Online Marketing Glossary
15 Second Rule
The amount of time a webpage has to capture the attention of the average visitor within. Many web surfers are, by and large, “hit and run” visitors who are not willing to spend any significant amount of time searching around or scrolling through long lists. Each page of a website should be designed in such a way that it quickly captures the interest of a visitor and directs them toward a certain “next action”. While this is a general rule which is applicable to certain offerings more than others, it is a good rule-of-thumb to keep in mind when thinking about site content, layout and navigation.
4 P’s of Marketing
In traditional marketing, the 4 P’s (product, pricing, place and proposition) are used to help in developing marketing plans and advertising campaigns. The four Ps model is most useful when marketing low-value consumer products, but for certain higher-value products and relationship-critical offerings, the P’s model is not as relevant. In these instances, customer focused models which include process and people are more appropriate.
Above the fold
The part of a web page that is visible without any scrolling. This is prime advertising space.
AdSense
Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money. Because, AdSense ads are related to what visitors are looking for on a website, or matched to the characteristics and interests of visitors a website’s content attracts, AdSense is a way to both monetize and enhance web content pages. It’s also a way for website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.
Affiliate Marketing
An popular e-marketing technique based around the Cost-Per-Action (CPA) model, whereby a product and/or service vendor only pays the advertiser a fee or commission based on a specific customer action taking place e.g. a sale, an application form being completed, a booking being made etc.
See also Customer Referral-Based Marketing.
Algorithm
The complex formula that determines how a web page will rank in the search results pages of a search engine.
Analytics
Data collection and analysis software that runs within your website to help you learn about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. Various providers supply different types of analytics software. Google has a free analytics service that plugs straight in to your website (http://www.google.com/analytics/).
ALT Text
The text that appears when you put your mouse on top of an image or a picture. ALT text describes the image and factors into the overall page rank (but rather insignificantly).
Anchor text
Also known as link text, anchor text the clickable text of a hyperlink. Example: “Please examine our SEO case studies for validation to evaluate our search engine optimization capabilities”
Bidding
The process involved in placing a bid price that you are willing to pay as an advertiser on a pay-per-click search engine. The highest bid for a given keyword achieves the top spot in the PPC search results. In Overture, the top three bids are “featured” on Overture’s partners’ sites, including AOL, Altavista, Infospace, and others. The minimum bid amount on Overture is 5 cents per click-through
Bot
Short for robot. See “Spider”
Branding
The process by which a business employs marketing strategies to get people to easily remember their products and services over a competitors.
Bulk Submission
Bulk submission services submit many URLs to search engines on your behalf e.g. SubmitWolf. However, this tactic is generally frowned upon by the search engines.
Click-to-call
Click-to-call is a service which lets users click a button and immediately speak with a customer service representative. The call can either be carried over VoIP, or the customer may request an immediate call back by entering their phone number. One significant benefit to click-to-call providers is that it allows companies to monitor when online visitors change from the website to a phone sales channel.
Cloaking
Serving different content to search engine spiders than to human visitors. Cloaking is basically a “bait and switch” tactic, where the web server feeds visiting spiders content that is keyword-rich, thus fooling the search engine into placing that page higher in the search results. Yet when the visitor clicks on the link they are given different content, which may be totally unrelated. Search engines frown upon this practice and some will penalize or ban sites that they catch doing it.
COA
Cost Of Acquisition - What it costs you to gain a sale or subscriber. If you spend $100 on advertising and gain 10 sales, then your cost of acquisition is $10 per sale.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of people who take a desired action (after being introduced to a business’s products and services), usually involving a sale.
CPA (see also PPA)
Cost Per Action - Advertiser payment based on site visitors executing a desired response e.g. subscription, survey completed, download or sale.
CPC (see also PPC)
Cost Per Click - What it costs to have individual visitors sent to your site. For example, in a CPM model, if you pay $5 for 1000 impressions and an average of 10 people click through for each 1000 impression, then your CPC would be $5 per visitor under that campaign.
CPM
Cost Per Thousand impressions - This is the way that banners, pop ups and pop under ads are often sold. Why the “M”? M is the Roman numbers equivalent of “one thousand”. In CPM campaigns, it is important to note where the actual ad will be placed on an advertisers’ screen real estate, as the success of CPM is based primarily on CTR. If the ad is not being seen by potential customers, then you may be wasting your money paying based on impressions.
CR
Conversion rate - the percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action upon visiting the website. The desired action may be submitting a sales lead, making a purchase, viewing a key page of the site, downloading a whitepaper, or some other measurable action.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets – A technical approach to separating a website’s layout + look + feel from its content (data) and programming.
CTR
Click Through Rate or Ratio – the ratio between someone viewing an ad and actually clicking through to see it (assumes that the ad has been seen). If one thousand banners are displayed and from these displays, 10 people click on the banner, the CTR would be 1% i.e. 10/1000 * 100.
Custom 404 Error Page
You can customize the content and the look-and-feel of the default page that is displayed on your web server when a 404 File Not Found error occurs. A good 404 error page has a friendly message explaining that the page they requested doesn’t exist at the location, a site map to encourage the user to continue exploring the site, a search box so the user can conduct a search, and a look-and-feel that matches the rest of the site, including navigation of course.
Creating a custom 404 error page not only helps keep visitors in your site, it is also an important part of the search engine optimization process. Inevitably pages on your site will get moved and removed over time. When a search engine spider returns to your site to reindex those now non-existent pages, they will have a set of links to explore in the form of the site map on the custom 404 page. You can test for whether a site has a custom 404 error page by trying to access a web page with a nonsense filename after the domain name in the web site address. For example: www.yourcompany.com/blah
Customer Referral-Based Marketing (network marketing)
A type of affiliate marketing scheme whereby existing customers are offered discounts, commissions and/or incentives to refer their friends/colleagues to purchase the same or similar offerings. Sometimes, such customer-referral based schemes are many tiers deep, allowing for customers to earn revenue from referrals made by friends/colleagues they have referred (almost mimicking a network marketing or pyramid scheme).
Doorway Page
Also known as a “bridge page.” A web page optimised to draw in Internet traffic from search engines, and then direct this traffic to another website. A doorway page is a web page full of keyword-rich copy that doesn’t deliver any useful information on it other than a link into the site, and whose sole purpose is to be fed to the search engines.
E-marketing
E-marketing relates to strategies (i.e. multiple approaches) which employ the Internet and other electronic means to promote products and services that satisfy customers while making profits for the companies that offer those products and services.
Eyeballs
A rather impersonal way to describe people who visit your site or view an advertisement.
FFA
Free For All pages. An FFA is a link page (web page) set up ostensibly to improve the search engine placement of a particular web site.
Filter Words
Words such as “is”, “am”, “were”, “was”, “the”, “for”, “do”, etc., that search engines deem irrelevant for indexing purposes.
Frequency Cap
Limit on the number of times a single visitor can see a certain advertisement.
Google Bombing
When a group of sites such as blogs join forces to link to an unflattering page about a company such that this page rises to the top of the search results in Google. Google bombing takes advantage of the power of hyperlink text and of PageRank. For example, if a group of sites with high PageRank all link to a page about XYZ Company’s inappropriate behavior with hyperlink text of “XYZ Company sucks” then the linked page can shoot to the top of Google’s search results for the term “XYZ Company.”
Googlebot
A Googlebot is a search bot used by Google. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine. If a webmaster wishes to restrict the information on their site available to a Googlebot, or other well-behaved spider, they can do so by with the appropriate directives in a robots.txt file
Guaranteed Position
A bit of a misnomer - no search engine optimization company can really guarantee where your site will appear in the natural (organic) search engine results. Why? Simply because you can’t control your competition’s moves and you can’t control how search engines weight or process search results. E-marketing companies can guarantee placement in the Sponsored Listings using Google’s Adwords or Yahoo’s Search Marketing products because you are paying for placement.
Hidden Keywords
Keywords that are placed in the HTML source in such a way that these words are not viewable by human visitors looking at the rendered web page. This practice is frowned upon by search engines and if found out, the site may be blacklisted from results pages.
Hit
Hit is a flexible term. It can be used to describe a person visiting a site, or the number of requests to a server for an item of information - a page, an image. Each web page is made up of a number of items, so one visitor requesting a page will generate a number of hits as all the elements are loaded. It’s very important that you ensure the person who uses the term to clarify what they mean by “hit”. If you’re wanting to advertise on a site, they may entice you by saying that the site gets, for example, 300,000 hits a month - this may only translate into 1,000 unique visitors.
Hybrid Campaign
A composite of a number of advertising strategies under the same campaign e.g, CPC and CPM.
Impression
A single display of an advertisement. 100 displays equals 100 impressions. Impressions are usually sold in lots of 1 thousand.
See CPM.
Inbound Link
A link from another site to a page on your site.
Incentives Site
A web site that gives some kind of reward for visitors who click on a link or fill out a form on an advertising partners site. Be very careful in using incentives sites to promote your products as they can generate a lot of garbage traffic and wasted advertising dollars.
Keyword
A word that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn’t appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it’s highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine).
Keyword Density
The number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a web page. The more times that a given word appears on your page (within reason), the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search
Keyword Popularity
The number of occurrences of searches done by Internet users of a given keyword during a period of time. Both WordTracker.com and Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com) provide keyword popularity numbers. Google provides http://trends.google.com - Google Trends analyses a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the certain keywords relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.
Keyword Prominence
The location (i.e. placement) of a given keyword in the HTML source code of a web page. The higher up in the page a particular word is, the more prominent it is and thus the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search engine user. Consequently, it’s best to have your first paragraph be chock full of important keywords rather than superfluous marketingspeak. This concept also applies to the location of important keywords within individual HTML tags, such as heading tags, title tags, or hyperlink text. So get in the habit of starting off your title tags with a good keyword rather than “Welcome to.”
Keyword Research
Determining the words and phrases that people use to find something, then compiling them into a list for use on web pages, etc
Keyword Stuffing
Placing excessive amounts of keywords into the page copy and the HTML in such a way that it detracts from the readability and usability of a given page for the purpose of boosting the page’s rankings in the search engines. This includes hiding keywords on the page by making the text the same colour as the background, hiding keywords in comment tags, overfilling alt tags with long strings of keywords, etc. Keyword stuffing is just another shady way of gaming the search engines and, as such, its use should be strongly discouraged.
Landing Page
The web page that a visitor clicks through to from the search results. Each landing page should be optimised for 4-5 specifically chosen keywords (unique to other pages on the site), and direct/funnel visitors to a specific action. Landing pages help divide up a complex or multi-layered product/service offering and provide a flatter site navigation scheme which is easier for search engines to index (and users to get around).
Link Bait
Useful or entertaining web content which compels users to link to it e.g. a controversial product review, a glossary of terms, a game etc.
Link Building
Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your “link popularity” and/or “PageRank.” Considerations for link building can include directory submissions and press release syndication.
Link Popularity
Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking. However, the actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. Search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site.
Media Kit/Page
A section of a web site that demonstrates to potential advertisers the potential and user demographics of the site.
META Description
A <meta> tag hidden in the HTML that describes the page’s content. Should be relatively short e.g. only ~150 characters (with whitespace) are accepted by Google before trimming, but other engines accept longer descriptions. The meta description provides an opportunity to influence how your web page is described in search results pages, but it will not improve your search rankings. Make sure your meta description reflects the page content or you may be accused of spamming.
It is a good practice to mention the page’s keywords once in the meta description for that page.
META Keywords
A <meta> tag hidden in the HTML that lists keywords relevant to the page’s content. Because search engine spammers have abused this tag so much, this tag provides little to no benefit to your search rankings. Of the major search engines, only Yahoo! still pays any attention to the meta keywords tag.
META Tags
Meta-information (information about information) that is associated with a web page and placed in the HTML but not displayed on the page for the user to see. There are a range of meta tags, only a few of which are relevant to search engine spiders. Two of the most well-known meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords; unfortunately these are largely ignored by most major search engines (in terms of their effect of organic search result rank), including Google.
Network Marketing
See Customer Referral-Based Marketing.
Opt-in Email
A specific request by a visitor for subscription to an ezine etc. Double opt-in means that not only does the visitor need to initially subscribe, but also confirms the subscription request. Genuine double opt-in mailing lists provide the best targeted advertising responses.
Organic Rank
Organic rank describes where a web page appears in search engine results pages based on having good, keyword-rich and relevant content and a link building campaign. This is in contrast to listings ranked based on who paid the most money to appear at the top such as those on Overture.com. Sometimes this is called “pure” or “natural search” as it is supposed to be “untainted” by commercial payments or bids.
Outbound Link
A link from a page of your site to another site.
Page View
Basically, just as it states – a single view of a web page by a visitor.
PageRank
Google uses a weighted form of link popularity called PageRank™. Not all links are created equal. Google differentiates a link from an important site (such as CNN.com) as being better than a link from Jim-Bob’s personal home page. The Google Toolbar (which is a free download from http://toolbar.google.com) has a PageRank meter built into it, to see which web pages are considered important by Google and which aren’t. PageRank scoring ranges from 0 to 10, 10 being the best. PageRank scores get exponentially harder to achieve the closer to 10 they are. For example, increasing your own homepage’s PageRank from a 2 to 3 is easy with not a lot of additional links, jumping from a 7 to an 8 is very difficult to achieve. The higher the PageRank of the page that’s linking to you, the more your site’s PageRank will benefit. The better your PageRank, the better you’ll do in Google, all else being equal.
Paid Placement
Paying a search engine to have your listing show up prominently. These listings are usually denoted as “sponsored listings.”
Pay-Per-Call
Pay-Per-Call is a business model for ad listings in search engines and directories that allows publishers to charge local advertisers on a per-call basis for each lead (call) they generate.
Permission Marketing
Marketing based on obtaining consent from a site visitor to receive promotional information. Visitor consent is usually achieved in exchange for the vendor providing something of value to the visitor for free.
PPA (see also CPA)
Pay Per Action – Payment made based on a successful action taking place. This may be a sale or may be a milestone on the sales process e.g. for credit card applications, the final stages of the process must be taken offline. Because of this, a PPA may be attached to the successful completion of a credit card application form.
PPC (see also CPC)
Pay Per Click – Very popular on paid placement search engines now. Instead of paying for the number of times an ad is viewed, you only pay for clicks on the ad. PPC is an example of performance based advertising.
PPL
Pay Per Lead – A payment made based on an action such as someone filling in an advertiser’s contact form or survey.
PPS
Pay Per Sale – Payment made based on a successful financial transaction occurring.
Rate Card
Information on advertising rates on a particular site.
Reciprocal Linking
The practice of trading links between websites. While this may result in more traffic to the each site it will not usually improve the organic rank of either site in search results pages as the links generally cancel each other out.
Robots.txt
Text file placed in a websites root directory and linked in the html code. Allows for SEO’s to control the actions of search engine spiders on the site or even deny them access
ROI
Return on Investment - The margin gained from a particular marketing strategy, e.g. a $500 ad campaign that returns $650 has an ROI of $150 (or a +30% return).
RON
Run of network – Many sites are members of a larger network. This option allows you to purchase ad space on all member sites.
ROS
Run of site – An advertisement running on many pages on a web site, not confined to a particular section.
Scanners
See Skimmers.
Screen Real Estate
The amount of space available on a display for an application to provide output. Typically, the effective use of screen real estate is one of the most difficult design challenges because of the desire to have as much data and as many controls as possible visible on the screen to minimize the need for hidden commands and scrolling. At the same time, excessive information may be poorly organized or confusing, so effective screen layouts must be used with appropriate use of white space.
SE
Search engine.
Search Query
The execution of a search on a search engine.
SEM
Search engine marketing – An E-marketing approach concerned with developing CPC (or other sponsored) advertisements to appear on search engine results pages.
SEO
Search engine optimization – An E-marketing approach concerned with improving the “organic rank” of a website in search engine results.
SEP
Search engine placement.
SERP
Search Engine (Search) Results Page.
Skimmers
A type of site visitor that is only interested in digesting short snippets of test and information. As many site visitors are likely to be skimmers, it is usually a good idea to optimise your content for this type of viewing e.g. use descriptive titles, use abstracts, use dot-points, shorten content and ensure its relevancy to the reader etc.
Skyscraper
Vertical banner, usually around the 120x600 pixel mark.
Spamglish
Keyword-rich gibberish used as search engine fodder instead of thoughtfully written, interesting content. Spamglish often includes meaningless sentences and keyword repetition.
Spider
Also known as a bot, robot, or crawler. Spiders are programs used by a search engine to explore the web in an automated manner and download the HTML content (not including graphics) from web sites, strip out whatever it considers superfluous and redundant out of the HTML, and store the rest in a database (i.e. its index). Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).
A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, recursively browsing the Web according to a set of policies. A spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalogue websites on the internet. When a spider indexes a particular website, this is known as “being spidered”.
Spider Trap
An infinite loop that a spider may get caught in if it explores a dynamic site where the URLs of pages keep changing. For example, a home page may have a different URL and the search engine may not be able to ascertain that it is the home page that it has already indexed but under another URL. If search engines were to completely index dynamic web sites, they would inevitably have large amounts of redundant content and download millions of pages.
Splash Page
A home page that is, for the most part, devoid of content. Often times created in Flash. Splash pages usually say something to the effect of “Enter Here” or “Choose our Flash-enabled site or the HTML version”. Splash pages are an annoyance to Internet users as they introduce an extra hoop that the user has to jump through before they get to any meaningful content. Splash pages are also damaging to search engine rankings. Consider that your home page is typically considered by search engines as the most important page of your site. If your home page is a content-less splash page, then it’s a wasted opportunity.
Standards Compliant
Sites that use valid XHTML and CSS, separate the content layer from the presentation layer. Because standards compliant sites are accessible and usable to both humans and spiders alike, they tend to rank better in search engines than non-compliant sites.
Stemming
The practice of stemming involves the derivation of word variations. For example, the query “swim” was entered into a search engine that supports stemming, it might return results that include “swimming” or “swims”.
Stickiness
The ability to hold the attention of web site visitors and to keep them returning to your web site.
Stop Character
Certain characters, such as ampersand (&), equals sign (=), and question mark (?), when in a web page’s URL, tip off a search engine that the page in question is dynamic. Search engines are cautious of indexing dynamic pages for fear of spider traps, thus pages that contain stop characters in their URL run the risk of not getting indexed and becoming part of the “Invisible Web.” Google won’t crawl more than one dynamic level deep.
Stop Word
A word which is ignored in a query because the word is so commonly used that it makes no contribution to relevancy. Examples are common net words such as computer and web, and general words like get, “I”, “me”, “the” and “you”.
Title Tag
The text displayed in the blue bar at the very top of the browser window, above “Back,” “Forward,” “Refresh,” “Print,” etc. Although inconspicuous to the user, the title tag is the most important bit of text on a web page as far as the search engines are concerned. Search engines not only assign the words in the title tag more weight, they also typically display the title tag in the search results, making the title tag an important potential call-to-action as well. Thus, the wording of each page’s title tag should be thought through carefully. Also see “keyword prominence.”
Total Lifetime Value
The total lifetime value of a customer is the revenue likely to be received over the entire period they are purchasing products and/or services form a vendor. This is an important consideration to make as while some offerings are suited to once-off marketing strategies (e.g. closing down sale), others require longer-term relationship building to encourage repeat sales and referrals.
Unique Visitors
Another flexible term. Unique Visitors refers to a single person who visits your web site in a set space of time, usually 24 hours. If a person visits your web site 3 times in a 24 hour period, they would only count as 1 unique. This is another statistic that needs to be clarified with the company who is quoting it - their time frame for “uniqueness” may be as little as one hour and that will inflate their statistics dramatically.
URL
Universal Resource Locator - The protocol and standard for locating resources in the Internet.
USP
Unique Selling Proposition - Sometimes mistakenly defined as Unique Selling Point, the Unique Selling Proposition concept was first developed by Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency. A USP is the reason why somebody should buy from you and not your competition i.e. the unique benefits that your products or services offer consumers. A USP is usually a short, succinct paragraph or set of dot points. Having a USP is important due to the 15 second rule i.e. the time a business has to capture a visitor’s attention.
Viral Marketing
A marketing technique that encourages visitors to pass along a sales message, usually by giving away something for free, or be attaching something of human interest e.g. a game, a funny anecdote etc.
Xenu
A software tool to check broken links
XML Sitemap
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines (like Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc.) about pages on their sites that are available for crawling and indexing. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. For more information on the XML Sitemaps protocol, visit http://www.sitemaps.org/
Compiled using various resources including:
www.seoglossary.com
www.patrickgavin.com/SEO-Glossary.htm
www.phpauction.net/esources/e_mkting.pdf
www.sitemaps.org
