SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING - A GLOSSARY OF TERMS

The following list of terms is meant to help familiarize the reader with the vocabulary of search engine marketing (SEM). The order of terms here is meant to provide a logical progression from top to bottom. For an alphabetical index to these terms, see the Index to the Glossary of Terms below. For more information on the many aspects of search engine marketing, see our SEM Primer, or visit the SEM area of our resources page.

• AdWords - Google's paid search ad program.
• alternate text (or alt text) - descriptive text that is meant to be displayed by the browser when it cannot locate a specific image or other piece of content, or when the user has configured the browser to turn off graphics images. Some search engines will index the contents of ALT text and use it when determining relevancy and ranking.
• cascading style sheet (CSS) - an extension to the original HTML specification which is intended to help web developers keep formatting information separate from content in the design of their web pages by putting it all in a set of style sheets. The cascading feature of these style sheets refers to the order in which style elements take precedence - the precedence of style declarations cascades in a specified order.
• HTML - "hypertext markup language" or html refers to the primary programming language used to code web pages. The HTML standards, as expressed by a set of versioned specifications, have been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in an attempt to define a standard for how web browsers (called "user agents" in the standard) render (or display) html code on the user's computer screen. By establishing this set of standards, the W3C has helped simplify one of the most daunting tasks faced by web site developers: supporting different versions of each of their web pages, one version for each unique combination of vendor and version number of the numerous web browsers. While the efforts of the W3C have gone a long way toward simplifying this problem, web browser vendors like Microsoft continue create their own proprietary extensions to HTML in an effort to supply needed functionality to their users.
• indexing (or crawling) - the process by which a search engine spider analyzes and catalogs the structure of a web site and the human-visible text within a web site's html pages. The frequency and depth of this indexing process are important factors in getting a high ranking, as is designing "search-engine-friendly web pages".
• keyword - the word or phrase that a person types into the search line of a search engine to find useful web sites on the Internet. Also, from the SEM point of view, keywords are the foundation of search engine marketing upon which both paid search and natural search initiatives are built. Careful keyword selection is therefore central to the success of any SEM effort.
• keyword stuffing - The html coding practice of stuffing the keyword meta tag full of popular search terms that did not have anything to do with the content of the web site. The search engine spiders now look for this practice as a means of ruling out pages that they must index. So, while keyword stuffing was once an easy way to get a top position in the search engine results, it now will backfire on you.
• link popularity - the number of "inbound" links to a web page or web site. Link popularity is an important factor used by Google and other major search engines to establish a web site's PageRank. Generally, the more inbound links from pages with high PageRank scores, the higher the PageRank of the web site (or web page). Some search engines, including Google, ignore inbound links from other pages in the same web site (i.e within the same domain).
• meta tag - a group of special html elements that are intended to convey to browsers and search engine spiders non-visible information about the web page. Originally a useful concept, one of the meta tags - the keyword meta tag - has been so abused in the past by an html coding practice know as "keyword stuffing", that most search engines now ignore the keyword meta tag altogether. However, most do look at another tag - the meta description tag - to construct the snippet for their search results.
• mouseover - the act of moving the cursor over a defined area of a web page. A mouseover serves to activate special rendering by the browser. For example, when you move your mouse over a link, it may turn a different color or be highlighted in some other manner to indicate to you that it is a clickable link. Another example is the appearance of text (called alternate text, or "alt text") when you position your mouse over an image on the page.
• natural search results (also called organic search results) - natural search results refers to the search results themselves, i.e. the "matches" that the search engine displays as a rank ordered list of sites including one or more clickable links. For Google, these results are selected from the search engine's database of indexed web pages based on their relevancy to the searchers keyword phrase and the PageRank of the web page. Other major search engines use similar techniques.
• PageRank - PageRank is simply a number from 1 to 10 which Google uses to establish the overall importance for each web page indexed by the Google spider. Contrary to what its name implies, PageRank does not refer to the rank of a given web page in the search results. Named for Larry Page, a founder of Google, PageRank is one of hundreds of factors that Google uses to rank-order search results. The details of how PageRank is calculated by Google are available in the technical paper published by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Essentially PageRank is a system for establishing the importance of a website based on its popularity. It is important to obtain a high PageRank in order to achieve a desirable position in the natural search results. PageRank for a given web page can be determined by installing the Google toolbar in your web browser.
• relevancy - Relevancy is the degree to which a given web page matches the search terms. Google uses relevancy to select web pages from its database of indexed pages and then rank-order them based on both relevancy and PageRank. For each search engine, the details of the algorithm used to determine web page relevancy for a given search term is a closely guarded secret. Based on empirical evidence (lots of experiments) gathered by the community of SEM professionals, there exists a pretty accurate understanding of which factors are used by Google and the other major SEs to determine relevancy. Altogether, there are hundreds of factors that Google uses to rank-order search results. The process of search engine optimization consists of examining these factors on a given web page and then optimizing each one for a given set of search terms.
• paid search - paid search is the paid advertising component of search engine marketing. With Google's AdWords program, for example, an advertiser pays Google to have their text "ad" appear on the same page as the natural search results for targeted keywords.
• search-engine friendly web page - a web page that has been coded such that all the important information is accessible (or "visible") by search engine spiders. There are many common web site coding practices which prevent search engine spiders from fully indexing the information on a given page and even the pages in an entire web site.
• search engine marketing (SEM) - a new specialty within the marketing function whose focus is to produce click-throughs by search engine users who search on specific terms or "keywords" and therefore are of special interest to the marketer as potential customers. As such, search engine marketing holds the promise of producing a stream of highly-qualified visitors to your web site.
• search engine optimization (SEO) - (also called natural search engine optimization and organic search engine optimization) the process of achieving a high rank in the natural (or organic) search results for target keywords by optimizing web pages for those keywords. The process of optmization is a complex one invloving the analysis and development of keyword phrases and the inclusion of those phrases in various important elements of the html code for the page, some of which are visible to the visitor and some of which are not visible.
• search engine spider - Search engine spiders "crawl" web sites (look at their html code), catalogue all the "visible" words on millions of web pages and store them in a database. They then create elaborate indices into this database so they can quickly produce a rank ordered list of web sites for any given keyword. Each search engine rank orders web sites based on its view of their relevancy for the searcher's keyword.
• search position (also called search rank, natural search position, organic search position, etc. ) - the position of a hyperlink to a web page within the rank ordered search results. Natural (or organic) search position is determined by proprietary search engine algorithms that calculate the relevancy of a web page to the searcher's keyword. Web page and web site relevancy is computed using a complex and proprietary algorithm unique to each search engine. Google's algorithm is referred to as PageRank. For Google and other search engines, relevancy is determined by many factors. Just a few of these are the frequency with which a keyword appears on the page and in specific elements, the actual position of the element on the page (closer to the top is better), the position of the keyword within the text of specific elements (e.g. the title element), and the overall importance of that element. Link popularity is also very important in determining natural search position.
• search results - the list of links to web sites, rank-ordered by their relevancy to the searcher's keyword (as calculated by the search engine).
• SERPs - stands for "search engine results pages" and refers to the actual pages returned by the search engine in response to a user query. Results usally include both natural search listings and paid search advertisement listings. see also "search results"
• snippet - brief excerpt or description of the web site. Each search engine uses its own complex algorithms to compile this string of text. The contents of the snippet is a key factor in determining whether a user, when presented with a particular web site in the search results, will click on the link and visit the site.
• tag - an HTML element. The term can also refer to the text value of an attribute of an html element (i.e. the textual content of the element). For example, the "title tag" refers to both the HTML element "title" and its textual content (i.e. the words you see in the banner at the very top of your browser).

Index to Glossary of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Terms

The following index allows the reader to alphabetically locate the definition of a search engine marketing term. Clicking on the term will take you to the definition in the SEM Glossary.

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