Search Engine Optimisation Glossary

Search Engine

Internet search engines (eg Google, Yahoo!, Bing) help users find web pages on a given subject. The search engines maintain databases of web sites and use programs (often referred to as "spiders", “crawlers” or "robots") to collect information, which is then indexed by the search engine. When a user enters a search query, the search engine will then return a list of results, ranked in order of supposed relevance.


Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and/ or quality of traffic to a web site from the ‘organic’ listings in search engines. Typically, the higher a site appears in the search results pages, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. The process of SEO incorporates ensuring that your website has content relevant to search queries, that this content is easily accessible and that your site is seen as ‘credible’ or ‘important’ by the search engine.


Search Engine Spider/ “Spiderability”

Often called a “crawler” or "robot", a spider is a functional software component of a search engine that continually visits web documents and "crawls" the web by following links through one document to another. Spiderabilty assurance is a process that ensures that search engine spiders are able to crawl all content publicly available on websites to be indexed on search engine databases. Spiderability assurance enables search engines to locate and rank all URLs on a site’s pages. The more pages a site has on the search engine database (index), the higher page saturation a site has, the higher the chances of higher site ranking within natural search results.


Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin is the Russian born American co-founder of Google, the world’s largest internet company. Brin met Google’s co founder, Larry Page, whilst studying for a Ph.D in Computer Science at Stanford University.


Sitemap

A site map is a blueprint for a Web site. Site maps help users and crawlers/spiders navigate through a Web site that has more than one page by outlining a diagram of the entire site's contents.


Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing helps companies to engage with their target audience through innovative online channels. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. In the context of Internet marketing, social media refers to web properties whose content is primarily produced by users. The purpose of SMM is to create a buzz that attracts the attention of, and encourages discussion amongst users or fans of particular brands/ organisations.


Title Tags

An HTML tag with text describing a specific Web page (but not visually displayed on the page). The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page and be constructed following specific guidelines. The title tag is important because it usually becomes the text link to the page found in search engine listings, and because search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages.


Quality Score

Specific to Google’s PPC, 'Quality Score' is calculated for each keyword advertisers bid for. Quality score looks at over 100 different factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A high Quality Score helps advertiser’s ads to gain a higher position and a lower cost-per-click.


Unique Visitor

A visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site in a given time period.


Universal Search

Universal Search refers to the integration of a variety of media into search engine results pages. Results pages now frequently include maps, images, videos, products and news. When considering online marketing methods, more and more companies are developing integrated search campaigns, focusing on a variety of media to help gain top rankings and maximise brand visibility.


URL

Uniform Resource Locator – A URL identifies a web resource and provides a means of locating that resource. URLs are typically entered into the address bar of a web browser, after the domain name. i.e.www.domain.com/url


Website Usability

Website usability refers to the ease in which a user can find relevant information within a website. If a user ‘lands’ on a website following a search and is not immediately presented with information that is relevant, there is a strong chance that they will ‘bounce’ back to the search engine results page. Techniques such as ‘breadcrumb’ navigations and ensuring a 3-click-to-sale methodology will help to decrease bounce rates and improve conversions.


White Hat

White hat SEO is also often referred to as ethical SEO. Ethical SEO companies will engage and strictly adhere to SEO best practice guidelines. Typically, white hat techniques will take longer to bear fruit than techniques that cheat the system, though they will also provide sustainable, long term results with no risk of getting your website blacklisted.


Yahoo!

Acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"; a web directory which categorizes web pages, Yahoo! is one of the Internet's leading search tools. The business created by David Filo and Jerry Yang of the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University is now a major web portal, content provider and web based email account provider.


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Latest News...


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The introduction of Google Instant, which allows users to see search results as they are typing, could have an impact on search habits, which will change the ways that companies use search engine optimisation....Read more >>>


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