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SEO Glossary of Terms

Search Engine Optimization – Definitions

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Rankings
The order in which individual web pages are returned in the SERPS for a given search query. Search engines rank the web pages based upon relevancy to your search terms according to their proprietary algorithm.

Reciprocal links
A mutual agreement between two webmasters to exchange links (i.e. they both add a link to the other's website on their own website) and therefore build link popularity. Most search engines (certainly Google) are sophisticated enough to detect reciprocal linking and they don't view it very favorably because it is clearly a manufactured method of generating links. Websites with reciprocal links risk penalization.

Redirect
A tactic sometimes used to send a user to a different page that the one she found in the SERPS. For example, a webmaster optimizes a web page for a very popular keyword. When a user finds the page by searching on that keyword, she is subsequently redirected to a different, possibly non-relevant page from which the webmaster stands to make money.

This is considered to be an invalid use of a redirect and the search engines (including Google) will penalize pages that use one in this manner.

Referrer or Referring URL
The URL of the web page where a visitor clicked a link to come to your site.

Refresh Tag
A tag which defines when and to where a page will refresh.

Relative Link
A relative link is a hyperlink that does not include an entire domain name, folder or subdirectory name and file name together in the URL. A link that is defined by its relative position to the current URL. For example: optimizationbasics.html

Relevancy
The degree to which the content on a web page that is returned in a list of search results (SERPS) "matches" the topic of the information that the user was searching for. In other words, if you use the search phrase "small green widgets" and a page is returned that deals with "large red thingamajigs", the relevancy of that page is very poor.

Robot
A program used by a search engine to crawl the web in order to find, rank, and index new web pages.

Robots.txt
A special file that is commonly used to exclude some or all robots from crawling certain files or directories on a website. This file should be placed in your website's root directory.

RSS feed
Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication