BROWN BEAR MEDIA

Web Designers in Windsor Berkshire

Accessibility

People don't only look at the web via a standard browser. Accessibility is the task of making a site work for a wide variety of user configurations. This is particularly important for enabling people with disabilities to access web pages. It is also now an obligation in European law.

AdSense

Google system for selling advertising space on a website

AdWords

Google system for buying advertising space on a network of websites

AJAX

"Asynchronous JavaScript And XML" is a combination of Javascript and XML that is used to power some of the more advanced functionality currently seen on websites. One noteable example is Google Maps.

Alt tags

Descriptive tags added to images on web pages so that they can be understood by people using speech synthesis software or other aids for the visually impaired.

Anchor text

The underlined (usually)text in a link

ASP

Active Server Pages. Microsoft technology commonly used to run database enabled websites. An alternative to the common PHP.

Black Hat

Illicit or immoral techniques that fool the search engines into inappropriately driving traffic to a site. Approved techniques are known, unspurprisingly as White Hat.

Back links

Back links are links pointing to a web page from other websites. Back links are used by Google as a key measure of a page's importance.

Banner Ads

A graphic image with a link placed as an advert on a web page. One standard banner ad is 468 x 60 pixels, but technically banner ads can be any size or shape.

Blogs

Blogs or weblogs are pages updated on a regular basis. They are presented in chronological order like a diary. Blogs often include links to other sites and so become useful SEO tools.

Body copy

This is the term used to describe actual words on the page. Body copy does not include navigational elements, or images.

Bot

Bot is short for robot. See also 'spider'

Cache

When you visit a web page, your computer stores a copy of the page in its memory cache. This allows web pages to load really quickly when you revist a page you have visited before.

Clickthrough rate

This is the rate at which people click on a link and is usually expressed as a percentage of the ammount of times the link was displayed. If a link was displayed to 50 visitors but only 5 of them clicked on it, the click through rate (abbreviated to CTR) was 10%.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a much frowned upon technique of configuring a site to deliver different web pages depending on the species of the visitor. If the visitor is a human being then the server displays a page designed solely to make money (generally through hidden advertising buttons and a complete lack of readable content) or trick the visitor into handing over secret passwords; whereas if the visitor is a search engine spider then a cloaking page of well-formed, content-rich, advert-free html is served up to fool the search engine regarding the site's real purpose and thereby improve future visitor numbers. Cloaking is a violation of Google's Terms Of Service and is both annoying and potentially dangerous for people who accidentally stumble across these sites.

Error page

Most servers are set up to display a page stating "File Not Found" or a similar message when a request for a page fails. These are also known as 404 pages after the error code that the server generates. Clever websites can use these pages to help the visitor try a different way of searching for the information they were originally seeking.

Firefox

Alternative browser to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox is described by its creators as the faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to surf the web

HTML

The language used to markuop webpages. Often now replaced by XHTML which is very similar but is less forgiving of sloppy coding mistakes.

Javascript

Javascript is a programming language used mainly to write computer code which runs on the machine of the person visiting a website (as opposed to the server which hosts the site).

Keyword

A word or phrase which describes the content of a page. This is the core of SEO. The aim of optimisation is to ensure that search engine bots see the keyword, and associate it correectly with the page in question.

Landing Page

The Landing Page or 'destination URL' is the web page where a visitor enters a site having clicked on an ad or search result.

Meta tags

Meta tags used to be important to search engine spiders. Two of the most well-known meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords but neither is now particularly of value for SEO purposes.

Mod_rewrite

On apache web servers, the Mod_rewrite option can be used to change confusing URLs (typically those with lots of variables appended for ASP or PHP database driven sites) into clear, easy to read and understand URLs.

Pay Per Click

A popular revenue model for advertising, as seen on Google Adwords / Adsense.

Reciprocal links

Exchanging links between websites

SEM

SEM is a popular acronym for "search engine marketing"

SEO

SEO is a popular acronym for "search engine optimization"

SERPs

Acronym for Search Engine Results Pages

Spam

Techniques that violate search engine rules

Spider

Also known as a bots, robots, or web crawlers; Spiders are programs which analyse web pages and place the content (or parts of it) on a Search Engine database such as Google or Yahoo. Spiders are automated and happily carry on working without human intervention. They use clever algorthmns to decide what a page is about and how highly to rate its contents. If your site blocks spiders then those pages will not appear in Search Results pages

Title tag

The Title tag for each page is displayed in the bar at the very top of the browser window. The title tag is the most important bit of text on a web page as far as the search engines are concerned and the SEO benefits of correctly writing title tags should not be underestimated.

URL

Acronym for 'Uniform Resource Locator'. Better known to most people as a 'web page'.

White hat

Approved techniques for Search Engine Optimisation - as practiced by Brown Bear Media

XML

An infinitely extensible markup language used for recording data sets. XML is great for transfering large amounts of data between websites with ease.

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