Optimize My Web Site Dictionary

Rankings - The order in which individual web pages are returned in the SERPS for a given search query. Search engines rank the web pages based upon relevancy to your search terms according to their proprietary algorithm.

Recall - The portion of relevant documents that were retrieved when compared to all relevant documents.

Reciprocal Links - Links to another website placed on your site in exchange for links back to your site from theirs. This is a proven way to build link popularity which is instrumental in getting high search engine rankings.

Redirect - A tactic sometimes used to send a user to a different page that the one she found in the SERPS. For example, a webmaster optimizes a web page for a very popular keyword. When a user finds the page by searching on that keyword, she is subsequently redirected to a different, possibly non-relevant page that the webmaster stands ready to make money from.

This is considered to be an invalid use of a redirect and the search engines (including Google) will penalize pages that use one in this manner.

Referrer or Referring URL - The URL of the web page where a visitor clicked a link to come to your site.

Registrar - A company which allows you to register domain names.

Reinclusion - If a site has been penalized for spamming they may fix the infraction and ask for reinclusion. Depending on the severity of the infraction and the brand strength of the site they may or may not be added to the search index.

See also:

Referrer - The source from which a website visitor came from.

Relevancy - The degree to which the content on a web page that is returned in a list of search results (SERPS) matches the topic of the information that the user was searching for. In other words, if you use the search phrase small green widgets and a page is returned that deals with large red thingamajigs, the relevancy of that page is very poor.

Relevant - See Relevancy

Relative Link - A link which shows the relation of the current URL to the URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.

Example relative link; <a href="../folder/filename.html">Cool Stuff</a>

Example absolute link; <a href="http://seobook.com/folder/filename.html">Cool Stuff</a>

Relevancy - A measure of how useful searchers find search results.

Many search engines may also bias organic search results to informational resources since commercial ads also show in the search results.

See also:

Reputation Management - Ensuring your brand related keywords display results which reinforce your brand. Many hate sites tend to rank highly for brand related queries.

Resubmission - Much like search engine submission, resubmission is generally a useless program which is offered by businesses bilking naive consumers out of their money for a worthless service.

Reverse Index - An index of keywords which stores records of matching documents that contain those keywords.

See also:

Rewrite - see URL Rewrite

Robot - A program used by a search engine to crawl the web in order to find, rank, and index new web pages.

Robots.txt - A special file that is commonly used to exclude some or all robots from crawling certain files or directories on a website. This file should b placed in your website's root directory. See: Robotstxt.org

ROI (Return on Investment) - is a measure of how much return you receive from each marketing dollar.

While ROI is a somewhat sophisticated measurement, some search marketers prefer to account for their marketing using more sophisticate profit elasticity calculations.

RSS (Rich Site Summary) or (Real Simple Syndication) - is a method of syndicating information to a feed reader or other software which allows people to subscribe to a channel they are interested in.