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Glossary of Internet Marketing Terms

Alexa – A website which provides some measure of a website popularity/traffic quantity by statistical sampling.

 

Adwords Qualified Individual – A person who has an official accreditation from Google proving that he/she is competent in managing PPCcampaigns on a specific size/scale. Toltech has two Adwords Qualified Individuals.

 

Algorithm - A sophisticated calculation used by search engines to gather information about websites and place them in a specific order on search results pages.

 

AOL (America Online) – A multi-faceted internet company. They are a search engine, an ISP (Internet Service provider) and an online service provider.

 

Anchor text – The text which forms the link in a hyperlink.

 

Authoritative site – A site which is deemed to be authoritative by popular consensus or use. The BBC is considered such a site for the provision of news and general information.

 

ALT tags – The text which is used to describe an image on a website: alternative text. This helps people with visual impairment identify/contextualise the subject/purpose of an image on a web page.

 

Article Marketing – An effective way of brand and reputation building as well as boosting online presence and backlinks to a website. Original articles are submitted to article submission sites where they are syndicated to webmasters looking for website or newsletter content.

 

Ask (Ask Jeeves) – A search engine specifically focusing in properly formed questions rather than individual phrases.

 

Backlink – A link from one website or web page to another. An important factor in Search Engine Optimisation as high numbers of backlinks contributes to good search engine rankings.

 

Bing (an acronym for Bing Is Not Google) – A search engine developed by Microsoft specifically to compete with Google.

 

Blog – Short for weblog. A facility generally used as a publishing tool for web users, often updated frequently (often daily).

 

Broken link – A link on a web page pointing to another page where the target page has been moved or deleted.

 

Click-Through - The action of ‘clicking on a link’ to visit a website/web page. Often related to email communications where the ‘through’ suggests clicking a link on an email to the website.

 

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – A measure of the number (more accurately a ratio in percent) of people who ‘click through’ from a website, email or marketing communication.

 

Content – The words, pictures, downloads, videos, soundbytes, adverts that make up the web page.

 

Conversion – The act of achieving a site visitor carrying out a desired action on a website usually in relation to sales/enquiry objectives. Commonly these are completing an enquiry form, purchasing a product, clicking on an email link, downloading a brochure, etc. The conversion is dependent on what you want people to do when they reach your website in terms of generating sales/enquiries.

 

Conversion Analysis – The analysis of the conversions on a website to measure the effectiveness of the sales/enquiry process.

 

Copy Writing – Writing words and messages for publication (in any medium).

 

Counter – A crude (old fashioned) facility for counting the number of visitors to a website. They generally are inaccurate and misleading and not used anymore.

 

Crawler – See Spider.

 

Description Meta Tag – A piece of computer code inserted ‘behind the scenes’ on a webpage i.e. not viewable by site visitors to be read by a search engines.

 

Digital Marketing - A synonym for Internet Marketing.

 

Directory – A online version of a directory (e.g. Yellow Pages or a Business Directory). Web based directories with a lot more space, searchability and links are much more functional than an offline directory

 

DNS (Domain Name System) – A system for identifying unique addresses on the web. Every website has a unique domain name associated with it e.g. http://www.toltech.co.uk which also has a unique number (see IP address).

 

DNS Propagation – The process of changing addresses on the web. Not unlike changing your house address, it takes some time for everything to be brought up to date.

 

Domain Name - A unique identifier for a web address eg.toltech.co.uk.  Note that a domain name does not contain www.

 

Domain Name Server – A computer which manages/catalogues domain names.

 

Doorway Page – An entry page to a website specifically created to gain a high search engine placement. Considered poor practice nowadays.

 

Duplicate Content – Pages on several websites with identical content.

 

Email Marketing – A method of marketing to/communicating with existing clients via email.

 

Facebook – A social networking service enabling personal and business users to create profiles and share information including messages, photos, video. Becoming increasingly more important for business marketing through business pages and PPC advertising.

 

Google – A popular search engine and provider of online services (including advertising and applications).

 

Google Adwords Qualified Individual – see Adwords Qualified Individual.

 

Googlebot – Google’s own spider software which crawls the web and catalogues/indexes websites.

 

Google Analytics – A web-based software package which analyses your website traffic.

 

Google Toolbar – A facility which extends the functionality of a web browser, it provides short cuts to many Google facilities e.g. search, mail, links, etc.

 

Hits – A much abused term. A hit is a request for information from a webserver. Many people mistakenly equate it with the number of visitors to a website.

 

Image Map – A facility which allows a picture/image to be divided into zones where each one has it’s own link. A map of the UK could have 4 zones with a link for Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England.

 

Inbound link – A link to a website from another site.

 

Internet Marketing – The holistic approach to marketing on the internet. This consists of a much more inclusive approach to marketing using the internet than just search engine optimisation.

 

Internet Marketing Plan – A plan (much like a traditional marketing plan) providing a route map for marketing on the internet. It contains goals/targets, objectives, actions/activities with time scales and measurements to achieve the desired targets.

 

IP Address – A unique address in numerical format to define a location. A bit like a telephone number for a website or a location. Mainly in the form of up to 12 numbers separated by dots (132.121.212.125).

 

Keyword/Key Phrase – A phrase which is considered an important phrase in relation to search terms.

 

Keywords Meta Tag – A piece of computer code inserted ‘behind the scenes’ (i.e. not viewable by site visitors) on a web page to be read by a search engines describing keywords/key phrases.

 

Link Anchor Text – See Anchor text.

 

Link Farm – A website whose sole purpose is to list a lot of links to other pages. They were used to improve search engine rankings but are now considered poor practice and damaging to search engine rankings.

 

Link Popularity - A measure of the number of incoming links to a website.

 

Meta Tag - A piece of computer code inserted ‘behind the scenes’ i.e. not viewable by site visitors to describe some global parameter.

 

Meta Search Engine – In the early days of the internet some search engines were Meta Search Engines which purely read the ‘meta tag’ information and catalogued the site based on this information. These ‘tags’ very quickly got abused and now search engines use much more sophisticated measuring mechanisms to give a search ranking.

 

Mirror Sites – Multiple copies on different webservers around the world to spread the traffic load.

 

Outbound Links – Links from your website to another.

 

Organic Listings/Rankings – The results delivered by search engine based on the merit of the site. The site search engine determines the position of sites based on a complex series (probably several hundred parameters) of calculations/algorithms.

 

PageRank (PR) – A facility devised by Google to try and measure the relative importance of a website/page. Developed by Google founder Larry Page, it is named after him and would arguably have caused less confusion had it been called Larry Rank than Page rank. Much less important now that it used to be, to the point where Google actually want to drop the whole metric.

 

Page views - A measure of the amount of times a page or pages have been viewed.

 

Paid Inclusion – Referring to the method of appearing in a search engines (as opposed to organic or natural inclusion) which offer both organic/natural and paid inclusions.

 

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – A method of advertising on the web where you pay per click through on an advert on a website.

 

Rank/Ranking – The position which a website achieves in a search engine results page when someone searches for a specific word or phrase.

 

Reciprocal link – A link ‘swap’ between two sites. This used to be a technique for improving inbound links to a website (to raise each site’s visibility). Now considered poor practice.

 

Redirect – A method of telling a browser that a page or site has now been relocated to another address on the web. Just like redirecting your mail to your new address when you move house.

 

Referrer or Referring URL – A website/URL which sends traffic to another site via a hyperlink.

 

Reputation Management – The practice of monitoring your online reputation and managing it accordingly.

 

Robot – See Spider.

Sandbox - A place where Google (allegedly) place your website information and monitor it’s performance, status when initially uploaded. Somewhat like a prototype testing facility.

 

Search engine – A website which specialises in helping users find content on the web. The most common one is Google but others are Yahoo, Bing/MSN, Ask, AOL.

 

Search Engine friendly – A website which has been formatted/authored/optimised to maximise it’s visibility in search engines.

 

Search Term – The phrase or word a person types into a search engine search box in order to find information.

 

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. The practice of optimising a website to improve its visibility in a search engine. Marketing a business site requires a lot more than just Search Engine Optimisation. See Internet Marketing.

 

SEM – Search Engine Marketing. Encompasses SEO and further marketing methods e.g. paid advertising options, article writing, blogging, podcasting.

 

SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages.

 

Social Networking – Participating in networking, interacting in a social context using specific sites on the internet. Many sites have a different focus e.g. classmates, business links, hobbies and interests.

 

Spam – Unsolicited, unwanted, commercial email.

 

Spam Filter – An automatic facility which filters out spam email.

 

Spider – A name given to a piece of software which crawls the web and catalogues information from website. Sometimes referred to robots or bots.

 

Traffic – The people who visit websites.

 

Traffic Analysis – The Analysis of patterns and behaviour of website visitors. A lot of information can be gathered and analysed.

 

Traffic Analytics - The software used to gather and display the traffic information. A common Analytics package is Google Analytics but there are many others around.

 

Tweet - The act of posting a comment on Twitter.

 

Twitter - A form of blogging/personal journalising using a short format of 140 characters for content (‘one liners’).

 

URL (Uniform Resource Locator) - A unique web address or location for a web page or a website.

 

Web Copy Writing - Writing words and content specifically for websites, blogs, articles, email, etc.

 

World Wide Web - A system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents. Shortened to www.