Does SEO Terminology Confuse You?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 6 of September , 2008 at 9:34 am

The world of SEO is full of abbreviations and acronyms and many people find these confusing. One of the most confusing areas relates to websites (and blogs) and the search engines. Let’s clear up a few off these confusions:

Search Engine Crawler:
A search engine crawler is really nothing more than a piece of software that sends out feelers to websites. It reads the websites and notes any changes. It also follows any links to see where they are going.

Search Engine Spider:
The search engine spider and the search engine crawler are the same thing.

Search Engine Index:
The search engine crawler (or spider) visits pages on the web and ‘reads’ them. It passes that information back where it is stored in an index. When someone searches for a term, that search term is looked up in the index. In theory, the most appropriate answers are taken from the index and ranked. The ranking determines the order the results are printed in.

Search Engine Algorithm:
This is the heart of the search engine. An algorithm is simply a mathematical formula that takes all the small variables and creates a score based on the search query. Results from a search engine query are rated using the search engine algorithm.

These are four terms that you will come across a lot when attempting to undertake your own SEO program. Gain an understanding of them and you will help place your site above the rest.

                      Category: SEO