Online Marketing Terms - You Should Know

Below is a listing of some of the important terms and definitions that you should know as an Internet marketer.

Search Engine: An application that searches for information on the web provides that information to a searcher. The top 3 search engines today are Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Search engines return their results to search engine results pages (SERPs). It generally ranks or orders the results according to its proprietary algorithms. Their algorithms are always improving in order to improve relevance to the searcher who queries the search engine using search terms entered into a search field.

Website:  Website is collection of several subject or content and data files which has a unique web address (URL) that is located on WWW and accessible through a browser. Website must be hosted on at least on web server for accessible on internet. The page open with web address called home page that may contain several connecting hyperlink called inner pages.

Search Query:  The word or keyword or phrase, a searcher types into a search field, which initiates search engine results page listings and PPC ad serves. In PPC advertising, the goal is to bid on keywords that closely match the search queries of the advertiser’s targets.

Search Algorithm: Search algorithm of Google is used to find the most relevant web pages for any search query. According to Google, the algorithm considers over 200 factors, including the PageRank value, the meta and title tags, the content, age of the domain, etc.

Internet: The Internet is a global system of interconnected millions of computer networks that interchange data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). Also define as the Internet is a network of networks or interconnect of computer network defined by the TPC/IP standards.

URL: Any website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet address known as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). It displays on top of any browser’s Address Bar, that is a full address of a website that identifies the protocol, IP address, domain name and web resources. It was developed by Tim Berners-Lee is 1994.

Web Browser:  It is a free software or application used to viewing websites or web addresses. Examples: Internet Explorer,Google Crome, Firefox etc.

W3C: The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).Thus, the Web is an information space. The first three specifications for Web technologies defined URLs, HTTP, and HTML. It is an information-sharing model or a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is established in 1990 by CERN Physicist, Tim Berners - Lee, which became free to use by anyone in 30 April, 1993.

Targeting:  Narrowly focusing keywords and ads to attract a specific potential customer based on a marketing profile.

Traffic:  Refers to the number of visitors a website receives. It can be determined by examination of web logs.

Sponsored Listings:  It is a term used to identify paid advertisements. It is visible on some search engine result pages as a title or column head to distinguish between paid and organic listings.

Unique Visitor:  When tracking the amount of traffic on a Web site, it refers to a person who visits a Web site more than once within a specified period of time. Software used to tracks and counts web site traffic can distinguish between visitors who only visit the site once and unique visitors who return to the site.

301 Redirect (permanent redirect): Interpreted by search engine robot that the current domain is no longer valid. All links to the domain (and PageRank) are typically assigned to the site which is pointed to by the redirect. This redirect is implemented on the server (server-side).

302 Redirect (temporary redirect): Interpreted by search engine robot that both the target domain and the current domain are temporarily invalid. Use for geolocation to point country specific domains (ccTLDs) as separate listings. But note this is used for domain hijacking and as a consequence can result in sites getting penalized. This redirect is implemented on the server (server-side).

Duplicate Content: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar. You should avoid having duplicate content on your website because it can get you penalized.

Canonical URL: Canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation. A canonical URL, therefore, is the standard URL for accessing a specific page within your website. For instance, the canonical version of your domain might be http://www.domain.com instead of http://domain.com.

Authority pages:  A page which contains many inbound links about a topic.

Cloaking: Showing a different web page to a search engine spider than what is normally seen. Method typically used by spammers.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): A language used to describe how a given page or web site will look. It is used to control font styles, graphical layouts, color, etc.

Dynamic Website: A website whose content is not fixed. What is shown on a page is based on user-selected activities and/or programmatically driven.

Static Website: A website or web page whose content is fixed and in other words we can say that Static Web’s content not change automatically or we need to change it manually.

Google Page Rank: Page rank is defined by Google web search engine, that is a link analysis algorithm named after founder of Google 'Larry Page'. It is an estimate of important of any measure in number, value of any website out of 10 based on their quality and popularity. There are many toolbars that display a PageRank of 0 to 10 for the page.

Keywords: It may be worlds or phrase or short form that are used to help finding indexed content page on search engine or to get some results. In other words Keywords are the words that people type in search engines. Google indexed million of webpages and show them to us when we search some keyword on their search engine, google identifies keywords using a contextual algorithm.

Keywords Density: It denotes the percentage of any keywords or phrase appears on any web page compare to all content on the web page.  It is a important factor for page rank and search engine optimization. It should not be less than 1% or not more than 3% for optimizing keywords.

Mata Tag: It play an important role in search engine marketing and search engine use meta tag information when building their indices or display as search result. It is a special HTML or XHTLM tag that provide information about particular website.

Web Title and Description: Meta title and description are the part of meta tag. They are the important part of HTML code of any website, usually they contain a summery of the website and include main focused keywords. These meta tags always included within the 'header' code of web page.

Alt Tag: It is an Alternate Text or second keywords displayed when user hover the mouse over the graphic or link or image. It is used in HTML or XHTML and very important part in image optimization.

Anchor Tag: Anchor Tag is used display some text on a web page clickable and when user view the webpage in the browser, they click the text to active the link and linked URL open the new web page.

Landing Page: It is a destination page or some time called lead capture page which is a page that appear when anyone click on search engine result page or any ads. It may be of two types - Transactional page and reference page. In search engine, every result have potential to redirect user to their landing page.

Latent Semantic Indexing:  LSI for short, is an algorithm used by Google (and possibly other search engines) to determine how words are related to each other in the context of a web page. An article about "cookies" might contain words such as chocolate, sugar, flour or dough for example

Organic Search: Search Results are of two type and organic search is one of them. When any user search his keyword on any search engine, it show some results, one paid result sponsored by Search engine and other are SEO results which are called organic results and these searches called Organic search for that keywords for your website if exist in search engine.

PPC (Pay Per Click):  It is an advertising model to promote any website in search engine to generate traffic where website owner or publisher need to pay to search engine as per clicks over ads.

Backlinks: Backlinks are simply linked web pages with any particular web page and it may be the incoming link, inbound links, inlinks and inwards links. They display other website that link to your web page.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing): It is a process of promoting any website by increasing their visibility in any search engine and gaining traffic through free SEO  tactic or paid search engine advertising. 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): It is an technique or process of improving quality and affect visibility of any website in all major search engines and with organic search results and increase traffic to generate earning for a particular website. It include everything from an initial consultation to keyword generation, copywriting, website redevelopment, creating incoming links, submitting and finally, reporting on service results. It is of two type: On Page SEO and Off Page SEO

SMO (Search Media Optimization): A technique or process of promoting or increasing awareness of particular brand or website or products by using various social media platform is called SMO. 

SERP (Search Engine Result Pages): The search engine page that comes when we type any keyword in search box and result page include some results with clickable title and description of webpage.
Three type of results display on any search engine, one that listing or indexed in search engine's spider, second are indexed in search engine's directory and third one are listed by the search engine as paid result.

Splash Page:  An introductory web page or first page seen by a web surfer that is graphics-heavy for the purpose of visitor’s attention only and lack content.

TLD (Top Level Domain):  The three main domain extensions: .com, .net, .org

Black Hat SEO: Used to increase visibility and promote website with fraud techniques or over optimization and used by those people who want to earn faster and not want to survive for long term. 

White Hat SEO: Using SEO technique by allowing or following all search engine rules and policies and used for long term existence in Search engines. These practices improve performance of your website and win the trust of all search engines.

Web Content: Content is most important part of SEM and it should be unique, relevant, user friendly, correct, logically strong and perfect. It play an important role in success of any website.

Robot.txt: A text file, that resides in the web server’s root directory, that is used to direct search engine spiders that visit your website. It is typically used to indicate which portions of the site should be crawled and which should not. It may have crawler-specific directives.

Doorway Pages: This is basically a fake page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher.

Keyword Stuffing: Since keyword density was an important factor on the early search algorithms, webmasters started to game the system by artificially inflating the keyword density inside their websites. This is called keyword stuffing. These days this practice won’t help you, and it can also get you penalized.

Nofollow Link: A link used to instruct search engines that a link should not influence ranking. They are used when you want to cut down on irrelevant content to improve the quality of search engine results. Don’t use nofollow when linking to internal pages in your website. Use it when linking to external pages that you don't want to endorse. Dofollow links do not have the nofollow attribute and do pass on link juice to the sites they link to.

Link Farm: A link farm is a group of websites where every website links to every other website, with the purpose of artificially increasing the PageRank of all the sites in the farm. This practice was often used in the early days of search engines, but today these sites are seeing as a spamming technique (and thus can get you penalized).

Linkbait: A linkbait is a piece of web content published on a website or blog with the goal of attracting as many backlinks as possible (in order to improve one’s search rankings). Usually it’s a written piece, but it can also be a video, a picture, a quiz or anything else. A classic example of linkbait is the “Top 10? lists that tend to become popular on social bookmarking sites.

Link Sculpting: By using the nofollow attribute strategically webmasters were able to channel the flow of PageRank within their websites, thus increasing the search rankings of desired pages. This practice is no longer effective as Google recently change how it handles the nofollow attribute.

Sandbox: Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries. Once Google verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the sandbox and into the main index.

Affiliate marketing: Typically, a commission-based arrangement where referring sites (publishers) receive a commission on sales or leads by merchants (retailers). A lead may be based on data captured during an enquiry, or it could be simply a visitor to the site (a click), in which case it overlaps with paid-search marketing.

Affiliate Program: An agreement or arrangement on which an advertiser pays a fees to an affiliate network in return of clicks or sales or leads or impression generated from the the promotional links available on its publishers' website or platform.

Affiliate Link: A unique linking code or landing page tracking URL for the promotion to redirect users to advertiser's main website. It enables the advertiser and/or the network to track any activity.

API (Application Programming Interface): It’s an interface that lets users access Majestic data for the purpose of application development as well as automated searches.

Datafeed: A file containing a list of all the products sold by a given advertiser. It usually includes descriptions, images, and prices of the advertised products.

CTR (Click Through Rate): Standard method of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. Calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of times the ad was shown (also known as an impression).

Conversion

CPA (Cost Per Action): An advertising pricing model in which advertiser pay on the basis of per action or lead or payment or registration.

CPC (Cost per Click): An advertising model in which advertiser pay on the basis of per click over specified link or ads.

DSP(Demand-Side Platform): Interfaces where you can buy digital advertising inventory. You normally have access to multiple ad exchanges.

Fired Pixel: Click ID (user’s identification code) was triggered and you should receive that info on your side. It means when a user purchases any offer with network's tracking link, the click ID is activated or “the pixel is fired” and we receive that info on your tracking platform.