Ranking - In the context of search engines, it is the position that a sites entry is displayed in a search engine query results.

Rate Card - A sites list of fees for advertising and placement options.
Re-submission - The process of resubmitting a web page or web site to a search engine or directory. This is often done to update a listing because of content changes, the page has moved, or the page has been removed. It can also be done after updating or optimizing a page to acquire better rankings.

RealNames - A company that sells names associated web address queries. This is mainly for corporate brand name protection. Some search engines now use that system to generate search results. Companies can buy their Real Name and their name will be the first one returned for that search query. For example, Coke-Cola could buy Coke and have their webpage returned first for any search on Coke.

Reciprocating Link - A link exchange between two sites.
Referrer - The address (URL) of the web page a user came from, before entering another site. Each time a user clicks (selects) a new HTML link on a web page, most browsers report a "HTTP-REFERER" string to the new site. Web hosts can record these "referrer strings" in a log file for usage by a web site.
In the context of search engines, these referrer strings are a powerful way to determine what searches users used to enter your website. As part of a referral string from search engine, the search terms a user typed in will be included.
Some img tag counter style logging software can also record referral strings.

Refresh Tag - Meta Refresh tag reloads a page at a set time.
Registration - The act of submitting a website to a directory for inclusion (such as registering with Yahoo).

Results Page - A page at a search engine that displays the results of searches. After the user types in a search query, the page that is displayed, is call the results page. The order of results on the results page, is called the rankings.

RFP- Request For Proposal.

RFQ - Request for Quotation.

Robot - A program that automatically does "some action" without user intervention. In the context of search engines, it usually refers to a program that mimics a browser to download web pages automatically. A spider is a type of robot. Some times referred to as Webbots.

robots.txt - A file on a web site in the root directory of a website that is used to control which spiders have access to which pages within a website. When a spider or robot connects to a website, it checks for the presence of a robot.txt. Only spiders that adhere to the Robots Exclusion Standard will obey a robots.txt command file.

There are several specific fields in a robots.txt such as User-agent specifies which User Agents are allowed to access the site and "Allow/Disallow" specifies which directories a spider may access.

ROI - Return On Investment. In relation to search engine advertising, it often refers to sales per lead. (Request a Proposal from an AQABA Representative)

RON - Run of Network. Large advertising brokers such as Burst or Double click can sell ads across the entire network of member sites.

ROS - Run of Site. An ad that can be placed anywhere on a website without restrictions.

Sandbox - A development space where developers can test data sets without causing an actual execution of the final code. PayPal, Microsoft, AOL, Google, and many search engines use "sandboxes" to test code. For example: the PayPal sandbox allows webmasters to use shopping carts without a purchase using real money actually occurring.

Scooter - The Altavista spider. The name is in reference to the world famous Altavista Raceway that holds motorcycle races every year.

Search Engine - A program designed to search a database. In the context of the Internet this refers to a web site that contains a database of information from other websites. Directories of sites are *not* search engines (such as Yahoo).

Search Engine Optimization - Effectively submitting your site in search engines will enable you to acquire top placement in search engine results and increase the likelihood that people will link into your site during search queries. The trick is to identify effective methods to optimize your placement. The criteria search engines and directories use to determine which sites rank highly varies. Some, like Google, use link popularity in their ranking mechanisms. Others measure click popularity, gauge the number of times key words are used throughout a site, or favor sites that are updated regularly. Therefore, it is important to learn about the various search engines and identify the ones that are best suited for your site.

Search Terms - The words that are typed into a search engine search box. Also called Search Words, Keywords, and Queries.

SERP - Started at Webmaster World, it is short for "Search Engine Results Page". This is the page that is generated by a search engine in response to a search query.

Server - A computer which is designed to generate information for connected users (client). In the context of the world wide web, this refers to a web site that delivers web pages to users.

Session ID - Webpages that are produced at the time of the page request from programs, are called Dynamic pages. Programs often will use specific urls for each visitor. You will often see those as a string of numbers in the browser address bar. These numbers will track you via cookies and serve pages specific to your "session". A session can be any time limit and then it expires. Sites use these sessions to serve custom content, defeat browser caching, and to direct the flow of visitors through the website.

Sessions - By setting a cookie, tracking a visitors IP address, or by other unique identifiers, we can track a visitor’s session through a site. These sessions can be used to analyze visitor behavior. Sometimes software will create urls based on a unique variable and track a visitor through a site by that means..

Shopping Cart - Software designed to keep track of customer purchases until they "check out" on an ecommerce website.

Sidewinder -The Infoseek spider.

Sky Scrapper - An ad that is quit tall and large. They can run 160x600 pixels down the side of a webpage.

Slurp - The Inktomi spider.

Snap! - A medium sized web site directory. Uses Inktomi for non-directory matches.

Spamdexing - The submission of pages that are intended to rank artificially high by various unethical techniques. These can include submitting hundreds of slightly different pages designed to rank high, small invisible text, or word scrambled pages. Most of these techniques are flagged by search engines as spam.

Spamming - See spamdexing. A broad term mainly referring to unsolicited junk email.

Spider - The main program used by search engines to retrieve web pages to include in their database. A spider is what a search engine uses to analyze and include your website within its search. Spiders run through the html of your website at light speed picking up different tidbits from various pages. This information is then used by search engines in determining your placement in queries. Different search engines use different spiders. Different spiders, in turn, analyze your HTML coding differently. Spiders continually roam the internet picking up new web-sites and content. Search Engines use spiders, directories do not. A commonly known spider is Google’s “GoogleBot.” see robot.

Spidering - While a spider is downloading pages, it is called Spidering. Most modern spiders used by search engines are only responsible for downloading the pages and storing them raw in a temporary database. An indexer is then used to process the page for inclusion in a search engine database. Spiders have a wide range of variables and guidelines that they can be setup to use and follow. Some include: speed at which it downloads pages, whether it will walk or crawl through a website, whether it only goes after index pages, what time of day it is active, which domains it will connect to, how many pages it will accept from one domain.

Spider Directory
· Infoseek (go.com) Sidewinder ,
· Altavista Scooter,
· Lycos T-Rex,
· Excite Architext,
· WebCrawler Excites Architext,
· Google Backrub or GoogleBot
· Northern Light Northern Lights Gulliver

Splash Page - Also referred to as a Welcome Mat Page. It is a page that normally just includes a logo and a "click here to enter" type link. These can be used to direct traffic based upon user variables.

SSI - An acronym for Server Side Includes. These are HTML Comment commands placed in an HTML file, to cause a webserver to execute some action when the page is viewed by a user. These include calling external programs such as CGI programs, displaying date or the last modified date on the file. Apache is the most widely used web server and has a wide range of SSI commands available.

Static IP Address - An IP address that remains constant each time a person logs on to the internet.

Stealth - A broad term referring to the hiding of data from a user or robot. Often this includes Obfuscation where by the data presented looks correct, but there is something wrong with it. In the context of search engine optimization this can include Stealth Meta Tags that are displayed for search engine robot but not users.

Stemming - Refers to root word origins. For example, Search, Searching, and Searches all have Search as the root stem. Some search engines use stemming to provide results from more than just the entered search terms. A search on Boat could return results on Boating or Boats.

Stop Words - This term has been so often confused with Filter Words that it now refers to Filter words most of the time. Words that are censored by search engines. These include the FCC's seven naughty words. Search engines often maintain two databases, one with all the bad stuff to keep away from children, and one for the general public. Adult words are called STOP WORDS by the search engines because the indexer STOPS when it finds one of these words..A stop word is a word that causes an indexer to STOP indexing in the current procedure and do something else. Most common of these, is when an indexer encounters an Adult censored words.

Subdomain - The traditional portion of a domain name where "www" is location is said to be a third level or subdomain of the primary domain.

Submission - The act of submitting a web page to a search engine or web site to a directory.

Submission Service - A service that will automatically submit your page or website to many search engines at once. These were once popular, but many search engines now ban these types of services.

Teoma - Teoma is one of the internets full spidering search engines. Delivers results to parent company AskJeeves.

Term Vectors - Term vectors map associations between keywords based on the frequency and location of term when used in search queries. Apple has a high vector relation to "fresh fruit", but is not to "fruit of the loom".

Theme Engine - A theme engine is a search engine that indexes entire sites as one giant page. They then use only the most relevant keywords found to determine your sites theme. By determining a theme search engines hope to return more accurate results.

Throw Away Domain - A domain name that has little value. These are most often used to test out new search engine optimization tactics and they may get banned.

Title - The part of an HTML page that is displayed on a browser title line (usually at the top of the window).
The text of a web page title is important, because it is the part of the page displayed on search engines as a link. Search engines also give the page title more weight when determining what order to display pages.

TLD - An Acronym for Top Level Domain. This would be the .net, .org, .com portion of a domain name.

Toolbar - An add on program for a browser that creates a bar across the browser - most often under the menu line. These often provide search query boxes and other features. Most of the major search engines have Toolbars.

Traffic - A reference to the number of visitors a web site receives.

T-Rex - The Lycos spider.

Unique Visitor - A single individual website visitor. Visitors (or users) can visit multiple pages within a site. Unique users are important because it is an indication of success of a website. If you have high visitor counts, but relatively low page per user counts, that indicates that people are not finding your site attractive enough to set and read through it. On the other hand, if you have low visitor counts and very high page per user counts, that is an indication your site is providing good information to people and you should do a better job a promotion. High page per user counts indicate good site potential, while low page per user counts indicate you need to rework the site with more content or better displays.

Upload -The process of retrieving information from any computer is called Downloading. When one computer sends information to another, it is called Uploading.

URL - An acronym for Universal Resource Locator. The basis of how we find web sites on the internet. URL's can include different forms of communicating with a server: (an HTTP url is Hyper Text Transfer Protocol while a FTP url is a File Transfer Protocol). You can determine how you are connecting with a site, by looking at the beginning of a url for the HTTP, FTP, or other protocol identifier. Most websites are located on http servers and begin with HTTP://.
In the context of search engines, URL's are important because they contain entities which the search engine may or may not like. For example, your domain may include keywords related to your website.

URL Submission - See Registration. The process of submitting a webpage to search engines.

User Agent - Each time a web browser or other client connect to a web site, they report aUSER_AGENT. Common user agents include Netscape, Opera, and Internet Explorer. In the context of Search Engine Robots or Spiders, a CGI program can read the USER AGENT and deliver custom content to that user or robot. The User Agent can also be included in a robots.txt file to allow or deny access to the website.

Viral Marketing - Any program that result in customers or program members promoting the service for you.

Virtual Domain - A website setting on its own domain name. For example this web site is located on the Virtual Domain www.AQABASEO.com.

Webcrawler - A large search engine owned by Excite:

Weblog - It started out as referring to specific content management software (blogger), and has transitioned into a description for a wide range of personal pages, journals, and diary type setups.

Whois - A search that provides the company name, address, and contact information of a visitor to a site. Whois lengthens the log analysis duration considerably.

Word Scrambled - Randomly sorting the words on a page is called word scrambling. A word scrambled page can be submitted to search engines for high ranking, yet the page will be unreadable by a human. By using cloaking, stealth, or other techniques, a web master can hide the scrambled page from all but the search engine spider.

Yahoo - One of the oldest site directories on the net. Currently uses Inktomi for webpage results.

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