In the world of Search Engine Optimisation there are many different technical terms and words, which are used to describe a variety of things relating to SEO. Here are a few of them explained:

Spamdexing

This is the term used to describe the deliberate effort made to spam a Search Engine index. In reference to Search Engine Optimisation, the term spam is when a website is quite high up the search engine ranking even though its content is not relevant. This technique is seen as deceitful and, when used, can result in the page being banned from the search engine.

Link Farms

Link farms are groups of separate websites, which are highly interlinked. The purpose of these groups of sites is to inflate the link popularity in order to maximise hits to the website and increase the search engine ranking. This is another technique that is not approved by the major search engines and can, again, lead to a total ban.

Bot

A bot or robot is also known as a spider. This refers to the software, which scans the web and the purpose of a spider in Search Engine Optimisation is to crawl through all the different websites looking for new and related content in order to rank the website higher on the search engine’s results. The main thing they look for on the websites is written matter that contains many of the keywords and that this content makes sense.

Robots.txt

This term refers to a file that features on every website. The spiders (as mentioned before) read this file in order to determine which pages of the website they need to read to gather the information they require for the ranking. Webmasters must specify in this file which pages should not be crawled by the spiders as an indexing of login specific pages are seen as spam by Google and can have a harmful effect on the ranking of the site.

Indexed

A search engine, such as Google, is essentially a massive index of websites. The term indexed refers to a website being featured on the search engine’s results. Indexing also refers to the process of using the spiders to rank the site on the search engine results.

Meta tag

A meta tags provide a guide to the content of each page. They were used in the beginning of SEO to help the search engine gauge the relevancy of the website for searchers. This proved to not be reliable enough as there were many inaccuracy in the meta tags and many websites used them to wrongly inform people and search engines of the contents of their website.

Keywords

When typing something into a search engine, there are generally certain terms regularly used when looking for certain things. These are known as keywords. They are used by websites in Search Engine Optimisation in the new content they upload so that the search engine moves it higher up their ranking and directs suitable people to the site.

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