Rank (Ranking) – The actual position of a website on a search engine results page for a certain search term or phrase.
Reciprocal Link – When two sites link to each other.
Redirects – Either server side or scripting language that tells the search engine to go to another URL automatically.
Referral Spam – Sending multiple requests to a website spoofing the header to make it look like real traffic is being sent to another site.
Referrer – A referrer is the URL of the page that the visitor came from when he entered a website.
Relevancy – Term used to describe how close the content of a page is in relation to the keyword phrase used to search.
Results Page – When a user conducts a search, the page that is displayed, is called the results page. Sometimes it may be called SERPs, which stands for “search engine results page.”
Robot – Often used to refer to a search engine spider.
Robots.txt – Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.
RSS Feed – “Rich Site Summary” or “Rich Site Syndication”. RSS feeds use an XML document to publish information.
SE – “Search Engine”. A web based information retrieval program. Almost a database of websites users can search using search terms.
Search Engine Degradation – The degradation of search engine rankings, and the reputations of others through the use of underhand SEO techniques, combined with negative public relations activities via the internet and other media.
Search Engine Marketing – The practice of getting a website found on the internet
Search Engine Optimization – The act of altering code to a website to make a website search engine friendly.
Search Engine Results Page – See “SERP”
Search Query – The text entered into the search box on a search engine.
Search Terms – The words or phrases used by people when performing searches in search engines. Also called keywords, query terms or query.
SERP – “Search Engine Results Page”. The results that are displayed after making a query into a search box.
Sitemap – A page that lists all of the critical navigation points of a website.
Slurp – The name of Yahoo’s Search Engine Spider.
Snippet – The text displayed from a search query.
Social Media Poisoning – This is a form of Search Engine Degradation carried out in social networking sites.
Spam (1) – This refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds for banning.
Spam (2) – Unwanted email or irrelevant content delivered.
Spamming – The act of delivering unwanted messages to the masses.
Spider – Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
Spiderbaiting – A technique that makes a search engine spider find your site.
Splash Page – Splash pages are introduction pages to a web site that are heavy on graphics, or flash video, with no textual content. They are designed to either impress a visitor or complement some corporate branding.
Stemming – The main part of a word to which affixes are added.
Stickiness – How influential your site is in keeping a visitor on your page.
Stop Word – Stop words are very common words such as a, the, and & that and are filtered out of your search query. Search engines do this in order to try to serve the best results for a user query.
Strategic Linking – A thought out methodology to getting websites to link to your site.
Submission – The process of submitting URL(s) to search engines or directories.
Syntax – The proper use of language when coding a website.
Tag Soup – Tag soup is HTML code written without regard for the rules of HTML structure and semantics. Usually carried out by amateurs.
The Deep Web – The content in databases that rarely shows up in Web searches. It is estimated that there are 500 billion Web pages that could potentially be hidden.
Theme – What the site’s main topic is about.
Title Tag – It should be used to describe the web page using targeted keywords using no more that 60 characters, including spaces.
TLD – “Top Level Domain”. Most commonly thought of as a “.com”, also includes “.org” and “.edu”
Tracking URL – Usually used in PPC campaigns, it is a URL that has special code added to it so that results can be monitored.
Traffic – The number of visitors a website receives over a given period.
Trusted Feed – A form of paid inclusion which can be optimized so that your website can take advantage better rankings and therefore more traffic
Unique Visitor – When a user visits a website, his/her IP address is logged so if he/she returns later on that day, the visit won’t be counted as a unique visit but as a page impression.
Universal Search – Launched on May 16, 2007, this is Google’s attempt to deliver the best result from the web. This can include video, images, news, podcasts or any other form of digital content.
URL – “Uniform Resource Locater”. Commonly referred to as the domain name, this is how humans navigate through the Internet, whereas computers use IP addresses.
VEO – Visitor Enhanced Optimization. Making your site friendlier for human users.
VoIP – “Voice Over Internet Protocol”. VoIP converts the voice signal from your telephone into a digital signal that travels over the internet then converts it back at the other end so you can speak to anyone with a regular phone number. Skype is a popular example of this.
Web Saturation – How many pages of your site are indexed by the search engines collectively.
White Hat SEO – A term that refers to ethical practice of SEO methodologies that adhere to search engine Terms of Service.
White Paper – A White Paper is your statement about how a problem should be solved.
Wi-Fi – A term used to describe the interoperability of wireless computer networking devices.
WWW – “World Wide Web”. Another term used to describe the Internet.
XML – “Extensible Markup Language”. A scripting language that allows the programmer to define the properties of the document.
Yahoo! – Currently the #2 Search Engine in the world.