Be Found.

Search Engine Marketing Terminology

Crawler - also known as 'spiders', 'robots' or 'bot'. These are programs used by the search engines to visit web pages, collect its information, and automatically download their contents for indexing in their databases.

Directory - searchable subject guide organized by topical subject or geographical region and consisting of web sites that have been reviewed and compiled by human editors. Directories are often provided as a browsable alternative to the searchable indexes of search engines. Yahoo! is the largest directory on the net.

Search Engines - search engine is a coordinated set of programs that includes:

A spider (also called a "crawler" or a "bot") that goes to every page or representative pages on every Web site that wants to be searchable and reads it, using hypertext links on each page to discover and read a site's other pages

A program that creates a huge index (sometimes called a "catalog") from the pages that have been read

A program that receives your search request, compares it to the entries in the index, and returns results to you.

An alternative to using a search engine is to explore a structured directory of topics. Yahoo, which also lets you use its search engine, is the most widely-used directory on the Web. The biggest and most popular search engine is Google.

Index - 'to index'- to categorize web pages by subject or other criteria specified by the search engines.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - search engine marketing is the process and strategy involved to promote a product or service in the internet. After the strategy have been developed, the optimization process takes place.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - the process of 'fine tuning' a website so that the search engine's crawlers will be able to enter the pages, follow links and download its content into a database, so when a user searches for a specific term or keyword, the website will place in a prominent position. Also referred as organic seo.

Mirror Sites - these are pages or websites that contain similar or identical content, but have different url's. There are various valid reasons why this technique might be used, however its been used mostly to try to fool the search engines by increasing the odds to rank high. For this reason, this and other strategies are viewed as Spam.  

Pay for Inclusion - a particular search engine will guarantee inclusion in its index for a fee (think the Yellow Pages).

Pay for Consideration - used by Yahoo!, a non- refundable fee required at the time of submission regardless of the website getting indexed or rejected.

Pay-Per-Click - (also known as Pay Per Ranking, Pay Per Placement or Pay Per Position). The process of selecting keywords related to the website and bid for positions to obtain high rankings when a user searches for that keyword. The higher the position, the higher the bid.

Spam - any technique used with the intention of fooling the search engines to try to rank high. Examples of these are unsolicited email, irrelevant keywords or terms that are unrelated to the web page and keyword stuffing.

URL - Universal Resource Locator, is the address of a file (resource) accessible on the Internet, or in short, your website's address.