Glossary - B

back link
A link on another page that links to the page you are viewing. Also called an inbound link .

bait-and-switch
A technique (considered spam ) used in SEO . It involves creating an optimized page and a regular page. The optimized page is submitted to the search engines and replaced with the regular page as soon as the optimized page has been indexed.

begins-with partial word matching
Some search engines will match indexed words that contain a search term at the beginning. For example, if you're searching for "guns", documents containing the following variations of the term will show up in your search results :
Guns (exact match)
Gunsmith (Begins-with partial word matching)
Gunslinger (Begins-with partial word matching)

bells-and-whistles
Advanced features. A web site is said to have too many bells-and-whistles when it contains unnecessary animations etc. In the context of SEO , bells-and-whistles are generally seen as a hinderance since they rarely contribute to high search engine rankings and may even cause a site to rank poorly.

beta
A testing stage / testing version of a product. For example, when a beta version of a search engine is released, users can access it online and are encouraged to report bugs and give general feedback.

Boolean search
A Boolean combination of terms allowing the inclusion or exclusion from search results of documents containing certain words. This is achieved through the use of operators such as AND, NOT and OR.

bid
The amount you are willing to pay for keyword ranking on PPC search engines .

block level analysis
A method of analysing a web page's content on a block-by-block basis, rather than looking at the whole page. It implies that some parts of a page are more important than others, based on what people tend to focus on. Microsoft is said to use block level analysis (BLA) to make its search engine results more relevant.

blog
The name "blog" is a truncated form of "web log" according to Rebecca Blood's essay "Weblogs: a history and perspective."

bug
An error or glitch in a program / search engine .

burst
A rapid increase in the popularity of a new topic. In the search engine world a burst refers to a significant but usually short-lived increase in both the number of searches done on a specific topic and the number of relevant documents on that topic. Bursts are often related to news stories, new technological advances etc.