A web browser, developed by Apple. See http://www.apple.com/safari/
Glossary
Welcome to the glossary section of our site please feel free to search through here for any terms you want to learn more about.
Sandbox
When a Google prevents your content from appearing in any search engine results pages.
Scraper Sites
Sites which take (or ’scrape’) their content exclusively from other sites.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Also known as Search Marketing, SEM is a cover-all phrase for marketing via search engines. It encompasses SEO and Paid Search.
Search Engine Optimisation / Optimization (SEO)
Stands for ’search engine optimisation / optimization’ and/or ’search engine optimiser / optimizer’ (if you are referring to an individual as an SEO).
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
The results page which is displayed by a search engine in response to the search query entered by the user.
Search Term
The phrase which a user enters into a search engine.
Search Term Popularity
Refers to the relative popularity of a particular search term – e.g. ‘car insurance’ is a very popular search term; but ‘renault 5 car insurance’ will be less popular.
Session
An online marketing metric. A session is when a user accesses a site and then either leaves of their own accord, or the session will expire after a period of inactivity.
See Also: Visit
Share of Voice
A marketing metric which is calculated by dividing a specific company’s spend by the total spend in the sector to give a percentage.
Share of Wallet
A Marketing Metric which refers to the amount of spend you get from your customers versus their total spend. This can be difficult to calculate as you will not always know exactly how much your customers have to spend.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a representation of the structure of a website and should include all of the pages on a given domain. It’s typically used at the planning stage to assist in the design process, and when included on a live site acts as an alternative way to navigate for both search engine spiders and human users.
Sky Scraper
An industry standard sized banner with the following dimensions: 120 pixels (wide) x 600 pixel (high). The following other ad types also come under the Skyscraper banner – Wide Skyscraper 160 x 600 & Half Page 300 x 600.
Sniffer Script
A program which identifies which browser a visitor is using and serves them an appropriate version of the website. These scripts are also used to ascertain whether or not a user has flash, and therefore serve them an appropriate version of the site.
Spam
In techie speak spam refers to unsolicited or undesirable messages – these can come in many forms – examples include email spam, SMS (mobile phone message) spam, instant messenger spam, forum spam, comment spam etc.
Spamdexing
Spamdexing is a blackhat method (or set of methods) used to manipulate the relevancy of a site indexed by a search engine. An example of a spamdexing technique is repeating certain phrases in order to dupe a search engine’s algorithm into thinking a particular page contains content or resources that are relevant to the repeated phrase.
See Also: Spam
Spamglish
Spamglish refers to the language commonly used on spammy sites – it’s often keyword rich, but to the point where the copy is meaningless to the reader. This phrase is also coined for spam emails which contain similarly nonsensical language.
See Also: Spam, Spamdexing
Spider
A spider is an agent sent out by a search engine to catalogue websites for indexing purposes.
See Also: Bot, Crawler, Robot, Web Crawler
Spider Trap
Web pages which either intentionally or unintentionally cause a spider or bot to make an infinite number of requests – e.g. a calendar where there is always a link to the next day.
See Also: Bot, Crawler, Robot, Web Crawler
Splash Page
A splash page is a webpage that a user sees just before the homepage, almost like a pre-homepage. Splash pages have many uses, e.g. to advertise a particular product, to warn users of adult content, to direct a user to the appropriate website for their country or language etc
Spyware
A catch all term for potentially harmful software which is installed on a user’s computer without their knowledge or consent. The function of spyware programs can vary, but include the collection of personal data, can cause changes in computer settings, redirect browsers to other sites which can result in infecting the computer with further viruses etc.
Standards Compliant
A term which refers to a website’s design being compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) standards. See also Web Standards.
Static
Static means unchanging; the opposite of dynamic. For example a Static URL will always lead to the same web page; whereas in sites where URLs are generated dynamically a given URL will not always lead to the same page; and may instead cause an error message to appear as the web page cannot be found.
Stemming
Stemming is a process in which an algorithm reduces a word to its root or stem. For example a stemming algorithm will identify that the words “running”, “runner”, “runs”, all stem from the word “run”. Search engines use algorithms like this to identify a range of associated words related to a users search phrase.
Stop Character
A stop character is a character within a URL that tells a search engine that page being crawled is dynamic. Examples of stop characters are question marks or ampersands.
Stop Word
Stop words are commonly used words such as ‘the’. If they are included within a query, search engines will ignore them, as they are used too frequently to have any bearing on the relevancy of the results.
Streaming Media
When media is streamed it allows the user to view and / or listen to a continuous audio and / or visual without the need to download a file. Streaming is a method whereby the data is sent in small packets which are instantly displayed to the end user.
Submitting
Refers to the process of submitting a website to a search engine for indexing.
Supplemental Results
Refers to web pages which rank lower (normally due to having low trust rank – this may be due to duplicate content, low levels of links etc) and are therefore placed in supplemental indices.
Syndication
Web syndication is a means of sharing information on multiple websites. Web syndication usually refers to making web feeds available to provide a website with useful information. For example, The BBC website contains web feeds for different types of news broadcasts.
See Also: RSS