For those of you who do not know what Page Rank is Google defines it as;

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

To instantly see the page rank of every website as you visit it, download the Google Toolbar.

Anchor texts are the words used within a link that you click on to follow through to another page.

A sitemap links to all the different pages on a website and informs search engines about pages that are available for crawling.

In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

For further info see Sitemaps.org.

Poison words, are words that are known to decrease your pages rankings if a search engine finds them in the title, description or in the url. They don’t kill, they just bury pages in rankings.

Generally, people think of adult words first. Adult words (obscene) often put your page in an adult category where it is filtered out by various filters at search engines.

Newer non-adult Poison Words are being uncovered. These words don’t throw you into a different category, then just decrease your rankings. Poison Words signal to a search engine, that this page is of low value.

Words that are common in a full-text file but have little value in searching. Words in a stopword file will be excluded from the indexes, considerably reducing the size of the indexes and improving search performance. Examples of stopwords: a, about, an, are, as, at, be, by, com, for, from, how…

A webmaster is a person responsible for designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining Web site(s).

The Google sandbox is a filter affect that Google places on new domains to stop the website from high rankings for the main keywords.

The Sandbox Effect is the theory that websites with newly-registered domains or domains with frequent ownership or nameserver changes are placed in a sandbox (holding area) in the indexes of Google until it is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence.

A keyword is a word or phrase that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn’t appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it’s highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine).

Acronym for Search Engine Optimisation; simply put the art of altering a website so that it improves its ranking within organic crawler based listings of search engines.