Glossary [A–C]   [D–J]   [K–M]   [O–R]   [S–Z]

Search Engine: A technology that allows users to conduct queries for information on the Internet or in specialized collections of information.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Activities taken to promote a website via search engines through organic listings, paid listings, or a combination of the two. SEM can also refer to a company that does search engine marketing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Designing or modifying a website to improve its organic search engine rankings for particular keywords and drive traffic to the site.

Search Terms: See Keywords.

SERPS: see Results Page.

Spam: Practices that a search engine considers to detract from its ability to return quality, relevant search results to users. Spamming tactics, which include practices such as doorway pages or hidden text, can result in a site being banned from a search engine’s index.

Spider: See Crawler.

Submission: Submitting web pages for inclusion in a search engine’s index. While the process generally does not guarantee listing, it can help search engines find and index key pages more quickly.

Title Tag: A title tag produces the text that appears at the top of the browser window. In addition, title tags typically serve as the hyperlink to pages from the search engine’s results page, so they must be relevant and appealing to draw visitors.   

Unique Visitor: This refers to a single visitor to a website–no matter how many times the visitor returns to the site–when tracking a site’s traffic.

Website Marketing: All activities taken to promote a website. In regards to search engine optimization, this covers any steps taken to increase a site’s ranking in search engines’ organic and paid listings.

Website Optimization: See Search Engine Optimization.

Website Submission: See Submission.

XML Feeds: Feeding information about pages to a crawler-based search engine via eXtensible Markup Language (XML). A form of paid inclusion, marketers pay to have their pages included in the index on a per-URL or CPC basis.