Abbreviated Search Engine Marketing Glossary

Unique Visitor
A real visitor to a web site that is not just a page request or hit.

Hit
A single access request made to the server for either a text file or a graphic.

Link Popularity and Page Popularity
How many other sites link to you or your inner pages.

Log File/Web Stats
A server file in which details of visitor accesses are stored.

Spidering
When the search engines "crawl" the web, storing URLs and indexing keywords, links and text.

Server/Host
The computer where your Web site is stored.

Robot
Any browser program which follows hypertext links and accesses Web pages but is not directly under human control. (Search engine spiders, etc.)

Registration/Submission
The process of informing a search engine or directory that a new Web page or Web site should be indexed.

Relevancy Algorithm
The method a search engine or directory uses to match the keywords in a query with the content of each Web page, so that the Web pages found can be ordered suitably in the query results. Each search engine or directory is likely to use a different algorithm and to change or improve its algorithm from time to time.

Meta tag
Code placed in the HTML header of a Web page, providing information which is not visible to browsers. The most common Meta tags (and those most relevant to search engines) are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION.

Dynamic content
Database driven content (.asp, .cfm, .cgi or .shtml., etc.) i.e. a shopping cart online where products are stored or a site that draws on a database when building it's pages.

Frames
An HTML technique for combining two or more separate HTML documents within a single Web browser screen. Avoid frames if at all possible, or use workarounds.

Cloaking
Showing one page to your visitors and another to the search engines from the same URL.