Glossary of Terms

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301 Redirect:

Used to indicate a permanent move of a web page from one location to another. The 301 redirect is the correct way to indicate a permanent shift of domain or file location.

302 Redirect:

Temporary redirect. Used when a page is moved for a short while.

404 Error:

Error code displayed when a page is not found on the server.

404 Error Custom Page:

A customised page displayed upon occurrence of a 404 error, instead of the default browser or server error page.

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A

AOL:

America On-Line - Great for novice users, uses Google as part of it's search results.

AskJeeves:

Now considered to be one of the "Top 3" along with Yahoo and MSN, following Google.

AllTheWeb:

Second Tier search engine. Now owned by Yahoo and using its database, but presenting results differently.

AltaVista:

Used to be the #1 search engine until Google came along. Now more popular for its free online translation service - babelfish.altavista.com.

Algorithm:

A mathematical formula used to determine the value of a page when compared against others.

ATF (Above the Fold):

This is the part of the user's screen that is always displayed.

Anchor Text:

Also known as Link Text, the clickable text of a hyperlink.

ALT Text:

The text that appears when you put your mouse on top of an image or a picture.

Authority Site:

A site that has many In-Bound links coming to it, and very little outbound links.

AdSense Link Clicking Bots:

Automated programs that try to spoof random IP addresses to click through AdWords displayed on a site.

Added Value Affiliates:

Provide a value-added service to visitors in addition to affiliate links and affiliate content.

AIDA:

Attention, Interest, Desire, Action: A term used to describe a formula to increase conversions.

API:

Application Programming Interface. An API is a source code interface that operating systems, programmes or online services provide to support requests made by other programs.

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B

BTF (Below the Fold):

This is the part of the user's screen that is hidden unless the user scrolls down on the page.

Blog:

A "Web Log" that is updated frequently and is usually the opinion of one person. Also joking stands for Better Listing on Google.

Black Hat SEO:

A term referring to the practice of “unethical” SEO. These techniques are used to gain an advantage over your competition.

Banned:

A term that means a site has been removed from a search engine's index.

Banner advertising:

Creation of online banners and placement such that internet users find them easily and are attracted to them. Clicking on a banner ad usually redirects users to a specific landing page.

Bounce Rate:

Percentage of visitors who leave a website on the entry page without clicking further into the website. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not finding what they were looking for on the page.

Brochure:

A flyer, broadside or bound printed piece often included in your direct mail package. This piece usually highlights a product and offer, and should include all the benefits of the product.

Browser:

Software application used to browse the internet - Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer are the 2 most popular browsers.

Bulk Mail:

Large quantities of direct mail (packages, catalogues, self-mailers) that are sorted before going to the post office. Bulk mail allows the mailer quantity discounts.

Bot:

Short for robot. Often used to refer to a search engine spider.

Business intelligence:

The process for increasing the competitive advantage of a business by intelligent use of available data in decision making.

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C

Cache:

Snapshot of a web page as it looked when it was indexed by the search engine spiders. The cached pages on Google usually contain the page text and all links on the page.

Cleansing:

List or data cleansing refers to keeping the data as up to date as possible by eliminating incorrect information, duplicate entries and updating all changes.

Click Fraud:

The act of clicking on a competitor's PPC paid ads on the search engines in order to run them through their budget and eliminate them from the listings or just simply to make them spend money on clicks which arent from genuine customers. Click fraud is frowned upon by the search engines and can have legal rammifications for offenders.

Cloaking:

A technique that shows keyword stuffed apges to a search engine, but a real page to a human user.

Clustering:

In search engine search results pages, clustering is limiting each represented website to one or two listings.

Compiled List:

A list of names, addresses and emails that are created specifically to be used by direct marketers.

Cookies:

Small files that can be created and written to by a programming/scripting language. Usually holds information about the times and dates you have visited a web site, but can also save information about online purchases, login names, passwords, and more.

Copy:

Text found on a web page.

Contextual Advertising:

Paid advertising where listings appear on websites containing content relevant to the ads. A keyword search isn't required for the listings to appear. Contextual advertising is usually featured on the search engine's content network. Publisheers insert code into their web pages to allow the search engines to automatically serve ads based on content relevancy.

Contextual Link Inventory (CLI):

Text links that are shown depending on the content that appears around them.

Conversion Optimization:

Transforms your site into a selling tool - your site logically leads visitors through the sales cycle and closes sale.

Conversion Rate:

The number of visitors to a website that end up performing a specific action that leads to a conversion. This could be a product purchase, newsletter sign up or anything where information is submitted.

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition):

The average cost incurred to acquire a sale or lead. Can also be measured as cost per conversion, though strictly speaking CPA refers to sales i.e. customer acquisition.

Crawler:

A bot from a search engine that reads the text found on a website in order to determine what the website is about.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets):

Used to define the look and navigation of a website.

CPC (Cost Per Click):

The amount it will cost each time a user selects your phrase or keyword.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions):

The amount it will cost an advertiser to show their ad a thousand times on any site or sites on the Google content network. This is an alternative pricing model Google offers for site-targeted advertising.

CTR (Click Through Rate):

The value associated to the amount of times a paid ad is viewed.

Cybrarian:

A person who finds, collects, and manages information available on the Internet.

Custom Error Page:

A customised page displayed upon occurrence of a 404 error, instead of the default browser or server error page.

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D

Database:

A database is a collection of information, stored in a computer, which can be readily accessed when needed.

Data cleaning / Data cleansing:

Removing duplicate or incorrect information, updating records, and deleting out of date entries on a database.

Data centre:

The physical location where electronic information is housed. The data centre of a hosting company is the place where Internet files are stored on servers, accessed by unique IP addresses.

Data extraction:

Drawing meaningful data from a large database to enable analysis of only the relevant data. Usually part of a data mining exercise.

Data mining:

Analysis of vast quantities of data to find precious information about customers, suppliers etc. Involves elementary analysis and multi-point statistical and temporal analysis.

Dangling Link:

This term is applied to a web page with no links to any other pages. Also known as an Orphan Page.

Dead Link:

A hyperlink pointing to a non-existent URL.

Deep Crawl:

Once a month, Googlebot will crawl all of the links it has listed in it's database on your site. This is known as the Deep Crawl.

Delisting:

When a site gets removed from the search index of a search engine.

Demographics:

Statistics about customers that refer to external life patterns - such as age, sex, income level, education, size of family, etc.

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Description Meta Tag:

Special HTML tag in the "Head" of an HTML document. Contains a brief description of the content found on the page.

Direct marketing:

Marketing efforts that are targeted directly and proactively towards the customer, such as marketing via email, physical mail, fax etc.

Direct mail marketing:

Promoting products and services by sending brochures and information in physical form via post or a delivery service, direct to target customers.

Directory:

Usually human edited, a directory contains sites that are sorted by categories.

DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act):

A declaration that protects digital works found online.

DMOZ:

Also known as the Open Directory Project.

DNS (Domain Name System):

A protocol that lets computers recognize each other through an IP Address, whereas the human sees a website URL.

Doorway Page:

A web page designed to draw in Internet traffic from search engines, and then direct this traffic to another website.

Dynamic Site:

A site that uses a database to store it's content and is delivered based on the variable passed to the page.

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E

Email marketing:

Promotion of products and services to customers via email.

Enquiry:

Usually a request for information, it is sometimes a way for direct marketers to generate names of prospects they can then convert to buyers.

EPC (Earnings Per Click):

How much profit is made from each click from a paid ad.

EPV (Earnings Per Visitor):

The cost it takes to make profit from a site's total number of visitors.

Everflux:

A term associated with the constant updating of Google's algorithm between the major updates.

External Link:

A link that points to another website.

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F

Features:

The particular factual attributes of a product that make it interesting to prospects, such as size, shape and colour.

FFA (Free For All):

A site where anyone can list their link. Don't waste any time submitting your site to these places.

Frequency:

The average number of times an advertisement is run. Frequency, together with reach, determines what percentage of people are being targeted and how often they are seeing the message from your company.

Fulfillment:

Fulfillment is the back end of a direct marketing campaign, or all the activities that go on once the customer's order is received: sending out mailers, opening orders, entering information in the computer and so on.

Filter Words:

Words such as is, am, were, was, the, for, do, ETC, that search engines deem irrelevant for indexing purposes. Also known as Stop words.

Fresh Crawl:

Utilizes FreshBot to review already indexed pages and any pages where the content has been updated.

FreshBot:

A sister to GoogleBot, this spider crawls highly ranked sites on a very frequent basis.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol):

Technology that allows file transfers from a local machine to a remote host.

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G

Google:

Currently, the world's #1 search engine.

Google AdWords:

Google's PPC program.

Google Analytics:

Google's website visitor tracking and analysis service. Formerly known as Urchin.

Google Bombing:

A technique where using the same text anchor links, many people link to a certain page, usually of irrelevant content.

Google Mobile Sitemaps:

An extension of Google Sitemaps that enables you to submit URLs that serve content for mobile devices into our mobile index.

Google Sitemaps:

Recently renamed to Google Webmaster Tools

Google Toolbar:

A browser plugin in the form of a toolbar featuring a Google search bar, as well as other Google tools.

GoogleBot:

The spider that performs a deep crawl of your site.

Googlebowling:

To nudge a competitor from the serps.

GOOGOL:

This is the term that inspired the creators of Google to use this name - it means: 10100 = 1 followed by 100 zeros

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H

.htaccess:

Short for Hypertext Access. This is the default name of the Apache configuration file. This is where 301 redirects, custom error pages and mod_rewrite can be specified

Hidden Text:

Text that can't be seen normally in a browser.

HotBot:

One of the first generation of search engines. Now just offers search powered by a choice of Google or AskJeeves.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol):

It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for many tasks.

HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure):

It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for many tasks, but has security features enabled to protect sensitive data.

Hub:

A site that has many outbound links, and few sites linking back.

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I

IBL (In-Bound Link):

A link residing on another site that points to your site.

ICRA (Internet Content Rating Association):

The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) is an international, non-profit organization of internet leaders working to make the internet safer for children, while respecting the rights of content providers.

Index:

A term used to describe the database that holds all the web pages crawled by the search engine for each website.

Information Architecture:

The gathering, organizing, and presenting information to serve a purpose.

Internal Link:

A link that points to another page within the same site. Most commonly used for navigation.

Internet:

An interconnected system of networks that connects computers around the world via the TCP/IP protocol.

Interstitials:

Loads a commercial in the background of a Web page. When the user exits the page, the user gets served a full-page, between-page advertisement in Flash, an animated gif or other rich media.

IP (Internet Protocol):

This protocol allows for machines to communicate to each other via the Internet.

IP Address (Internet Protocol Address):

how data finds its way back and forth from your computer to the internet.

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J

js (JavaScript):

A scripting language that provides browser functionality.

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K

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI):

The KEI compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results to pinpoint which keywords should be the most effective for your campaign.

Keywords Meta Tag:

Tag in the "Head" section of an HTML document. Contains a list of keywords that are found on the page.

Keyphrase:

A group of words that form a search query.

KW (Keyword):

Used to define the terms a user might enter into a search engine to find information on their query.

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L

Landing Page:

Usually used in conjunction with a PPC campaign, they are call-to-action pages that prompt the user to engage the site.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI):

A technique in information retreival used to process large natural language documents, such as websites, to identify the overall focus of the document by tackling two main problems - identifying synonyms and differentiating polysems (same word with multiple meanings).

Lead:

A person or company who has expressed some sort of interest in your company's products or services. Leads may come in as ordinary inquiries or with an intention to buy.

Link:

Also known as a hyperlink, it is the "clickable" area of text or image that allows for navigation on the Internet.

Link Farm:

A site that features links in no particular order which are totally unrelated to each other.

Link Maximization:

The method of getting popular sites in your industry to link to your website.

Link Popularity:

How many sites link to your website.

Live Local :

The new name of MSN Local Search. Launched along with Live.com in the UK and US. The version of Microsoft Live Search that allows users to search for websites based on proximity to a location they specify along with the search string.

Live Search:

The new name of MSN Search. Launched along with Live.com and Live Local in the UK and US. Harnesses Web 2.0 technologies to provide personalised search and information.

Link Text:

The clickable part of a hyperlink. Also known as Anchor Text or Anchor Link.

Localised:

Refers to search results that have been ranked according to relelvance as well as proximity to the users physical location or a location specified along with the search query .

Log:

A file that records all connections to a server.

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M

Marketing consulting service:

Providing guidance and consultation to companies for marketing their products and services. Includes development of marketing strategies and a marketing plan.

Meta Tags:

Special HTML tags in the "Head" section of an HTML document. The most important and commonly used Meta Tags are the Title, Description and Keywords tags.

Meta Search Engine:

A search engine that relies on the meta data found in meta tags to determine relevancy.

Metadata:

META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements, are found within the section of your web pages.

Market research:

Investigation of the business and customer base where the products or services are sold. The aim is usually to gain a better understanding of customer behaviour and motivators to buy products / services.

Marketing agency:

A company that provides marketing services to other companies. Can be considered as a business whom other companies outsource marketing work to.

Mirror Sites:

A mirror site is a site that exacltly duplicates another site.

MMS:

Multimedia Messaging Service. Standard for mobile phone messaging systems that allows sending messages that include multimedia objects (images, audio, video, rich text) and not just plain text as in Short Message Service (SMS)

MSN Search:

MicroSoft Network Search is Microsoft's search engine. Now known as Live Search

MSN Local:

The version of Microsoft's search engine that allows users to search for websites based on proximity to a location they have previously specified. Now known as Live Local.

Model:

A computer system comprised of mathematical formulas to help marketers locate their best prospects or forecast sales.

mod_rewrite:

A complex server directive that enables rewriting of URL's on the fly, based on a set of rules that have been specified.

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N

Natural Listing:

A listing that appears below the sponsored ads, also known as Organic Listings.

NOFOLLOW:

An attribute used in a hyperlink to instruct search engines not to follow the link. (And pass PageRank)

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O

Off-Page Factors:

Factors that alter search engine positions that occur externally from other website's.By having many links from other sites pointing to yours is an example of Off-Page Factors.

On-Page Factors:

Factors that determine search engine positions that occur internally within a page of a website. This can include site copy, page titles, and navigational structure of the site.

OOP (Over Optimization Penalty):

A theory that applies if one targets only 1 keyword or phrase, and the search engines view the linking efforts to be spam.

OpenRank (Open Source PageRank):

A suggestion to make a web-wide ranking system as opposed to Google's Pagerank.

Opt-In:

When a user willing joins a subscription to a newsletter or some other service.

Organic Listing:

The natural results returned by a search engine.

Outbound Link:

A link from your site to any other site.

Offer:

A promotion put to the customer prior to the customer's consent to buy. The offer becomes a contract when the completed offer form is returned to the vendor.

Online marketing:

Marketing products and services on the internet.

Overture:

One of the first PPC advertising services. Formerly known as GoTo. Now owned by Yahoo! and recently renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing

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P

Page View:

Anytime a user looks at any page on a website through their browser.

PageMatch:

A cost-per-click advertising program that serves your site's ad on a page that contains related content.

Pay-Per-Click Management:

Strategy, Planning and Placement of targeted keywords in the paid search results.

PFI (Pay For Inclusion):

A system in which a site pays to get a guaranteed listing.

PFP (Pay For Performance):

A system in which payment for services is only made when a conversion takes place.

PPC (Pay Per Click):

A technique where placements are determined by how much id bid on a particular keyword or phrase. Can become very expensive.

PR (Google's PageRank):

Google's unique system of how it tries to predict the value of a pages rank.

Personalisation:

The method of adding an individual's name and/or address on the communication.

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Q

Quality Score:

Number used by Google when measuring the quality of your keywords, based on the clickthrough rate for the keyword, relevance of the actual ad's text, historical performance, landing page performance and other relevancy factors.

Query:

An inquiry that is entered into a search engine in order to get results.

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R

Rank - Ranking:

The actual position of a website on a search engine results page for a certain search term or phrase.

Reciprocal Link:

When two sites link to each other.

Redirects:

Either server side or scripting language that tells the search engine to go to another URL automatically.

Referrer:

A referrer is the URL of the page that the visitor came from when he entered a website.

Relevance Rank (RR):

A system in which the search engine tries to determine the theme of a site that a link is coming from

Relevancy:

Term used to describe how close the content of a page is in relation to the keyword phrase used to search.

RFP (Request for Proposal):

Used to send out to multiple companies in order to get a list of services to be delivered and at what cost.

Robot:

Often used to refer to a search engine spider.

Robots.txt:

A plain text file placed in the root folder of a website to provide index / crawl guidelines for search engine spiders. This file is used chiefly to restrict search engine access to certain parts of a website.

Response Rate:

The gross responses received from a direct marketing program as a percentage of the total number of direct mail pieces sent or contacts that were made with readers or viewers.

ROC (Return on Customer):

The value each customer brings.

ROI (Return on Investment):

The cost it takes to in order to see success on your marketing investment.

RSS (Rich Site Summary or Rich Site Syndication):

RSS feeds use an XML document to publish information.

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S

SE (Search Engine):

A web based information retrieval program.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM):

The practice of getting a website found on the internet

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

The act of altering code to a website to have optimum relevance to a search engine spider.

Search Query:

The text entered into the search box on a search engine.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page):

The results that are displayed after making a query into a search box.

Sitemap (Site Map):

A page that lists all of the critical navigation points of a website.

SMS (Short Message Service):

Text messages sent to/from mobile phones using GSM communication. SMS are brief and usually limited to 160 or 224 characters.

SMS Trigger:

Service that sends an SMS message with an embedded link to a mobile website when a user sends a text message with a specific code to request this link.

Snippet:

The text displayed from a search query.

SPAM:

Unwanted email or irrelevant content delivered. (or as some say, Site Placed Above Mine)

Spamming:

The act of delivering unwanted messages to the masses.

Search engine optimisation:

Process of improving page rank on search engines by using clean HTML and effective copywriting.

Spider:

The software that crawls your site to try and determine the content it finds.

Stop Word:

Stop words are very common words such as ‘a, the, and & that’ and are filtered out of your search query. Search engines do this in order to try to serve the best results for a user query.

Strategic Linking:

A thought out approach to getting websites to link to your site.

Search engine marketing:

Promotion of a website via internet search engines and directories such as Google, Yahoo!, Altavista, and MSN

Seasonality:

A pattern in customer behaviour in which response shows variation with the changes of season. Every product should be tested to see if there are certain months which will outperform others.

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T

Telemarketing:

Use of the telephone as an interactive medium for promoting a product (outbound telemarketing) or promotion response (inbound telemarketing).

Text Trigger:

Please refer to SMS Trigger

Title Tag:

It should be used to describe the web page using targeted keywords using no more that 60 characters, including spaces.

TLD (Top Level Domain):

Most commonly thought of as a ".com", also includes ".org" and ".edu"

Tracking URL:

Usually used in PPC campaigns, it is a URL that has special code added to it so that results can be monitored.

Traffic:

The number of visitors a website receives over a given period. Usually reported on a monthly basis.

Transactional Query:

A query where the user expects to conduct a transaction.

TrustRank:

A method of using a combination of limited human site review in conjunction with a search engines algorithm.

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U

Unique Visitor:

When a user visits a website, his/her IP address is logged so if he/she returns later on that day, the visit won’t be counted as a unique visit but as a page impression.

Urchin:

Free website visitor tracking solution owned by Google. Now called Google Analytics.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator):

Commonly referred to as the domain name, this is how humans navigate through the Internet, whereas computers use IP addresses.

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V

Visitor Stats (Visitor Data):

Information about visitors that use a website. Visitor stats include webpages visited, time spent on each page, referring page etc.

Visitor Log :

A log is a file that records all connections to a server. The visitor log specifically refers to the record of all visitors to a website, and includes information such as the referring source, the time of the visit, the pages visited etc.

VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol):

VoIP converts the voice signal from your telephone into a digital signal that travels over the internet then converts it back at the other end so you can speak to anyone with a regular phone number.

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W

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium):

International consortium working to develop Web standards. W3C creates Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term growth for the Web. Over 400 organizations are Members of the Consortium. W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France, Keio University in Japan, and has additional Offices worldwide.

WAP (Wireless Application Protocol):

Secure specification that allows users to access information instantly via handheld wireless devices such as mobile phones, pagers, PDAs, smartphones and communicators.

Web Saturation:

How many pages of your site are indexed by the search engines collectively.

Webneck:

Slang term for a person who spends most of their time on the internet, most of their friends are netpals, and they are uncomfortable if they can't get online.

White Hat SEO:

A term that refers to ethical practice of SEO methodologies that adhere to search engine Terms of Service.

Whois Data:

Registration data such as the company name, address and telephone number when registering a domain name.

Website development:

Creation of a website, micro site, or single web pages for other companies.

WWW(World Wide Web):

Another term to describe the Internet.

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X

XML:

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language (filename.xml) - A scripting language that allows the programmer to define the properties of the document.

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Y

Yahoo!:

The #2 Search Engine in the world.

Yahoo! Search Marketing :

Pay per click advertising program for Yahoo! and its search and content partners Formerly known as Overture.

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Z

Zeitgeist:

The Google Zeitgeist page reflects tidbits of information related to the search behavior of Google users. It pulls together interesting search trends and patterns, automatically generated based on the millions of searches conducted on Google over a given period of time - weekly, monthly, and annually.

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