.

 

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