Search engine terms and definitions
Author: Dean Quek Article source: http://www.articledeshboard.com/. Used with author's permission.
There are numerous terms on the Internet that most people have probably seen, but are definitely not familiar. If you have a website or blog online, the foremost concern on your mind would be traffic to your website. Traffic to your website would be a good indication of how popular your site is, and if it is connected to your online business, how much money you can expect to make.
In this article, I shall make a short compilation of the most popular Internet terms associated with website traffic and popularity.
SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is the process or technique of increasing the number of visitors to a website by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. It is common practice for Netizens to only view roughly the first three pages of any search. Hence, where a website appears, or ranks, in a search result is extremely important for getting traffic. SEO considers how search engine algorithms work and will usually involve tweaking a site's programming code, presentation and structure.
SERP, which stands for Search Engine Results Page, is the webpage or site that a search engine returns from a search. Major search engines usually return these listings on their SERPs; listings that have been indexed by the search engine's spider, a human, and paid listings.
Spiders (or alternatively known as webcrawlers) are programs that are written to explore the World Wide Web and retrieve some or all of the information that are referenced in a document. As most web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start its work almost anywhere. As soon as a spider sees a link to another page, it will go off to that page to get data.
Backlinks is the term used for links located on other websites that link to your website. Backlinks are extremely important to SEO as most search engines determine the search engine ranking of a website by the quality and quantity of backlinks to that website. To find your website's backlinks, type in link:www.yoursiteurl.com in any search engine. Alternatively, you can make use of Ablewise.com's free domain statistics tool; this tool will show you the number of backlinks you have from Google, Yahoo and MSN Live.
PageRank is Google's patented algorithm to determine the overall importance of a webpage. This algorithm will consider factors such as content, inbound links and quality of the webpage. However, many factors influence PageRank; thus, it is not a very accurate indicator of how well a page ranks for particular keywords. Contrary to common belief, "page" in PageRank is not related to "page" in webpage. It is from the name of Larry Page, one of PageRank's inventors.
Do stay tuned for more terms and definitions to come.
The author writes occasional articles of interest in finance, advertising and IT related topics.
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