Internet Marketing & Web Design Glossary Terms

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• Above the Fold : The science of Sound. Its production, transmission and effects.The part of the page you can see without scrolling down or over. The exact amount of space will vary by viewer because of screen settings. You often pay a premium for advertisement placements above the fold, which will add to the costs of internet marketing services, but may also add to results.
  
  
• Accessibility: Refers to a web page or web site that people interacting with different kinds of disabilities, the difficulty they can experience due to physical and or technological barriers. A web page or site that address these users limitations is said to be Accessibly friendly.
  
  
• AJAX: Stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, which is a term describing a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of: * HTML (or XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets for presenting information* Document Object Model, JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented* XML, XSLT and the XMLHttpRequest object to interchange and manipulate data asynchronously with the web server.
  
  
• Algorithm: The process a search engine applies to web pages so it can accurately produce a list of results based on a search term. Search engines regularly change their algorithms to improve the quality of the search results. Hence search engine optimisation tends to require constant research and monitoring.
  
  
• ALT Tags: HTML tags used to describe Web site graphics by displaying a block of text when moused-over. Search engines are generally unable to view graphics or distinguish text that might be contained within them, and the implementation of an ALT tag enables search engines to categorize that graphic. There is also talk that business Web sites will all be required to utilize ALT tags for all pictures to comply with certain American Disability Act requirements.
  
  
• Analytics: Also known as Web Metrics. Analytics refers to collection of data about a Web site and its users. Analytics programs typically give performance data on clicks, time, pages viewed, Web site paths, and a variety of other information. The proper use of Web analytics allows Web site owners to improve their visitor experience, which often leads to higher ROI for profit-based sites.
  
  
• Anchor: A word, phrase or graphic image, in hypertext, it is the object that is highlighted, underlined or "clickable" which links to another site.
  
  
• Anchor Text: Anchor text refers to the visible clickable text for a hyperlink. For example: < a href="http://www.drive-internet-marketing.com/" >This is the anchor text< /a >The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.
  
  
• Animation: It is referred to an image that changes over time. A simple example is Abacus logo where the red dot is moving up and down every several seconds.
  
  
• ASP: Short for Active Server Pages that is used for creating dynamic content of a web page. Technically said it is a server side scripting language. It is mostly used on Windows platforms.
  
  

• Banners: Picture advertisements placed on Web sites. Such advertising is often a staple of internet marketing branding campaigns. Depending upon their size and shape, banner ads may also be referred to as buttons, inlines, leaderboards, skyscrapers, or other terms. When using specifics, banner ads refer to a 468x60 pixel size. Banner ads can be static pictures, animated, or interactive. Banner ads appear anywhere on a site – top, middle, bottom, or side. Banner costs vary by Web site and advertiser; two of the most popular pay structures are Cost per 1,000 Impressions (CPM) and flat costs for a specified period of time.
  
  
• Behavioral Targeting (BT): An area of internet marketing becoming increasingly refined, behavioral targeting looks to put ads in front of people who should be more receptive to the particular message given past Web behavior, including purchases and Web sites visited.
  
  
• Blogs/Blogging: Contraction of Web log. An internet publishing device allowing an individual or company to express their thoughts and opinions. Businesses can use blogs as a marketing communication channel.
  
  
• Bounce Rate: This shows a percentage of entrances on any given page that resulted in an exit from the page without entering any other page on the site.
  
  
• Brand and Branding: "A brand is a customer experience represented by a collection of images and ideas; often, it refers to a symbol such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme. Brand recognition and other reactions are created by the accumulation of experiences with the specific product or service, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary." (Added Definition) "A brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols, sound which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality.
  
  
• Browser: Very often called Web browser, a software application used to locate and display Web pages. The two most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. There are many other browsers like AOL Browser, Opera, NeoPlanet and many others.
  
  
• Business-to-Business (B2B) Targeting: The targeting of online advertising to websites that cater to business users, or targeting the business users directly.
  
  
• Buying Funnel: Also called the Buying Cycle, Buyer Decision Cycle and Sales Cycle, Buying Funnel refers to a multi-step process of a consumer’s path to purchase a product – from awareness to education to preferences and intent to final purchase.
  
  

• CGI Script: A CGI script is a program written in one of several popular languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, etc., that can take input from a web page, do something with the data, and produce a customized result (among many other possible uses). CGI scripts are widely used to add dynamic behavior to websites and to process forms.
  
  
• Click: The opportunity for a visitor to be transferred to a location by clicking on an ad, as recorded by the server.
  
  
• Click-Through Rate: Percentage of times a user responded to an advertisement by clicking on the ad button/banner. At one time the granddaddy of Web-marketing measurements, click-through is based on the idea that online promotions that do what they're intended to do will elicit a click. CTR is one metric Internet marketers useto measure the performance of an ad campaign.
  
  
• Cloaking: Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
  
  
• Code: Anything written in a language intended for computers to interpret.
  
  
• Competitive Analysis: As used in SEO, CA is the assessment and analysis of strengths and weaknesses of competing web sites, including identifying traffic patterns, major traffic sources, and keyword selection.
  
  
• Content: A word you'll likely see around a lot is "web content" and by definition, content is the 'stuff' that makes up a web site. This could be words, pictures, images or sounds. In essence however, when we talk about web content, we are essentially referring to content in a textual nature. Content therefore is the 'information' in text form a web site provides.
  
  
• Content Network: Also called Contextual Networks, content networks include Google and Yahoo! Contextual Search networks that serve paid search ads triggered by keywords related to the page content a user is viewing.
  
  
• Contextual Advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a Web page based on the page's content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.
  
  
• Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of your clicks that generate sales or leads.. This number is given by dividing the number of sale/leads by the number of clicks you send to the offer. For example, if 100 clicks generated 100 visitors to your site, and they generate 5 sales/leads then your conversion rate would be 20%.
  
  
• Copyrighting: Copywriting for search engines is the art of creating web page copy that is tailored not only to fall in line with the current interpretation of search engine algorithms, but also to entice the reader to perform the action you desire. For example, to sign up for your newsletter, or click through to a certain area of your site.
  
  
• Cost per Click (CPC): A common way to pay for search engine and other types of online advertising, CPC means you pay a pre-determined amount each time someone clicks on your advertisement to visit your site. You usually set a top amount you are willing to pay per click for each search term, and the amount you pay will be equal or less to that amount, depending on the particular search engine and your competitors' bids.
  
  
• CPA: Cost Per Action. A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.
  
  
• CPC Campaign: A website marketing campaign based on a cost-per-click price where you only pay for the visitors that click on your listings.
  
  
• Cost per Impression (CPM): A common internet marketing cost structure, especially for banner advertising. You agree to pay a set cost for every 1,000 Impressions your ad receives. Search engine marketing may involve CPM costs for Contextual Advertising. This internet advertising pay structure should really be called Cost per 1,000 Impressions.
  
  
• Crawler: Component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically "crawling" the Web. A search engine's crawler (also known as a Spider or robot) follows links to Web Pages. It makes copies of those pages and stores them in a search engine's index.
  
  
• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets, A simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. Not all browsers (of specific versions) implement the full specification of CSS.
  
  

• Database: A special way of organizing computer data. It looks like a table implemented columns and rows for fast accessing data from any of the cells in the table. There are many different types of databases but all of them work on the same principle. Databases are very useful for storing and organizing data for later retrieval. Very often used for managing accounts, managing user information, creating guest books and bulletin boards, even this page (dictionary) is implemented with database.
  
  
• Description: A short piece of descriptive text to describe a web page or website. With most search engines, they gain this information primarily from the meta data element of a web page. Directories approve or edit the description based on the submission that is made for a particular URL.
  
  
• Directory: A database edited manually by Humans. Sites are indexed by category making this feature the main difference to a Search Engine. Users can navigate through the categories to locate documents or information. Most directories offer searching options (which is similar to searching from a Search Engine) within its database.
  
  
• Domain Name: A unique name that identifies one or more IP addresses. For example, the domain name abacus.ca represents one IP address. Domain names are used in URLs to identify particular Web pages. Every web site that you visit is stored under domain name.
  
  
• DMOZ: The most important of all directories. This is because when you get your web site listed in DMOZ, it is not only listed there but in all other directories that use DMOZ's database. It is a human-edited directory and all editors are volunteers. It can take some time to get listed in DMOZ so patience is the key.
  
  
• DNS: The Domain Name System which identifies each computer as a network point on the Internet using an internet protocol address systems to translate from domain name to IP and reverse.
  
  
• Doorway Page: A Web page created to rank well in a search engine's organic listings (non-paid) and delivers very little information to those viewing it. Instead, visitors will often only see a brief call to action (i.e., "Click Here to Enter"), or they may be automatically propelled past the doorway page. With cloaking, they may never see the doorway page at all. Several search engines have guidelines against doorway pages, though they are more commonly allowed through paid inclusion programs. Also referred to as bridge pages, gateway pages and jump pages and not to be confused with Landing Pages.
  
  
• Duplicate Content: When two or more web pages on a single site contain the exact or significantly similar content. Some search engines including Google have filters in line to penalize sites with duplicate content when crawled therefore lowering the page rank.
  
  
• Dynamic Content: Generated web pages from database information initiated from queries set forth by others.
  
  

• Ecommerce: The ability to purchase online. Ecommerce also goes by other super-snazzy names like etail. Web site features that allow ecommerce are commonly called shopping carts.
  
  
• E-mail Marketing: is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to: Sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or old customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
  
  
• Encryption: A way of coding the information in a file or e-mail message so that if it is intercepted by a third party as it travels over a network it cannot be read. Only the persons sending and receiving the information have the key and this makes it unreadable to anyone except those persons (your browser does it automatically).
  
  

• Flash: Browser independent vector and graphic animation technology owned by Macromedia Inc.. Most browsers support Flash technology and one flash animation looks the same on all browsers.
  
  
• FTP: FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol which is one of the methods of transferring files over the Internet.
  
  

• Geo Targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won't be shown based on the searcher's location, enabling more localized and personalized results.
  
  
• GIF: GIF stands for graphics interchange format, it is a bit-mapped graphics file format used by the World Wide Web. GIF supports colour and various resolutions. But it is limited to 256 colors.
  
  
• Googlebot: Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Google bots begin with "Googlebot"; for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.
  
  

• Header (or Heading) Tags: HTML heading and subheading tags are critical components of search engine marketing, as often times both are graphical, thereby unreadable to search engine spiders. Optimally, page titles should also be included to clearly define the page's purpose and theme. All of the header tags should be used according to their relevance, with more prominent titles utilizing H1 tags, subheaders using H2 tags, and so on.
  
  
• Hits: Are the individual requests a server answers in order to render a single Web page completely. The page document itself and the various images on the page represent a separate hit.
  
  
• Home Page: It is a first page (also referred as an opening page, start page or main page) of a Web site. This would technically be your index page or default page of your directory.
  
  
• Hosting: Hosting is a service provided by hosting company. That's a place (a computer available on the Internet) where web site is stored and made available to web site users to view the content of that web site.
  
  
• HTML: Stands for HyperText Markup Language, the authoring and editing language used to create web pages on the World Wide Web.
  
  
• Hyperlink: A link from one Web page to another, either on the same site or somewhere else on the Internet.
  
  

• Image Maps: Clickable regions on images that make links more visually appealing and Web sites more interesting. Image maps enable spiders to "read" this material.
  
  
• Impression (Ad Impression or Page Impression): The ad impression is the metric a site uses for measuring inventory. Different definitions exist for this term: 1. The viewing of a page or ad(s) by the user. The assumption is that the page or ad images were successfully downloaded and the user viewed the page or ads on the page are recorded whether or not a user clicks on an ad. 2.The request for a page or ad. Agencies usually collect a fee for every thousand impressions (hence the term CPM cost per thousand).
  
  
• Inbound Link: An inbound link is an hyperlink to a particular Web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that Web page. Inbound links important because many search engine algorithms use the quality and quantity of inbound links to measure the popularity of a Web page.
  
  
• Index: The collection of information a search engine has that searchers can query against. With crawler-based search engines, the index is typically copies of all the Web pages they have found from crawling the Web. With human-powered directories, the index contains the summaries of all the Web sites that have been categorized.
  
  
• Interactive: A Web page is interactive when it prompts a response from the user or in some way can interact with the user dynamically (eg; filling out a form or a poll etc).
  
  
• Internet: The largest global network connecting millions of computers. It is strictly based on TCP/IP protocol for communication between host and server.
  
  
• Internet Marketing: Internet Marketing is an all-inclusive term for marketing products and/or services online – and like many all-inclusive terms, Internet marketing means different things to different people.
  
  
• Intranet: A private network belonging to an organization, usually a corporation, accessible only by the organization's members, employees, or others with authorization.
  
  
• IP: [Internet Protocol] – The method or protocol by which data is sent from one computer to another on the Internet. Each computer (known as a host) on the Internet has at least one IP address that uniquely identifies it from all other computers on the Internet.
  
  

• JavaScript: JavaScript is a client-side scripting language that allows dynamic behavior to be specified within HTML documents. Most browsers support java however some browsers are disabled for JavaScript use.
  
  
• JPEG (JPG): Stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. JPEG uses compression technique for color images and therefore some details are lost in the compression yet giving relatively good quality. It is widely used on the Internet and other digital applications.
  
  

• KEI: Keyword Effectiveness Index.
  
  
• Keyword: A word -- or often phrase -- used to focus an online search. A keyword is a database index entry that identifies a specific record or document. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords. Unless the author of the web document specifies the keywords for her document (this is possible by using meta tags), it's up to the search engine to determine them. Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that are believed to be significant. Words that are mentioned towards the top of a document and words that are repeated several times throughout the document are more likely to be deemed important.
  
  
• Keyword Density: The number of times a keyword or keyword phrase is used in the body of a page. This is a percentage value determined by the number of words on the page, as opposed to the number of times the specific keyword appears within it. In general, the higher the number of times a keyword appears in a page, the higher its density.
  
  
• Keyword Prominence: The general location of a keyword or phrase in relation to the overall text on that page. You'll want to make sure your important keywords appear early in your Web site copy and that they draw attention to themselves.
  
  
• Keyword Research: Keyword research includes the processes and methodologies to research kewywords that would be used for search and internet marketing campaigns.
  
  
• Keyword Stemming: To return to the root or stem of a word and build additional words by adding a prefix or suffix, or using pluralization. The word can expand in either direction and even add words, increasing the number of variable options.
  
  
• Keyword Stuffing: When the Web was young and search engines were strating to gain in popularity, some smart Web site owners realized that the search engine Algorithms really liked some Meta Tags. Really liked them. So they started stuffing a bunch of keywords, often with high search volumes and no relevancy to the site, into title, description, and keyword tags. Sites instantly rocketed to great SERPs. Soon thereafter the search engines changed their ranking formulae and the sites lost their positions or were outright Banned.
  
  
• Keyword Tags: HTML tags which define the keywords used on Web pages. Meta keyword tags are sometimes useful in reinforcing the terms deemed most important for a specific page. Not all search engine crawlers support Meta keyword tags.
  
  

• Landing Page: The first page a person sees when coming to your Web site from an advertisement. This page can be any page on your Web site including your home page. Almost anytime you direct someone to your Web site from an advertisement, you should send them to a specialized landing page with tailored information to increase your landing page conversion rate.
  
  
• Link: Sometimes called hyperlink. A link is object on the web page. When visitor of a web site click with the mouse on that object then user is taken to another web page where the link is pointing to. Different types of links are: text links, graphic links, java links, form links and some other which are not very important.
  
  
• Link Building: The process of getting quality Web sites to link to your Web site, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can reciprocal linking, entering barter arrangements, and may include buying links.
  
  
• Link Popularity: A measure of inbound links. Several search engines have included this factor into their algorithms, the most notable being Goggle with their trademarked PageRank.
  
  
• Local Search: A huge and growing portion of the search engine marketing industry. Local search allows users to find businesses and Web sites within a specific (local) geographic range. This includes local search features on search engines and online yellow page sites.
  
  
• Long Tail Keywords: Rather than targeting the most common keywords in your industry, you can focus on more niche terms that are usually longer phrases but are also easier and quicker to rank for in the search engines. Long tail keywords can amount for up to 60% or so of a site's search traffic.
  
  

• Marketing: Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.
  
  
• Meta Tag: An HTML tag located in the non-displaying portion at the head of a Web page. Meta tags contain useful information about the page - creation date, page title, page description, keywords associated with the page. The information is contained in the file but invisible who views the page in their browser.
  
  
• Mirror Sites: Sites designed as duplicates of an original site, but are hosted on a different server. Link cloaking and doorway pages, the creation of mirror sites is a recognized spam tactic and violators will be penalized by many of the major search engines.
  
  
• My Space: MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-generated content with network of friends, music, photos, bulletins, blogs, groups, and more.
  
  

• Natural Listings: Also referred to as "organic results", the non-advertised listings in Search Engines. Some search engines may charge a fee to be included in their natural listings, although most are free. How high or low your Web site is ranked depends on many factors, two of the most important being content relevance and Link Popularity.
  
  
• Niche Marketing: The marketing of a product or service to a small and well-defined segment of the market place.
  
  

• Off-Page Elements: Elements that are outside the direct control of the web site developer and are influential in determining search engine ranking. Examples of off-page elements are links pointing to a web site and anchor text in links pointing to web site. However web site developers still have some degree of control over these elements for example directory submissions. Search engines are relying more and more on these elements when determining ranking because they are more resistant to spamming/abuse.
  
  
• On-Page Elements: Elements that are within direct control of the web site developer and are influential in determining search engine ranking. Examples of on-page elements are META tags, page text, title tag text, site link structure etc... These elements are prone to keyword spamming and other similar forms of abuse so the search engines do not look to them as much as off-page elements when determining ranking.
  
  
• One-Way Links: Links to a web site that are not reciprocated i.e. no link exists to the web site that is doing the linking. These type of links are powerful in building link popularity.
  
  
• Opt In/Opt Out: An email marketing promotion that typically gives consumers an opportunity to "opt in" (taking action to be part of the promotion) or to "opt out" (taking action to not be part of the promotion). Marketers can be sensitive about the distinction, although many are secretly anxious about the day when email, like real-world direct mail, becomes an opt-out medium.
  
  
• Organic Listings / Natural Listings: Organic Listings: Listings that search engines do not sell (unlike paid listings). Instead, sites appear solely because a search engine has deemed it editorially important for them to be included, regardless of payment.
  
  
• Outbound Links: Links on any Web page leading to another Web page, whether they are within the same site or another Web site.
  
  

• Page: A document on the Web that is displayed by a Web browser.
  
  
• PageRank (PR): PR is the Google technology developed at Stanford University for placing importance on pages and web sites. At one point, PageRank (PR) was a major factor in rankings. Today it is one of hundreds of factors in the algorithm that determines a page’s rankings.
  
  
• Page Views: Number of times a user requests a page that may contain a particular ad. A page is defined as any file or content delivered by a web server that would generally be considered a web document. This includes HTML pages, script-generated pages, and plain-text pages. It also includes sound files, video files, and other non-document files. Only image files, javascript and style sheets are excluded from this definition.
  
  
• Paid Inclusion: Advertising program where pages are guaranteed to be included in a search engine's index in exchange for payment, though no guarantee of ranking well is typically given. For example, Looksmart is a directory that lists pages and sites, not based on position but based on relevance. Marketers pay to be included in the directory, on a CPC basis or a per-URL fee basis, with no guarantee of specific placement.
  
  
• Paid Listings / Sponsored Listings: Listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion programs. In contrast, organic listings are not sold.
  
  
• Paid Search: Also referred to as Paid Placement, Pay Per Click, and sometimes Search Engine Marketing, paid search marketing allows advertisers to pay to be listed within the Search Engine Results Pages for specific keywords or phrases. Paid placement listings can be purchased from a portal or a search network. Search networks are often set up in an auction environment where keywords and phrases are often associated with a cost-per-click (CPC) fee. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are the largest networks, but Microsoft adCenter (live.com) and other sites also sell paid placement listings directly as well.
  
  
• PPC Advertising: Acronym for Pay-Per-Click Advertising, a model of online advertising in which advertisers pay only for each click on their ads that directs searchers to a specified landing page on the advertiser’s web site. PPC ads may get thousands of impressions (views or serves of the ad); but, unlike more traditional ad models billed on a CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions) basis, PPC advertisers only pay when their ad is clicked on. Charges per ad click-through are based on advertiser bids in hybrid ad space auctions and are influenced by competitor bids, competition for keywords and search engines’ proprietary quality measures of advertiser ad and landing page content.
  
  
• Pay-Per-Impression: An advertising pricing model in which advertisers pay agencies based on how many consumers see their promotions.
  
  
• PPC Management: The monitoring and maintenance of a Pay-Per-Click campaign or campaigns. This includes changing bid prices, expanding and refining keyword lists, editing ad copy, testing campaign components for cost effectiveness and successful conversions, and reviewing performance reports for reports to management and clients, as well as results to feed into future PPC campaign operations.
  
  
• Pay Per Call: A model of paid advertising similar to Pay Per Click (PPC), except advertisers pay for every phone call that comes to them from a search ad, rather than for every click-through to their web site landing page for the ad. Often higher cost than PPC advertising; but valued by advertisers for higher conversion rates from consumers who take the action step of telephoning an advertiser.
  
  
• PDF: Portable Document Format. Word processing software, business applications or desktop publishing files on the Web that look exactly like the originals. Must have Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.
  
  
• Perl: [Practical Extraction and Report Language] – Perl is a server–side, interpreted language that provides much of the web's interactivity.
  
  
• Pixel: Refers to how monitors divide the display screen into thousands or millions of individual dots to display an image. A pixel is one dot.
  
  
• PHP: PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is a server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. Designed for Windows and Unix type platforms.
  
  
• Podcast: A method of publishing audio files to the Internet for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.
  
  
• Position: In PPC advertising, position is the placement on a search engine results page where your ad appears relative to other paid ads and to organic search results. Top ranking paid ads (high ranking 10 to 15 results, depending on the engine) usually appear at the top of the SERP and on the "right rail" (right-side column of the page). Ads appearing in the top three paid-ad or Sponsored Ad slots are known as Premium Positions. Paid search ad position is determined by confidential algorithms and Quality Score measures specific to each search engine. However, factors in the engines’ position placement under some advertiser control include bid price, the ad’s CTR, relevancy of your ad to searcher requests, relevance of your click-through landing page to the search request, and quality measures search engines calculate to ensure quality user experience.
  
  
• Press Optimization: The optimizing of press releases for search engines. This process has many similarities to Search Engine Optimization, although it focuses much more on Keyword use in content creation in regards to how press releases are often picked up by Blogs and other forms of new media.
  
  

• Quality Score: A number assigned by Google to paid ads in a hybrid auction that, together with maximum CPC, determines each ad’s rank and SERP position. Quality Scores reflect an ad’s historical CTR, keyword relevance, landing page relevance, and other factors proprietary to Google. Yahoo! refers to the Quality Score as a Quality Index. And both Google and Yahoo! display 3- or 5-step indicators of quality evaluations for individual advertisers.
  
  
• Query: The keyword or keyword phrase a searcher enters into a search field, which initiates a search and results in a SERP with organic and paid listings.
  
  

• Ranking: The number (order of ranking; ie 1 being the highest) that a web site is listed for a specific search term in a specific search engine. Search Engines utilize a ranking algorithm (mathematical formulas, variables, and set of weights) to determine a site's ranking for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.
  
  
• Reach: Unique Web users that visited the site over the course of the reporting period, expressed as a percent of the universe for the demographic category. Also called unduplicated audience.
  
  
• Real Simple Syndication (RSS): An increasingly popular new technology that allows information to be easily shared on Web sites or given directly to users per their request.
  
  
• Reciprocal Link: A link exchange between two sites. Both sites will display a link to the other site somewhere on their pages. This type of link is generally much less desirable than a one-way inbound link.
  
  
• Referrer: The URL or webpage that the user clicked on to arrive at your web page. This is often recorded in the log files via the web server software.
  
  
• Resolution: The resolution of an image describes how fine the dots are that make up that image. The more dots, the higher the resolution. When displayed on a monitor, the dots are called pixels. A 640 x 480 screen (resolution) is capable of displaying 640 distinct dots on each of its 480 lines, or about 300,000 pixels.
  
  
• Robots.txt: A file used to keep Web pages from being indexed or to tell which pages you want a search engine to index.
  
  
• ROI: Return on investment = (Revenue - Cost)/ Cost, expressed as a percentage. A term describing the calculation of the financial return on a Internet marketing or advertising initiative that incurs some cost. Determining ROI and the actual ROI in Internet marketing and advertising has been much more accurate than television, radio, and traditional media.
  
  

• Script: A script is an executable list of commands created by a scripting language. Scripts that are executed on a web server (eg; Perl, PHP) are said to be server–side scripts. Scripts that execute on your own home PC (eg; JavaScript) are said to be client–side scripts. Scripts can be embed within HTML to produce a web page with dynamic actions.
  
  
• Scripting Language: A scripting language is a simple programming language used to write an executable list of commands, called a script. JavaScript, Perl, VBscript are scripting languages rather than general-purpose programming languages.
  
  
• Search Engine: A program that performs searching on documents for specified terms or phrases and returns a list of the documents where those terms were found. Search Engines are lately referred to Internet Search Engines. Most popular search engines today are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb, Excite, Lycos, AOL, HotBot, Altavista. There are over several thousands search engines and growing every day.
  
  
• Search Engine Optimization: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an act of of increasing the the number of visitors to a particular Web site by adding appropriate keywords and phrases, and such ranking high in the search results. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that your site will be found by a search user. For general and competitive web sites it takes a lot of professionalism to tweak the web site in order to be well optimized and search engine friendly.
  
  
• SEM - Search Engine Marketing: The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click advertising (PPC), as well as using all other areas and services offered by Search Engines.
  
  
• Search Engine Rank: How well a particular web page or web site is listed in a search engine results. For example, a web page about hotels may be listed in response to a query for "hotels." However, "rank" indicates where exactly it was listed -- be it on the first page of results, the second page or perhaps the 200th page.
  
  
• Search Terms: Text that is typed into a search engine to gain results leading to related content.
  
  
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization is the ongoing process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.
  
  
• Server: A computer, program or process which responds to requests for information from an user. On the internet, all web pages reside on servers (computers).
  
  
• SEO Services: SEO Services are designed to get your website a top ranking in the results of search engines for any given keyword.
  
  
• SERP: Search Engine Results Page. The page searchers see after they've entered their query into the search box. This page lists several Web pages related to the searcher's query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.
  
  
• Session: A series of transactions or hits made by a single user. If there has been no activity for a period of time, followed by the resumption of activity by the same user, a new session is considered started. Thirty minutes is the most common time period used to measure a session length.
  
  
• Site Map: A special page on a web site that contains a tree-like representation of the link structure of the site. It allows a search engine spider to index all the most important pages of the site with ease because it can access them all from one page. A link to the site map should be clearly accessible / indexable from the home page at least.
  
  
• Social Media: A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, or My Space, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Simpy, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.
  
  
• Social Networking: A type of Social Media, Social networking Web sites allow users to interact and create or change content on the site. These sites, of which businesses are now using for marketing purposes, allow users to create their own Web sites (e.g. MySpace and Facebook), share photographs (e.g. Flickr), or recommend information for others to find on the Internet (e.g. del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit.). The sites in this last grouping are also referred to as social bookmarking or social news sites.
  
  
• Snail Mail: A term for traditional land and air mail services, which take days to deliver a message, versus seconds for delivery of email.
  
  
• Spam: The use of mailing lists to blanket usenets or private email boxes with indiscriminate advertising messages. Very bad netiquette. Even worse, it's bad business. The future of marketing online is about customizing products and information for individual users. Anyone who tries to use old mass market techniques in the new media environment is bound to fail.
  
  
• Site: A particular 'place' on the Internet. A collection of Web pages.
  
  
• Spider: An automated software robot that continuously crawls hyperlinks and pages on the Internet and collects data that is returned to its database for indexing. This is how Search Engines function. The process of crawling the web, storing URLs' and indexing keywords, links and text, is the act of Spidering.
  
  
• Splash Page: A bridge page between a banner advertisement and an advertiser's Web site that provides product information and hotlinks. Splash pages are replacing many home pages -- particularly on sites more involved with news and publishing -- as gateways into web content. They start with a bigger "splash," more graphics and timely information, and change often -- like the cover of a magazine.
  
  
• Sponsored Listing: A term used as a title or column head on SERPs to identify paid advertisers and distinguish between paid and organic listings. Alternate names are Paid Listings or Paid Sponsors. Separating paid listings from organic results enables searchers to make their own purchase and site trust decisions and, in fact, resulted from an FTC complaint filed by Commercial Alert in 2001 alleging that the confusion caused in consumers who saw mixed paid and unpaid results constituted fraud in advertising.
  
  
• Sub–Domain (Name): A sub–domain is a domain that is part of a larger domain name. DNS hierarchy consists of the root-level domain at the top, underneath which are the top–level domains, followed by second–level domains and finally sub–domains.
  
  
• Stickiness: A measure used to gauge the effectiveness of a site in retaining individual users. The term is typically used in promotional material when traffic numbers are too low to be effective in lauding a site's performance. Never mind the quantity, feel the stick.
  
  
• Stop Word: A word that frequently appears in pages but has no significance. Most search engine spiders ignore stop words while searching. Example of stop words are: and, the, of, etc.
  
  
• Submission: Refers to content submitted or suggested to a search engine or directory. Several search engines and directories supply forms for users to complete to suggest or pay for content to be included. In most cases the actual submission should be optimized to include relevant keyword phrases to increase the chances of being found in a search.
  
  
• SWOT Analysis: A method of analysis which examines a company's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Often used as part of the development process for a marketing plan, or to feed the results of a marketing audit back into a revised plan.
  
  

• Targeted Marketing: Banners or other promotions aimed, on the basis of demographic analysis, at one specific subsection of the market.
  
  
• Text Ad: An online advertisement that contains only written copy. Paid listings found on the results pages of the main Search Engines are currently Text Ads, although this is starting to change. Soon you should expect to see video ads pop up here occasionally.
  
  
• Themes: A theme is an overall idea of what a web page is focused on. Search engines determine the theme of a web page through analysis in the algorithm of the density of associated words on a page.
  
  
• Title: An element of a web page which appears in the top left of most browsers. It is also the part of a directory submission that represents the title of the website. Arguably one of the most important parts of SEO is ensuring an optimized title or unique titles across all pages of a website.
  
  
• Traffic: Similar to a real–world sense of traffic on a road or freeway, traffic in a web–sense is a measurement of the amount of users that visit a Web site.
  
  

• Unique Users: The total number of different users, or different computer terminals which have visited a Web site. This is measured using advanced tracking technology or user registration.
  
  
• Upload: To send a file from one computer to another via modem or other telecommunication method.
  
  
• URL: Uniform Resource Locator, an HTTP address used by the World Wide Web to specify a certain site. This is the unique identifier, or address, of a web page on the Internet. URL can be pronounced "you-are-ell" or "earl." It is how web pages, ftp's, gophers, newsgroups and even some email boxes are located.
  
  
• Usability: How easy it is for a user to navigate a Web site and find the information he or she is seeking.
  
  

• Validation: Validation is a way to make sure that your (HTML) code is compliant with current HTML specifications.
  
  
• Viral Marketing: Any advertising that propagates itself. When Hotmail users send email, they unwittingly infect the recipient with the tag line at the bottom of the message.
  
  
• Visits: A sequence of requests made by one user at one site. If a visitor does not request any new information for a period of time, known as the "time-out" period, then the next request by the visitor is considered a new visit. To enable comparisons among sites, I/PRO uses a 30-minute time-out.
  
  
• VPN: Virtual Private Network.
  
  

• W3C: The W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium, is a standards body dedicated to ensuring interoperability between all the varied system and network types that comprise the World Wide Web part of the Internet. The W3C log format is commonly used by several web server software systems, such as Microsoft IIS. For more information, see the W3C website.
  
  
• Web Application: Web Applications are web programs or real programs designed to be used on the web site using a browser. Example of web application would be e-commerce web site, web banking, stock exchange on the web, web games and many others. Web applications are becoming very popular due to wide availability of the Internet access.
  
  
• Web Based E-mail: Web based e-mail is a software on a POP3 server that allows you the luxury, if desired, to access your POP accounts by simply using a web-browser. It allows users to send and receive emails via any web-browser by viewing an HTML web page.
  
  
• Webmaster: The individual assigned to administering a corporation or organization's web site. This person lays out the information trees, designs the look, codes HTML pages, handles editing and additions and checks that links are intact. In addition, he or she monitors, routes and sometimes responds to email generated by the site.
  
  
• Web Page: A HTML (Hypertext markup Language) document on the web, usually one of many together that makeup a web site.
  
  
• Web Site: The virtual location for an organization's presence on the World Wide Web, usually making up several web pages and a single home page designated by a unique URL.
  
  
• World Wide Web: A system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a script called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio, and video files. This means you can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots. Not all Internet servers are part of the World Wide Web.