Definitions of Webmaster Jargon

Content Management System

A Content Management System (CMS) allows a website owner to update the site without the need for any technical knowledge. A simple example would be an online form in which you type the text you want to appear on a certain page.

However, it's not just about text. Any element on a page can be altered using a CMS including images, prices, or even the colour of the links.

The CMS is accessed from an administration area of the website, and this area is normally password-protected. This is sometimes known as a backend. It can be as simple or as complex as you like, depending on your individual needs and budget.

A CMS requires a database and scripting capability. PHP with a MySql database is a common combination. ASP with MsSql or Access is another possibility, although Microsoft hosting may be slightly more expensive. Your hosting plan will have to support whatever scripting language and database you want to use, and it will usually be more expensive than hosting that allows only static pages.

Who Needs a Content Management System?

Large websites can be updated more easily using a CMS. Manually changing each page of a 100+ page site could soon become a laborious task, and a CMS would make this much quicker. It would also be useful for smaller sites that are frequently updated, particularly if those working on the site have no experience of HTML.

If your site contains only a few pages, and the information that they contain is unlikely to need to be altered frequently, content management is probably overkill. But if you want control over your site without having to pay a developer every time you need to add some news to the front page, it's worth getting one.

SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of changing the structure of a website so that it performs well in search engines. It is a dark art, because the exact formula the engines use to decide which results to deliver first is a closely guarded secret, and constantly changing. Optimisers learn what works best by continuously testing and monitoring websites.

The dark side of SEO

There is something of an arms race going on between search engines and optimisers. When unscrupulous webmasters use tricks to get irrelevant pages to the top of all the results, it is a problem for search engines. This dilutes the value of their results and they lose visitors. These tricks are known as "search engine spamming". An example is cloaking, which means serving one page to a human visitor and a very different one to search engines.

Cheating in order to perform well in search engines is a high-risk strategy. If a website is found doing this it risks being banned, either automatically or manually when someone makes a spam report, or having penalties applied. Penalties vary, but if a major engine applies one it can drastically reduce a site's traffic. If this happens the webmaster is often better off starting afresh with a completely new domain name.

Legitimate SEO

Fortunately, there are many optimisation techniques that do not involve deception. Legitimate SEO matches the topic of a website to the text picked up by search engines, and ensures that the words on a page are visible to them. Some search engines have difficulty with technologies such as Flash, Javascript, frames, and dynamically created pages. Occasionally mistakes in code will make a website hard or impossible to crawl correctly. Optimisation ensures that your website is not invisible to them. It also deals with ways of giving more prominence to your most important pages.

Why Optimise?

Search engine optimisation is a major method of marketing your website. Although it's possible to buy paid-for listings in most search engines, some searchers will always prefer to use the regular listings first. Without optimisation your website will only be accessible to those people who have come into contact with your advertising or your sales literature, or who have heard of it through word of mouth. Increasingly people are turning to the internet to research topics before making a decision to purchase. Search engines are a major part of this process.

Some judicious changes to your website, coupled with a link building campaign, could provide better results than more traditional forms of advertising, especially for certain sectors. If you want a part of the massive amount of traffic that flows through search engines, but you don't have a large budget for advertising, good optimisation is the best option.

SERPS

In the context of search engines, SERPs stands for "Search Engine Results Pages". This is the page shown by a search engine in response to a search query.

How much is a word worth?

Certain keywords are the focus of intense competition. Good examples would be so-called "money phrases" such as "home loans" or "hotels". Getting to the top of SERPs such as these would bring a large number of visitors who may be planning to spend a lot of money. However, nobody gets these top positions easily : it will usually take expert optimisation and aggressive link building.

Measuring the competitiveness of SERPs is not as straightforward as simply counting the number of other pages that use the keywords. Most pages written in English will include the keyword "the", for example, but it's unlikely that many websites will be using "the" as a keyword. By contrast, there are fewer sites that use "mortgages" as a keyword, but getting a high rank for this will be difficult, not least because few webmasters want to place links on their sites to a page about mortgages.

Fluctuating SERPs

SERPs are not constant, and may even change from one minute to the next on some engines. The search engines are updated constantly as new websites and pages are added. The way they order their results, known as the algorithm, is also updated frequently.

The advent of personalised search results mean that not only do results change with time, but they're different for each person. Personalisation can happen on a lot of levels. It can be a response to where the user is located, whether they are logged in to an account, language preferences, cookies, search behaviour, and much more.

Not all search engines use personalisation to the same degree. DuckDuckGo is known for using less personalisation than other search engines, due to its policies on user tracking.