Internet Marketing Glossary
Have you ever wanted to know what an Internet Marketing term means? Well the SearchPath Glossary is here to help.
Below are a selection of commomon internet marketing terms with a short explanation for each. This list is by no means exhaustive; if you have any suggestions to make, please contact us.
Adwords - Google's PPC advertising interface.
Algorithm - A set of formulae used by search engines to generate (hopefully) relevant and useful search results in the SERPS.
Web analytics - The study of website traffic and activity. The most popular analytics tool is Google Analytics.
Anchor text - Also known as "link text", this refers to the words or phrases that users click on to connect to a website via a hyperlink.
Banner Ad - A fixed fee ad displayed on a website. An older more traditional form of web advertising, banner ads are now generally considered as a less effective and less flexible method than PPC advertising.
Blacklisting - A penalty incurred by websites who contravene the search engines' guidelines on best practice. Usually a temporary measure, blacklisting involves a website being taken out of the search engine listings for a period. The website is then usually added back to the listings once the offending content is amended. Perhaps the most prominent example of blacklisting in Google was in 2006 when BMW Germany was punished for using doorway pages.
Cloaking - The method of presenting content to the search engines than is different to what the physical viewer sees, in order to improve a site's ranking in the search engines. Cloaking is considered an unethical form of SEO and is liable to punishment by the search engines.
Conversion - The process of turning a prospective customer into one that makes a commitment or sale. In web terms, it is the result of a visitor to a website moving from browsing the site to making a purchase or filling out a contact form
Cost-per-click (CPC) - The price charged to the webmaster/site owner by search engines each time a PPC advert is clicked.
Click-through-rate (CTR) - The rate at which a PPC ad is clicked, compared to how many times it is viewed (impressions).
Crawlers (spiders or bots) - Software used by search engines to locate, scan and index web pages.
CSS - Stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Used in conjunction with HTML to create styling in webpages.
Directories - Sites that organise sites by topic, to allow users to find content. Can be paid or free.
Email marketing - A method of promoting a brand or product via the medium of email contact with prospective or current customers. The prominence of email spam in today's web (some studies estimate the percentage of email that is spam to be as high as 90%) has led to the rise of the idea of more targeted "permission" marketing, rather than mass mailing.
Email Spam (spamming) - Mostly used in the context of email, where unsolicited email is distributed en masse to people who mostly don't want to receive it. Some say spam email is killing the internet, with some inboxes getting clogged up with hundreds of spam emails daily. The continued prevalence of spam is down to the fact that it costs virtually nothing to send out a million emails, and even if a mailing prompts a 0.0001% response rate, the spammer is making money.
Ethical SEO (White Hat) - Search Engine Optimisation that follows the guidelines set out by search engines, which are in place to maintain the quality and relevance of the search results. Ethical, or white hat SEO sets out to maintain the integrity of the internet, and does not attempt to artificially manipulate search results.
Flash- Flash is a programming language used in for web based animation and games. Flash can greatly enhance the appeal of a website, and can make excellent link bait. The user must have a free plug-in installed in order to view Flash items.
Googlebombing - The process of a number of sites linking to one site with the same anchor text in order to raise its ranking for that phrase. The most famous example was in 2005 when so many people linked to the White House biography page of George Bush using the anchor text "miserable failure" that the page rose to number 1 in Google for that phrase.
Hits- A term used to measure website traffic, "hits" is often used in lay circles when talking about website traffic, but is not the most accurate measurement.
HTML - Stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. The language used to create web pages.
Internal linking - The process where by words or phrases within a web page are linked to other pages in the site. Internal links are considered important in SEO terms, as they are often spidered and displayed by Google.
Internet Advertising - Any form of advertising that is located on the internet. The two main forms are banner ads and PPC advertising.
Keyword stuffing- An unethical "black hat" SEO practice that involves repeating keywords over and over in the text content of the site (either the meta tags or the main content) in order to artificially manipulate the search engine results. Keyword Stuffing is considered quite a quite primitive form of black hat SEO, one that is a leftover from the days when search engines were less sophisticated. It can still result in blacklisting by Google.
Landing Page - The entry page to a website once the user has followed a link. It is usually optimised for the phrases used in the advert or anchor text preceding the click.
Link text - See anchor text
Meta tags - Sections of HTML code in a webpage that search engine spiders scan and analyse to assess the page's relevance for a given query. Originally very important in SEO, meta tags have declined somewhat in SEO importance, with the keywords meta tag being considered virtually redundant. However the title tag is still relevant to Google's algorithm, and the description meta tag is sometimes used in the organic listings so still plays a part in SEO.
Micro site - A website within a website, a microsite is usually used to promote a specific product that a company wants to promote strongly and in depth.
Online PR - Methods used to promote brands or products online. Tactics include submitting press releases to PR sites who syndicate them to various outlets.
Organic listings - The main listings in the search engine results pages (SERPS). These are on the left of the search engine pages, as opposed to the paid search (PPC) listings that are often at the top of the page and on the right. Websites in the organic listings are ranked according to the algorithms of the search engines, and do not pay for a listing. This enhances the integrity of the results. Factors affecting the organic listings include page content, meta tags and Page Rank (PR).
Page Rank (PR) - A very influential programming algorithm developed by Google founders Sergy Brin and Larry Page, used to calculate quality search engine results. The basic formula is widely known (it was part of a PhD project at Stanford University) and counts the number, relevance and quality of inbound links to a given site. It is considered to be the most important factor in SEO.
PPC (pay-per-click) - A very successful method of online advertising, developed by Overture (now Yahoo search marketing) and perfected by Google. Instead of paying a flat fee for online adverts which appear on various websites (banner ads), search engine PPC advertising works on a pay-per-click system, whereby the webmaster only pays the search engine when a user clicks on his ad. Ads are triggered when the user types a phrase into the search engine.
Quality score - An algorithm used by Google in its Adwords PPC interface to rank search results. Google has said recently that Adwords ranking in the future will be based more around the Quality Score and less around the amount bid by the webmaster.
Robots (bots) - see crawlers.
ROI (Return-on-investment) - The ratio of sales completed as a result of marketing or business to the amount spent on it. The success of PPC advertising has largely been down to its easily quantifiable ROI statistics (Click through and conversion rates).
RSS - Stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is a method of feeding information from a site directly into a user's bookmarks or to a reader (such as Google reader).
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - The process whereby web pages are designed, built and modified with search engine results in mind. A branch of search engine marketing (SEM), SEO involves attending to the many factors involved in a search engine's algorithm including on page elements (such as meta tags and internal linking) and off page factors (the number of back links coming to a site - used to build Page Rank). The goal of SEO is high placement (preferably number one!) in the organic listings of search engines (especially Google).
SEO spamming - Also termed unethical or black hat SEO, this involves attempts to artificially influence the search engine results page (SERPS) to achieve high rankings. Spam methods include using hidden text and cloaking.
SERPS - Search Engine Results Pages.
Spiders - See crawlers.
Traffic - The volume of visitors coming to a site. Usually measured using analytics.
