Ranking
The position of a website on a search engine results page for a certain search term or phrase.

Reciprocal Linking
The act of two websites linking to each other by agreement.

Redirect
Where the Internet user is automatically taken to another web page address without him/her clicking on anything.

Referrer
From where a site visitor originates.

Relevance Rank (RR)
A system by which a search engine determines the theme of a site that a link comes from.

Relevancy
Describes how close the content of a page is in relation to the keyword phrase used to search.

Resubmitting
Pointless submissions of a website to search engines after it has already been submitted and/or indexed.

Robot
Another term referring to a search engine spider, or bot.

Robots.txt
Text file placed in a website's root directory that allows control of search engine spiders on the site or even deny them access.

ROI (Return on Investment)
The profit(s) returned over marketing costs.

RSS Feed
Known as Rich Site Summary or Rich Site Syndication, RSS feeds use an XML document to publish information.

Saturation
The total number of pages a search engine has indexed from a website. Generally, the more accessible pages a site has is considered better (by search engines).

SE (Search Engine)
A web based information retrieval program that offers its visitors the ability to search the content of numerous web pages on the Internet.

Search Engine Algorithm
Operational programming rules that determine how a search engine indexes content and displays the results to its users.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Configuring code, text and other HTML attributes of a website in order to improve its relevance to a search engine spider.

Search Engine Positioning (SEP)
Efforts to improve a website's ranking in the SERPs for certain keywords and phrases.

Search Query
Entering a term into a search engine.

Search Term
A word or phrase used to search.

Search Term Popularity
The competitiveness of a given term, or the number of searches conducted for the term over a period of time.

Seasonality
Pattern in customer behavior in which response shows variation with the changes of season.

SEO
An acronym for "search engine optimization."

SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)
The pages displaying the results of a search engine query.

Session
An instance of an Internet user accessing your web site for a length of time.

Sitemap (Site Map)
A page that lists all the critical navigation links to main pages of a website.

Sniffer Script
Small program or script that detects which web browser software an Internet user is using and then serves up the particular browser-specific cascading style sheet to match.

Snippet
The text displayed by an engine from a search query.

Spam
Unwanted, or unsolicited email content delivered.

Spamming
Refers to stuffing page content with tons of keywords with the unscrupulous intention of fooling the search engines.

Spider
An automated search engine program (also known as a bot) that methodically browses the Web visiting website pages; creates copies that are later processed to determine how the files will be indexed and displayed for queries.

Splash Page
A home page mostly devoid of textual content; may display an image that says enter here, or uses a Flash presentation, etc.

Standards Compliant
Code validation to accepted Web standards - some report better performance in the search engines.

Static
Means a Web page was not created dynamically from a database; instead created and saved as a HTML file.

Stemming
Search engines such as Google use a process called stemming to deliver results based on a word's root spelling. An example would be similar search results returned for clothes as for the word clothing.

Stop Character
Certain characters, such as ampersand, equals sign, and question marks, appearing in a URL, tip off a search engine that the page in question is dynamic.

Stop Word
Very common words such as a, the, and, and that ...are filtered out of a search query in order to provide better quality SERPs.

Strategic Linking
A well thought out approach to getting websites to link to yours.

Supplemental Results
Search engine results that are used to add on to the results for obscure search queries.