Ohio Web Weaver - Glossary of Terms

Glossary of Terms (A-E F-L M-Z)

Malware

A generic term used to describe a variety of malicious software such as viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware, etc.

Megabyte (MB)

A measure of data storage and/or data transfer on your Web site.
1 Megabyte = 1,000 Kilobytes = 1,000,000 Bytes
1,000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
For data storage and data transfer:

* 10MB is roughly 330 Web pages stored or transferred (viewed)
* 20MB is roughly 660 Web pages stored or transferred (viewed)
* 30MB is roughly 990 Web pages stored or transferred (viewed)

Meta Tag

Meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements are placed as tags in the <head></head> section of an HTML document.

Typical uses of Meta tags are to include information for search engines to help them better categorize a page.

Password

A password is a form of secret authentication that is used to restrict access to a resource. Good passwords contain letters and non-letters and are not simple combinations such as Fred1. A good password might be: B4uGo#.

Perl

Short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl is a programming language with strong capability to process text. Commonly used for writing CGI Scripts.

Private Registration

When you register a domain name, your address, e-mail and phone number are published in the public WHOIS database. ICANN requires this personal information to be available for anybody to view on the Web. Private registration allows you to use alternate contact information rather than your own personal information for the WHOIS database when registering a domain name.

Register Domain

To establish an Internet identity you need to have a domain name. In order to do this, you'll need to register a domain name. To do so, you can go to www.networksolutions.com and type your desired name in the search box and purchase an available domain.

Script

A script is a type of program that consists of a set of instructions for another application or utility to use.

Search Engine

A search engine is a program designed to help find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web using key words and phrases. Search engines explore the Internet and return a list of Web pages that are related to the key words or phrases entered. Popular search engines include Google, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Excite, Hotbot, Lycos, and Yahoo.

Search engines are also a good tool to market your Website to potential visitors. Search engines let people know about your site and drive traffic to your site. When a person searches on a term that is related to your Website, a brief description of your site with a link to it will appear in their search results. There are a number of different ways to approach Search Engine Marketing.

You can also pay to have your site listed on search results (in a different area from natural, non-paid search results) when a key word you designate is searched on.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes your Website more appealing to search engines and gives them a better understanding of who they should send to your site. Optimizing your Website should result in a high placement in natural search results or in the area where companies aren't paying to be listed.

Search Engine Submission

This includes the submission of your Website to search engines and a complete analysis of your site, identifying improvement on your Website that can help your Website get indexed by search engines more successfully.

Sub-Domain/Directory Pointer

A directory pointer (or sub-domain) allows you to point that sub-domain to a particular page (or directory) of a Website. Two popular examples of subdomains include news.google.com and mail.yahoo.com, where news and mail subdomains.

Unix

A popular multi-user, multitasking operating system developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s. Created by just a handful of programmers, UNIX was designed to be a small, flexible system used exclusively by programmers.

URL

An acronym for Uniform Resource Locator, a URL is the address for a resource or site (usually a directory or file) on the World Wide Web and the convention that Web browsers use for locating files and other remote services.

User ID/User Name

A User ID is the account name used to access a computer system. Also called login name or user name, it is a way people identify themselves to their online service or Internet access provider.

Web Design

The aesthetic and navigational architecture of a Website.

Web Hosting

Web hosting is an online storage service for information, images, video, or any content accessible through the Web.

Web Page

A Web page is a document created with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that is part of a group of hypertext documents or resources available on the World Wide Web. Collectively, these documents and resources form what is known as a Web site. Web pages can contain hypertext links to other places within the same document, to other documents at the same Website, or to documents at other Web sites. They can also contain fill-in forms, photos, large clickable images, sounds, and videos for downloading.

Website

A Website is a collection of HTML documents or Web pages that are linked together and that exist on the Web at a particular server. Exploring a Website usually begins with the home page, which may lead you to more information about that site. A single server may support multiple Web sites.

Website traffic

The visitors who come to your Website are collectively referred to you as your site's traffic. You may find it helpful to use a page view counter to track how many visitors your site receives. More sophisticated tracking tools, such as SuperStats, compile Website traffic reports on what sites your visitors come from when they arrive at your Web site, where they go within your Web site, and the activities they engage in on your site.

WHOIS

WHOIS is a directory of domain name information. When you register a domain name, your postal address, e-mail address and phone number are automatically published in the public WHOIS database. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit body responsible for accrediting domain name registrars, requires that this personal information be accurate and available for anybody to view on the Internet.

World Wide Web (WWW)

You can think of the Web as a worldwide collection of text and multimedia files and other network services interconnected via a system of hypertext documents. Http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) was created as a means for sharing data internationally, instantly, and inexpensively. With hypertext, a word or phrase can contain a link to other text. To achieve this, CERN developed a programming language called HTML that allows you to easily link to other pages or network services on the Web.