Search Engine Marketing -- The act of marketing a web site via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities.
Search Engine Optimization -- Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.
Search Engine Copywriting -- Writing your Web page content so that it is easy to read for your end user and search engine friendly.
Search String -- Search strings or terms are the words entered by users into a search engine or directory to locate needed information.
- Search Terms -- The words (or word) a searcher enters into a search engine's search box. Also used to refer to the terms a search engine marketer hopes a particular page will be found for. Also called keywords, query terms or query.
SEK -- Sweden Kronor (3 Letter Currency Code)
SEM -- Search Engine Marketeer
--Search Engine Marketer
--Search Engine Marketing
SEMPO -- Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. Non-profit, formed to increase the awareness of and educate people on the value of search engine marketing.
SEO -- Search Engine Optimization
--Search Engine Optimizer
SEP -- Search Engine Placement
--Search Engine Positioning
--Search Engine Promotion
SERPs -- Search Engine Results Pages
SEs -- Search Engines
SES -- Search Engine Strategies (a conference)
SEU -- Search Engine Usability
SGML -- Standard Generalized Markup Language
Shockwave -- A technology developed by Macromedia, Inc. that enables Web pages to include multimedia objects. To create a shockwave object, you use Macromedia's multimedia authoring tool called Director, and then compress the object with a program called Afterburner. You then insert a reference to the "shocked" file in your Web page. To see a Shockwave object, you need the Shockwave plug-in, a program that integrates seamlessly with your Web browser. The plug-in is freely available from Macromedia's Web site as either a Netscape Navigator plug-in or an ActiveX control. Shockwave supports audio, animation, video and even processes user actions such as mouse clicks. It runs on all Windows platforms as well as the Macintosh.
Site Placement -- In search engine marketing terms, site placement is the location of a page within the search engine results page. The higher the placement, the more likely your page will be clicked on by the searcher.
SIT -- Stuffit Archive (file.sit) Macintosh File Compression Format
SM -- Service Mark (SM)
SMB -- Small and Medium Sized Businesses
SME -- Small to Medium Enterprise (less than 50 employees)
SMTP -- Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
SOAP -- Simple Object Access Protocol
SPAM -- In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds for banning. Alan Perkins has published an excellent white paper on Search Engine Spam that is highly recommended.
--SPAM Food Products from Hormel Foods Corporation
Spamdexing -- Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine's index. Spamdexing is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Spider -- Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
Spider Trap -- A spider trap refers to either a continuous loop where spiders are requesting pages and the server is requesting data to render the page or an intentional scheme designed to identify (and "ban") spiders that do not respect robots.txt.
Splash Page -- Splash pages are introduction pages to a web site that are heavy on graphics (or flash video) with no textual content. They are designed to either impress a visitor or complement some corporate branding.
SQL -- 'Abbreviation of structured query language, and pronounced either see-kwell or as separate letters. SQL is a standardized query language for requesting information from a database. The original version called SEQUEL (structured English query language) was designed by an IBM research center in 1974 and 1975. SQL was first introduced as a commercial database system in 1979 by Oracle Corporation. Historically, SQL has been the favorite query language for database management systems running on minicomputers and mainframes. Increasingly, however, SQL is being supported by PC database systems because it supports distributed databases (databases that are spread out over several computer systems). This enables several users on a local-area network to access the same database simultaneously. Although there are different dialects of SQL, it is nevertheless the closest thing to a standard query language that currently exists. In 1986, ANSI approved a rudimentary version of SQL as the official standard, but most versions of SQL since then have included many extensions to the ANSI standard. In 1991, ANSI updated the standard. The new standard is known as SAG SQL.
SSI -- Server Side Includes (file.shtml)
SSL -- Secure Socket Layer
STATS -- Statistics
Stop Word -- Stop words are words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries. Common words such as the.
Submission -- The act to submitting a URL for inclusion into a search engine's index. Unless done through paid inclusion, submission generally does not guarantee listing. In addition, submission does not help with rank improvement on crawler-based search engines unless search engine optimization efforts have been taken. Submission can be done manually (i.e., you fill out an online form and submit) or automated, where a software program or online service may process the forms behind the scenes.
- SV -- Swedish (2 Letter Language Code)
SVG -- Scalable Vector Graphics
SWF -- Shockwave Flash (file.swf)
SYSOP -- System Operator
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We encourage you to use this resource as much as possible and if you ever come across a term that you don't know and you can't find it in our glossary simply stop by our SEO Forum and visit the Glossary of Terms thread. Let us know what term needs to be added or defined, we will do the research and post it by the end of the day!
To find the definition of any word just click on the first letter in the word.
