:: Web Developer Resources

Web Marketing Terms

Backlink: Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web log. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website.

Big Daddy: Google's recent infrastructure overhaul procedures, which include a new crawler as well as hardware upgrades.

Browser: A program allowing you to see and interact with the internet. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator are popular browsers. Others include Firefox, Opera and Safari.

Caching: What search engines do with the information on certain types of web pages, save the information for later.

Cloaking: A website that sends different content to the search engine than it sends to the end-user. This is spam trickery. When Google catches cloaking websites, they are banned from search results.

CPC: Cost Per Click. The cost per click-through; the fee charged every time a user clicks on a banner ad or HTML link. Your cost is based upon what your nearest competitors bid.

Crawler: Program sent out by search engines that mechanically categorize your website based upon its text.

Delisting: When pages are removed from a search engines index. This may happen because they have been banned or for other reasons, such as an accidental glitch on the search engine's part. Source: Adventive

Doorway Pages: Doorway pages are simply pages that you've optimized to rank well on one or more search terms for each search engine. Doorway pages act as alternate entrances, or "doorways" to your Web site.

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Directories: A type of search engine where listings are gathered through human efforts, rather than by automated crawling of the web. In directories, web sites are often reviewed, summarized in about 25 words and placed in a particular category. Source Sempro

DMOZ / ODP: "World's Largest Human Edited Directory." This directory employs stringent entrance standards for listing. It is very difficult (if not impossible) to obtain a place in this directory, although all together the most important directory for ranking highly in Google search results. Read the DMOZ guidelines for inclusion here.

Google PageRank (PR): Ranking system of Google search engine to determine your websites value on scale of one to ten in comparison with all the other sites on the web.

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Impression (Impr.) - The number of impressions is the number of times an ad is displayed on advertiser network.

Keyword - The keywords for your website are words typically used to search for the goods and/or services you provide. They are used to target your PPC ads and website content to potential customers.

Keyword Density: Keywords as a percentage of indexable text words. Different search engines evaluate this differently, giving weighted values to keywords found in differing parts of the page. In general, a high density indicates a high ranking, although to high a density is counted as spam, which heavily devalues the site.

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Links/Linking:

Deep Links: Links to pages other than the home page of a website.

Inbound Links: Links from other websites to your website.

Outbound Links: Links from your website to another website.

Link Farms: Web pages created for incoming links only. Considered spam by search engines. Participating in link farming can lead your site to be penalized or banned from search engine results.

Link Popularity: A measure of the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site. Link popularity is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. Off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings, as citations from other authors in the Web community helps define a site's reputation. In theory, great sites will naturally attract many links, and content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all inbound links are equal. For example, an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page.

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Manual Submission: Submitting manually is seen by some SEO professionals as a way of staying on the good side of the search engines, lessening the risk of being associated with the steady stream of spam submitted through automated programs. AltaVista has even implemented a submission process to discourage automatic submission. If the program is a success, other search engines may follow suit.

Meta Search Engine: A search engine that gets listings from two or more other search engines, rather than through its own efforts. Source Sempro

Meta Tags: Information placed in a web page not intended for users to see but instead which typically passes information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications. Source Sempro

Mousetrapping: The use of browser tricks in an effort to keep a visitor captive at a site, often by disabling the "Back" button or generated repeated pop-up windows.

PHP: PHP hypertext preprocessor is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development (http://www.php.net/).

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Reciprocal Link: A link exchange between two sites. Source: Webmaster World Forums

Results Page: After a user enters a search query, the page that is displayed, is call the results page. Sometimes it may be called SERPs, for "search engine results page." Source: Webmaster World Forums

RK Parameter: Parameter that you could see in a Google toolbar query. Some people outside of Google had speculated that it was live PageRank, that PageRank differed between Bigdaddy and the older infrastructure, etc.

ROI: Stands for "Return On Investment" and refers to the percentage of profit or revenue generated from a specific activity. For example, one might measure the ROI of a paid listing campaign by adding up the total amount spent on the campaign (say $200) versus the amount generated from it in revenue (say $1,000). The ROI would then be 500 percent. Source: Did-It.com

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Search Engine: Any service generally designed to allow users to search the web or a specialized database of information. Web search engines generally have paid listings and organic listings. Organic listings typically come from crawling the web, though often human-powered directory listings are also optionally offered. Source: Webmaster World Forums

Spam: Unethical advertising, unsolicited email, devious tactics by advertisers, unsolicited pornographic messages, blatant self-promotion on forums, groups and web lists, link farms.

Spiders: See "Crawlers."

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XML Feeds: A form of paid inclusion where a search engine is "fed" information about pages via XML, rather than gathering that information through crawling actual pages. Marketers can pay to have their pages included in a spider based search index either annually per URL or on a CPC basis based on an XML document representing each page on the client site. New media types are being introduced into paid inclusion, including graphics, video, audio, and rich media. Source: Sempro.

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