Let's be honest, digital marketing is confusing. Once you feel like you have something figured out, Google goes and alters their algorithm, best practices change, or some blogger comes up with a new acronym for you to learn. Digital and all of the terminology that go with it are the amoeba of doing business: constantly shifting and only held together by its shared marketing membrane. Even if you have turned your company's marketing efforts over to an agency or consultant, digital marketing speak can sound like a foreign language. It is always good to recognize when you need to call in the experts, but shouldn't you also be able to actually understand what they are talking about? For the amount of money that you pay for marketing, the answer should be a resounding, "YES!" You make better marketing decisions for your company when you are informed, and to do that, you must gain a deeper understanding of all of the moving parts that make up a marketing strategy. To help you reach a level of functional understanding, I decided to put together a digital marketing dictionary so that maybe, just maybe, you might be able to begin to grasp this mysterious and enigmatic world.
The Digital Marketing Dictionary
A/B Split Test: Testing two variables for a statistically significant influence. Can be used in emails or advertisements to evaluate the effectiveness of a message, word choice or subject lineAbove the Fold: The content that can be seen on a screen without having to scroll down. In Email Marketing, this refers to the portion of an email that can be viewed in the preview pane. Usually the content that is above the fold gets the most attention from website visitors so important information should be concentrated here.Ad Group – A group of ads within a Campaign that are focused on a set of closely related keyword phrases.Ad – An individual Google ad within an Ad Group. Ad Groups can contain numerous text ads with different ad wording.Algorithm: A mathematical, computational or statistical method that takes a number of variables into account to output a single, quantifiable number that is a function of all of the variables. A good example of a commonly used algorithm is the one used by Google to determine which pages should rank more highly on the SERPs. .Alt text/Alt image tag: A description of a graphic, which usually isn’t displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is undeliverable, or a browser is used that doesn’t display graphics. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated picture. Special web browsers for visually challenged people rely on the alt text to make the content of graphics accessible to the users.Anchor text: The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.Authority: (trust, link juice, Google juice) The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites.Avg. CPC: The average cost-per-click that has been charged.Avg. Pos: The average rank position for an ad. A rank position between 2 and 3 tends to be most productive and gives the biggest bang for your buckBack link: (inlink, incoming link) Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.Black hat: Search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.Blog: A website which presents content in a more or less chronological series. Content may or may not be time sensitive. Most blogs us a Content Management System such as WordPress rather than individually crafted WebPages. Because of this, the Blogger can chose to concentrate on content creation instead of arcane code.Bot: (robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.Bounce Rate: In Google Analytics, this refers to the percentage of people that do not progress beyond the entry page within a certain time limit. This can also reflect the number of people who visit a page only to immediately leave.Brand Evangelist: One who lives and breathes a brand, and is capable of spreading the word far and wide. For hotels, using a blogger as a brand evangelist can provide a ridiculous amount of return for the initial investment of a free stay.Call to Action: A phrase written on a website, advertisement or in an email that encourages a customer to take further action. Examples: Click to learn more, start today, call nowCampaign: Specific activities designed to promote a product, service or business. In Google Adwords :Defines the daily budget, language, geographic scope and the networks where ads are displayed.Campaign Daily Budget: The daily spending limit for an entire campaign. When the daily budget limit is reached, ads cease to display until the next day.Clicks: The number of users who have been sent to a site because they clicked on an ad.CTR: Click Through Rate. Total number of clicks on a link divided by the number of times that a link or ad was shown. A CTR greater than 0.5% is considered to be average. A CTR of 2% or better is very goodCMS: Content Management System. A good content management system allows someone to make changes to the content of a website with very little to no technical experienceComment spam: Posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an inlink to another site. The reason many blogs use link condoms.Content (text, copy) The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.Content Total: The number of clicks, cost and other statistics related to ads displayed on non-Google sites through the Google AdSense affiliate Content Network.Conversion: (goal) Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.Conv. Rate: The conversion rate based upon a snippet of Google code added to a Web page. The code is most commonly added to an order confirmation page or a thank you page following an e-mail form submission. This indicates the percentage of users who clicked on an ad and followed through with an order or a request for information.Cost: Actual cost charged for clicks. Cost is displayed for Ad Campaigns, Ad Groups, Search Total, Content Total and individual keywords.Cost/Conversion: The average cost for converting a user who clicks on an ad into a customer or for someone who requests further information. Requires a snippet of Google code to be added to an order confirmation or thank you page following an e-mail form submission or order submission page.CPM: (Cost Per Thousand impressions) A statistical metric used to quantify the average value / cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M - from the Roman numeral for one thousand.Crawler: (bot, spider): A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data. This is how Google determines how a website is structured and what it is about.Directory: A site devoted to directory pages. The Yahoo directory is an example. If you are a hotel that also serves as a wedding venue, you might want to have your hotel listed on a wedding website directory like TheKnot.comDirectory page: A page of links to related webpagesDuplicate content: Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any trust from the search engines compared to sites that display unique contentDCP: Dynamic Content Personalization. A method of creating a website that will self-alter its content based on the visitor. Example: If an international traveler is visiting a hotel website, the website will then show promotion relevant to long term travel and translate into the visitor's native languageGoogle dance: The change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.Googlebot: Google’s spider programHit: Once the standard by which web traffic was often judged, but now a largely meaningless term replaced by pageviews AKA impressions. A hit happens each time that a server sends an object - documents, graphics, include files, etc. Thus one pageview could generate many hits.HTML: (Hyper Text Markup Language) directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.Impression: The number of impressions, which means the number of times an ad has displayed based upon either a user’s search using a keywords phrase (Search network) or based upon the content found on a page for a site that is part of the Google AdSense program (Content network).Keyword: An individual keyword or keyword phrase assigned to an Ad Group. A word or phrase that someone might enter into a search engine that would bring them to your site. Example: Florida beach hotel, donut shop Denver, best brunch in Chicago.Keyword cannibalization: The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.Keyword density: The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.Keyword Matching Options: There are several different methods for targeting AdWords ads to more precisely match the ads to the intended search keywords.
- Broad Match – The default option for your keywords. With no special characters surrounding the keyword phrase, AdWords ads should display when users search using any of the words in a keyword phrase and possibly with other words that may be used in the search. At one time a broad match meant that all of the words in a keyword phrase needed to be part of the search, but that was changed to any of the words in a keyword phrase. This is an important reason as to why broad match keywords should only be used on a limited basis. The problem with a broad match is that ANY word in a phrase can be used to trigger an ad. In other words, if you targeted search phrase is ‘Phoenix ticket sales’, any search using the word ‘Phoenix’, ‘ticket’ or ‘sales’ can trigger the display of an ad.
- +Broad +Match – This is much improved version of the broad match. With a modified broad match, a plus sign (the broad match modifier) is placed directly in front of each word that must be included in the users search phrase in order to trigger an ad. That could be one word or multiple words. An additional benefit is that Google can substitute similar words and misspellings, which allows you to trigger ads based upon a wider range of closely related search phrases. This tactic is helpful to uncover new keyword opportunities and phrases to improve cost efficiency.
- Phrase Match "alaska cruises" – Surrounding a keyword phrase with quotation marks makes the ad appear only when a user searches for the words "alaska cruise" in that order, and possible with other search words. The ad may appear if someone searches for "alaska cruise", but not if they search for "cruise NCL to alaska".
- Exact Match [alaska cruise] – Surrounding a keyword phrase with brackets makes the ad appear only when a user searches for the words "alaska cruise" in that word order and without any other search words. The ads will not appear is a user searches for "NCL alaska cruise".
- Negative Keyword – If you sell alaska cruises, but do not want your ads to appear if someone searches for "cheap alaska cruise" you can add negative keywords to either a campaign or individual Ad Groups by adding them to a list that is available when you scroll to the bottom of a page under the Keyword tab for any Ad Group. Negative keywords prevent ads from showing for searchers who are not looking for what you offer.
Keyword research: The process of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting. It can often be a long and arduous journey to find quality keywords for your company and website, but the hard word is worth it.Keyword stuffing: (keyword spam) Inappropriately high keyword density.Keyword search volumes: in relation to broad, “phrase” and [exact]Landing page: the page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP. Ideally, a highly relevant page to what they were searching forLatent semantic indexing: (LSI) This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail Searches”. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail”. The significance is that it might be almost impossible to rank well for “mortgage”, but fairly easy to rank for “second mortgage to finance monster truck team”. Go figure.Link: An element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page or another part of the current page.Link bait or click bait: A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media.Link building: Actively cultivating incoming links to a site.Link exchange: A reciprocal linking scheme often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves. Quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.Link farm: a group of sites which all link to each other.Link spam: (Comment Spam) Unwanted links such as those posted in user generated content like blog comments.Link text: (Anchor text) The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.Long tail: longer more specific search queries that are often more targeted than shorter broad queries. For example a search for “dogs” might be very broad while “find Scottish terrier dogs for sale” would be a long tail search.Max CPC: The maximum cost per click that has been bid for a set of keywords. The bid price is one factor that determines the rank position for an ad.META tags: Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.Mirror site: An identical site at a different address.Organic link: organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.Pagerank: (PR) is a link analysis algorithm used by Google to help determine the relative importance of a website. Every website is given a Google. PageRank score between 0 and 10 on an exponential scalePersonalization: See DCPPPA: (Pay Per Action ) Very similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversions.PPC: (Pay Per Click) a contextual advertising scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.Redirect: Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.Responsive website: A website that is automatically adjusts for optimal viewing across devicesRobots.txt: a file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behavior of search engine spiders.ROI: (Return On Investment) One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment, and thus cost / benefit of different schemes.SEO: Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site.SERP: Search Engine Results PageSEM: Search Engine Marketing. Using a combination of SEO, PPC, and display advertising to drive traffic to your websiteSite map: A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.SMM: (Social Media Marketing) Website or brand promotion through social mediaSocial media: Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.Spider: (bot, crawler) A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.Static page: A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.Text link A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.Time on page: The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of quality and relevance.URL: Uniform Resource Locator - AKA Web AddressUser generated content: (UGC) Social Media, wikis, Folksonomies, and some blogs rely heavily on User Generated Content. One could say that Google is exploiting the entire web as UGC for an advertising venue.White hat: SEO techniques, which conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to unscrupulously “game” or manipulate SERPs.
Let's be honest, digital marketing is confusing. Once you feel like you have something figured out, Google goes and alters their algorithm, best practices change, or some blogger comes up with a new acronym for you to learn. Digital and all of the terminology that go with it are the amoeba of doing business: constantly shifting and only held together by its shared marketing membrane. Even if you have turned your company's marketing efforts over to an agency or consultant, digital marketing speak can sound like a foreign language. It is always good to recognize when you need to call in the experts, but shouldn't you also be able to actually understand what they are talking about? For the amount of money that you pay for marketing, the answer should be a resounding, "YES!" You make better marketing decisions for your company when you are informed, and to do that, you must gain a deeper understanding of all of the moving parts that make up a marketing strategy. To help you reach a level of functional understanding, I decided to put together a digital marketing dictionary so that maybe, just maybe, you might be able to begin to grasp this mysterious and enigmatic world.
The Digital Marketing Dictionary
A/B Split Test: Testing two variables for a statistically significant influence. Can be used in emails or advertisements to evaluate the effectiveness of a message, word choice or subject lineAbove the Fold: The content that can be seen on a screen without having to scroll down. In Email Marketing, this refers to the portion of an email that can be viewed in the preview pane. Usually the content that is above the fold gets the most attention from website visitors so important information should be concentrated here.Ad Group – A group of ads within a Campaign that are focused on a set of closely related keyword phrases.Ad – An individual Google ad within an Ad Group. Ad Groups can contain numerous text ads with different ad wording.Algorithm: A mathematical, computational or statistical method that takes a number of variables into account to output a single, quantifiable number that is a function of all of the variables. A good example of a commonly used algorithm is the one used by Google to determine which pages should rank more highly on the SERPs. .Alt text/Alt image tag: A description of a graphic, which usually isn’t displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is undeliverable, or a browser is used that doesn’t display graphics. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated picture. Special web browsers for visually challenged people rely on the alt text to make the content of graphics accessible to the users.Anchor text: The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.Authority: (trust, link juice, Google juice) The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites.Avg. CPC: The average cost-per-click that has been charged.Avg. Pos: The average rank position for an ad. A rank position between 2 and 3 tends to be most productive and gives the biggest bang for your buckBack link: (inlink, incoming link) Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.Black hat: Search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.Blog: A website which presents content in a more or less chronological series. Content may or may not be time sensitive. Most blogs us a Content Management System such as WordPress rather than individually crafted WebPages. Because of this, the Blogger can chose to concentrate on content creation instead of arcane code.Bot: (robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.Bounce Rate: In Google Analytics, this refers to the percentage of people that do not progress beyond the entry page within a certain time limit. This can also reflect the number of people who visit a page only to immediately leave.Brand Evangelist: One who lives and breathes a brand, and is capable of spreading the word far and wide. For hotels, using a blogger as a brand evangelist can provide a ridiculous amount of return for the initial investment of a free stay.Call to Action: A phrase written on a website, advertisement or in an email that encourages a customer to take further action. Examples: Click to learn more, start today, call nowCampaign: Specific activities designed to promote a product, service or business. In Google Adwords :Defines the daily budget, language, geographic scope and the networks where ads are displayed.Campaign Daily Budget: The daily spending limit for an entire campaign. When the daily budget limit is reached, ads cease to display until the next day.Clicks: The number of users who have been sent to a site because they clicked on an ad.CTR: Click Through Rate. Total number of clicks on a link divided by the number of times that a link or ad was shown. A CTR greater than 0.5% is considered to be average. A CTR of 2% or better is very goodCMS: Content Management System. A good content management system allows someone to make changes to the content of a website with very little to no technical experienceComment spam: Posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an inlink to another site. The reason many blogs use link condoms.Content (text, copy) The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.Content Total: The number of clicks, cost and other statistics related to ads displayed on non-Google sites through the Google AdSense affiliate Content Network.Conversion: (goal) Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.Conv. Rate: The conversion rate based upon a snippet of Google code added to a Web page. The code is most commonly added to an order confirmation page or a thank you page following an e-mail form submission. This indicates the percentage of users who clicked on an ad and followed through with an order or a request for information.Cost: Actual cost charged for clicks. Cost is displayed for Ad Campaigns, Ad Groups, Search Total, Content Total and individual keywords.Cost/Conversion: The average cost for converting a user who clicks on an ad into a customer or for someone who requests further information. Requires a snippet of Google code to be added to an order confirmation or thank you page following an e-mail form submission or order submission page.CPM: (Cost Per Thousand impressions) A statistical metric used to quantify the average value / cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M - from the Roman numeral for one thousand.Crawler: (bot, spider): A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data. This is how Google determines how a website is structured and what it is about.Directory: A site devoted to directory pages. The Yahoo directory is an example. If you are a hotel that also serves as a wedding venue, you might want to have your hotel listed on a wedding website directory like TheKnot.comDirectory page: A page of links to related webpagesDuplicate content: Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any trust from the search engines compared to sites that display unique contentDCP: Dynamic Content Personalization. A method of creating a website that will self-alter its content based on the visitor. Example: If an international traveler is visiting a hotel website, the website will then show promotion relevant to long term travel and translate into the visitor's native languageGoogle dance: The change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.Googlebot: Google’s spider programHit: Once the standard by which web traffic was often judged, but now a largely meaningless term replaced by pageviews AKA impressions. A hit happens each time that a server sends an object - documents, graphics, include files, etc. Thus one pageview could generate many hits.HTML: (Hyper Text Markup Language) directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.Impression: The number of impressions, which means the number of times an ad has displayed based upon either a user’s search using a keywords phrase (Search network) or based upon the content found on a page for a site that is part of the Google AdSense program (Content network).Keyword: An individual keyword or keyword phrase assigned to an Ad Group. A word or phrase that someone might enter into a search engine that would bring them to your site. Example: Florida beach hotel, donut shop Denver, best brunch in Chicago.Keyword cannibalization: The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.Keyword density: The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.Keyword Matching Options: There are several different methods for targeting AdWords ads to more precisely match the ads to the intended search keywords.
- Broad Match – The default option for your keywords. With no special characters surrounding the keyword phrase, AdWords ads should display when users search using any of the words in a keyword phrase and possibly with other words that may be used in the search. At one time a broad match meant that all of the words in a keyword phrase needed to be part of the search, but that was changed to any of the words in a keyword phrase. This is an important reason as to why broad match keywords should only be used on a limited basis. The problem with a broad match is that ANY word in a phrase can be used to trigger an ad. In other words, if you targeted search phrase is ‘Phoenix ticket sales’, any search using the word ‘Phoenix’, ‘ticket’ or ‘sales’ can trigger the display of an ad.
- +Broad +Match – This is much improved version of the broad match. With a modified broad match, a plus sign (the broad match modifier) is placed directly in front of each word that must be included in the users search phrase in order to trigger an ad. That could be one word or multiple words. An additional benefit is that Google can substitute similar words and misspellings, which allows you to trigger ads based upon a wider range of closely related search phrases. This tactic is helpful to uncover new keyword opportunities and phrases to improve cost efficiency.
- Phrase Match "alaska cruises" – Surrounding a keyword phrase with quotation marks makes the ad appear only when a user searches for the words "alaska cruise" in that order, and possible with other search words. The ad may appear if someone searches for "alaska cruise", but not if they search for "cruise NCL to alaska".
- Exact Match [alaska cruise] – Surrounding a keyword phrase with brackets makes the ad appear only when a user searches for the words "alaska cruise" in that word order and without any other search words. The ads will not appear is a user searches for "NCL alaska cruise".
- Negative Keyword – If you sell alaska cruises, but do not want your ads to appear if someone searches for "cheap alaska cruise" you can add negative keywords to either a campaign or individual Ad Groups by adding them to a list that is available when you scroll to the bottom of a page under the Keyword tab for any Ad Group. Negative keywords prevent ads from showing for searchers who are not looking for what you offer.
Keyword research: The process of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting. It can often be a long and arduous journey to find quality keywords for your company and website, but the hard word is worth it.Keyword stuffing: (keyword spam) Inappropriately high keyword density.Keyword search volumes: in relation to broad, “phrase” and [exact]Landing page: the page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP. Ideally, a highly relevant page to what they were searching forLatent semantic indexing: (LSI) This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail Searches”. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail”. The significance is that it might be almost impossible to rank well for “mortgage”, but fairly easy to rank for “second mortgage to finance monster truck team”. Go figure.Link: An element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page or another part of the current page.Link bait or click bait: A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media.Link building: Actively cultivating incoming links to a site.Link exchange: A reciprocal linking scheme often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves. Quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.Link farm: a group of sites which all link to each other.Link spam: (Comment Spam) Unwanted links such as those posted in user generated content like blog comments.Link text: (Anchor text) The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.Long tail: longer more specific search queries that are often more targeted than shorter broad queries. For example a search for “dogs” might be very broad while “find Scottish terrier dogs for sale” would be a long tail search.Max CPC: The maximum cost per click that has been bid for a set of keywords. The bid price is one factor that determines the rank position for an ad.META tags: Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.Mirror site: An identical site at a different address.Organic link: organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.Pagerank: (PR) is a link analysis algorithm used by Google to help determine the relative importance of a website. Every website is given a Google. PageRank score between 0 and 10 on an exponential scalePersonalization: See DCPPPA: (Pay Per Action ) Very similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversions.PPC: (Pay Per Click) a contextual advertising scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.Redirect: Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.Responsive website: A website that is automatically adjusts for optimal viewing across devicesRobots.txt: a file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behavior of search engine spiders.ROI: (Return On Investment) One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment, and thus cost / benefit of different schemes.SEO: Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site.SERP: Search Engine Results PageSEM: Search Engine Marketing. Using a combination of SEO, PPC, and display advertising to drive traffic to your websiteSite map: A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.SMM: (Social Media Marketing) Website or brand promotion through social mediaSocial media: Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.Spider: (bot, crawler) A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.Static page: A web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.Text link A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.Time on page: The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of quality and relevance.URL: Uniform Resource Locator - AKA Web AddressUser generated content: (UGC) Social Media, wikis, Folksonomies, and some blogs rely heavily on User Generated Content. One could say that Google is exploiting the entire web as UGC for an advertising venue.White hat: SEO techniques, which conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to unscrupulously “game” or manipulate SERPs.
