Common used SEO and internet marketing related terms

'sandbox'

Probation period for new sites before getting ranked in Google. Also whenever a site gets banned, it gets sandboxed by Google which means it lost its ranking in the SERPs.

'search engine'

A website or software used to search a database, documents or information. The main scope of a search engine is to deliver relevant results to people who are looking for something.

'search engine friendly'

A website created to be search engine friendly to get high rankings in SERPs. The structure of these websites is designed to be easily crawled by search engine spiders.

'search engine marketing (SEM)'

A marketing campaign in which search engines are involved.

'search engine optimization (SEO)'

Planning and creating websites to get high rankings in natural SERP listings. Search engine optimization is a very complex and long lasting process.

'search engine results page (SERP)'

The page of a search result after a search query has been introduced.

'SEMPO'

The acronym for Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. SEMPO is a non-profit professional association working worldwide to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide. Check the site here: www.sempo.org

'spam'

Any search engine marketing technique which abuses search engine guidelines and is trying to beat the war with search engine listings in an unscrupulous way. There are many techniques considered spammy by search engines, from keyword stuffing to cloaking and regular mass submissions of web pages to search engines. The most common SPAM is the unsolicited commercial e-mail.

'spider'

Also known as robot, crawler or user agent. It is used by search engines to read the content of web pages by following the links on them. The information gathered will get stored in the search engine's database. There are also unscrupulous spiders used by spammers to harvest e-mail addresses from web pages.

'sitemap'

It is a page of a website where links to all pages are placed in hierarchical order. There is also a link from each page leading to the sitemap page. This way surfers and search engine spiders can more easily find each individual page.

'stemming'

This is a linguistic analysis created to get the root form of a word. Stemming is actually variations of a word. For example, a search engine which supports stemming like Google and a searcher enters the query "run" in the results there would be also words like runner, running and so on.

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