Search Engine Optimization Firm

Alphabetical Index

Scooter
The name of the Altavista search engine's spider.

Search Engine
A server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing internet web pages, storing the results and returning lists of pages which match particular queries. The indexes are normally generated using spiders. Some of the major search engines are Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light and Webcrawler. Note that Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine. The term Search Engine is also often used to describe both directories and search engines.

Searchking
A smaller search engine which allows visitors to vote on the relevance of the pages returned by their queries, thus ranking sites based on the opinions of searchers. Unlike some of the major search engines, there is good customer support. http://www.searchking.com.

Search Term
See Query.

Server
A computer, program or process which responds to requests for information from a client. On the internet, all web pages are held on servers. This includes those parts of the search engines and directories which are accessible from the internet.

Sidewinder
The name of the Infoseek search engine's spider.

Siphoning
The use of various means to steal another site's traffic. Techniques used include the wholesale copying of web pages (with the copied page altered slightly to direct visitors to a different site, and then registered with the search engines) and the use of keywords or keyword phrases "belonging" to other organisations, companies or web sites.

Site Hit
See hit.

Skewing
Artificially changing search engine results so that, for example, popular queries will return artificially created listings. Infoseek is currently experimenting with this technique, using a small group of reviewers to artificially force higher relevance for certain sites.

Slurp
The name of the spider used by Inktomi.

Snap!
A large directory. The URL is http://www.snap.com.

Sniffer
The name of the filter program used by the Infoseek search engine to prevent spamdexing. It detects multiple mirror pages, font and background spoofs, multiple title tags, keyword stuffing and possibly other types of spamdexing.

Spamdexing
The alteration or creation of a document with intent to deceive an electronic catalog or filing system. Any technique that increases the potential position of a site at the expense of the quality of the search engine's database can also be regarded as spamdexing - also known as spamming or spoofing.

Spamming
See spamdexing. Spamming is also used more generally to refer to the sending of unsolicited bulk electronic mail, and the search engine use is derived from this term.

Spider, Spyder
That part of a search engine which surfs the web, storing the URLs and indexing the keywords and text of each page it finds. Please refer to the Search Engine Watch SpiderSpotting Chart for details of individual spiders. See also Robot.

Spidering
The process of surfing the web, storing URLs and indexing keywords, links and text. Typically, even the largest search engines cannot spider all of the pages on the net. This is due to the huge amount of data available, the speed at which the new data appears, the use of politeness windows and practical limits on the number of pages that can be visited in a given time . The search engines have to make compromises in order to visit as many sites as possible, and they do this in different ways. For example, some only index the home pages of each site, some only visit sites they're explicitly told about, and some make judgements about the importance of sites (from number and quality of inbound links) before "digging deeper" into the subpages of a site.

Splash page
Similar to a gateway page but provides an initial display which must be viewed before a visitor reaches the main page. This usually acts as a kind of "opening title" sequence, and can be extremely annoying.

Spoofing
See spamdexing.

SSI
Server Side Includes. Used (for example) to add dynamically generated content to a web page.

Stealth Script
A CGI script which switches page content depending on who or what is accessing the page. See agent name delivery.

Stemming
A function of some search engines and directories which allows results to be returned from some or all keywords based on the same stem as the keyword entered as a search term. For example, when stemming is switched on, a search for the word dance will return matches for any word whose stem is danc-, matching the keywords dance, dancer and dancing.

Stop Word
A word which is ignored in a query because the word is so commonly used that it makes no contribution to relevancy. Examples are common net words such as computer and web, and general words like get, I, me, the and you.

Submission Service
Any agent which submits your site to many search engines and directories. Useful to get listed with many of the minor search engines, but don't rely on such services to get listed with the major search engines. Many of these services are automatic and run from web sites. Others run off line. Some are free. Beware of supplying your email address to the so called FFA (free for all) services - you may receive lots of spam.

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the process of modifying the html code of a web page by inserting target keywords prominently on that page. This enables the web site to rank high on search engines for those particular keywords.

SEO
Acronym for Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimisation.

Search Spiders
An automated application that crawls the web to include web sites to a search engine database.

SEM
Search Engine Marketing generally includes adding media buys such as PPC to SEO efforts.

SERPS
Search Engine Results Pages

Seolid
Seolid is an ethical seo firm founded in 1999 and offering search engine optimization and seo friendly website design.

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