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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Glossary - S

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Sales Tag

HTML code that allows marketers to track users' purchase activities, such as order size and items purchased, on a landing page.

Search Engine

Refers to an application that indexes the Web and matches a list of relevant pages to search queries. Search engines are typically free services offered at a destination website, or as a component of a larger set of offerings.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

The practice of using search engine results for marketing and advertising. Search Engine Marketing is typically associated with generating revenue through paid listings, but may also include: increasing brand visibilty, improving organic search engine ranking, site optimization, increasing traffic to a website, and lead generation.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The practice of manipulating the code and structure of a website’s pages to improve its ranking among organic search engine results for key words and phrases. Because search engines do not publicly share their ranking methods, and constantly evolve their algorithms, SEO is a long-term, evolving process, not a one-time fix.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

The page generated by a search engine in response to a search query.

Search-Friendly Design

Crafting a website’s content, navigation and meta-tags with the search engines in mind, so that they can easily find and index the site’s information. Search engines typically have trouble reading sites that have been designed using frames, Java Scripting, Flash, CGI scripts or active-server pages as well as database-driven sites, with dynamically generated pages.

Search Term Research

Discovery and analysis of keywords to target in an SEO or SEM campaign.

Site Map

A hierarchical list with links to all pages on a website. Used to show the structure of a site and aid navigation.

Social Bookmarking

Sharing a personal collection of bookmarks with a network of Internet users. “Bookmarks” may include favorite photos, websites, music, news articles, blog posts, or other online content. The most well known social bookmarking program is del.icio.us.

Spamming

Typically refers to unsolicited junk email. In SEM, Spamming is the practice of manipulating a Web page so that it ranks well against search terms despite a lack of relevant content. The major search engines typically have a strict anti-spam policy, often removing offending websites from their index upon discovery.

Spider

Software used by a search engine to scan Web pages, content and documents and catalogue them in an organized database called an index.

Splash Page

Also referred to as a "Welcome Mat Page." Functions as a precursor to the website homepage, offering topline navigation, interactivity or multimedia content.

Spotlight Tag

HTML code used by marketers to monitor clicks for a search marketing campaign. Spotlight Tags track click-through-rates for specific keywords and phrases to generate meaningful reports about user behavior.

Standard Match

A common keyword matching type which seeks out variations of a purchased search term, including the singular and plural forms of the word or phrase as well as abbreviations and mis-spellings. Ex: A keyword buy for “hotels” can include results with the word “hotel” or “hotells.”

Stemming

The ability of search engines to discern the root, or “stem,” of a longer search term. For instance, users searching for “shopping” would also receive pages that match on “shop”.

Stop Words

Conjunctions, prepositions and articles and other words such as AND, TO and A that appear often in documents yet alone contain little meaning. Search engines often overlook these words when indexing a site.

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