The internet and mobile industry has changed so much in the last 24 months that it is impossible to stay up to date. This isn’t a comprehensive internet marketing glossary, but a list of important terms that our team keeps updated to make sure that you as a marketer or business is up to speed on the latest.
A-list bloggers. aka A-listers. All those writers who dominate the Technorati rankings (see Technorati, below). Getting a nod from one of these folks can mean exponential growth in site traffic.
Affiliate marketing. Selling your product through other web sites or e-mail lists by paying the site or list owner for each sale. Great for expanding your sales network.
Analytics. Taking traffic data and other information about your web site, analyzing it, and then providing insight. Note that a raw report is not analytics.
AJAX. Not the cleaning stuff. Generic term for forms that let you modify data on a page without reloading the entire page. You care because it looks neat, is speedy, but may kill you in the search engines.
Behavioral Targeting. Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or implied intent. For example, if I recently searched for mortgages then am later reading a book review the page may still show me mortgage ads.
Black Hat SEO- tactics that are unethical to get to the top of the search engines that will eventually get your site black-listed and never be found. Run like hell if your SEO company does black hat techniques.
Blog. Short for ‘web log’. A fancy word for a web site where you publish short entries on a regular basis and let visitors post comments about those entries.
Branded Keywords. Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand. Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle, and are some of the highest value and highest converting keywords.
Canonical URL. Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use Page Rank or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.
Webmasters should use consistent linking structures throughout their sites to ensure that they funnel the maximum amount of PageRank at the URLs they want indexed. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL.
Examples of URLs which may contain the same information in spite of being at different web addresses:
- http://www.seobook.com/
- http://www.seobook.com/index.shtml
- http://seobook.com/
- http://seobook.com/index.shtml
- http://www.seobook.com/?tracking-code
CMS. Content Management System. A web application (see below) that allows users to add and edit web pages on a web site without learning HTML. May cause mass celebration or mutiny among web teams.
Conversion. Many forms of online advertising are easy to track. A conversion is reached when a desired goal is completed.
Here are a few common example desired goals
- a product sale
- completing a lead form
- a phone call
- capturing an email
- filling out a survey
- getting a person to pay attention to you
- getting feedback
- having a site visitor share your website with a friend
- having a site visitor link at your site
Conversion rate. The number of sales, leads or other desired actions that occur on your web site, compared to the total number of visitors.
Cookie. Information stored on a user’s computer by a Web site so preferences are remembered on future requests.
Cost-per-action (CPA).online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying actions such as sales or registrations.
Cost per Click (CPC) the cost or cost-equivalent paid per click-through.
CPM. cost per thousand impressions.
Crawl Depth. How deeply a website is crawled and indexed. Since searches which are longer in nature tend to be more targeted in nature it is important to try to get most or all of a site indexed such that the deeper pages have the ability to rank for relevant long tail keywords. A large site needs adequate link equity to get deeply indexed. Another thing which may prevent a site from being fully indexed is duplicate content issues.
Crawl Frequency. How frequently a website is crawled. Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority. Sites with highly artificial link authority scores (ie: mostly low quality spammy links) or sites which are heavy in duplicate content or near duplicate content (such as affiliate feed sites) may be crawled less frequently than sites with unique content which are well integrated into the web.
Domain name. The address of your web site, such as www.commarketing.com
Dynamic. A web site generated using a web application and a database. These sites will often change from one visit to the next, or one moment to the next.
Dynamic Content. Content which changes over time or uses a dynamic language such as PHP to help render the page. In the past search engines were less aggressive at indexing dynamic content than they currently are. While they have greatly improved their ability to index dynamic content it is still preferable to use URL rewriting to help make dynamic content look static in nature.
Hit. Any one file downloaded from your site one time. A single page of a web site, viewed once, may generate 30 or more hits. Great if you need to impress your boss. Lousy as a measure of web site traffic.
Link authority. The ‘vote’ provided to a page on your web site when another web site (or page within your web site) links to it. Search engines include these ‘votes’ in their ranking algorithms.
Movable Type. A popular blogging platform.
Pageview. Any one page of your site completely loading any one time. If I visit your web site and look at 3 pages, that will count as 3 page views.
Ping. Originally a networking term, in internet marketing parlance ‘ping’ means notifying the world that you’ve updated your web site. Pings are usually sent automatically to sites such as Technorati.
PPC. Pay Per Click marketing. Bidding for position in the sponsored search engine rankings. Higher bids have a better chance of a higher ranking, although there are other factors.
Ranking algorithm. The mysterious black box that determines how you rank for a specific keyword. Google has one algorithm. Yahoo! has theirs. Microsoft does their best to copy Google’s.
Reciprocal linking. Linking to someone else’s web site in return for them linking to you. This used to help with search engine rankings. Now helps you disappear from the search rankings.
RSS. A type of text file that delivers a list of headlines and content directly to feed readers and other software. Stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’.
SEO. Search Engine Optimization. Working to insure your web site will get as high a ranking as possible in the unpaid search results in the major search engines.
Social media. Usually refers to the many blogs, bookmarking sites and other sites that allow visitors to interact with each other and the web site owner.
Spam. Used to refer only to unsolicited e-mail. May also refer to unproductive comments or repeated submissions to blogs or discussion forums. Or a Monty Python skit.
Static web site. A web site that isn’t connected to a database. ‘Static’ refers to the fact that the page does not change.
URL. Uniform Resource Locator. The unique address of one file on the internet. www.commarketing.com is the URL of one page on my site.
Unique visitor. Any one visitor coming to your site any number of times in the time period. If I come to your web site 30 times in a month, I still only count as one unique visitor.
Visit. Any user visiting your site any one time.
Web 2.0. Refers generically to any site that looks cooler than sites before 1999.
Web Application. Usually refers to a database-driven web site, such as a shopping cart.
WordPress. A popular blogging platform.
XHTML. Successor to HTML. XHTML is used to build web pages.
Sources: Conversational Marketing, SEObook
