— Eric Enge and Stephan Spencer and Jessie Stricchiola and and Rand FishkinTerm weighting refers to the importance of a particular search term to the query. The idea is to weight particular terms more heavily than others to produce superior search results. For example, the word the in a query will receive very little weight in selecting the results because it appears in nearly all English-language documents.
Replicated under Fair Use from The Art of SEO by Eric Enge and Stephan Spencer and Jessie Stricchiola and and Rand Fishkin.