Techie Talk? Beam me up Scottie!
Techies, they are a strange breed. Often difficult to understand and unhealthily obsessed with new toys and gizmos. However, given that you are involved with the web, no doubt you will find yourself dealing with them.
Welcome to another informative installment of Techie Talk. Our goal? To give you the knowledge to cut through the technical mumbo jumbo and understand what on earth they are talking about! In this issue we will be discussing everything from meta tags to routers!
(M – S)
M
Meta Tags: Elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page.
Megabit: Unit of digital information storage. Normally seen as Mb. 1Mb = 1,000,000 bit in metric measure
N
Navigation: This usually consists of a menu which allows the viewer to get to all of the pages on your website.
Nofollow: Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link targets ranking in the search engine's index.
Netscape: General name of series of web browsers originally produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, now part of AOL. Discontinued on 1st March 2008.
O
Optimisation: Changes made to a web page to improve the positioning of that page with one or more search engines.
Open Source: Method of design and development utilising the accessibility of the internet that allows public collaboration and peer involvement.
P
Page Rank: A link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents.
PDQ: Acronym for “Process Data Quickly” terminals that process credit and debit card transactions in retail outlets.
Q
Quality Content: Make sure your content is relevant and fresh.
Query: A user enters this into web search engine to satisfy his or her information needs.
Quicktime: Multimedia application developed by Apple Inc that enables users to handle formats of video, media clips, sound, music and animation. Normally associated with iTunes.
R
Ranking: The process of ordering websites or web pages by a search engine or a directory so that the most relevant sites appear first in the search results for a particular query.
Redirects: A redirect is a script that will send the viewer to an alternate page or website.
Regional: Search engines are getting local. Google is starting to filter the results you see based on your geographic location. Making it clear for search engines to know where you are will help “future proof” your site for future changes in search patterns.
Router: A networking device often used on the Internet to forward information and route its direction by various paths. They provide connectivity between businesses and interconnect internet service providers.
S
Search Engine: A server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing internet web pages, storing the results and returning lists of pages which match particular queries.
Spam: A term to describe a site that is abusing SEO with too many keywords, is also a term for unsolicited emails.
Shopping Cart: : American term for shopping basket software assisting customers purchasing multiple items within an on-line retail store. When a customer has finished adding items into the basket they precede to the checkout, when the software will calculate total, tax, postage and packaging.