Search Engine Marketing Terminology

Automated Robots - Are invisible little web creatures, crawling the WWW, inspecting, indexing and  web sites for inclusion to search engine databases.
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Categorical - Categorical or category is simply a keyword or phrase entered on a search engine while making a search or a topic on a directory such as positioning.
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Comments - are not HTML tags, as such, but are included in a web page but are not viewable by the browser. They are viewable if you look at the page source code, and some times can be used to add extra optimization to a webpage.
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Content - Is the contents of your website, or more specifically, the contents of the specific page in question.
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Description - Refers to the information contained in one of the META tags located in the head tags that holds a text description of the page and/or web site. This is sometimes used by search engines when listing your site.
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E-Commerce - Is the entire transaction of commercial business on the internet. Electrical Commerce.
Referrers more specifically to websites that you can purchase through.
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FFA - pages (Free For All) are not search engines or directories. They are, for the most part, pages that simply take submissions that usually stay active for a specified period of time. A submission is placed at the top of their list and then moved down and eventually out as other submissions are made.
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Headings - Are those areas on a web page enclosed by heading tags. Heading tags vary in weight depending on the status of the heading or sub-heading and are part of HTML language.
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HTML Tags - Hypertext Mark-up Language tags are part of the programming language that powers web pages into displaying more than just plain text so that a browser can read and interpret them.
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Keyword Frequency - Is how often a keyword appears on a page and in specific areas on a page. The higher a keyword frequency, the more relevant it will be to that search. If overdone, some engines and directories will downgrade the page due to what they term as spamming.
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Keyword Placement - Refers to the various areas on a web page that a search engine looks for in a search when providing search returns, and includes the page title, heading, and body as well as link text and even in comment and picture tags.
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Keyword Prominence - In some cases, a keyword that appears closer to the top of the page or area will be more relevant. However, sometimes it helps to have a keyword placed effectively  through out the webpage.
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Keyword Weight - Is simply a percentage how that keyword or phrase prominence stacks up in relation to all other words on a page.
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Keywords - Generally refers to any word or phrase the user might search for in order to find your Web site or a page on your site. Each variation of a keyword, such as the plural form of the word, is treated like a separate keyword.
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Listings - Refers to the report or results of an search engine or directory search, usually 15 to 25 websites per page.
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META Tags - Meta tags provide a useful way to control your summary in some search engines, and can also help you provide keywords and descriptions on pages that for various reasons such as a lack text.
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Optimize - Or optimization refers to changing and/or adding various items and /or text to a web page in an attempt to gain rakings and make it ready for positioning. Usually refers to optimizing for a particular search engine since most develop their own ranking algorithms.
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Phrases - Are (keyword phrases) are combination of keywords than are descriptive of your website content category and are optimized to those words that a typical web searcher may use when searching for content.
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Positioning - Positioning is the act of targeting various aspects of a website to closely align with the database criteria of an individual search engine, through the use of such tools as META tags, keywords, description, content, headings, tags, comments and much more. Submission is a part of positioning.
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Ranking - Refers to the position a website page ranks on a search engine or search directory when a keyword search is conducted pertaining to your website.
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Results - The ranking or positioning report received on your website page after the optimization process and the submission process have been achieved.
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Search Directory - A search directory is similar to a search engine in that they each compile databases of web sites. A directory differs in that it only enters sites that are directly submitted to it.
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Search Engines - A search engine is a large scale database of many Web sites on the Internet. A search engine generally returns the result of a search ranked by 'that search engines' indexing criteria, otherwise known as their ranking algorithm.  This formula varies widely between search engines.
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Site Popularity - How many other websites link to yours. There are specific methods that can be employed to increase a sites popularity, as many search engines now rely on link popularity when returning results.
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Spamming -
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Spider - Programs enter your website and categorize the information contained in the site then determines your sites ranking in search requests by users.
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Submission - Is the act of submitting a website to search engines and directories within the database criterion of each individual engine or directory.
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Title - Title refers to the META tag that contains the page title, and is often a consideration when search engines return results.
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Total Words - a count of the words in an area on a page. This count excludes HTML tags. Engines rank pages more favorably if they have a certain number of words on the page.
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World Wide Web - Develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.
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