Search engine and internet acronyms

Search engine acronyms

SEO

Search engine optimisation. The art of writing pages for your users and co-incidentally having them show up well in search engine rankings.

SERPs

Search Engine Results Pages.

#1

Position 1. Where we'd all like to be in the SERPs.

BL

Backlink - a link to a web site (normally from an external site). Having lots of them is a good way to get to #1.

IBL

An InBound Link (a link from an external site). Also used to describe an Internal Backlink (a link from the same site).

CPC

Cost Per Click - The amount you have to pay every time your advert on a web site is clicked.

PPC

Pay Per Click - normally used in association with search engines that show paid listings before those that have got there on merit.

ROI

Return on Investment - How much money you make against the amount you put in in the first place.

KW

Keyword - A word found on your page that people might search for to find your site.

Google related acronyms

G

Google - the search engine. Also known as GG, and the Big G.

PR

Pagerank - Google's measure of the importance of a page based on the number and importance of inbound links.

PR0

When Google page rank is 0 out of 10. It could mean a penalty, but usually it is a result of not having enough inbound links to a site.

#9999

Normally used in reference to a web site that is not included in Google results (the results only go up to 1000).

IPO

Initial public offering - where a company floats on the US stock market.

API

A tool from Google that allows you to use their results in your own search facility.

Server acronyms

URL

Uniform Resource Locator - Your domain name in essence.

URI

Uniform Resource Indicator - What the W3C want us to call URLs.

W3C

World Wide Web Consortium - The guys that set standards for html, CSS, and other internet related things (like URIs).

DNS

Domain Name Server - Translates a human readable web address (URI) into a numerical IP address which defines the server where your web site can be found.

IP

Means Internet Protocol, but normally used to refer to IP Address which is the numerical address of a server in the format 123.123.123.123

Web design acronyms

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets - Used to separate the content of html from the style. Can be used in search engine optimization to clean your code and define where different parts of the page appear in the code.

PHP

Formerly Personal Home Pages, now (apparently recursive) Hypertext Preprocessor. A good way to automatically generate thousands of useless pages, but also used for honest purposes in sites like Amazon.

ASP

Active Server Pages - The equivalent server side processing from Microsoft. Now being replaced with ASPX which is very much more powerful, but also more complex.

SSI

Server Side Inclusion - A useful technique where the server constructs a page from parts of other files.


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