Glossary of Internet Terms – Learn Internet Jargon

The following is a list of terms often used to describe the Internet and placing your web site in cyberspace. This list is organised in such a way as to group the terms together logically.

Search Engine Terms

Search Engine Optimization/Optimisation SEO: The act of altering a web site/page in order to improve search engine rankings. Learn more on this subject here.

SERP: Stands for “Search Engine Results Page”. This means the results any given search engine will produce for a search on any term.

PageRank: This is a uniquely Google concept and refers to a rank that Google allocates a web site based on how many other web sites link to it. Learn more on this subject here.

Ranking: The place your web site/page sits in relation to other results on the SERP. Learn more on this subject here.

Spider/Crawler/Robot ( bot ): A small piece of software designed to trawl the Internet by following links from one page to another. Search engines will often use the information gathered by their robots to catalogue web sites.

Doorway/Entry/Splash Pages: These are pages placed on a web site to specifically target a given search term. While using these pages can be effective and legitimate you need to be careful that the page won’t be interpreted as attempting to spam a search engine. This can be achieved by making it a regular page on your web site focused on a particular term, or topic.

Meta tags: These are invisible tags placed on a web page to describe the content of a page for a search engine. The two most common Meta tags are “keyword” and “description” Meta tags. Use of these tags needs to be inline with the accepted guidelines, otherwise the site/page may be considered as attempting to spam a search engine.

Hidden Text: This refers to text that placed on a web page, usually the same colour as a background colour, making it invisible to the end user. This is normally used in an attempt to load the page with search keywords, or terms, while passing it off as real content. This not a legitimate technique to improve rankings and will potentially have your site perceived as trying to Spam the search engines.

Keyword Density: This is frequency with which a keyword, or term, will appear in the content of a web page and can help improve a page ranking. It can also be used by search engines to analyse the relevance of a page to a given keyword or term.

Keyword Loading: This is act of deliberately “stuffing”, or “loading”, a page full of keywords in order to improve search engine rankings. It can be done in legitimate content or through the use of “hidden text”, but either way it is not considered acceptable practice and could lead to a site/page being banned from a search engine.

Search Engine Spamming: This is the, usually deliberate, act f trying to trick a search engine into improving your search engine rankings. One means of doing this could include “Keyword Loading” through the use of “Hidden Text”. If your site gets perceived as trying to Spam a search engine it will most probably be banned from the search engine and getting it listed again can be extremely difficult, or impossible.

Directory: This is a web site that is dedicated to listing web sites, generally in relevant categories. There are hundreds of directories that you can place a link t your web site for free, potentially improving you SERP ranking.

Backlink: This refers to links, generally on other web sites, that are directed to your web site, or a page on your web site. The number and quality of backlinks to your web site can help improve you search engine ranking by assessing you “Link Popularity”.

Link Popularity: This refers to the quantity and quality of backlinks your web site has. This will determine your web site’s “PageRank”.  Learn more on this subject here.

Search Engine Submission: The act of deliberately submitting a web site to a search engine for “Indexing”. This is not necessarily required to be indexed by a search engine, as your web site should be crawled by any important search engines.

Search Engine Index(ing): This means that your site has actually been included on the search engine listings, or their database, to be included when a search is conducted. This does not reflect the ranking of your site within the SERP.

Algorithm: This is the set of rules a search engine will use to determine the results returned from its index to a request, or search. Each search engine uses a unique algorithm, which will affect the rankings of any given site for an individual web site.

Warez: (Pronounced “wares”.) A warez site contains copyrighted information traded in violation of the copyright. Most commonly these sites will contain software.

Domain (Name) Related Terms

Domain Name: A domain name is the name you obtain for your web site, to be used to access your web site from the Internet. A domain name needs to be unique to any given web site and can be easily identified by whatever is to the right of the @ symbol in an email address. An example domain name is “example.com”, can have any relevant country extension, such as “example.com.au” or “example.co.uk” and is not to be confused with a URL.

URL: This stands for Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which is a fancy way of saying “web address” really. An example URL would be http://www.example.com, which is the full address you would use to access the domain “example.com”.

TLD: Top-Level-Domains (TLD) is the last part of a domain name, following the final dot. Usually this is determined by country, e.g. “.au” for Australia in “example.com.au”, or “.ca” for Canada in “example.ca”.

Subdomains: A subdomain can be thought of as a subdivision of a larger domain. The subdomain is anything that appears before the main domain, and can be thought of as a second-level domain. An example subdomain might be “members.example.com”. This would create a distinctly different area of the web site to the main domain “example.com”.

IP Address: It is an Internet Protocol (IP) Address that uniquely defines each computer on the Internet, not a name. The IP Address is defined by a set of four numbers of up to three digits each, separated with a dot. The numbers “123.456.0.10” is an example of an IP Address.

DNS: Domain Name System (DNS) is the means by which a domain name is translated, or mapped, to an IP Address. For instance the domain name “example.com” may translate to the IP Address of “123.123.123.123”.

Name Server: A “Name Server” is a machine on a network that turns a “Domain Name” into an “IP Address”.

Delegate a Domain: When you delegate a domain you set a domain’s DNS to point to a particular “Name Server”. A typical DNS entry for a domain will have a “Primary Name Server” and a “Secondary Name Server”, such as “ns1.example.com” and “ns2.example.com” respectively.

Web Site Related Terms

Server: This is a computer on a network (e.g. the Internet) that delivers information (e.g. a web site/page) to that network.

Server Log: This is a file, or several files, that hold information about the activity of a server such as requests made to the server and the result of those requests.

Directory: A “Directory”, or folder, is a place on a computer hard drive where a group of files and/or other directories are held.

Index: The “index” page of a web site is the default page that will load for any given directory. This is the case when you load a default web address, such as http://www.example.com, you will be viewing the “index” page.

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is an authoring language for, or coding syntax, for creating pages for the World Wide Web (WWW). In a HTML page, “HTML tags” surround page text to define it’s formatting.

Frames: Frames are a method of constructing a web page so that it is divided into numerous pages, each displaying simultaneously in sections of the one browser screen. Frames are not considered ideal for the purposes of search engine indexing and should only be used for a specific purpose that a normal, singular, page cannot produce.

Browser: A piece of software used to access web pages. Three popular browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer (PC/MAC), Mozilla Firefox (PC/MAC) and Safari (MAC). It is a good idea to have your site designed so that it is compatible with all of these browsers.

Traffic: This defines the use that your web site is receiving, through the number and types of visits your web site receives. It is usually recorded in, and accessible via, web server log files.

Page Impression: A page impression can also be referred to as a “Raw”, and it refers to the loading of a web page once in a browser. Therefore if a user loads a web page it will be one “Page Impression”. If they then reload, or refresh, the same page it will be another “Page Impression”.

 Hit: The term “Hit” is often (mis)used to describe a “Page Impression”. However, the term actually refers to server downloads for a page loaded in a browser. For example, a web page that has 2 images that require downloading to view the page will record three “Hits” in the server logs for one “Page Impression”. One “Hit” for the Page Impression itself, and another two, one for each image. Therefore a web site’s “Hits” is not really a very accurate figure.

Unique: The term “Unique” is usually used to describe a unique visitor to the web site. Therefore if one unique visitor loads three pages in their browser it will be recorded as one “Unique” and three “Page Impressions”. This makes the most important/reliable “Traffic” statistics based on “Unique” visitors and “Page Impressions”.

Referrer: This is the URL that a visitor has come from when loading your web site. The “Referrer” statistics are usually held in the server log files and can include useful information such as the keywords used to search for your site on a search engine.

Back to Fact Sheets