Search engine optimisation glossary (QRST)

ABCD – EFGH – IJKL – MNOP – QRST – UVWXYZ – 0-9

Quality content
Content which is linkworthy in nature.

Quality link
Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links.

Query
The actual “search string” a searcher enters into a search engine.

Redirect
A method of alerting browsers and search engines that a page location moved. 301 redirects are for permanent change of location and 302 redirects are used for a temporary change of location.

Registrar
A company which allows you to register domain names.

Reinclusion
If a site has been penalized for spamming they may fix the infraction and ask for reinclusion. Depending on the severity of the infraction and the brand strength of the site they may or may not be added to the search index.

Referrer
The source from which a website visitor came from.

Relative link
A link which shows the relation of the current URL to the URL of the page being linked at.

Relevancy
A measure of how useful searchers find search results.

Reputation management
Ensuring your brand related keywords display results which reinforce your brand. Many hate sites tend to rank highly for brand related queries.

Resubmission
Much like search engine submission, resubmission is generally a useless program which is offered by businesses bilking naive consumers out of their money for a worthless service.

Reverse index
An index of keywords which stores records of matching documents that contain those keywords.

Robots.txt
A file which sits in the root of a site and tells search engines which files not to crawl.

ROI (Return on Investment)
A measure of how much return you receive from each marketing dollar.

RSS (Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication)
A method of syndicating information to a feed reader or other software which allows people to subscribe to a channel they are interested in.

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

Search engine
A tool or device used to find relevant information. Search engines consist of a spider, index, relevancy algorithms and search results.

SEM
Search engine marketing.

SEO (Search engine optimisation)
The art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries.

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.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
The page on which the search engines show the results for a search query.

Search marketing
Marketing a website in search engines. Typically via SEO, buying pay per click ads, and paid inclusion.

Server
Computer used to host files and serve them to the WWW.

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

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.

Social bookmarking site
These sites, sometimes called tagging sites, allow users to post links that interest them and share them with other users. Being linked on these sites increases your site’s chance of ranking higher.

Social media
Websites which allow users to create the valuable content.

Spam
Unsolicited email messages.

Spamming
The act of creating and distributing spam.

Spider
Search engine crawlers which search or “spider” the web for pages to include in the index.

Splash page
Feature rich or elegantly designed beautiful web page which typically offers poor usability and does not offer search engines much content to index.

Splog
Spam blog, typically consisting of stolen or automated low quality content.

Spyware
Software programs which spy on web users, often used to collect consumer research and to behaviorally targeted ads.

Static content
Content which does not change frequently.

Stemming
Using the stem of a word to help satisfy search relevancy requirements.

Submission
The act of making information systems and related websites aware of your website.

Supplemental results
Documents which generally are trusted less and rank lower than documents in the main search index.

Term frequency
A measure of how frequently a keyword appears amongst a collection of documents.

Text link ads
Advertisements which are formatted as text links.

Title
The title element is used to describe the contents of a document.

Topic-sensitive pagerank
Method of computing PageRank which instead of producing a single global score creates topic related PageRank scores.

Trackback
Automated notification that another website mentioned your site which is baked into most popular blogging software programs.

TrustRank
Search relevancy algorithm which places additional weighting on links from trusted seed websites that are controlled by major corporations, educational institutions, or governmental institutions.

ABCD – EFGH – IJKL – MNOP – QRST – UVWXYZ – 0-9