To help you make sense of search engine terminology, SearchWrite is proud to present a useful glossary of terms.

Archive – When a search engine stores pages of your site on their servers and shows those pages to visitors without them having to go to your site.

Cache – see Archive

Cloaking – ( a “no-no,” redirecting the search engine to separately prepared pages that are different than the actual content you show visitors. A practice that is prohibited by search engines and can result in penalizing or banning a Website.

Crawl – What the search engine software does when it visits your site and extracts content to include in its index. Also referred to as Website “spidering” or “scanning.”

Direct feed programs – Direct feed programs (usually “XML-Feeds”) permit you to feed large quantities of content onyour site directly to the search engine without the search engine needing to crawl your site. For dynamically generated, database-delivered sites and sites with CGI parameters in the URL, this can make the difference between rankings and obscurity.

Index – The database that the search engine builds on its own server using copies of Web pages that the spiders make when they crawl the site. Indexes are refreshed at different intervals. In order to be in the index, your site must be crawled by a search engine spider or submitted via a feed.

Keyword – The word(s) aka “search terms” that the visitor types into the search engine. These terms need to match those that are prevalent on your Website pages or those you have bid for onm a PPC search engine.

Meta Tags – A group of Web page source code data descriptors that provide instruction to Search Engine spiders. For example, the Meta Description tag provides a concise summary of the particular Web page, the Meta Keywords tag provides a list of keywords that are most prevalent on the page. Meta tags can also instruct search engines what not to search, when the content of a page expires and when to revisit the site again.

PI, Paid Inclusion – An arrangement where a search engine guarantees inclusion of Website data in its index and frequently recrawls the Website for regular updating and optimization or allows the Website to provide a direct feed.

PPC – Refers to Pay-per-click or pay-for-placement. A search engine business model that allows you to bid for keyword placement against other sites that also want to be associated with a particular keyword. PPC bids determine the search results ranking in order of the amount bid for that keyword. Overture and Google AdWords are the two major PPC service providers.

Ranking – Where your site falls in the results, returned to the visitors by the search engine.

Relevancy – How closely the content on your site matches what the search engine believes the visitor is looking for based on the keywords typed.

SE – Search Engine. Search engines and directories are often lumped together but for purposes of distinction, the major Search Engines are Google, AltaVista, Inktomi (MSN, AOL w/Google), Ask Jeeves/Teoma, and Terra/Lycos and the Directories are Yahoo!, Looksmart and the Open Directory Project.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization. The process of optimizing your site so that it will rank better on search engines for relevant keywords.

SEOP – Search Engine Optimization and Positioning. Redundant to SEO.

Spam – Anything submitted to a search engine that violates its policies. Excessive and artificial content you might put on your own site to try to convince search engines that you should be categorized for something other than what you are.

Spider – The querying scanner that the search engine uses to crawl your site. For example, FAST which feeds Lycos and All the Web, or Inktomi’s SLIRP which feeds MSN among others.

Submission – The process of telling the search engine index that your site exists and that you want it be crawled and included in their index.

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