Website Style Guide

Glossary of Terms

Glossary of terms used in this document.

Microcontent – content on a page which describes the macrocontent around it. A typical example is headlines in a newspaper describing the text and pictures around it. In our case, microcontent is keywords/meta-tags, page titles, headings, descriptions of pages, opening paragraphs and key words or phrases within the main body of text. The body text and images on the page is the macrocontent.

Spider – automatic program which crawls around the internet looking for pages to add to its search engines. Also called Crawlers or Robots (Bots). They will usually arrive at your homepage and follow any links they find there and index those as well. An auto-refreshing redirect page can stop some spiders in their tracks.

Scanning – users don’t read everything on your website – they scan the page looking for headings and paragraphs which attract their attention. Help them with this as much as possible.

Spamming (also Spam)– relative to this subject, spamming would consist of repeating popular words over and over again in your list of keywords, specifically keywords unrelated to the content of the site, in particular those of a pornographic nature. This is usually done in an attempt to boost the rating of a web site with a search engine. Most search engines frown upon this behaviour and will delete offenders from their index.

Index – a search engine collects all the data which it uses to search upon and stores it in its index. When a search is made through that search engine it will compare the keywords typed in by the user against those held in its index in order to produce a list of results. As the search engines do not search through every site on the web for every single search, any pages which are new or which have had their microcontent updated may need re-submitting so that they are added to the index.