SEO Glossary: S

Clicking on the glossary title will take you to further information about the term.

Scraper sites: Designed to 'scrape' search-engine results pages or other sources of content (often without permission) to create content for a website. Scraper sites are generally full of advertising or redirect the user to other sites. [edit]
Search engine: a web site that offers its visitors the ability to search the content of numerous web pages on the Internet. Search engines periodically explore all the pages of a website and add the text on those pages into a large database that users can then search. With a search engine, publishing web pages that incorporate relevant key phrases, prominently positioned in particular ways, is critical. Contrast this with directories, which don't siphon content out of the HTML of a site's constituent pages, but instead are comprised solely of site names and descriptions written or edited by human reviewers. [edit]
Search engine marketing (SEM): strategies and tactics undertaken to increase the amount and quality of leads generated by the search engines. [edit]
Search engine optimization (SEO): strategies and tactics undertaken to influence the rankings of web pages in the search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation involves the 3 steps of SEO including technical optimisation, content optimisation and link buidling.

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Search Engine Results Page (SERP): a page of search results delivered by a search engine. [edit]
Search term: a keyword, or phrase used to conduct a search engine query [edit]
Search term popularity: see "keyword popularity" [edit]
Select list: see "pull-down list" [edit]
SEM: Acronym for Search Engine Marketing [edit]
SEO: acronym for "search engine optimization" and/or "search engine optimizer." [edit]
SERP: An acronym for Search Engine Results Page. [edit]
SERPs: plural for SERP (search engine results pages) [edit]
Session: see "user session" [edit]
Share of Voice: Refers to the relative portion of exposure of an advertiser within a defined market sector over a period of time.

Share of Voice can refer to the portion of exposure in advertising, the blogosphere, etc. [edit]
Shoskeles: An animated ad that moves across the browser, usually with sound effects. It animates only long enough to play a message before settling into a stationary ad on the page. [edit]
Skyscraper: A tall, thin ad unit that runs down the side of a web page. A skyscraper can be 120 x 600 pixels or160 x 600 pixels. [edit]
Sniffer script: a 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. Sniffer scripts are also used to detect whether a user has the Macromedia Flash plug-in installed, and if so, a Flash version of the page is displayed. [edit]
Spam: Manipulation techniques that violate search engines. [edit]
Spamdexing: see "spamming" [edit]
Spamglish: keyword-rich gibberish used as search engine fodder instead of thoughtfully written, interesting content. Spamglish often includes meaningless sentences and keyword repetition. [edit]
Spamming: as in "spamming the search engines". Spamming is most commonly associated with the act of sending unsolicited commercial email, but in the context of search engine optimization, spamming refers to using disreputable tactics to achieve high search engine rankings. Such spamming tactics include bulk submitting spamglish-containing doorway pages. [edit]
Spider: Also known as a bot, robot, or crawler. Spiders are programs used by a search engine to explore the World Wide Web in an automated manner and download the HTML content (not including graphics) from web sites, strip out whatever it considers superfluous and redundant out of the HTML, and store the rest in a database (i.e. its index).

Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, recursively browsing the Web according to a set of policies.

A spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalog websites on the internet. When a spider indexes a particular website, this is known as 'being spidered'. [edit]
Spider trap: An infinite loop that a spider may get caught in if it explores a dynamic site where the URLs of pages keep changing. For example, a home page may have a different URL and the search engine may not be able to ascertain that it is the home page that it has already indexed but under another URL. If search engines were to completely index dynamic web sites, they would inevitably have large amounts of redundant content and download millions of pages. [edit]
Splash page: A home page that is, for the most part, devoid of content. Often times created in Flash. Splash pages usually say something to the effect of "Enter Here" or "Choose our Flash-enabled site or the HTML version". Splash pages are an annoyance to Internet users as they introduce an extra hoop that the user has to jump through before they get to any meaningful content. Splash pages are also damaging to search engine rankings. Consider that your home page is typically considered by search engines as the most important page of your site. If your home page is a content-less splash page, then it's a wasted opportunity. [edit]
Standards compliant: Sites that use valid XHTML and CSS, separate the content layer from the presentation layer. Because standards compliant sites are accessible and usable to both humans and spiders alike, they tend to rank better in search engines than non-compliant sites. [edit]
Static: As in "static web page." Means that the web page was not created dynamically from a database, but instead previously created and saved as a HTML file. [edit]
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. [edit]
Stop character: Certain characters, such as ampersand (&), equals sign (=), and question mark (?), when in a web page's URL, tip off a search engine that the page in question is dynamic. Search engines are cautious of indexing dynamic pages for fear of spider traps, thus pages that contain stop characters in their URL run the risk of not getting indexed and becoming part of the "Invisible Web." Google won't crawl more than one dynamic level deep. So dynamic pages with stop characters in its URL should get indexed if a static page links to it. Eliminating stop characters from all URLs on your site will go a long way in ensuring that your entire site gets indexed by Google. [edit]
Stop word: Certain words, such as "the," "a", "an," "of," and "with," are so common and meaningless that a search engine won't bother including them in their index, or database, of web page content. So in effect, the stop words on your web pages are ignored as if those words weren't on your pages in the first place. Including a lot of stop words in your title tag waters down the title tag's keyword density. [edit]
Streaming media: audio-visual content that is played as it is being downloaded. Thus, an Internet user could begin watching a video clip as the footage downloads rather than having to wait for the clip to download in its entirety beforehand. [edit]
Submitting: submitting a web page address to a search engine in the hopes that it will index it. Submitting your pages using an automated tool (see "automated submitting"), submitting multiple pages of the same web site (see "deep submitting"), or submitting multiple times (see "resubmitting"), particularly if those pages are already indexed, are techniques typically frowned upon by search engines. It is suspected that some search engines apply a penalty factor to pages that were submitted versus those that the search engine spiders found on their own. Indeed, Inktomi was engaging in this practice before they discontinued accepting free submissions altogether.

Also see announce website to search engines [edit]
Supplemental Pages: Pages which are indexed in Google but do not exist at this time. But during searching for a particular thing they are shown in the search result pages. These pages provides additional information about the particular search. [edit]
Syndication: An option that allows you to extend your reach by distributing ads to additional partner sites. [edit]

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SEO Glossary: S