Web Marketing Terms
.gif: (Graphics Interchange Format) A .gif is an image that is optimized on the web because it supports 8-bit color (256 colors) and because it compresses well.
.jpg: Pronounced "jay-peg." An image format that is very popular due to its excellent compression capabilities. JPEGs are widely used on the Web for photographic images, but are not as well suited for compressing charts and diagrams, as text can become fuzzy (GIFs are better for text).
Ad Blindness: Ad blindness results when people get accustomed to ads and stop noticing them. Ad blindness is not a problem for search engines, as people are searching for information and very often text ads constitute relevant information.
Adsense: AdSense is a Google offering that is fast and easy way to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site — or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts — you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages.
Adwords: AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product, and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution.
Alexa: Alexa Internet is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com, that is best known for operating a website (www.alexa.com) that provides information on the web traffic to other websites. Alexa collects information from users who have installed their Internet Explorer Alexa Toolbar, allowing them to provide statistics on web site traffic, as well as lists of related links.
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.
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.
Click-Through-Rate: The average number of click-throughs per hundred ad impressions, expressed as a percentage.
Cloaking: Also known as stealth, a technique used by some Web sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else.
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.
CPC: Short for cost-per-click, an Internet marketing formula used to price online advertisements. Advertisers will pay Internet publishers based on the number of clicks a specific ad gets.
CSS - Cascading Style Sheets: CSS is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents apart from the actual html code itself.
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.
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.
Deep Link: Deep linking, on the World Wide Web, is the act of placing on a Web page a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image within another website, as opposed to that website's main or home page. Such links are called deep links.
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.
DMOZ: "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.
Google Bombing - A form of Search Engine spam when a number of websites use the same anchor text to link to another site, often with humerous or political aspirations.
Google Page Ranking: 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. Google Page Rank (or Google Pr) relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Learn how to know your Google Page Rank.
Google Sandbox: The Google Sandbox is very similar to a new website being placed on probation, and kept lower than expected in searches, prior to being given full value for its incoming links and content.
Google Toolbar: Google Toolbar is an Internet browser toolbar available for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (with slightly different features).
Google Trustrank: Trustrank is a concept that implies that a website becomes trusted by earning links from other trusted websites. In reality there are not too many highly trusted sites out there, so a link from one is worth more than hundreds of links from untrusted sites.
Google Trustbox: The concept of Trustbox takes these two terms and mashes them together. The outcome is that many feel there is indeed a place in the Google index where many sites, particularly new ones, start out. It is from here they have to earn their way into the regular index.
HTML: In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on — and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML can also describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document, and can provide additional cues, such as embedded scripting language code, that can affect the behavior of web browsers and other HTML processors.
I
Indexing: Web indexes help users find information using a variety of keywords and gathering similar information under a single topic. Instead of page numbers, web indexes are hypertext-linked directly to the content with in the web site itself.
IP Address: Every computer connected to the Internet is assigned a unique number known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address. IP addresses consist of four numbers separated by periods (also called a "dotted-quad") and look something like 127.0.0.1. IP address can sometimes be used to determine the user's general location. Find out your IP Address by visiting "What's My IP Address."
IP Address (Static): When you have one single IP Address.
IP Address (Dynamic): Internet ISPs now issue IP addresses in a dynamic fashion out of a pool of IP addresses (Using DHCP). These are referred to as dynamic IP addresses.
L
Link Farms: Website or group of websites which exercises little to no editorial control when linking to other sites. These are very bad and highly discouraged by Google.
Meta Tag: The Meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. This was originally the only method for search engine optimization, but has since been devalued as a means for top rankings. Nowadays meta tag optimization is a part of the puzzle in a well-optimized website.
Natural Search Engine Optimization - Natural Search Engine Optimization also called "Organic Search Engine Optimization" or SEO is the process of building your website so that it obtains top rankings in search engines.
Off-Site Optimization: Off-site search engine optimization refers to the ranking factors that are usually out of your control. The most important off-site factor are the links to your web site.
On-Site Optimization: On-site optimization refers to the factors that you can control on your web site: text, links, keyword density, etc.
Pay-Per-Click: Pay per click (PPC) is an adverstizing technique used on websites, adverstizing networks, and search engines. Advertisers bid on "keywords" that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red widgets, he/she would bid on the keyword "red widgets", hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy. These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.
Reciprocal Linking: Reciprocal links are arranged when two web sites agree to link to each other. Reciprocal links are also known as "link swaps", "link exchanges" and "link partners". Reciprocal links help you in two ways:
1. They increase your web site traffic, from people who click on the links.
2. Reciprocal links also play a major role in boosting your rankings in search engines.
Search Engine Crawler: same as Spider.
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.
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.
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
MP3 File: An audio file, which offers near CD-quality sound at a high rate of compression, resulting in files ten times smaller than the original.
PHP: PHP hypertext preprocessor is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development (http://www.php.net/).
Podcast: A digital media file (or a series of such files) that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers. (Wiki). A podcast is distinguished from other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added, using an aggregator or feed reader capable of reading feed formats such as RSS or Atom.
Reciprocal Link: A link exchange between two sites.
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
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
Webcasts: A broadcast that is delivered over the Internet. Participants can view and hear streaming media, and they can participate in real-time online chats.
Windows Media Player:
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.
