Boost your site's search engine ranking
Info/resource and jargon explained
By Mike Slocombe for Internet Magazine, May 2004

Jargon buster:

Keywords: single words and phrases that describe the content and theme of a site

Search engine positioning (placement/ranking): refers to a site's position in search engine results when a user types in site-related keywords.

Reciprocal links: the practice of exchange links with like minded sites

Optimising: tweaking a page's layout and design to make it more 'attractive' to search engines.

Robots, spiders, crawlers, bots and webbots
A search engine robot is an automated data retrieval program which travels the web to find information and links.

When a robot comes across your homepage, it will look at the visible text on the page, the content of the various tags in your page's source code <TITLE> and <META>, etc.), and the hyperlinks on your page.

It'll then index the information and deliver it to the search engine's database.

More info
How search engine robots work
Web Robots FAQ
How search engines rank pages
Search engine optimisation
Web ranking tips
Search engine placement tips