Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Jargon Buster

SEO - search engine optimisation (or optimization) - is the art of getting your website a high ranking in the search engine listings.

SERPs - search engine results pages - are the pages that come up when you carry out a search with a search engine. They show you the websites that the search engine has picked as most relevant to your search criteria. The aim of SEO is to get as far up the first page as possible - remember, many people wil not look beyond the first few entries, let alone the first page.

Search engine ranking - how high up the list of the SERPs your website appears.

Search engine - ok, you probably know this one. Let's just say that the big names such as google, yahoo, MSN and AOL account for the lion's share of all searches performed.

On-Site SEO - whatever improvements that can be made to your actual website, as opposed to Off-Site SEO which is concerned with what can be done elsewhere on the Internet to promote your website and improve its search engine ranking.

Spider - a computer program used by a search engine to crawl the Internet looking for websites to include in the SERPs. Sometimes referred to as a robot.

Robots.txt file - a small file on your server that can be used to communicate your preferences to a spider if you don't want the search engines to crawl certain pages on your website.

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