Alexa Ranking

Alexa.com  distributes a navigation bar that keeps track of the visited sites. It uses those data to establish a ranking of the most visited domains in the Web. Yahoo.com is 1st. GatewayGenerator.com is 160,030 and FoundFirst.com is 277,150.

banners

standard graphic web ads. Many SEs demand placement of a banner in exchange for listing.

directory

A SE with a hierarchical structure. Directories have a tree-like structure with fixed categories, and the user needs to choose the most appropriate one. The first directories relied on human operators to ensure fitness within a category.

FFA pages

Free for all link pages. Good for link popularity and search engine positioning.

keywords

words that describe your content. Appropriate keyword selection is the basis of the promotion campaign.

link exchange

Usually between similar non-competing pages. Attracts traffic and improves searcher positioning.

link number

the number of links in the whole Web pointing to a certain domain. The more, the better for rankings. The links are measured by requesting: link:www.domain.com to Google or Altavista.

metatags

hidden code in the html file code, used to describe the page contents.

PageRank

a measure of link popularity, used by Google for its ranking calculations

search engine positioning

A hard to master science, full of strategic and commercial value. Appearance in SEs is one of its key factors.

Search Engines (SEs)

Any of the many information search systems available on the Web. They can be divided into Spiders or Directories.

Some authors consider SEs and Directories are completely different entities. At the beginning SEs were software and directories were human-powered. Today, the distinction is getting blurry.

SERP

Search Engine Results Pages

spider

Any software agent that navigates the Web. SE Spiders rely on its own judgement to classify websites. For that purpose, they collect keyword information from the website pages.