Glossary Term S – Best Affiliate Programs
Search Engine
A tool that enables users to locate information on the World Wide Web. Search engines take information gathered by its bots and create a searchable index. Search engines use keywords entered by users to find Web sites which contain the information sought. Complex algorithms are involved in gathering the most relevant data/sites for a keyword search.
Search Term
A single word or group of words used in a search engine document query. It also refers to the strategic keywords used to optimize Web page content.
Second Level Domain
In the Domain Name System (DNS), the next lower level of the hierarchy underneath the top level domains. In a domain name, that portion of the domain name that appears immediately to the left of the top level domain. For example, the networksolutions in networksolutions.com. Second level domain names are often descriptive and have come to be used increasingly to represent businesses and other commercial concerns on the Internet.
Secondary Server
A name server that will be used in addition to and as a backup for the primary name server for a domain name. Names and IP addresses of secondary servers are provided by registrars when they register names. Both a primary and secondary server name server are required.
Security Ceritificate
Secure sockets layer, SSL, uses security certificates, often stored as text files to establish a secure, or encrypted connection on the web.
SEM - Search Engine Marketing
Advertising a product or service on search engine results pages. These are usually listed as "sponsored links" or "advertisement" on the results pages of popular engines.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the constantly changing and very competitive practice of designing web sites and pages to rank as highly as possible in search results from search engines. When a search is done in a search engine the first web sites to appear on the list under sponsored links are the best search engine optimized sites for the keyword entered in.
Server
A server is a computer and hard disk that houses your web site information and manages and shares network resources so your site can be accessed on the world wide web. It also sometimes refers to the hosting service itself.
Session
A continuous period of time during which a user's browser is viewing Web pages or a Web application within the same server or domain.
Shared Hosting
This is the most common form of hosting and the least expensive. Your web site data is stored on a hard drive with a number of other web sites, and you are limited to a specific space allotment, and data transfer.
Shockwave
A technology that enables web pages to include multimedia objects such as audio, animation, and video; you use an authoring tool by Macromedia called "Director" to create a shockwave object and a program called "Afterburner" to compress the object. A plug-in available from Macromedia's web site is required to see a Shockwave object included on a web page.
Shopping Cart Software
Shopping cart software allows a web site user to shop online in a similar way to shopping in a real store. A virtual shopping cart is provided and customers can add or remove items prior to paying at a checkout location. Many ecommerce sites offer a free shopping cart, but the ability to use credit cards is usually an additional charge through a third party.
Site Builder
Either online or hard copy software used to ease the process of building a web site. Site building software often contains templates, clip art, fonts, color variations, and layout designs for building a web site.
Site Map
A listing of all sections of a website. Usually, each listing is an active link, enabling a visitor to click on the link and move directly to a section from the site map. Also a useful tool for getting search engine spiders to crawl an entire site by following all the links on the site map.
Source Code
The HTML and Java programming of a web document. Look in your browser under View Source Code to look at a page's code. If their page does something cool and you would like to use their code as a template, cut and paste their source code into a word processing program and save it.
Spam
The bane of computer existence, Spam is the pollution of unsolicited email and the misuse of mailing lists to send a message to large amounts of people who did not ask for the email to be sent. Term is generally agreed to have originated from a Monty Python skit where the term is repeatedly used. Spam is also a processed canned meat product.
Spider
A spider, or Web crawler, is a program that finds all the links from a page and returns them to another program for processing. All web sites submitted to an Internet search engine rely on the search engine's spider robots to discover new Web sites, pages, and changes and update their index accordingly.
Spyware
Software that secretly installs other software on a users computer and monitors the computer’s use without the user’s knowledge or consent. Worse than spam, Spyware is a curse to the technical world.
SRS - Shared Registration System
The Shared Registration System is The central system for all accredited registrars to access and register and control domain names.
SSL - Secure Socket Layer
A protocol designed by Netscape Communications to enable encrypted communications across the Internet. It is mostly used where sensitive information such as credit card numbers are transferred from a browser to a server and is common in e-commerce situations. Both sides have a certificate which allows messages to be encrypted and decoded only by the sending and receiving parties.
Stop Words
In database searching, "stop words" are small and frequently occurring words like and, or, in, of that are often ignored when keyed as search terms. Sometimes putting them in quotes " " will allow you to search them. Sometimes + immediately before them makes them searchable.
Subdomain
Typically known as a "domain within a domain", subdomains are individual Web addresses built upon a pre-existing domain name (such as clientname.yourhostingcompany.com). As a reseller, you will have the option of assigning subdomains to clients if they do not choose to have a domain name.
Submission
To suggest a website to be included in a search engine or directory, so that it may be evaluated and included in search results.
Submission Service
A service which charges a fee to submit your site to the search engines for you. Using these services is no longer necessary as it is free to submit to the search engines and submitting to five engines can get your site listed in the main engines. Submission services can be useful in getting listed in the minor engines.
Support
Depending on the web host support may be offered in on or more of the following forms: Forums, Frequently Asked Question and Answers, Telephone, Email, Trouble Ticket, and Live Chat.
