Search Engine

A web site that offers its visitors the ability to search the content of numerous web pages on the Internet. Search engines periodically explore all the pages of a website and add the text on those pages into a large database that users can then search. With a search engine, publishing web pages that incorporate relevant key phrases, prominently positioned in particular ways, is critical. Contrast this with directories, which don't siphon content out of the HTML of a site's constituent pages, but instead are comprised solely of site names and descriptions written or edited by human reviewers.

Search Engine Marketing(SEM)

Strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines. Short for search engine marketing. This refers to a more encompassing search engine strategy which includes search engine optimization and use of PPC Engines to maximize ROI from search engines.

Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

Strategies and tactics undertaken to improve web pages so they gain a higher ranking in the searchengines.

SERP

Short form search engine results page, SERPs are the actual results returned to the user based on their search query. The SERP is otherwise known as the Search Engines Results Page.This is the page that users see after typing their search query into an engine. Since conversion starts at the SERP,it is an important job of the search marketer to obtain strong call-to-action listings that entice the click.

Sandbox

Many SEO experts believe that Google 'sandboxes' new websites.Whenever it detects a new website,it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine,credible,long term site.It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site).Likewise,if Google detects a sudden increase (i.e. many hundreds or thousands)in the number of links back to your site,it may sandbox them for a period.

Site Map

A single page which contains a list of text links to every page in the site(and every page contains a text link back to the site map).Think of your site map as being at the center of a spider-web.

Search Engine Positioning(SEP)

Strategies and tactics undertaken to increase a site's rankings in the search engines for particular keywords.

Search Term

A word that a user uses to find relevant web page or web pages. If a keyword appears anywhere in the text of your web page,your page will appear in the search results.

SEO Copywriting

Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries.

Server Logs

Files hosted on servers which display website traffic trends and sources.

Singular Value Decomposition

The process of breaking down a large database to find the document vector (relevance) for various items by comparing them to other items and documents.

Siphoning

Techniques used to steal another web sites traffic, including the use of spyware or cybersquatting.

Site Map

Page which can be used to help give search engines a secondary route to navigate through your site.

Session

An instance of an Internet user accessing your web site for a length of time, then leaving.During a user session any number of pages may be accessed.

Sniffer Script

A small program or script that detects which web browser software an Internet user is using and then serves up the particular browser-specific cascading style sheet to match. Sniffer scripts are also used to detect whether a user has the Macromedia Flash plug-in installed, and if so, a Flash version of the page is displayed.

Spam

Spam is an Internet term for unsolicited commercial email. This often puts people in trouble by false appeals.

Spamdexing

This is the process of manipulating a search engine's pages to increase the chance of a website being placed higher in the search engine's results.

Spamglish

Keyword-rich content which is often meaningless. Spamglish includes keyword repetition just to increase the page's position in the web page.

Spamming

Spamming refers to using different unethical tactics to achieve high search engine rankings. Such spamming tactics include bulk submitting spamglish. It will contain spamglish pages.

Spider

Spider is also known as a crawler or bot. Spiders are computers used by a search engine to periodically explore your web site.

Spider Trap

Spider trap is a loop that a spider may get caught when it explores a dynamic site. This happens when the URL of a site keeps changing and the spider finds it difficult to determine the page, say for exaample, and the home page, which has already ben indexed.

Splash Page

A home page devoid of content in a great part is called as Splah page. Splash pages make the user wait before they get to any meaningful content and also damage search engine rankings.

Spam ad page (SpamAd page)

A Made For Adsense/Advertisement page which uses scraped or machine generated text for content, and has no real value to users other than the slight value of the adds. Spammers sometimes create sites with hundreds of these pages.

Spider trap

An endless loop of automatically generated links which can “trap” a spider program. Sometimes intentionally used to prevent automated scraping or e-mail address harvesting.

Splog

Spam Blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or made up of scraped content.

Static

Static means that the web page was not created dynamically from a database, but created and saved as a pure HTML file.

Stop Character

Certain characters confuse or stop search engines as to whether the page is a static or dynamic one for fear of spider traps. The characters include, ampersand (&), equals sign (=), and question mark (?).

Stop Word

Certain words, such as "the," "a", "an," "of," and "with," that are ignored by search engines because they are meaningless and common and they do not bother including them in their index, or database, of web page content. So, the stop words are not considered as if they are on your pages in the first place.

Streaming Media

Streaming video is the audio-visual content that is played as it is being downloaded. Thus, an Internet user does not have to wait for a video clip to download fully as it allows watching the clip as the footage downloads.

Static page

A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.

Supplemental index (supplemental results)

Pages with very low pagerank, which are still relevant to a search query, often appear in the SERPs with a label of Supplemental Result. Googles representative’s say that this is not indicative of a penalty, only low pagerank.

Search History

Many search engines store user search history information. This data can be used for better ad targeting or to make old information more findable.

Submitting

Submitting means submitting a web page address to a search engine with an intention of search engine indexing it.

Supplement Pages

Supplement pages are pages which are indexed in google and exist only when searching for a particular thing. They are shown in the search result pages. These pages provide additional information about the particular search term.

Search Engine Friendly

A search engine friendly web site is one which has quality and meaningful content, that which is easy to navigate, and also which is easy for search engines to rank.

SMM (Social Media Marketing)

Website or brand promotion through social media

SMP (Social Media Poisoning)

A term coined by Rand Fishkin - any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques designed to implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example, blog comment spamming in the name / brand of a competitor.

Sock puppet

An online identity used to either hide a persons real identity or to establish multiple user profiles.

Social bookmark

A form of Social Media where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.

Social media

Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.

SSI

Server Side Includes are a way to call portions of a page in from another page. SSI makes it easier to update websites.

In search results the listings from any individual site are typically limited to a certain number and grouped together to make the search results appear neat and organized and to ensure diversity amongst the top ranked results. Clustering can also refer to a technique which allows search engines to group hubs and authorities on a specific topic together to further enhance their value by showing their relationships.

Static Content

Content which does not change frequently. May also refer to content that does not have any social elements to it and does not use dynamic programming languages.

Stemming

Using the stem of a word to help satisfy search relevancy requirements. EX: searching for swimming can return results which contain swim. This usually enhances the quality of search results due to the extreme diversity of word used in, and their application in the English language.

Stop Words

Common words (ex: a, to, and, is ...) which add little relevancy to a search query, and are thus are removed from the search query prior to finding relevant search results.

Scooter

The name of the AltaVista search engine's spider.

Slurp

The name of the spider used by Inktomi.

Scumware

Intrusive software and programs which usually target ads, violate privacy, and are often installed without the computer owner knowing what the software does.

Slashdot

Central editorially driven community news site focusing on technology and nerd related topics created by Rob Malda.

Saturation (Search Engine Saturation)

A term relating to the number of URLs included from a specific web site in any given search engine. The higher the saturation level or number of pages indexed into a search engine, the higher the potential traffic levels and rankings.

Search Directory

Similar to a search engine, in that they both compile databases of web sites. A directory does not use crawlers in order to obtain entries in its search database. Instead, it relies on user interaction and submissions for the content it contains. Submissions are then categorized by topic and normally alphabetized, so that the results of any search will start with site descriptions that begin with some number or non-letter character, then moving from A-to-Z.

Session Id's

Dynamic parameters, such as session IDs generated by cookies for each individual user. Session IDs cause search engines to see a different URL for each page each time that they return to re-crawl a web site.