Computer Jargon Untangled

Ah computer lingo. It's sometimes tough to understand and if you're not computer savvy you may be left wondering what on earth they are saying. For instance, what is a walled garden? Is it a literal garden surrounded by a wall like in the olden days? Is it the stuff of Jane Austen? No, a walled garden in computer terms means a group of pages linked to each other but not linked to by other pages. So they're stand alone. This seems a bit weird since the whole point is to link to other pages, these do not. Sadly, this tactic doesn't fly and they will likely have a lower page rank than regular sites.

Time on page refers to, oddly enough, the time a person spends on a certain webpage. Go figure! The time is calculated from when someone clicks on to when they click off. The longer they spend on a page the better as this usually means they have found what they are looking for and are reading the information. If they click on and then immediately off you have work to do on your site (or they landed there by accident).

By comparison, the bounce rate is the percentage of users who enter and then leave a site without looking at any of the pages. Were they there by accident or did your site bore them to tears so they took off for the hills?

The site map is something we all love to use on websites, especially those that are built correctly. This simply means that you can easily find what you are looking for by clicking links to other things on the site.Saves us time and if we are redirected quickly we will be far happier than having to wait around for the new page.

An e-commerce site is one that is devoted to retail sales so it will have handy links, a built in shopping basket and hopefully an easy to use check out system so that we can get our stuff and go.

Finally latent systematic indexing. This is when search engines index commonly associated words in a document. These are also called long tail searches and it helps us users find what we are looking for faster and without a lot of unnecessary clicks.

Search engines are there to help us with our searches so keep them happy with your own website and you'll be good to go.