Search engine optimisation glossary (UVWXYZ)

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

Unethical SEO
Some search engine marketers lacking in creativity try to market their services as being ethical, whereas services rendered by other providers are somehow unethical. SEO services are generally neither ethical or unethical. They are either effective or ineffective.

Update
Search engines frequently update their algorithms and data sets to help keep their search results fresh and make their relevancy algorithms hard to update. Most major search engines are continuously updating both their relevancy algorithms and search index.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
The unique address of any web document.

URL rewrite
A technique used to help make URLs more unique and descriptive to help facilitate better sitewide indexing by major search engines.

Usage data
Things like a large stream of traffic, repeat visitors, multiple page views per visitor, a high clickthrough rate, or a high level of brand related search queries may be seen by some search engines as a sign of quality.

Viral marketing
Self propagating marketing techniques. Common modes of transmission are email, blogging, and word of mouth marketing channels.

Virtual domain
Website hosted on a virtual server.

Virtual server
A server which allows multiple top level domains to be hosted from a single computer.

Wordnet
A lexical database of English words which can be used to help search engines understand word relationships.

WordPress
Popular open source blogging software platform, offering both a downloadable blogging program and a hosted solution.

XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language)
A class of specifications designed to move HTML to conform to XML formatting.

XML (Extensible Markup Language)
A simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML, used to make it easy to syndicate or format information using technologies such as RSS.

Yahoo!
One of the oldest and most established directories, also one of the top 3 search engines.

Zeal
A volunteer-built web directory.

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