Business directory: A book or database containing an alphabetical listing of contact data for businesses. Most business directories only allow companies to include basic data, such as business names, street addresses and telephone numbers. Localeze, however, permits merchants to include a great deal of additional criteria, including business name and category, specific products, brands, services, hours of operation, payment options and much more.

Findability: How likely it is that your business listing will be visible on major search engines (such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN) for local-search terms that you choose. While companies may be listed in major directories, consumers might not find the listing if it doesn't include the right keywords.

Internet Yellow Pages: Web-based Yellow Pages directories that allow consumers to search for local listings. These are essentially digital versions of the traditional paper Yellow Pages books.

Keywords: Words used by Web surfers to describe what they hope to find when performing a Web search. In most cases, searches rank the sites by how relevant the keywords are to the content of the site.

Local search: A process by which users search for information on local businesses with the intent of purchasing from local stores or service providers. Users may search using geographic modifiers (e.g. "Chicago, IL") or name a specific brand (e.g. "Huffy") in an effort to find nearby sellers.

Merchant content: Business descriptions created directly by companies, rather than drawn from the limited descriptions contained within traditional Yellow Pages or directory listings. Merchant content is more accurate and timely since company representatives maintain it themselves.

Merchant Hub: A central repository containing detailed, updated information on local businesses. A Merchant Hub provides the data local buyers and sellers need to find each other.

Natural search: Natural-search results are those listings that appear at the discretion of the search engines based on their measure of how relevant the pages are to the user's search. The goal of search-engine optimization is to achieve good rankings in these natural-search results. To make sure they're visible to searchers, some companies also pay to have their ads appear when a given keyword is used.

Paid-search marketing: Paid-search marketing is when online advertisers bid to have their ads displayed when a searcher enters a relevant search term. (Furniture makers might bid on the term "couch," for example.) The advertisers only pay when the searcher clicks on the link in their ads, which are usually displayed in a search engine's right-hand column.

Search engine: A site that searches the Web for specified keywords and returns a list of the links to relevant sites. Unless they're specifically set up to do so, search engines typically won't pick up listings found in business directories.

Search-engine optimization: Search-engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the process of improving the volume of traffic to a Web site by making the site more visible to search engines.

Taxonomy engine: Our taxonomy engine classifies and groups related search terms, returning results which get at the user's true search intent rather than the literal meaning of the words. For example, searchers who enter the term "wedding gown" may also be interested in items related to the term "wedding dress," so the engine will return results relevant to both.