WEBMASTER'S OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES
WEBMASTERS GLOSSARY
     
Click through: The process of clicking on a link in a search engine output page to visit an indexed site. This is an important link in the process of receiving visitors to a site via search engines. Good ranking may be useless if visitors do not click on the link which leads to the indexed site. The secret here is to provide a good descriptive title and an accurate and interesting description.
 
Cloaking: The hiding of page code content. Normally carried out to stop page thieves stealing optimized pages
Comment Code: The HTML <!-- and --> tags are used to hide text from browsers. Some search engines ignore text between these symbols but others index such text as if the comment tags were not there. Comments are often used to hide Javascript code from non-compliant browsers, and sometimes (notably on Excite) to provide invisible keywords to some search engines.
 
Doorway Page: See Gateway Pages
 
Gateway Page: Also known as bridge pages, doorway page, entry pages, portals or portal pages. A web page submitted to a search engine (spyder) to give the relevance-algorithm of that particular spyder the data it needs, in the format that it needs it, in order to place a site at the proper level of relevance for the topic(s) in question. (This determination of topical relevance is called "placement".) There are several reasons why one might want to do this. One, is that the author may not want to publicly disclose placement tactics. Another is that the format that may be easiest for a given spyder to understand, may not be the format that the author wishes to present to his viewers for aesthetics. Still another may be that the format that is best for one spyder may differ from that which is best for another. By using gateway pages, you can present your site to each spyder in the way which is known or thought to be best for that particular spyder.
 
JavaScript: An simple interpreted computer language used for small programming tasks within HTML web pages. The scripts are normally interpreted (or run) on the client computer by the web browser. Some search engines have been known to index these scripts, presumably erroneously.
 
Keywords: A property of the text in a web page which indicates how close together the keywords appear. Some search engines use this property for Positioning. Analysers are available which allow comparisons between pages. Pages can then be produced with the similar keyword densities to those found in high ranking pages.
 
Keyword Denisity: A phrase which forms (part of) a search engine query.
 
Link Popularity: A measure of the number and quality of links to a particular page (inbound links). Many search engines (and most noticeably Infoseek) are increasingly using this number as part of the positioning process. The number and quality of inbound links is becoming as important as the optimisation of page content. A free service to measure page popularity can be found at http://www.linkpopularity.com.
 
Meta Tags: A construct 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.

The KEYWORDS tag allows the author to emphasise the importance of certain words and phrases used within the page. Some search engines will respond to this information - others will ignore it. Don't use quotes around the keywords or keyphrases.

The DESCRIPTION tag allows the author to control the text of the summary displayed when the page appears in the results of a search. Again, some search engines will ignore this information.

The HTTP-EQUIV meta tag is used to issue HTTP commands, and is frequently used with the REFRESH tag to refresh page content after a given number of seconds. Gateway pages sometimes use this technique to force browsers to a different page or site. Most search engines are wise to this, and will index the final page and/or reduce the ranking. Infoseek has a strong policy against this technique, and they might penalize your site, or even ban it.
Other common meta tags are GENERATOR (usually advertising the software used to generate the page) and AUTHOR (used to credit the author of the page, and often containing e-mail address, homepage URL and other information).

 
Politeness Window: In order not to overburden any particular server, most search engine spiders limit their access to each server. If your page is hosted on the same server as thousands of other pages, the spider may never get the time to reach (and index) your page. This can be a powerful argument for having your own server.
 
Robots: Any browser program which follows hypertext links and accesses web pages but is not directly under human control. Examples are the search engine spiders, the "harvesting" programs which extract e-mail addresses and other data from web pages and various intelligent web searching programs.
The most used are: 
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> 
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, all">
 A database of web robots is maintained by Webcrawler.
 
Search Engine Optimization Terms: 
  • Automatic Site Submission - Automatically submits to Web sites to quality search engines, including AOL, Yahoo!, Snap.com, Google, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, and many major international search engines.
  • Auto-populated Submission Forms - Scan your site’s content for keywords and descriptive information, and then automatically fill in the submission form for you.
  • Page Optimizer - This feature will scan your site’s content for keyword density and keyword relevancy, and generates a search engine placement score based on these two factors. The program will then offers suggestions on how to improve your content to generate better placement results.
  • Expanded Submission Control - You can submit your site to the program’s entire database, or take advantage of our new engine lists and submission categories, and select only the engines that best fit your industry.
  • Position-ranking Software - Instantly check your site’s placement in the top 20 engines. The ranking feature will show your current position, and will track position history, average position and site movement within search engine results.
  • Meta Tag Editor - Meta Tag editor lets you edit you Meta Tags directly for better placement. Or, if you don’t have Meta Tags, the editor will generate them for you, and insert them directly into your HTML code.
  • Frequent Submission - Register up to two Web sites as often as you like, ensuring maximum visibility for your sites as they change.
  • Submission Verification - Verify your submission efforts with the verification feature. Simply enter your URL and the program will check your description, site title, and keywords to verify the success of your submission efforts.
  • Complete Submission Reports - Reports track each of your site-promotion submissions. This feature enables you to follow-up on unsuccessful submission attempts and helps you to organize your site promotion strategy.
    Link Popularity     - The link popularity feature checks the number of outside links within the top 5 search engines that are connected to your Web site.
  • Multiple URL Submission - Allows you to submit web page to more than one URL at the same time.
  • Unlimited URL Submission - Submit web pages to unlimited number of URLs.

 

     
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