Geek’s guide to the internet

Jan 15 2008 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

THE lexicon of the net is like no other, but to use the web effectively, you need to speak the lingo...

BROWSER - Something of a misnomer these days, since most people are very specific in their search criteria, this is a program you use to view web pages and 'browse' websites. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer are the most popular.

KEYWORDS - A critical tool for targeting your customers, web sites have keywords planted in the coding behind the scenes in groups, called metatags, which also include title and description. The metatags are read by search engine robots when they visit sites. A search engine will check these and also the wording of the content of the page to check that they are all relevant to the customer’s search term before offering your page.

SEARCH ENGINE - a big, interactive encyclopaedia, which allows you to search the whole of the internet for information.

SERVER (aka webserver or host) - the host computer is the equivalent to the print world’s publisher, but with less editiorial integrity since anyone can be a publisher and there is no requirement on the internet for accuracy.

ROBOT - a software programme used by search engines to scour the internet automatically and add sites to their database. These are also creepily known as spiders or crawlers.

URL AND DOMAIN NAME - URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which is the techie term for the address of a web page. Included in the URL is the domain name, so the BBC’s domain name is www.bbc.co.uk and the full URL of a specific page maybe http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/gardenersworld

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) - engines use artificial intelligence to read the content of your site. They're not interested in layout or pictures, only the words on the page, so SEO is the technique of adapting a web site to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to match your content to customer searches. Search engines always work in favour of the person searching, which is why it’s important to design the site from the consumer’s perspective.

PAY PER CLICK ADVERTS -

space at the top and right-hand side of the search results pages is used to display short adverts which you pay for - but only if someone actually clicks on one and arrives at your site.