Google - The undisputed leader in search. If you don't rank well on Google, you're hurting. The numbers fluctuate a bit but Google provides roughly 65% of all web searches. That is billions of searches ever day.
Yahoo - About 16% of searches are run on Yahoo; not very much compared to Google, but good enough for second place.
Bing - A relatively new search engine developed and released by Microsoft. Bing has gained about 11% of searches and is finalizing a deal to team up with Yahoo. Combined, Yahoo and Bing hope that together they can eat into Google's lead.
All others - All other search engines combine for the last 8% of searches. These include Ask.com, AltaVista and a slew of others. Many of these offer specialized results.
Natural ranking - This is the non-paid ranking for your website. Paid results will appear along the right bar and in some cases at the top and bottom of the search engine results page (see Figure 4). Paid results are always designated as such through colored boxes and/or text titles. Natural rankings cannot be bought; they are the result of how popular and relevant or optimized your site happens to be.
Google Page Rank (PR) - Google displays a page ranking scale to the public between 0 - 10. The higher the PR, the more important Google considers your site to be. Factors that contribute to PR include age of site, number and quality of backlinks, the absence of certain frowned-upon SEO techniques, and of course page text content. You can see the PR for each site you visit by downloading the free Google Tool Bar here. The PR will appear as a small green and white bar (Figure 5). SEO experts can help you improve your page rank over time.
Sponsor Link - A sponsor link (Figure 6) or paid link is an ad that links to a website. The ads on top paid more for that placement than the ads underneath. Unlike natural ranking, sponsor link placement rankings can be bought.
Meta Data - Keywords, key phrases and page descriptions that appear at the top of a web page, in the source code. Strong meta data is not the most important factor in SEO, but it is valuable.
Backlink - A backlink is a link from another website that points back to your website. A backlink from a site with a high page rank is very helpful to your site.
Keyword - One of the most important factors of search engine optimization is keywords. These are the words that best describe the information and service that your website is providing. For example "SEO" is an important keyword for 270net.com.
Key Phrase - Not all searches consist of a single word. A key phrase is a string of words that do the same thing a keyword does. Often location is included in the phrase. An example would be "Search engine optimization in Maryland".
The first page - Most search engines return 10 results per search by default (the number of results returned can be edited in the preferences). Therefore the first page refers to the top-10 results for a given search.
Local Search - If you are providing location specific information and services from your site, and most of us are, than local search is very important. A dentist wants to attract web searches from potential clients in his or her city and county. A dentist in Maryland doesn't benefit much if their site appears for searches in Idaho. However, searches for dentists in Baltimore, MD should be much more valuable. Search engines offer local listings such as Yahoo Local and Google business directory. In addition, community business directories are valuable (for instance InsiderPages, MerchantCircle and Frederick.com). Is your business listed on Google Maps? It should be.
Spamming a Search Engine - Trying to blatantly trick a search engine into ranking your site higher than it deserves (meaning you are not supplying quality information and services to readers) is referred to as spamming a search engine. There are many methods; one of the oldest is to hide a bunch of white text on a white background at the bottom of your page. Search engines read the text but humans don't notice it. Search engine algorithms have become clever enough to recognize this and many other spam attempts and will punish your site if it is engaged in too much of this behavior.
White Hat SEO - As with any industry there are "best practices" and some methods that are deemed by some to be less ethical. According to Wikipedia, "the terms white hat and black hat have been applied to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry. Black hat SEO tactics... attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service, whereas white hat methods are generally approved by the search engines. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing." Yes, search engines can ban or penalize your site if it is optimized in a way that they consider unethical.