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Alt Tags
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Alt Tags are hypertext tags that are attached to content (e.g. images) and hypertext links. The alt attribute is used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify text that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered. Search engines use the tags as another indicator of the purpose/content focus of a page and of the page to which it is linked. Thus SEO experts leverage these tags as part of a site's search engine optimization.
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Black Hat SEO
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Black Hat SEO tactics attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service. Black Hat SEO will eventually get a website banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what is going on.
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Blogs
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A web log. Usually maintained by an individual to record on-going, or near real-time activities or thoughts. Often includes images and video. Like an online diary. Blogs can be a very powerful component of SEM, by giving the visitor useful detailed information about products and services. You would then leverage it by point visitors to your companies main website.
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Bounce Rate
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The percentage of visitors to a site that visit a first page and immediately leave the site. Obviously, you will strive to have a very low bounce rate.
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Branding
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The logo is an important component of your brand but is not everything. Your brand is defined by how well you can engage a viewer. It is what they remember about your site that keeps them coming back for more. It’s the experience you offer your viewers.
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Click-Through Rate
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The Click-Through Rate, or CTR, is a measure of audience receptiveness to an online ad or email. Click-Through Rate is the percentage of people that click on an ad or email N(c) divided by the total number of impressions N(p). CTR = N(c)/N(p).
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CMS
(Content Management System)
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A system designed to simplify the publication of Web content to Web sites, in particular, allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files.
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Contextual Advertising
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Contextual Advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the advertisements themselves are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed to the user. A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on what the user's viewing context.
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Conversion Rate
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Conversion Rate is the number of people who buy a product or service from a specific offer, divided by the number of people to whom the offer was presented (impressions). CR = N(b)/N(t) where N(b) equals the number of buyers and N(t) is the namber of impressions solicited to the offer. On the web, conversion rate often measures conversion from one page to another, or from a specific page to a purchase (on an ecommerce site).
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Cookie Stuffing
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Cookie Stuffing is a blackhat online marketing technique used to generate fraudulent affiliate sales. It involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor's computer without their knowledge, As a result, the affected user generates fraudulent affiliate sales when they visit the target publisher's site and either creates an account or makes a purchase (depending on the terms of the affiliate agreement).
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CPA
(Cost Per Acquisition)
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A payment mechanism that pays web publishers when they deliver an actual sale to an advertiser that advertised on their site. Also known as Pay for Performance, CPA is the most common form of payment mechanism used in affiliate programs.
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CPC
(Cost-Per-Click)
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A payment mechanism that pays a publisher every time someone clicks on an advertisement appearing on the publisher's website. see also Pay Per Click
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CPL
(Cost Per Lead)
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A payment mechanisism that pays a publisher every time his website, email, or landing page delivers a lead to the advertiser.
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Database Marketing
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Database Marketing is the use of databases to determine target recipients to receive an offer. An email or direct mail campaign would almost always be considered a form of database marketing. What distinguishes database marketing from other forms of marketing is the fact that sophisticated analytic tools are applied to databases containing large amounts of data about individuals backgrounds and buying behaviors. These analytics cross-tabulate data in myriad ways to find the customer segments most likely to respond to a specific offer from the advertiser.
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Data Mart
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A Data Mart is a company whose main business is collecting large amounts of data about individuals, their backgrounds, their attitudes, and their behavior and selling that data, as well as their analytic services, to companies who wish to better understand their customers and/or make offers to those customers. Data marts can collect both personally identifiable information (PII) or data for which the specific person is not known.
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Display Advertising
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Display advertising is a form of online advertising where an advertiser uses graphics, pictures, or other artwork as part of the ad. Banner ads are the most common form of display advertising, enough so that the two terms - banner advertising and display advertising - are used interchangeably.
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DMOZ
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DMOZ is an abbreviation for directory.mozilla.org, which is the directory of the Open Directory Project (ODP). It is a multi-lingual, open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape. It is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. DMOZ is very difficult to get into, but very worthwhile as it propogates its entries to numerous other directories.
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Index
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An Index is a structure within a database that speeds retrieval of information from the database. When applied to the content on the web, an index collects, parses, and stores critical information about any web page crawled by a search engine web spider to allow fast and accurate information retrieval.
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Interactive Advertising
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Interactive Advertising is a term that describes a form of ad on a publisher website with which the viewer can perform an action that causes the ad to respond. Adwords and other CPC programs are one form, clickable banner ads are another. There are also interactive ads that only respond upon mouse rollover but are not clickable.
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Keywords
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A Keyword is an index term, subject term, subject heading, or descriptor, in information retrieval. Keywords are used by search engines to determine relevance of entries in their indices to a specific query.
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Keyword Density
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Keyword Density is a measure of the number of repetitions of a keyword on a web page. Keyword density is often one of the key metrics used by search engine optimization specialists to determine if a page is optimized for a specific keyword.
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Landing Page
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A Landing Page is a content page on a website to which traffic is directed, either through paid search or email marketing.
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Link Analysis
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Link Analysis is the examination of links on a website to determine their effect on the site's rankings in the search engines. Link analysis covers both links into the site from other websites (inbound links), as well as links within a site (site cross-linking).
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Link Building
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Link Building is an active program that increases the number of inbound links into a web site or cross-linking within a web site in order to increase that site's placement in the search engine rankings for specific keywords.
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Meta Tags
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Meta Tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.
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Multidimensional Scaling
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Multidimensional scaling is a statistical approach for exploring and visualizing similarities or dissimilarities in data. An analysis based on multidimensional scaling starts with a matrix of item-item similarities, then assigns a location to each item in an N-dimensional space, where N is specified beforehand. In marketing, multidimensional scaling usually uses an N <=3, so that the resulting "map" may be displayed in a graph or 3D visualisation. Multidimensional scaling is often used to create a "preference map" that shows the tradeoffs between product features that a typical individual in a customer segment is willing to make.
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Natural Language Search
(Organic Search)
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Natural Language Search is a term describing the act of making a query, and the return of results from that query, to a web search engine. Natural language search refers especially to the list of results at the center of a web results page, as compared to any of the CPC ads that surround those results. Search Engine Optimization focuses on this aspect of web search, attempting to maximize both the relevance and precision of results to a specific query.
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Open Directory Project
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The Open Directory Project is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.
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Open Rate
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Open Rate is an email-marketing metric that is defined as the number of emails N(o) opened by receipients of a specific email campaign divided by the total number of emails sent N(t) or OR=N(o)/N(t).
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Page Headers
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A Page Header is the section of a web page that is contained within the HTML HEAD tags. Page headers contain general information, also called meta information, about a document that helps search engines identify the main topic or purpose of a web page.
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PageRank
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An algorithm developed by Sergei Brin and Larry Page that measures the relevance of a particular web page to a specific query. The PageRank algorithm is the fundamental algorithm underlying the Google search engine.
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Paid Directory Inclusions
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This is simply the practice of paying a directory to add a site to its database immediately, rather than setting up that site so that it will be found by the search engine spiders on its own. In the case of some directories, paid inclusion is the only way to get listed. For others, it's presented as an option. If you're willing to pay, your site will be listed sooner. It's also a useful practice if you wish to make frequent changes to your content, because your site will be spidered more often and you will be able to test how changes affect your ranking.
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Paid Inclusion
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Paid Inclusion is a hybrid of natural language search and paid search that places natural search engine results at the top of a search results page independent of how that page would otherwise rank in the SERPs. This manipulation of ranking, and the actual placement of a specific result, is based on a fee paid to the search engine. Paid inclusion was an invention of Yahoo!, and they continue to be the main proponent of that product in the web search engines (as compared to shopping search engines, which often practice a form of paid inclusion). Paid inclusion is very controversial as it can often compete with a company's organic search results.
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PPC
(Pay-Per-Click)
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PPC ads are simple enough to look at. They're text-only. PPC ad campaigns are completely controlled by the advertiser. You decide which keywords should bring up your ads, you write the copy, and you decide how much you want to pay. And, as the name indicates, you only pay for an ad when someone clicks it and is brought to your site. There are two main networks of PPC ads, run by Google and Overture, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in both cases, one should be prepared to spend a great deal of time (and money) monitoring and adjusting such a campaign.
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Quality-Score
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Quality Score is a variable used by Google, Yahoo! (called Quality Index), and MSN that can influence both the rank and cost per click (CPC) of ads in their bid-based advertising programs. To determine the order in which ads are listed, each ad has the following formula calculated: bid * Quality Score. Ads are then listed in descending order based on the result of that equation.
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SB 1386
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SB 1386 stands for California State Bill 1386, which is a California law that regulates the use of personal identifiable information. The law was introduced by California State Senator Peace on February 12, 2002, and became operative July 1, 2003. SB 1386 requires an agency, person or business that conducts business in California and owns or licenses computerized 'personal information' to disclose any breach of security (to any resident whose unencrypted data is believed to have been disclosed).
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Search Engine
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Search Engine is an information retrieval technology that returns a set of relevant results from a database based on a specific query on the database.
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Search Engine Consultants
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An individual or firm that specializes in one or more forms of online marketing that ties to a query on a specific keyword by a search engine.
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SEM
(Search Engine Marketing)
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SEM is a broad term. It's everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a web site and increasing its traffic, its "stickiness," and, in the case of sites that promote a business (or are a business), increase profits. SEO, therefore, would be a subset of SEM.
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SEO
(Search Engine Optimization)
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SEO is a method of developing a website with keyword and target audience location integration. It involves all aspects of the sites structure such as page titles, alt tags, domain name, page names, meta tags and many other componets of the website. Any search engine marketing campaign must start with SEO. Without SEO a website can never begin to realize it's full potential.
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SERP
(Search Engine Results Page)
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A Search Engine Results Page, or SERP, is the list of results returned against a specific query on a web index like Google or Yahoo!
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Social Bookmarking
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Social Bookmarking is the act of tagging a specific web page for inclusion on a social bookmarking website. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
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Social Media
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Social media is any form of online publication or presence that allows end users to engage in multi-directional conversations in or around the content on the website.
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Social Network
(Web 2.0)
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A Social Network is a website, or network of websites, specifically established to allow end users to communicate directly with each other on topics of mutual interest.
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Spam
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The terms Spam is most often used to define email sent without permission to a vast, unfiltered audience. Spam can take many forms. Although it is most often associated porn sites and offers from online pharmacies, spam can be considered any form of email sent without permission, e.g. when a company sends a new kind of newsletter to a customer who has given permission only to receive a completely different newsletter.
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Supression List
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A suppression list is a database of email addresses of individuals who have opted-out from receiving emails from a specific email publisher. Maintaining a single up-to-date supression list can be a real challenge for firms that engage in email campaigns through multiple third-party distributors (e.g. affiliates). Even if affiliates conform to all legal standards, their processes may make it difficult to synchronize suppression lists within the times periods needed by a mass emailer to maintain a current suppression list for the next planned mailing.
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Tagging
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Within the field of information retrieval, tagging is the act of actively assigning keywords to a document, whether in a database or on the worldwide web. Tagging can be done programmatically or manually. In the case of the world wide web, tagging often means social bookmarking, which is a manual act performed by members of a social network of assigning specific keywords to a web page to make the content on the page easier to find by other members of the social network.
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Text Link Ads
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Text Link Ads are simple paid advertisements consisting only of text. The business model for vairous text link ad networks varies, and can be cost-per-click (CPC), Cost-per-Thousand (CPM), Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA or Pay for Performance), or Cost per Lead (CPL).
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Title Tag
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Title Tags are meta tags within the header of an XHTML document that define the title of the page that will appear in the browser toolbar. The title element is required in all HTML/XHTML documents.
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Web Metrics
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Web metrics are established goals and standards for measuring website performance. There are standard metrics in online marketing (e.g. conversion rate) which are often used by web marketers to provide a baseline of website performance. However, more savvy companies develop web metrics unique to their business to help the, achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in their industry.
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Web Spider
(Crawler)
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A Web Spider is software that follows links, either on a specific site or across the web, Web spiders catalog the data contained within the pages to which those links point. This data is then analyzed and used to create the search indices which are used to speed search queries.
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Webinar
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A webinar is a seminar that is presented through the worldwide web.
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Website Analytics
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Web analytics has two meanings. 1. The tasks associated with analyzing activity on a website. 2. Softare or services used to perform analysis of activity on with a website. Web analytics covers a wide range of analysis, including (among others) sources of traffic, internal flows within a site, and revenue generated with various parts of these site.
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Website Architecture
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Website Architecture structure of the flows,links and metadata associated with a web site.
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Website Audit
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A review of the performance of a website against online marketing best practices. The concept of a website audit is most often aasociated with Search Engine Optimization, but also is often applied to any aspect of online marketing.
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Website Traffic
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Two definitions. 1. The number of unique visitors to a website. 2. The total number of visits to a website.
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White Hat SEO
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Ethical and search engine approved methods for building search engine optimization. White Hat SEO tends to produce results that last a long time.
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Whitelist
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A whitelist is the list of email addresses of individuals who have given specific permission to a publisher to receive emails for the publisher.
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Word-of-Mouth Marketing
(Virtual Marketing)
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Word-of-Mouth marketing is the act of creating programs specifically designed to initiate and maintain broad public discussion of a brand, product, or issue. This differs from the traditional concept of word-of-mouth, which has the implication that people refer other individuals to a business without the active intervention of that individual or business.
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