Articles

Glossary N - S

Organic / Natural Search

Organic search results are the listings shown in the search engines results page. That are listed according to how relevant the search engine views them compared to the search query. Search engines such as Google also have sponsored listings shown on the results page. These are adverts that have paid to appear there and are often different in colour or background colour. Although these adverts appear near the top of the page, surveys show that a lot of people view the sponsored listings as spam and will avoid them. Internet users are far more likely to click on an organic search result.

Page Rank

Page rank is a popular tool created by Google to show the importance of a website page. Google assigns the website a number between 0-10, with 0 being the least valuable. Google calculates a web page’s page rank by the amount of quality inbound links, relevance of keywords on the page and actual visits to website page. Google does not provide specific information on how the tool works to stop manipulation of the tool. The page rank tool does not directly relate to your website position in the organic search engine listings. As there are many other factors determining you’re placing in the search engine listings.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay click is available from some websites and all search engines such as Google. Google PPC service is called Adwords; this service allows the customer to place an advert on the search engine results page. The advert generally costs nothing to place there and you are only charged each time someone clicks on your advert. PPC adverts are visually different compared to organic search results. PPC adverts generally have a different colour background and only allow for 1 heading line and 2 content lines.

RSS

RSS is an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a web feed format which is used to update pieces of work that are being updated on a very frequent basis e.g. blogs and news headlines. RSS feeds allows user to subscribe to a websites RSS feed. This is very useful because you will receive updates from all the sites you are subscribed to, meaning you don’t have to go on every website individually.

Sandbox

A sandbox is a temporary location website that is under development. Iconet use a sandbox to thoroughly test websites before they go live. This ensures that the website will be performing at its optimum as soon as it goes on the internet.

Search Engine

There are many search engines online now, with the main ones being Google, Yahoo and MSN. These are used to search the internet to find files, images, videos or websites that are relevant to the search query you entered. The search engine results are most commonly displayed as a list with the most relevant result at the top.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

This a way of promoting your product/website by increasing your presence in the search engines. Common SEM methods are PPC, SEO, paid placement, contextual advertising and paid inclusion.

SEO

Everyone wants their websites to be top of search engines such as Google. To achieve this you need an SEO (search engine optimisation) service. Search engine optimisation is a service that is used to increase the amount of traffic to a website through natural/organic search engine results. Search engines send bots which trawl through the code of your site and rank the website according to many different factors.

Iconet’s search engine optimisation service offers a quarterly update session in which we will optimise the code of your site, the meta tags, the keywords, submit your site to all the major search engines, ensures your site passes W3C guidelines, fix any broken links and much more. We offer all websites no matter what size a free search engine optimisation and website design report, detailing how optimised your site currently is. For more detailed information please click here.

Ben Towler, Web Design Assistant, Iconet