SEO glossary entries for ‘W’

Web Cookie: See ‘Cookie’.
Web Directory: A web directory is a web site whose sole purpose is to list, index, and categorise other websites and their content. Web directories may generic or specialised. In general, directories which specialise in a given topic, industry or region are likely to be of more use to SEO link builders, although there are one or two notable exceptions to this rule, such as ‘DMoz.’
Web Feed: A web feed is a web page or content file intended to be retrieved by other sites or ‘news aggregators’ for display on those sites or in aggregator software. Web feeds allow software to check for updates at a website. To provide a web feed, the site owner will typically use a content management system to publish a summary list (or feed') of recently updated content in a machine-readable format. Individual users or news aggregating sites then subscribe to the feed and download a new copy of it whenever it changes. The feed itself contains ‘entries’, which may be headlines, whole articles, snippets, summaries, and/or links to content, along with descriptive metadata.
Weighted List: see ‘Tag Clouds’
Whitehat SEO: Whitehat SEO is the practice of search engine optimisation within the rules and guidance set down by search engines.
Whois: See ‘Whois Database’.
Widget: Tiny applications designed to be embedded in web pages, e.g. media players, weather forecasters, news tickers, etc.
Wiki: Two common meanings. 1. A website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure in a web browser. 2. The software which creates and maintains a wiki website. Such software typically includes a mark-up editor, a web server, a page templating system and data storage/retrieval system.
Wikipedia: A a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project, using wiki software for content creation and editing.
Word Cloud: see ‘Tag Clouds’
Word Stem: 2 common meanings in linguistics: 1. A word form to which affixes (prefixes and suffixes) may be attached. 2. The part of a word that is common to all its inflected variants. Stems may also be ‘roots’, but only if the root is a proper word in its own right.
Word Stemming: In linguistics, it is the process of reducing inflected or derived words to their stem, base or root form. In SEO, it tends to refer to the way search engines sometimes return results for the range of words based upon a particular stem, e.g. a search for "farm" might return links to pages containing the words "farmer" or "farming.".
Wordnet: A lexical database for the English language.
WordTracker: 1. A now defunct free web service tracking the popularity and competitiveness of search keywords. 2. A website called wordtracker.com, which sells three SEO tools: 2.1. a Keywords Tool which tracks the popularity and competitiveness of keywords 2.2. a Link Builder tool which suggests targets for acquiring links related to given keywords, e.g. blogs, forums and 2.3. a ‘Strategizer’ which is designed to help you prioritize between different keyword targets.