Digital Marketing Glossary
Learn more about online marketing by looking up important digital marketing terms here.
A
Above The Fold
Above The Fold is a way of referring to the portion of your content that’s visible on the desktop screen without scrolling down. This is that area which directly appears on the screen as soon as a user navigates on to the page, which is why the cost of placing advertisements here is higher than other regions of your content.
Absolute Link
Absolute links are a distinct category of hyperlinks which leave nothing out and display the entire absolute URL of the page they are supposed to redirect you to. While there are certain links which show the URL only partially, called relative link paths, absolute links are different. Certain issues like hijacking and canonicalization make absolute links the preferred choice over relative links.
Accessibility
When designing a website, making it user-friendly to the physically challenged is probably not the first thing that crosses your mind. Accessibility of a website stands for how easily it can be accessed by the ones with disabilities. Say, there could be screen readers for the visually challenged, or perhaps picture descriptions for the pictorial representations. Similarly, suitable features can be added to make the site more convenient for them, be their disability hearing impairment, color blindness, or anything similar.
Activity Bias
This form of ad targeting targets consumers based on the activities they are generally engaged in or are more likely to be engaged in. Such activities are kept track of and subsequently, relevant content is delivered to the user.
Ad Extensions
As suggested by the name itself, Ad Extensions are extensions that you would attach to your text ads. These extensions can deliver useful information about your business or service, such as the location, contact details or useful links.
AdCenter
Bing, commonly known as the search engine, is also engaged in providing paid ads for searches conducted on Yahoo!, Microsoft’s Bing and other websites affiliated with it. Bing Ads, formally known as Microsoft AdCenter has now grown and expanded to become the second largest paid search provider in the US.
AdSense
AdSense is a contextual network for advertisements designed by Google, which works as a publishing platform for all manners of publishers. Publishers are free to log in and publish relevant advertorial content, and the profits gained by virtue of customers clicking on those ads then have to be shared with Google. The revenue stream generated by AdSense has been proven to be effective and continuous, helping publishers arrive upon a baseline for the expenses incurred in their ad inventory. Although underpriced in some cases, it still works because the deficit is simply a trade-off with automated ad sales. It works in the cost per click and CPM formats with ad formats being either one of text, graphic, animations or videos.
Advertising Network
Advertising networks refer to a number of websites that have come together under a common advertiser which then gains control over all the advertisements on the member websites. Google Search Network is a prime example of an advertising network. It includes a host of popular websites including Amazon, Ask.com, and AOL.
AdWords
This is a search marketing program, which is paid in nature and happens to be the largest such program in the world. It offers payments on a per click basis and works on the concept of Quality Score, which takes into account the relevance of searches along with the bid.
Affiliate Marketing
This marketing technique lets you collaborate with other companies, or individuals owning websites to increase the traffic to your website. In return, you pay them on a Cost per Acquisition or a Cost per Click basis.
Age
Age is one of the factors which search engines often consider while determining the credibility of an individual, document or website. Age, such as that defined for a site, page, user account or historical data may also factor into boosting the relevance of certain documents if they’re new enough. Fresh and relevant content also has the added advantage of ranking better than other content if it has been cited from multiple other sources. This leads to higher credibility since the content has been cited off a well trusted and a high Pagerank page.
Aggregate Data
This is a set of data that details the ways in which your customers interact with your content. It represents the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and lists major facts such as how the audiences have reacted to your images, videos or other content. This is not simply marketing data on an individual basis, but rather a close look at your consumer base as a whole.
AJAX
AJAX is the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is primarily used for developing dynamic web applications. The benefit in AJAX is that when using it, you can retrieve asynchronous data without reloading the page that is viewed by a visitor at the time. The JavaScript is akin to the backbone of the application since most of its fundamental functions are taken care of by it. This, in turn, makes the application turn out like a desktop program rather than one that is web-based.
Alexa
Alexa is a website traffic measurement protocol which has been put in place and designed by Amazon.com. It gives special preference to websites dealing with webmaster communities and marketing, and although it is not as accurate as some of the other programs out there, it does have the distinction of being free.
Algorithm
Whenever search engines determine the rank of your content under Natural Listings, they do so as per a preset algorithm. As per the algorithm, search engines make use of a spider which crawls through your website to look through all the data, which is then analyzed and your website as a whole is evaluated, and finally the ranks are determined accordingly.
AllTheWeb
AllTheWeb is a search engine that was initially designed by Fast and later overtaken and bought by Overture. The overture was in turn further bought by Yahoo! Yahoo now has the flexibility of utilizing AllTheWeb as a test bed for testing new and emerging search technologies, advancements and features.
Alt Attribute
Search engines have the distinguishing property of not being able to decipher an image or scan its contents. The image Alt attribute is a feature which lets search engines and screen readers identify the contents or function of an image simply by placing a small textual description next to it.
Alt Tags
These are elements of the HTML scripting language whose main purpose is to display a block of information whenever the mouse pointer hovers over them. Graphics usually are undetected by search engines as they are difficult to identify. However, the usage of Alt Tags solves this problem by encapsulating the graphic within them.
AltaVista
Before the sale of Overture to Yahoo, Overture designed and brought about a search engine by itself which was named AltaVista. While AltaVista was proving to be a major name and competition in the search engine domain, an algorithmic update introduced on October 25, 1999, brought about some major changes for the search engine such as the dumping of a long list of websites. This disastrous step proved to be instrumental in bringing about the downfall of the search engine coupled with brand mismanagement by the company. Such irrelevancy and heavy loss of market share and mindshare led the company to near bankruptcy before ultimately being taken over by Yahoo!
Amazon.com
One of the most major players in the field of eCommerce and internet retailing, Amazon.com is arguably the largest online sale and purchase website in the world. Consumer-generated media is what this global player specializes in apart from owning various other subsidiaries such as Alexa and IMDB.
AMP
Short for Accelerated Mobile Pages, this is an undertaking by Google which started in October 2015 and has been categorized as an open source initiative to allow publishers to add content that loads up much faster on mobile devices. It comes in three parts, AMP HTML, AMP JS and Google AMP Cache.
Analytics
Analytics refers to the compilation of all the relevant data about a website and its customers. Commonly referred to as Web Metrics, these are basically programs which spell out performance data such as a number of clicks, pages viewed, website paths and a lot more. Effective use of Analytics can enable website owners to increase user engagement with the website and improve profits.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is simply the text in a link that takes you to another website. A common example is – ‘Click Here to Go to Page’, which is the anchor text with the link that will take you to the page you wish to visit. As you can see, the hyperlink can contain any text of your choice and needn’t contain the actual URL of the website as such. This could be of immense help to the site’s ranking in search engines.
Android
Android is the flagship operating system by Google which is being used to drive the majority of all smartphone devices today along with a host of other devices. While always touted as an ‘open’ or free operating system, Google has been known to stay open only in markets where they need to increase their share, otherwise, in markets where they have already established dominance, they often switch to a restricted or closed supply.
AOL
AOL was a pretty widely known and popular web portal at a time which later, due to decreased traffic and market share had to shut down and subsequently merged with Time Warner. Following the merger, AOL was once again released into the market.
API
API stands for Application Programming Interface which is basically a series or set of rules, routines, and conventions designed to regulate access of software functions. Almost all major search engines have an API program running behind the scenes.
Arbitrage
Arbitrage is the process of taking advantage of the chinks in the market by engaging in the sale and purchase of a product simply for the profitability involved. As an active example, in relation to search markets, many websites associated with AdSense ads or an Overture feed have been known to buy traffic from major search engines in hopes of diverting some of the traffic towards a high priced ad. This practice is especially common among shopping search engines who gain most of their traffic through the use of arbitrage.
Ask
A widely popular search engine up until Google established absolute dominance in the market, Ask.com is a search engine designed and developed by InterActive Corp. While it was earlier named Ask Jeeves, early 2006 saw the search engine being renamed to simply Ask. Powered by the Teoma search technology, Ask is majorly relying on Kleinberg’s concept of authorities and hubs.
ASP
ASP stands for Active Server Pages which is a dynamic programming language developed by Microsoft.
Astroturfing
Astroturfing is the act of creating fake campaigns by planting fake reviews or comments on various websites. Generally utilized for websites like Google Places, Yelp or many more, these fake reviews can serve to sing praises for your own website or content so that it gains some popularity.
Authority
Authority is a measure of the ability of a domain or page to rank high in search engine results. Page and site authority as a concept has been largely defined as a combination of certain factors such as site age, link equity, publishing quality content, site history, and traffic trends. Search engines have constantly been seen tweaking their algorithms to balance out relevancy algorithms.
Authorities
A distinct category of authorities, topical authorities are websites which are highly trusted and cited by renowned experts within the community. Topical authorities are nothing but pages which have been referenced by experts and hub websites. A topical hub is one such page which references not one but many such authorities.
Automagically
Most of the latest technology whose working is nothing short of a wonder to the layman works ‘automagically’. This word is a beautiful combination of ‘automatically’ and ‘magically’. Basically, any program whose process is complex and kept hidden from the end users may almost seem to work magically and so, the program is called automagical.
Automated Bid Management Software
Even as pay per click search engine mechanisms and techniques continue to grow complex and difficult to understand, there have been some serious efforts made to cope with these complexities and help large advertisers understand the advancements being made. A prime example for this is the software that third-party developers and some selected search engines have jointly developed in order to better manage your ad expenditures. Some of these software are advanced enough to carry out integrations with your analytics program.
Automated Rules
This is another one of the many features of Google AdWords which manages and adjusts your budgets, bids and ad statuses as per specific pre-defined parameters.
Average Position
Average Position roughly defines the location at which your ad appears on the search results page.
B
Back End
What a normal user sees on the screen when visiting a website is a result of many complex design structures. This information with which the site is built is not visible to the visitor. The part of the website which contains all the information structure, content management system, and applications corresponding to it is called the Back End of the website.
Backlinks
Backlink, as the name suggests, is the connection between two websites. Backlinks are considered to play a pivotal role in generating a good SEO. A websites prominence is judged by its number of backlinks. Gaining backlinks is an imperative constituent of an off-site SEO. The other name for it is Link Building. Backlinks streaming out from trustable and eminent sites are accepted more than the backlinks from bogus and spammed sites. In order to obtain some inestimable backlinks for your blog, all you have to do is write some prodigious articles, leave appropriate comments for it and send it to the web agencies. But always keep in your mind; the race is only for generating valued backlinks.
Bad Neighbourhood
A class of linked websites with an ignominious and contemptible ranking is termed as bad Neighbourhood. Search engines degrade the rankings of the sites deemed as bad neighbors, as to avoid them from faking their rankings and trying to affect the quality and plausibility of a certified site. A site falls into the category of a bad neighborhood, either due to their abysmal and substandard behavior or their connection with shady and unrespectable sites. If you come across a site involving way more than normal spamming, lame advertisements or impoverished style of writing, then you may regard it to be a bad neighbor and block it or remove it from your search engine as soon as possible.
Baidu
Baidu is a search engine that operates mainly in China and happens to be the largest non-US based search engine enterprise.
Bait And Switch
Bait and Switch is a popular name given to a marketing technique where the true purpose of a web element in your page is shrouded by altering its appearance in a way that makes it look overtly pure. This way, the customers on your page are convinced to vote for the element, after which the purpose of the web page is once again reverted back to its original form.
Bandwidth
It means an amount of information transmitted by an internet connect per unit time. It is specified as bits per second. The requirement of bandwidth depends on the rate of internet consumption done by you. If you are an avid internet user, then you can spend as much as you want on bandwidth. But if you just want it for updating your social life on a number of sites on the internet, then don’t go for a costly investment. And there’s another thing you need to know about, if you try to download a high def video then it would be downloaded without any pause but if you start adding other files to it, then the speed reduces as it is divided among other files. Network availability depends on how much bandwidth you are left with.
Banned
Some websites tend to get banned by search engines mainly because they were found to be in violation of certain guidelines that must be followed by websites in order to maintain a search engine presence. Bans are especially dangerous since search engines tend to maintain a certain level of discreetness as far as informing banned websites of the nature of the bans placed on them as well as the reason behind these bans is concerned.
Banner Blindness
While the internet was still gaining traction among the masses and was still on its way to receive the immense popularity it enjoys today, the focus was more on flashy banners and attractive layouts rather than actual content. Ads were usually quite irrelevant as compared to the ones today, and users had adapted themselves to simply ignore or look past all the commonly seen ad types.
Banners
Pictorial advertisements added on to websites to make the content more engaging and interactive are known as banners. Often used as a means of luring in customers and making your content visually appealing to visitors, these banners come in various shapes and sizes and could be also be called buttons, leaderboards or inlines among other names. They generally come in fixed sizes of 468*60 pixels and could range from animated to static. The user gets complete control over the position of such ads as they look good almost anywhere on the page and also come in varying costs as per a Cost per 1000 Impressions (CPM) basis.
Battelle, John
John Battelle was an extremely well-known media and search blogger who was responsible for co-founding The Industry Standard and Wired, and even penned down a book on internet search himself and named it The Search.
Beacons
This is a display of the latest innovations in technology as per which website owners, that is, companies or private retailers get to connect with their customers on a personal level through a wireless connection on their mobile phones. Bluetooth signals are employed to transmit promotional content and messages on a location basis to consumers. As soon as the customer gets within the range of this beacon, marketers can even help their customers in making an effective purchasing decision.
Behavioral Targeting
This is simply a marketing and promotional technique as per which promotional content and messages relating to latest products, offers or services are sent out to users after analyzing their past behavior on the web and making a reasonable assumption on the type of content the customer would require. This is made possible only through the use of cookies which give the user relevant information about the customer’s inclinations.
Below The Fold
In those days, it meant that the information or details are provided at the bottom of the page. In technical terms, it means that the website visitant has to move their cursor down, in search of the content. Mostly, the ads are placed below the fold and important content are placed above the fold. It is often considered that the content above the fold has a higher rate of visibility than the content below the fold. Some ads which appear below the fold are important but due to the lack of awareness amongst the people, they overlook the ads and the poor companies broadcasting their ads below the fold have to suffer. And later on, they are forced to sell the ads, at a rate way less than the original price due to less visibility. The website’s audience analytics can provide you with a precise location for the folds.
Bias
Bias is simply what the literal meaning of the term would tell you. It is prejudice that one has towards a particular subject on the basis of some past experiences or a particular worldview. Bias can be manifested by media channels, publishing houses, persons or organizations through their experiences, set of social standards, operating markets, self-preservative need and interactions with the world in general.
Bing
A subtle competitor to Google, Bing is a highly popular search engine developed by Microsoft and has come into existence since June 2009. It has seen a swift growth over the years and has recently taken over Yahoo!’s search for paid and organic which are now powered by Bing.
Bing Ads
Bing Ads is the name given to Microsoft’s paid search program, which competes with Google AdWords and works with Yahoo! Search for paid search results.
Bing Ads Editor
This is an application developed by Microsoft; the creators of Bing that aims to help you effectively manage your Bing Ads advertising campaigns. It is free to use and downloadable from the net. Among its many features, it will let you manage multiple accounts, make changes to a group of files at the same time, easily transfer items and even enables offline working.
Bing Merchant Center
Bing Shopping is an undertaking by Bing that lets you sell your merchandise online. With Bing Merchant Center, you can put up details of your store, your products as well as product data online and make it accessible to Bing.
Black Hat SEO
This is basically a technique which is used to purposely trick search engines into giving a website an unfair SEO ranking. If caught or intercepted by search engines, these practices can get your website a much lower ranking than what you had originally intended, or in some cases, even permanent bans. This is the reason why Black Hat SEO practices are never recommended and other safer, ethical and legal techniques are rather advised.
Block Level Analysis
Block Level Analysis is a page break method which breaks an individual page into much smaller multiple points on the web graph. The typical usage of this technique is in determining if the content is specific to a given page or is, in fact, part of a much bigger navigational system. It can also be used to find out if a given link is a natural editorial link, the associated links and whether the link also doubles up as an advertisement.
Blog
A blog is a site where different kinds of contents (often in the form of discussions or opinions) are posted by an individual or a group of individuals. A blog may or may not be related to the domain name, and can be a part of a bigger website. Blogs help in garnering more traffic to websites, and this increases the visibility and search engine rank of the same. Blogs are used as personal online diaries, advertisements, and forums for discussion.
Blog Comment Spam
Blog Comment Spam is the practice of adding comments to an external blog or website which add no or negligible value to the actual contents of the page. This can be done either manually or through an automated system designed for this very purpose. With advancements in technology, comment spamming has undergone certain advancements as well. Both manual and automated methods are now designed in such a way that their comments look much more like natural comments posted by actual followers of the page.
Blogger
Blogger is the name given to a free of cost blogging platform developed by Google. While allowing you to publish your content on a subdomain of blogspot.com or even FTP content to a domain of your choice, it is perhaps the most convenient blogging tool available on the web, even though it lacks certain critical features present in some other blogging tools.
Blogroll
A blogroll is a linked list present on a blog or website which links the blog to other similar blogs jointly owned by a single corporation or company.
Bold
Bold is nothing but the bold typing given to certain sections of your text to make them appear more eye-catching and to simply highlight their importance as compared to the rest of the text. Bold fonts are generally also given more weight by search engines in terms of determining the purpose of the content.
Bookmark
A bookmark is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that ‘marks’ a page so that it can be used for future references. Bookmarked pages are stored in folders (that can be accessed quickly) for easy navigation.
Boolean Search
Mathematical formulas of the kind AND, OR and NOT can be highly helpful while performing searches online, especially when you want to club two conditions together. Some exclusive search engines allow you to make use of this functionality while some insert the AND between the words of your query of their own accord so that the results end up being relevant for each and every word.
Bounce Rate
It presents the amount or percentage of the visitants who visit the site and leave at the same time without checking other sites on the same page. If the success rate of your website is depended on the bounce rate then you need to mitigate it a bit. Suppose, your front page is the gateway to other sites, and viewers are just viewing your front page instead of other websites then, a high bounce rate is not at all good for your site. But for a single page site like a blog or something, high bounce rate is not that alarming. Try to make your content worth reading and also, include useful details on your website, to engage the visitants to remain for a longer time on your website rather than to bounce back.
Brand
A brand is simply what you would expect the term to mean in the real world. It is the emotional or quality value associated with a particular product or company or retailer. The process of building a brand is an art in itself, for it requires careful planning, dedication, and hard work. It involves learning from your experiences with customers, getting to know their likes and dislikes and banking on them to take your business forward. Successful brands can easily afford to price their commodities on a higher marginal value while developing brands have to agree to the market standard commodity based prices.
Brand Stacking
There’s obviously huge competition for the top results in brand searches by popular search engines. Every website creator or manager wants to ensure that their content appears at the very top where it’s the most noticeable and will be the first users click on. The competition mainly lies on the first page of results though, for it is a known fact that 90% of the users don’t bother clicking on page two. As per the Brand Stacking algorithm which has now been adopted by Google, it is now possible for a domain to have a maximum of eight top search rankings.
Branded Keywords
There are certain special keywords or terms associated with some particular brands or entities. Such terms are labeled branded keywords. They typically occur late in the buying cycle and actually turn out to be one of the highest converting or highest value keywords.
Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb navigation refers to a navigation technique which is most commonly used in almost all websites today. Essentially used to better understand and get to know the relationship between different pages of a website, this technique involves keeping a track of the path followed while venturing deep into a website so that those very steps can be retraced to end up back on the home page.
Brin, Sergey
Sergey Brin is the man responsible for co-founding the technology giant Google.
Broad Match
This is with regards to matching searches with ads and delivering accurate results. It is a bid type in which the search terms are scanned and if even a single one of them happens to match with any of your content or keywords, your ad will show up. It even works for synonyms of the keywords used, relevant variations on the term of any other relevant searches. Obviously, this technique is used to cover as large an audience as possible.
Broken Link
A broken link is a dead link that signifies that the website is no longer functional. This can be because of various reasons (such as wrongly spelled site name, changed the domain name, deletion of linked page). This causes the commonly seen ‘404 Error’ (page not found).
Browser
A browser is a software application that uses HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol- set of rules for transferring files on the internet) to explore (or ‘browse’) the contents of the World Wide Web. A web browser enables you to search for and view different websites on the internet. Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox are some of the most commonly used web browsers.
Bush, Vannevar
Bush Vannevar was a famous World War II-era scientist who wrote and published a seminal research paper that outlined the concepts of hypertext and a device utilized for memory extension which was named As We May Think.
Business.com
This website maintains a highly regarded and trusted archive for business information and websites. It also doubles up as a fairly decent pay per click arbitrage player.
Buyer Persona
This is a simulation technique for boosting sales in which buyers are simulated through the use of advanced techniques and studying buyer practices. These fictional models then act as references upon which you can strategize or plan on how to go about selling your products. These personas are usually created keeping in mind huge volumes of customer data and market research along with lots of demographics and human behavioral patterns. Thus, you get a rough estimate of an ideal customer and can then use it to design your content or marketing strategies.
Buying Cycle
Consumers in the present age are fairly conscious of which product fits their needs perfectly keeping mind their personal quality and budget constraints. Search marketing that involves and makes of keywords is not only essential to the present seller but even allows you to reach your customers at any stage while in the buying cycle. Branded keywords have even been known to contribute significantly towards higher search volumes and conversion rates. A typical buying cycle usually consists of the following well-defined stages-
- Problem Discovery: This is when the buyer identifies and comes to terms with his need.
- Search: This step involves searching for methods to satisfy the buyer’s need. It also involves listing down the keywords primarily associated with the problem and using them in your searches.
- Evaluate: Carry out comparisons among different models.
- Decide: Gather relevant information and reinforce your beliefs to arrive at a decision.
- Purchase: Make the actual purchase, either online or offline.
- Revaluate: This final step involves spreading reviews about the product, either good or bad depending on your experience with it, through a general word of mouth or by writing reviews.
C
Cache/ Caching
Files are often saved by the web browsers to enable faster loading and access the next time they are wanted. This is called caching, and the saved files are known as cached files. A cache is thus a temporary space that allows you faster access to saved data.
Calacanis, Jason
Jason Calacanis is the founder and creator of Weblogs Inc. He is also the person responsible for AOL turning Netscape into a Digg clone. He then went on to launch longtail SEO play Mahalo.
Canonical Tag
There might be a discrepancy between two pages having similar or almost similar URLs. In such a scenario, canonical tags are used which inform a search engine about the page to be used. Thus, if you have a product that has been listed on multiple websites, search engines would decide which website to reference it with by looking at the canonical tag. It comes as a part of the HTML head tag.
Canonical URL
Content Management Systems are often faulty or suffer from bad programming which makes them full of errors such as those which allow duplicate or largely similar content to find a place under multiple different URLs. Webmasters are often guilty of using inconsistent link structures all over their website which can also cause the same content to get indexed with different URLs. The most authoritative version of a URL is without a doubt the canonical version which has been formally indexed by not one but multiple major search engines. These search engines have been known to use some accurate measure such as Pagerank to determine whether the version of the URL under consideration is the canonical version.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to add fonts, spacing and coloring (‘styles’) to Web documents. CSS thus decides the ‘look’ of the website and makes it presentable. It is also used to enhance the usability and appeal of the website. CSS is independent of HTML, and can actually simplify a site’s HTML files, enabling an increase in search engine rankings (thus making your site more popular). CSS allows you to change the style of the web page by changing just one file (without needing to make any changes to the content of the page).
Catch-All Listing
Pay per click search engines often makes use of a common listing in order to monetize a few certain long tail terms which are yet to be targeted or even discovered by marketers. Such a listing is commonly referred to as a catch-all listing. Highly valuable in case of competitive keywords, this technique may, however, fail to deliver since a majority of search engines now make use of editorial guidelines whose very purpose is to stop bulk targeted advertising. Also, only places with low traffic and activity generally allow catch all listings. In spite of all this, such listings may even prove to be a game-changing idea for theme specific directories or search engines, as they anyway deal in pre-qualified clicks.
Categories
They are simply what the name suggests. They are special words or even phrases designated so that blog posts or other specific content can be organized categorically. They can be thought of as being the upgraded version of tags as they are broader in scope and can have more than one post or data files associated with each of them.
CCTLD
They are groups of letters given a special purpose which is to inform the user about the region or country the website is based in. They are a part of the website’s URL and generally referred to as ‘country-code’ TLDs. A few examples are google.co.uk for Google UK and com.au for any website based in Australia. They can either be sets of two letters each or even be two sets of letters with a period in between, such as in the case of com.au. Using CCTLDs correctly can prove to be a big boost for search engine optimization as it allows developers to target their content as per the country involved. Although having said that, there are designated subdirectories or country-focused subdomains which can be used to target foreign countries.
CGI
CGI is short for Common Gateway Interface, which is nothing but a piece of software which acts as an interface between a web server and any or all software or machines running on the server. Primarily used to make a page more interactive and appealing, CGI is in wide use today for a variety of applications.
Chrome
Most widely known as the web browser by Google, Chrome also happens to be the name given to an operating system.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
It is simply a marketing measurement tool for the Internet which can give site owners a measure or estimate of how popular their website is proving to be and if there are certain changes they need to make. It refers to the number of clicks which means whenever a person clicks on one of your ads, the counter for CTR is incremented by one. Irrelevant ads or those that have been copied from somewhere may fetch you a significantly lower CTR than unique or relevant ads.
Client
A client is simply a process, program or computer engaged in creating requests for information to another process, program or computer.
Client-side
Client-side (also known as the ‘front-end’) basically means that the action or application is taking place on the user’s computer. The client of a site refers to the web browser that is viewing the site (thus the term ‘client-side’), while the server that hosts the website is known as the ‘server-side’. Client-side programming is usually related to user interface and experience. Although client-side scripts can take some time to initially load, they are faster and easier to access and interact with.
Cloaking
This is an unethical practice followed by some site owners which involves hiding your true content from search engines by showing one type of content to them and another entirely different type of content to the end user. These two different forms of your page are condemned by search engines and strict rules have been put in place to discourage site owners from indulging in this practice. Those who are found guilty of violating these rules may end up having their pages banned from search engines. However, there is a form of cloaking called approved cloaking which is only possible with search engines that allow for a paid inclusion program, as per which the site owner must get approval first by explaining effectively what their intentions are behind such a move.
Cluetrain Manifesto, The
The Cluetrain Manifesto is simply a book which outlines all of the principles and factors which contribute towards shaping the web like a marketplace and gives out certain pointers which define or point out the glaring differences between the web and conventional offline businesses.
Clustering
Search engines generally make use of a certain technique as per which all results from the particular website are grouped together and even limited to a certain number so that the results appear more organized and the screen looks neat. This technique is referred to as clustering. Apart from the above-mentioned usage, clustering also finds application in grouping together of similar authorities and hubs by search engines in order to amplify their usability and highlight the relationships among them.
Co-Citation
Topical authority search algorithm links which usually appear adjacent to each other on a web page may easily be classified as being related to each other. Similarly, in latent semantic indexing, which is a popular algorithm and many other similar programs, even words which are placed adjacent or in close proximity to each other are thought of as being related to one another.
Comment
Comments are pieces of HTML or XHTML code that are ignored by web browsers. In HTML, anything written within the tag qualifies as a comment and doesn’t invite any action from the browser. Comments enable designers to insert useful information in between codes, such as code identifiers or instructions for other designers. Commenting is a convenient way to make codes more understandable for other designers who might work on the same site. Other Markup Languages have different Commenting formats.
Comments Tag
Quite a few web developers follow the common practice of including comments in the source code of their programs or projects for better readability and understandability of the code. Such comments are often distinguished by the presence of the comments tag which defines the start and end of a comment.
Compacted Information
When some particular information has come to be widely known and associated with a single product or commodity, that piece of information is given the term compacted information. As an example, ISBN is generally associated with published books.
Conceptual Links
These are a specific category of links which go beyond just the information that is encased in their URL. Search engines often try to understand conceptual links on a deeper level with some of them going so far as to actually look for words or co-citations adjacent to the link rather than simply fixating on the anchor text.
Concept Search
A concept search is one which goes beyond just the words used in the search query and rather focuses on the concept being conveyed through the query. Search results are then fetched taking into account the concept delivered through the search terms.
Consumer Data
This refers to a collection of statistics and other relevant data that has been collected for each user who interacts with your website. It is a focused approach which is linear in nature and allows for brands to focus on some key customers essential to their development. Thus, this marketing tool also lets website owners to target their content effectively by studying collected data and categorize it in a much better way.
Content Management System
A lot of the times, website owners have to hire specialized staff such as trained programmers and coders to develop their website as they themselves are not qualified or skilled enough to get the job done. Thus, they are left with no choice but to depend on the staff they hire. With Content Management Systems (CMS) however, website owners can make some significant changes to their website including the addition of pictures or text without even having to learn any of the complicated coding procedures. Prime examples of CMS are Joomla, WordPress or Drupal.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a marketing method for online content that focuses on generating traffic through creating content that is focused on a particular batch of consumers or potential consumers. It differs from traditional advertising methods and came into focus when content marketing became of prime importance after Google released the Penguin algorithm that brought major changes to search queries by adjusting spam factors.
Content Network
A content network is generally present with all major search engines as a part of their paid search interface. While they generally don’t have a designated name, Google has renamed theirs to Google Display Network. As a part of Google AdWords, advertisers can perform the following functions using content networks; they can either choose the sites they want their ads to be displayed on or opt for contextual advertising as per which they can use keywords which will then be associated with your ads, thus displaying them whenever a related web page appears in the search results.
Content Tags
These are basically headers which encapsulate what is stored on your web page. They are accessible and readable by search engine spiders so that they can affect your search engine ranking and organize your content accordingly. Prime examples are Header and Alt tags.
Contextual Advertising
Contextual Advertising is a feature that is offered by almost all major search engines and involves placing your content with other content that runs along similar lines or belongs to the same category. It matches web posts or content with your advertisement keywords and although there are still a few bugs left to root out before this technique can be called perfect, it is certainly a big step towards providing extreme value to advertisers and their advertisements.
Conversion
To make online advertising easy to track, and to keep a record of the number of customers who have benefitted from your online business, or to check if you have successfully managed to meet a business goal, conversions are essential. Conversion can be defined as the completion of any desired goal as uniquely defined by your business. A conversion could be any of the following actions; a product sale, lead completion, phone call, email, filled out the survey, receiving feedback or having site URL shared among users.
Conversion Rate
Conversion could mean anything; from what percentage of people are signing up on your website to how many of your visitors are actually signing up for your newsletter. It all depends on what kind of goals you have set. Conversion rate then obviously implies the percentage of people who you are able to convert.
Conversion Rate Optimization
After you as a site owner have decided on the criteria based on which you will count your conversions, the next obvious step is to work towards increasing them. The easiest way to do that is to study the process of conversion for your website and think of ways through which you can optimize it. If you run an eCommerce website, and you define conversions by the number of sales you make, you can try changing the style attributes of the cart icon, or make the ‘buy’ button bigger and bolder. A/B testing is necessary as there’s no universal law for conversion rate optimization and different websites work with different needs.
Cookie
Cookies are essentially tracers or tracking devices which websites are free to use on you. You do however, have the options to disable cookies although some websites refuse to function in case cookies are turned off. When websites use cookies, they are essentially tracking your online activity to deliver content that is targeted and focused towards you. However, it does have fringe benefits for you as well, such as not having to remember passwords or receiving offers specifically tailored to your needs.
Copyright
All creative and non creative works once placed under copyright are protected from being reproduced or published elsewhere without the original artist or creator’s consent and permission.
Cost Per Acquisition
Cost per Acquisition is an online payment technique in which you pay as per acquisitions, which could be any agreeable event such as a registration, sale or lead.
Cost Per Click
Another payment method for online activities, Cost per Click functions by taking into account the number of clicks on each advertisement that leads to your website. The amount per click is pre-decided and the way it works is through setting up a top amount that is associated with each click for each search term. Finally, the amount you pay will either be equal to or lesser than the decided amount, depending on the bids your competitors have placed and the search engine you’re paying. It is sometimes also called Pay per Click.
Cost Per Impression (CPM)
Another technique used exclusively as a marketing payment strategy for online advertisements, CPM works primarily for banner advertisements. You need to agree and arrive at a set amount for every 1000 impressions your advertisement receives. CPM costs are generally included for contextual advertising in search engine marketing.
Crawl Depth
Crawl depth is a measure of how deep inside a website a search engine’s spider bots or crawlers will go for indexing purposes. This is especially relevant for longer search queries since they tend to be comparatively more targeted and hence it becomes important to index all of a website such that deeper pages can rank better for long tail keywords.
Crawl Frequency
Crawl Frequency is a measure of how frequently a website is visited by spiders from search engines. Crawl frequency is in direct relation to how trusted the website is in the eyes of the search engine. More trusted websites which are also updated periodically will generally have a pretty high crawl frequency while the opposite is true for lower ranked or less trusted websites.
Crawler
These are basically agents of search engines sent out in order to better go through and read web content on various websites, also called ‘crawling’ the web. Also known as spiders, these crawlers gather listings and follow links. It expands a search engine’s index by making copies of the pages it goes through.
CSS
Short for Cascading Style Sheet, these are documents that specify the styling properties for all the contents on your web page.
CSS Framework
A CSS framework is a set of CSS and HTML files that can be used as a code base to build CSS and HTML sites. CSS frameworks fasten the web designing process by providing the designer with resets, buttons, and common layouts, which otherwise need to be reinvented with every project.
CTR
CTR stands for click-through rate, that is, the percentage or proportion of people who actually go on to click on the advertisements that are displayed to them. This is thus a direct measure of the relevancy of advertisements or keywords on a web page. Traditional banner ads generally end up having a lower CTR than search ads due to the simple fact that search ads are much more relevant to the user and are designed using ad labeling disclosures by search engines.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Big enterprises or companies often need software that allow them to effectively manage their customers and handle relations with clients. CRM is such software that involves the creation of databases consisting of customer information and credentials that the management can utilize to match products or deals with consumers and target their content.
Cutts, Matt
Matt Cutts is the head of search quality at Google.
Cybersquatting
Cybersquatting is a practice which is generally frowned upon and seen as a way of causing menace for others. It involves buying and registering domain names that may relate to or perfectly fit some other brand or company in order to cash in on the brand value or well-established trademark.
D
Daily Budget
This is a form of PPC advertising in which an average daily budget is decided upon. This daily budget will be decided to keep in mind the amount of money you are willing to spend and must comply with all your goals.
Day Parting
At times, it is beneficial to categorize your advertisements as per the time of the day, such that the ads meant for the morning are displayed only in the morning. The same can be said about different days of the week. If there’s a specific time on a particular day that you do not want your ads to be displayed, 11 AM to 2 PM on Tuesdays for example, you can make that change either manually through most online platforms, or automatically in some such as Google AdWords. Since it is still a relatively new concept, automated Day Parting is not currently available through quite a lot of social media advertising platforms.
Dead Link
A dead link is simply a link which is no longer functional or the page which it initially redirected to has been deleted.
Deep Link
A deep link is one which redirects the user to an internal page of a certain website. When requesting links from external websites, it only makes perfect sense to not simply redirect the user to a generic home page, but rather to the specific internal page which is being asked for. Such a link between two websites will most definitely involve a deep link.
Dedicated Server
A dedicated server, as the name suggests, is one which focuses on a single website or pretty small collection of closely linked websites which are most preferably owned by a single individual or corporation.
Deep Link Ratio
The deep link ratio as is evident by the name is the ratio of the number of links pointing to an internal page of a website to the number of links pointing to the website in general.
Delisting
When website owners indulge in certain fraudulent practices or the website is found to be in violation of ethical search engine regulations, search engines immediately put a ban on said websites, effectively preventing them from ever appearing in search results.
Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is a widely used and famous social bookmarking website.
Demographics
Demographics is the name given to statistical data that has been recorded through continuous and careful examination of certain sections of the population and drawing comparisons between diverse groups of people to arrive at meaningful conclusions. The characteristics or statistics so determined are then widely used for targeting consumers based on their lifestyle choices or commonly recorded traits.
Denton, Nick
Nick Denton is best known for being the publisher of Gawker, a widely acclaimed and popular group of topical weblogs, with the content usually catering to controversies.
Deprecated
Deprecated codes are codes consisting of terminologies, features, and designs that are no longer used in the designing process due to the development of more efficient alternatives. Depreciation doesn’t necessarily mean that a particular feature or terminology is completely removed from the language specifications. They are discarded simply because using superior alternatives makes more sense.
Description
It is common for search engines and directories to provide a snippet of information next to each and every listing in order to bring about some context to the title. Highly regarded and successful directories generally prefer the description to simply provide a brief description of the nature of the website rather than take a more promotional stance. Search engines have been known to commonly utilize a description from a well-trusted directory, make use of the meta description tag or simply try and fetch a description from the actual contents of the page.
Description Tags
Description tags are special keywords that provide a brief summary of your web content which is to be read and understood by search engines. It must contain key elements or terms from your content but at the same time, must not overstep the word limit.
DHTML
DHTML is an acronym for Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language. DHTML is a fusion of various web development technologies that are primarily used to create dynamic websites. A website created using DHTML may contain animations, dynamic menus, and also dynamic text effects. The technologies that make up DHTML include JavaScript, XHTML, CSS, and Document Object Model (DOM).
Digg
Digg is a highly popular and trusted social news website which works on a system of votes from users to decide upon the stories which need to get the most attention.
Digital Marketing Funnel
Search marketing is one of the prime ways through which companies attract customers or increase their consumer base, and the process and strategies they employ for the same are referred to as the digital marketing funnel. It consists of six essential steps which are Exposure, made possible through SEO and ads, followed by Discovery of your content by the customer and Consideration with regards to buying or engaging. The next step is Conversion as per which the customer actually makes a purchase or performs some action followed by Customer Relationship which mostly involves maintaining relations with your clients. The final step is Retention which involves giving enough benefits and value to your customers such that they don’t consider leaving your service for one of your competitors.
Directories
Directories are basically archives which store huge amounts of data in the form of business listings which have been accumulated through various sources such as submissions by users, data fetched from data aggregators such as Acxiom and a few more. They work in the form of a search engine where websites are often categorized and organized efficiently. These directories find major utilization in the fields of SEO and providing referral traffic.
Disavow
The link disavow is a handy tool often used by webmasters to clearly specify that they do not hold themselves responsible for a group of inbound links to their own website. Manual link penalties often force webmasters to outright remove some low-quality links from their page and also disavow other such questionable links.
Display URL
Whenever you have an ad on display on a page, there must be a URL associated with it which is activated as soon as the customer clicks on the ad. The Display URL is not necessarily the same as the Destination URL but must belong to the same root domain. The maximum number of characters is 35 in AdWords for a display URL.
Dither
Full colored photographs can contain millions of color values. However, the 8-bit GIF and certain other image formats can show only a limited number of colors. Dithering is the process through which the color range of a photo is reduced to 256 (or fewer) colors. In Dithering, pixels of two different colors are juxtaposed in such a way that it creates the illusion of a third color. It’s a very useful technique used by a variety of image formats to approximate unsupported colors.
DMOZ
DMOZ is the acronym given to the Open Directory Project which is perhaps the single largest human edited directory for websites. The ownership rights for DMOZ are with AOL, while it is primarily run by volunteers and editors.
DNS
DNS is an acronym for Domain Name System (alternatively, Server or Service). It deals with all the information related to a domain name. Most notably, it is responsible for converting a domain name into an IP address when that particular domain name is fed to the internet browser by a user. While domain names are readily memorable, it is the numerical IP address that is necessary for locating the servers. Whenever a domain name typed in a web browser, the DNS servers quickly find out the IP address and direct the browser to the correct server.
DOCTYPE
A Doctype Declaration is an instruction written for the web browser informing it about the version of HTML used to create the page. It is the very first entity written in an HTML document. Even thecomes after the Doctype Declaration. The HTML will be accepted or declined by the web browser depending on the version of HTML used to write the page.
DOM
Document Object Model (DOM) is an Application Programming Interface for HTML, XHTML, and XML documents. It is a cross-platform Language-independent interface for representing objects in the said Markup Languages. The content of the document is represented so that the desired changes can be made programmatically.
Domain
A domain name is the name of a given website. Every website has a String of numbers (IP Address), through which its servers can be accessed, but it is difficult for us to remember the long and complex IP address of every website we want to use. The domain name can be thought of an alias. The domain name of a website is associated with its IP address, so a user only needs to memorize the domain in order to access the particular website. Domains names can be purchased by users. However, no two websites can have the same domain name.
Domain Authority
It is a scale designed to indicate how well your website is going to perform on a search engine’s index. It rates a website from (0-100) and has been developed by Moz. It is often utilized by SEOs to perform sitewise comparisons and also track the improvements websites go through.
Domain Name
This is the website’s primary URL or addresses used to access it by typing the address into the browser.
Doorway Page
A doorway page is a web page specifically created to rank high in a search engine’s non-paid listings without conveying any useful information. Those navigating to the page will only find a call to action such as that urging them to click on it, or they may be automatically redirected to another page. However, if a user implements cloaking, the doorway page may not be visible to visitors at all. Although search engines commonly have regulations against such doorway pages, it is possible to include them through paid inclusion programs. A common mistake is confusing these with landing pages which are totally different. Doorway pages are also known by the names bridge pages, gateway pages or jump pages.
Domain Name Monitoring
Domain name monitoring is the act of watching over or ‘monitoring’ domains across a host of extensions. There are companies dedicated to this very purpose who offer this service in exchange for a small fee. For instance, they will check up on domain names in the .net, .org and .eu extensions for a .com site.
Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is a widely acclaimed web development software utilized for editing and offers an interface that follows the ‘what you see is what you get’ principle.
Drip Marketing
Drip Marketing refers to marketing communication done in an organized manner and procedure consisting of writing down the message before the delivery is made and then sending it to current or future customers at pre-set intervals or at pre-decided time instants. The term ‘drip’ was given to these communications by looking at the way these messages are written and later transmitted. Usually sent one at a time, they are generally centered around a particular product or service and with regular gaps in between.
DTD
DTD is an acronym for Document Type Definition. It is a collection of markup declaration that defines a document type for HTML, XML, and SGML. A DTD defines the building blocks of a document by providing a list of attributes, comments, elements, and entities, along with their relationship with each other.
Duplicate Content
Any two separate content boxes on separate pages which are either complete duplicates of each other or are almost identical may be termed as duplicate contents. Duplicate content is a hindrance for search engines as they are not interested in indexing the same content twice. Because a lot of content generation techniques are based on recycling content, search engines have adopted a somewhat strict demeanor whilst filtering out duplicate content.
Dwell Time
Dwell Time refers to the time spent by the average user on a website they have been redirected to before going back to the search results page. Dwell time is largely dependent on the search query for the user; for some queries might require a significant time to satisfy the user’s informational goals while others may require a much lesser time.
Dynamic Content
Dynamic content is the content that doesn’t remain static but in fact, undergoes certain changes over time. Such type of content most typically utilizes a dynamic programming language such as PHP for rendering the page.
Dynamic Languages
Certain programming languages have an added characteristic of being dynamic in nature and can thus be utilized to build web pages almost instantly if the need be. Primary examples are PHP and ASP.
Dynamic Retargeting
This is a marketing technique which has the basic concept of only showing those ads to visitors on your website that revolve around or concern those products which they have viewed before.
E
E-commerce
E-commerce is a popular terminology used everywhere these days to refer to the process of buying and selling things online. Sometimes also called other fancy names like e-tail, e-commerce is made possible on websites using a feature called shopping carts.
E-commerce Site
An e-commerce site is an online space where the buying and selling of goods take place. The retailer often sells their own affiliated products. The exchange of goods and services can be business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business. Amazon.com is an example of an e-commerce site.
E-marketing
E-marketing is better known as online marketing, or even digital marketing and internet marketing. Irrespective of the term used, it always refers to a collection of marketing strategies, some of which are social advertising, SEO, PPC and retargeting that are used in the online sphere as a means to generate or increase sales or revenue from e-commerce.
Earnings per Click
Contextual Advertisers often make use of this system in order to get a rough estimate or idea of their profits based on their earnings from each individual click on their ads.
Editorial Links
An editorial link comes from a website as a result of good content and marketing techniques. These links are not paid or requested for, and can only be earned through quality content and marketing. It is thus a link placed or listed within the content of other websites (to point to yours as a source). An editorial link implies that another site found your content to be trustworthy. Thus these links help a website rank higher in search engine results and indicate the website’s reliability and visibility.
Edgerank
Edgerank is an algorithm used by social networking giant Facebook. It spells out a way to rank the pages of popular businesses, brands or celebrities, in order to determine the posts to be displayed on the user’s news, feeds connected to the said pages. A page having a higher edgerank will have more chances of getting its posts displayed on the user’s news feeds. While originally the algorithm focused solely on the engagement between the accounts and the posts, it has since been updated to take into account a number of other factors as well. Facebook has always been secretive about this aspect and has never released any information, or even used the term publically.
Ego Keyword
Ego Keyword is a special keyword that is used extensively by individuals or organization for in order to rank in it for natural listings as well as paid search results irrespective of the cost and returns involved.
Elastic Layout
An elastic layout is the type of layout in which the website design responds to the user’s preferences, and changes according to the increase or decrease in the font size of its content. The elastic layout comes under Responsive Web Design and uses ems (a unit of typography) to rearrange font size and the overall layout when a user clicks the zoom button.
Element
Elements are complete building blocks of any XML document. An element includes everything from the start tag to the end tag. It may contain other individual elements along with texts and attributes.
EM
It is a unit of measurement in typography. The em unit is the height of the font in nominal points or inches. It is thus used for sizing fonts (and other elements) within a web page relative to the parent element. 1em is equal to the point size of the font in the parent element. So 2em would be twice the current size, and so on.
Email Campaign System
In the fast-paced world of social networking, email has rapidly lost its place as the favored form of digital communication and is now currently being underutilized. Taking into account the cost and effectiveness of emails, it is definitely the most overlooked form of media campaigns today. With email campaign systems, organizations can send out group emails to their lists with a standardized look and even include amazing features like segmented lists.
Embedded Style
The embedded style is a CSS style that, when embedded into an HTML document, allows you to define the style of one webpage. Unlike a separate CSS, it does not affect site-wide elements and pages. It also overrides styles from the CSS file and is thus helpful when there is a need for unique designs on a page.
Emphasis
Emphasis is simply a tag used in the HTML programming language meant to emphasize or convey special importance to certain parts of the text.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics is a term commonly used to act as a measure of the amount of engagement a typical user finds with the content on a page. Search engines also make use of this particular quantity and go over user data and behavior in order to improve and refine their rankings.
Enhanced Bidding
Enhanced bidding is a special feature restricted to Google AdWords that gives AdWords the flexibility to actually make changes in your bidding in order to positively influence your conversions. Enhanced bidding lets you pay as much as 30 percent over your set keyword. It takes the best out of both CPC and CPA, although it does get a little costly in terms of cost per click. Although useful in a lot of ways, caution is to be exercised while using enhanced bidding as a number of marketers have faced unpleasant experiences with cost per acquisition bidding with AdWords.
Entities
There are certain things, places or people which search engines must gather information on in order to better index and gather listings. The most popular form of entities is brands, while certain songs or movies may also be counted as one.
Entry Page
Generally, the home page of a website, entry pages are those pages through which a user enters your website. They are essential since they are a first thing a user sees whenever he logs on to your website.
Ethical SEO
Ethical SEO implies that a website is using only the techniques considered ethical and acceptable by search engines to get traffic. This means no ‘fooling’ search engines in order to get more visitors and visibility.
Everflux
Almost all major search engines partake in the process of constantly updating their indexes to catch up with all the content changes. This continuous process has been dubbed Everflux by Google. Earlier, the term Google Dance was coined which basically referred to monthly updates that Google performed on its search engine’s index. However, the policy has since been changed to a continuously updating index, and thus the term is no longer relevant.
EX
Ex is a measurement of the font height to the height of the lowercase ‘x’ in that particular font family. The ex-unit is thus defined as the font’s ‘x-height’.
Exact Match
Among the various match types, this one happens to be the most accurate and exact. It allows for ads to be displayed if and only if the search contains any of your keywords exactly similar to the way it’s been written.
Expanded Text Ads
Almost similar to normal text ads, expanded text ads differ in only one aspect which is volume. They are almost double the size of standard text ads and consist of sections like two thirty characters headlines, an eighty character description and two fifteen character paths. Also, since these are mobile-optimized, they have a much wider reach and can be accessed from anywhere.
Expert Document
Expert documents are simply quality pages which link to a large number of resources from the topical category.
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
It is a flexible markup language, and it defines rules for encoding documents in such a way that it can be read by both humans and machines. It describes how to write new languages (custom languages or meta languages). It also functions as a basic syntax that allows different applications to share data.
External Links
An external link takes you to a different domain (away from the one you are currently in). For example, if your website has a link to another website, it is considered as an external or outgoing link.
External Style Sheet
It is CSS document written in a separate file, where you can declare all the styles you want for your website. This is used for ‘global’ site changes. It can be linked to multiple HTML/XMTML files and so changes made to the style sheet will change all the pages linked to it. Using external style sheet thus removes the trouble of changing each page individually.
Eyetracking
Eyetracking is a testing methodology that lets you test websites on a number of factors such as usability and is generally conducted by a group of corporations which make use of high-speed advanced cameras to capture and monitor the eye movements of test subjects on the screen.
F
Facebook Retargeting
While also used as a generic term for retargeting, the term specifically and most accurately refers to displaying ads to visitors who have been on the site before while they are browsing their Facebook. This feature has been in play since December 2012 when Facebook first opened its ad exchange and let partners offer Facebook retargeting.
Fair Use
Fair use refers to the complete list of exceptions which have been allowed usage of work even while under copyright without explicitly requiring the permission or consent of the holder of the original copyright. The principle is mentioned explicitly in section 107 of the Copyright Code.
Favicon
Favicon is short for favorites icon and basically refers to small icons which are typically displayed right next to URLs in web browsers.
Feed
The feed is an incoming message and content display forum that works with the XML language and utilizes Atom formatting or RSS, and is the best way to make sure that the right content gets delivered into the right hands. With just a single click, visitors get to view everything that’s happening and trending at the moment in an organized and clear manner.
Feed Reader
Feed reader is a software or a website designed specifically to allow users to subscribe to notifications concerning feed updates.
FFA
Free for all pages are those which allow anyone to make changes or impose certain links to them. Such links carry absolutely no weight themselves in search algorithms simply because automated programs tend to make them point towards low-quality pages or websites.
FFA Directories or Pages (Free for All)
A page with many external links is called a free-for-all directory. The links hold no value and are not unique.
Filter
Filtering is a process carried out by search engines. This usually happens when websites make use of certain fraudulent techniques, signatures or activities which can make a page look unnatural. The search engine then filters out such pages from its index.
Final URL
The final URL is the address of the page that you are redirecting traffic to when a user engages with your ads. Although quite different from the display URL, both of them use the same root domain.
Firefox
Firefox is an extensible and widely used open source web browser developed by Mozilla.
Fixed Width Layout
The web designer determines the size of the layouts and according to that, the layouts are made. Settled width formats permit a web designer a more direct control over how the page will look much of the time. They are preferred by the web designers with a print foundation as they help them to make minute changes in accordance with the design and have them stay predictable crosswise over programs and PCs. Here you can have full control over how the page looks. Some of their advantages are as follows.
- A settled width format enables the creator to construct the pages that will appear to be indistinguishable regardless of who is taking a gander at them.
- The components that are part of them, for example, pictures will not subdue on the little screens, in light of the fact that width of the page will incorporate all those elements.
Flash
Flash is the name given to an animation software based on vector graphics and primarily utilized for making websites look attractive and make the content more interactive for the end user.
Fluid Layout
Here you can assess the size of percentages instead of pixels. For a fluid layout, most of the segments inside have percentage widths and can change in accordance with the client’s screen determination. They look good on the expansive and little screens, for example, they can get excessively occupied on the smaller screens while they leave a lot of space on the enormous ones. They are used for responsive websites. Subsequently, here the sections are in respect to each other and the program, enabling it to scale all over smoothly. Therefore, you can change the program window or view the site on your phone and you find that your site is settled at the same width. An excess of substance can befuddle the client and make a site excessively congested or jumbled which is one of their disadvantages.
Focal Point
The first thing that you notice on a webpage is the focal point. Make sure that whatever your focal point if focusing on, must be an important content. It’s best to have a solitary point of convergence. The point of convergence mostly focuses on the objectives and the needs of the site and to the site proprietor’s desires. Users always focus on creating the focal points on the homepage. Instead, try to spread it across all other important web pages so that the user gets access to each and every piece of important information.
Fold
This term is related to the newspaper. This point is found at the bottom of the webpage. Here you have to keep on convincing the users to scroll and the scrolling keeps on going until they come across something important. The location of the fold depends on the interest areas of the users. Important information is found above the fold so that the focus of the viewer directly falls on that.
Font Family
It contains a large number of fonts that can be used. One of the ways to attract the users to indulge in your website is to use the right fonts. But some web designers make an error by choosing many fonts at a time for each page. Sometimes, the web creators and designers use fonts which are indecipherable as to make it distinctive and cool. There are some font rules that you need to follow to make your articles readable.
Forum
A forum is like a club on the internet where likeminded people meet and collectively put forward ideas and have discussions, or come looking for interesting information.
Frames
It is a feature supported by web browsers that allow multiple pages (page within a page) to appear on a single screen. It is not advisable for Search Engine Optimisation as it takes time to load and cannot be bookmarked or shared.
Fresh Content
Fresh content is completely original content that can help attract traffic to the website. Fresh content will be exclusive to only your website, and so increases the search engine rank of the same. Keywords used in the novel or fresh content helps in increasing the visibility of the website.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
It is the standard internet protocol used to exchange or transfer files over the internet. The exchange takes place between a client and a server, and separate control and data connections between the two are used. Large portions of data (encrypted for safety reasons) can be sent using FTP through private or public networks.
Fuzzy Search
Fuzzy Search is a type of search carried out on search engines that doesn’t require a perfect matching of the search query to fetch relevant search results. In case of minor spelling mistakes, a fuzzy search will return somewhat matching terms in the search results.
G
GAP
GAP stands for Google Advertising Professional and is a program which marketers often have to undertake in order to qualify as a proficient AdWords marketer.
Gateway Page
Also known as ‘doorway’ or ‘entry’ page, a gateway page acts as a ‘door’ between the user and content. It generates more traffic to the website. Some gateway pages redirect the user to a page that contains advertisements, while others provide links to pages within the website. The main aim is to attract visitors and increase the visibility of the website.
Geo-Targeting
As is evident by the name, this technique involves reaching out to clients and delivering content based on their physical locations only. Almost all major search engines now offer this functionality in their pay-per-click campaigns which are carried out by viewing the concerned IP addresses. It allows advertisers to reach out to specific markets and let go of the ones they are not interested in.
Gladwell, Malcolm
Malcolm Gladwell is an English born Canadian journalist and author who has written the famous book ‘The Tipping Point’.
Gmail Sponsored Promotions (GSP)
Gmail Sponsored Promotions are a part of Google’s display network campaigns which let advertisers display ads in Gmail. Among the ads that can be displayed, there are custom ads that can be created by the advertisers themselves in the AdWords ad gallery. Whenever someone clicks on the ad to expand it, you need to pay, whereas clicks on already expanded ads are free.
Godin, Seth
Seth Godin is a popular author, business consultant, blogger and viral marketer.
Golden Triangle
Extensive eye-tracking studies and researches have shown a constant pattern that appears across almost all users on a variety of search results. People have been proven to look at an ‘F’ shaped pattern while viewing search results, with only some minute changes happening in the pattern as one switch between search engines. This basically highlights the importance of placement as far as natural listings and pay per click ads are concerned.
Google
Google is the world’s most used and trusted search engine.
GoogleBot
GoogleBot is the name given to the search engine spider that Google employs to carry out indexing. Google, in fact, makes use of multiple spiders all of which share from a common crawl cache.
Google AdWords Editor
AdWords Editor is an application by Google that is free to use and easily downloadable from the internet. It lets the user manage AdWords advertising campaigns as well as multiple accounts simultaneously and even make changes to them such as moving files around between ad groups. Additionally, it works offline as well.
Google Base
Google Base is a huge archive of information created and designed by Google which is semantically structured and helps Google get in touch with all kinds of commercial information.
Google Bombing
Google Bombing is the process of influencing the rank of a page for some particular search query in a positive way by virtue of pointing numerous links at it with all the keywords included in the anchor text.
Google Bowling
Google Bowling is the process of making a particular website or page slip from the search results deliberately by pointing numerous low quality and lesser trusted links at it.
Google Dance
Although this practice has since been done away with, Google used to earlier update their indexes about once a month. These monthly updates were then christened Google Dance. However, presently Google has employed a more continuous stance on updates rather than having monthly gaps in between and thus the traditional Google Dance is now obsolete.
Google Forwarding Number
This is a unique phone number assigned to various companies in order to replace the standard number displayed on their respective landing pages.
Google Keyword Tool
A complete keyword management system is provided with Google Keyword Tool which functions as a keyword research system designed and developed by Google. This tool is responsible for recommending related keywords, estimating competition and even advises you on relevant keywords for your page.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center is a handy and useful tool that lets users upload their store and products to Google such that they can be made available through Google Shopping and other similar Google services.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a business listing which comes as a part of Google Maps, is free to use and is instrumental in displaying businesses when a local search is conducted.
Google OneBox
This is the region from the search results page where vertical search results from Google Base, Google News and some other vertical search devices from Google are often displayed.
Google Partner
Of all the paid search marketing providers, the certification process offered by Google AdWords is the most extensive. The Google Partner program is an apt replacement for the Qualified Google Advertising Company program.
Google Penguin Update
The Penguin Update was an infamous initiative by Google launched in the month of April 2012. It was launched with the sole purpose of looking into and curbing the increasing use of malpractices such as questionable link building for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. It mainly dealt with websites that were identified as having purchased backlinks or obtained them through linked networks. In order to save themselves from any strict action taken against them, sites should simply refrain from any such ill activities and avoid them to the best of their abilities.
Google Panda Update
Another highly talked about the update by Google was the Panda update, which was launched in February 2011 with the latest version has come in July 2015. This update was simply a step towards ensuring better and more relevant search results for their users. While fetching search results mainly involves going through the length of an article, and searching for particular keywords within it, this was also problematic as it allowed for websites with much shorter content and theoretically less relevant results to show up. Besides dealing with this problem, the Panda update also found a solution for the problem of duplicate results by devaluing the search rankings of duplicate pages.
Google Sitelinks
There are times while fetching search results that some particular link is found to be much more relevant and accurate than the other links in the results. In such a scenario, Google may display multiple links to the same website on top of the search results in the form of deep links.
Google Supplemental Index
Google Supplemental Index is the name given to the index which particularly stores pages with low trust scores. Such pages may consist majorly of duplicate content or perhaps the URLs of these pages are too complex to understand.
Google Traffic Estimator
This is a tool developed by Google itself utilized for estimating bid prices and the number of searchers who will click on a particular ad for a certain keyword.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a tool which keeps track of Google search volumes and the way they change for a certain keyword as time passes.
Google Wallet
The Google Wallet is a payment service designed and developed by Google whose primary purpose is to help Google better understand and get in touch with conversion rates for merchants and the values held by different markets and keywords.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
These are simply a collection of rules, guidelines, and conventions which specify certain rules regarding penalizing web pages or websites.
Google Webmaster Tools
These are a collection of tools and mechanisms which allow Google to easily view and record all the latest trends related to search traffic, allow webmasters to set targets and interact with geographic markets, let some selected pages be chosen for re-crawling by spider bots, display penalty notifications and finally let webmasters carry out disavow links and also request manual reviews from the editorial team at Google.
Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer is free of cost testing platform which is multivariable in nature and lets advertisers associated with Google AdWords work upon their conversion rates.
Google XML Sitemaps
XML are files that help an URL index on a search engine (i.e., the website will turn up on the results page). Sitemap is a file where the web pages of our website are listed out. This informs Google and other search engines about your content.
Graphical Search Inventory
Graphical Search Inventory refers to the collection of visual components such as banners and other interactive advertising units which can be set up and synchronized to search keywords. It even includes rich media, browser toolbars, and pop-ups.
Growth Hacking
A means to increase customer acquisition and engagement through the use of much effective and smart tactics aimed towards engaging a specific buyer persona, Growth hacking will most usually be found in the ‘Software as a Service’ industry. It makes use of numerous marketing strategies and effective product development practices aimed towards creating solutions that are perfect for amplifying the user base of a product. Retargeting and social media advertising, apart from SEO and PPC are some of the core components of the growth hacking industry.
Guestbook Spam
These are automated links which are low in quality and as a result have to work with almost negligible trust from search engines.
H
Hashtag
The hashtag has in the recent years been catapulted to widespread fame due to its extensive use in popular social networking websites. While it was earlier known as the pound symbol, it is now commonly used as a means to group together certain pictures or tweets by virtue of category. The symbol (#) is placed directly before the text such as in the widely popular #TBT which basically stands for Throwback Thursday as per which people generally upload pictures that they might have taken some time back.
Header Tags ()
These are elements of the HTML server-side scripting language which are used as headers or as a means to give a header to some section of your content. These heading and subheading tags are critical for search engine marketing as if by any chance they happen to be in a graphical form, they essentially become unreadable to search engines. They must ideally be used as per relevance, such that the more prominent ones are enclosed within H1 while the less important ones are enclosed within H2 and so on.
Headings
The title head of a page is referred to as a heading. It is generally presented in a large font (to attract the visitor’s eye) and has H1 and H2 tags. The heading gives basic information about the content in most cases.
Headline
Headlines are simply the titles given to stories or articles.
Hidden Texts
Hidden texts involve the process of using white font on a white background in order to hide extra keywords. It is done to ‘fool’ a search engine in order to get more visitors. It is against SEO guidelines, and a website can be banned if found to have used hidden texts to get more traffic.
Hijacking
This frowned upon practice involves fooling a search engine into believing that the URL for the website is actually occupied by some other foreign website. To accomplish this, some advanced techniques like meta refresh or 302 redirects are most typically used.
Hilltop
Hilltop is an algorithm as per which the manner of ranking search results is largely dependent on unaffiliated citations from experts.
HITS
This refers to another algorithm which is link based on nature and as a result assigns relevancy scores on the basis of topical authority citations.
Home Page
This is the primary and central page of every website. This is the page which the user first sees and hence it carries immense importance for it helps set up and establish your brand and also sets up major navigational schemes for your website.
.htaccess
This is an Apache configuration file at the directory level that is majorly responsible for redirecting files or password protection.
HTML
This is a programming language that stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is primarily used for building web-based applications or websites. Developers often make use of similar languages that can easily be understood by HTML for building upon existing applications and expanding websites.
HTTP
HTTP, an acronym for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is an application protocol used on the World Wide Web to transfer files (images, text, video, sound, and other multimedia files). HTTP’s primary role is to conduct hypertext requests between a web browser and a web server.
HTTPS
HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP, with the last ‘S’ standing for “secure”. All communication between a browser and a web server is encrypted in this protocol which makes it a safer alternative to HTTP.
Hubs
Topics hubs are typically websites which specialize in forming links with highly trusted and bankable websites within the same topical community. Topical authorities, on the other hand, are pages which are referenced from a number of topical hub sites. Hence, a topical hub is one page which references various authorities.
Hummingbird
Hummingbird is the name given to the search algorithm update put into place by Google with the purpose of enabling better conversational search.
Hyperlink
Hyperlinks are special text elements that allow you to navigate to other pages easily simply by clicking on them. Quite often simply referred to as ‘links’, these hyperlinks generally appear as underlined and blue in color.
Hypertext
Hypertext is the text that contains a hyperlink. The highlighted images, GIFs, and texts that take a user to another page are all hypertexts. Hypertexts can easily be differentiated from normal texts in that they often have a different font color, or are additionally underlined.
I
IDF
IDF stands for Inverse Document Frequency and is defined as the term utilized for determining the position of a term inside a vector space model.
IFRAME
Short for “Inline Framing”, an IFrame is used to embed one HTML document on another HTML document. In other words, IFrame enables a developer to insert content from another source into a web page. The content may vary from advertisements to a full-blown web page with its own scrollbar.
Image Maps
Image maps are regions on images that are clickable and make for interesting websites by making the content visually appealing and attractive to look at. A notable feature is that search engine spiders can read these image maps with ease.
Impressions
Impressions are nothing but a numerical count of the number of times someone views a page that displays your ad. Understanding a site’s traffic and ad placement are important factors to be considered while making payments on a cost per 1000 impressions basis.
Inbound Link
It is a link incoming to your site from another site. Websites with lots of inbound links rank better on Search Engine Result Pages, as they are seen as trustworthy and reliable. The more links that come to your site from other sites, the more visitors you get.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing refers to a collection of marketing strategies and services that are aimed at convincing potential customers to navigate to a website. This is made possible through the use of relevant and engaging content. Some of the prime examples are SEO, blogging, content marketing and email marketing.
Index
The index refers to the entire archive of information against which queries are made. As far as crawler-based search engines are concerned, the index is mostly composed of copies of all the web pages it comes across. In case of human controlled directories, the index generally contains brief summaries of the content on each page.
Indexed Pages
These are pages that have already been indexed by the search engine (and turn up on the results page)
Influencer Marketing
A common marketing strategy for brands and marketers usually involves contacting and getting in touch with content creators and creative artists who can reach out to specific communities in order to widen the brand’s reach. Brands often use this technique of partnering with such influencers to gain awareness and create a better understanding of the brand within the community. An apt example would be if a dog accessories brand partnered with a dog blogger in order to better reach dog lovers and create better content.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is formally defined as the process of structuring, organizing, designing and categorizing content in a meaningful and useful way. The primary aspects of information architecture are to focus on individual pages of a specific agenda, usage of meta descriptions and informative page titles, usage of non-complex file and folder names, usage of headings for structuring, usage of breadcrumb navigation to make navigating easier, usage of informative anchor text, improvement of conversion rates and avoiding duplicate content.
Information Retrieval
Information Retrieval is a separate branch of science that deals with searching or sorting through data sets with large volumes in order to extract relevant and meaningful information.
Inheritance
In CSS, when an element is not assigned any value for certain inherited properties such as style, it derives those properties from its parent element in the same document tree.
Inktomi
Inktomi is a search engine primarily responsible for firmly establishing the paid inclusion based business model. It was subsequently bought by Yahoo towards the end of the year 2002.
Inline Style
When CSS is written using the style attribute instead of writing it in a <style> tag, it’s called an inline style. Inline Style is used to define styles for specific parts of an element instead of the whole.
Interlink
Interlink is a link that sends the user to another web page of the same website’s domain.
Internet
The internet or the web as it is sometimes called is the immense global network of interconnections and computer systems connected through the TCP/IP protocols.
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer is one of the first web browsers to have existed and is owned and run by Microsoft. After beating out stiff competition from Netscape’s browser, the Internet Explorer collapsed into a state of mundane existence without receiving any form of innovation or updates on the design or technology. It was only after five years when it started facing competition from Mozilla’s Firefox that Microsoft introduced some much-needed updates to the software.
Internet Marketing
Internet marketing refers to reaching out to the immensely wide consumer base of the Internet through any of a number of ways including Banner advertising, Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.
Internet Promotion
Any marketing method or promotion technique implemented through the Internet is called Internet Promotion. Advertisements, videos, blogs are a few examples of this. The main aim of internet promotion is to attract more users and visitors.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is a form of linking wherein the hyperlinks placed on a page redirect to other pages of the same website. This practice has a variety of benefits including easy access to information, improved site interaction and enhanced SEO.
Interstitial
An interstitial is a form of ads that appear in between two pages that a user is trying to view. Typically, such ads are seen next to hyperlinks which allow the user to exit the ad and go back to the page which was originally the intended destination.
Instagram
Instagram is a photo sharing platform and a social-networking website designed specifically to share and create images using a variety of filters. These images can then be shared with your followers.
Invisible Web
The invisible web is that portion of the internet which is not easily accessible or even visible to search engine crawlers due to limitations on the search technology, issues with information architecture and copyright issues.
IP Address
IP address stands for internet protocol address and is owned by each and every computer with the capacity to connect to the internet. While some web servers and websites may have unique IP addresses, a majority of web hosts prefer to host a large number of websites on an individual host.
ISP
ISP, which stands for Internet Service Providers are the people or corporations responsible for selling access to the web to the general consumers all over the world. Some Internet Service Providers are also engaged in the practice of selling usage data to web-based analytics companies.
J
Javascript
Javascript is often confused with another highly popular programming language called Java, even though both of them are highly different in their approach towards programming. Javascript, an Object Oriented Programming Language has been developed by Netscape and is used mainly to amplify user experience through the addition of certain advanced functionalities to websites.
K
Keyword
Keywords are designated words that carry special importance as far as search engine results are concerned. They are often used interchangeably with ‘Search Terms’, and are basically words or group of words that a person searches for. Another common usage of the term is to refer to the words you bid on through search engine marketing for the purpose of attracting visitors to your website or page. A successful search engine optimization is possible only by including keywords in Meta tags.
Keyword Density
It is used to measure how many times a keyword has appeared on a page. This measurement is recorded in percentage and is expected to be either too high or too low. If the keyword density is on a good scale, there is an increased chance of the web page achieving a better rank in the results shown by the search engines.
Keyword Difficulty
It is a form of measurement that is most commonly employed for search engine optimization and that pertains to the amount of page targeting and offsite link building required. More commonly referred to as KPI, keyword difficulty is mostly ranked on a scale of 1-100. As per this scale, a search phrase which requires comparatively more efforts, and consequently a high keyword difficulty will be given a score more towards 100 while a search that requires much less effort will be given a score close to one.
Keyword Funnel
Keyword funnel defines the relationships shared amongst various keywords when a user initiates a search. There are some searches in particular which turn out to be especially well aligned due to poor relevancy, query refinement, and spelling errors.
Keyword Not Provided
As soon as Google updated their protocols to include secure search there was a marked change in the way organic referrals were treated. Keyword information was stripped thus making it much more difficult for SEOs to find out which keywords led to more conversions through organic search. While all of this happened instantly, they retained the principle of passing keyword data to advertisers associated with AdWords for years.
Keyword Research
SEO professionals use this technique to determine the appropriate and similar keywords to the terms that are entered by the people in a search engine. This practice helps gain maximum returns during the search.
Keyword Research Tools
The keyword research tools are a collection of specialized tools and mechanisms through which potential keywords can be determined on the basis of search trends, past search volumes, page contents fetched from relevant websites and bid prices. Some of the most popular keyword research tools are Bing Ad Intelligence, SEO Book Keyword Research Tool, Wordtracker and Google AdWords Keyword Planner.
Keyword Spam
To gain top rank in the results of search engines, a website owner/content creator includes too many keywords on their webpage. This is done to increase traffic to their website. This is an unfair practice so that the website is shown on the top of the search results.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the phenomenon of putting in an unnecessary amount of keywords, even those with absolutely no relevance to the site, into the description and keyword tags of the site. This was a practice that gained immense popularity a few years back when the web was still young and no laws existed to prevent such misuse. As a result, a number of websites instantly skyrocketed to highly appreciable SERPs. However, this practice did not last long as soon enough search engines started formulating laws and modified their formulae to determine ranking which caused either the plummeting of some very high ranking websites or outright bans being placed on some of them.
Keyword Tags
These are HTML tags that are used to define the keywords used on websites and web pages. Meta keyword tags were being given special prominence by some older search engines until a few of them caught wind of spammers misusing these tags and subsequently modified their algorithms to match the updated security protocols. Presently, Google has gone on record saying that these tags do not hold any special importance anymore as far as their results are concerned.
Kleinberg, Jon
Jon Kleinberg is an American computer scientist who has been primarily responsible for a good majority of the research which contributed towards advancing the field of authority and hub based search relevancy algorithms.
Knowledge Graph
Knowledge graph refers to enhancements by Google on search results usually carried out by virtue of fetching third party information and having it displayed along with the search results in an extended format. The primary goals which must be met through a knowledge graph are enlisted below
- Provide quick and satisfactory answers to questions from users
- Shift the organic search results further towards the lower end of the page
- Include and display links to properties owned by Google or other similar forms of advertisements
L
LAMP
The LAMP is an open source web development platform, the full form of which is Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP where each component performs the role of the operating system, web server, relational database management, and object-oriented scripting language respectively.
Landing Page
Landing pages are the first page that a user sees when they navigate to a website from an advertisement. You can choose this page from any number of pages from your website, although most prefer the home page. The best way is to navigate the users to an especially tailored and custom-made page in order to drastically increase landing page conversions. However, one exception to this rule is radio advertisements, since spelling out complex URLs can prove to be a time-consuming process.
Landing Page Quality Scores
Landing Page Quality Scores is a scale of measurement used by Google to quantify and filter out noisy ads from the AdWords program. Since affiliate programs have been launched by Google, there has been a marked rise in arbitrage players in the ad market. To counter this, Google has actively introduced numerous measures to keep their ad relevancy high.
Link
A word or a sentence that can be clicked to get to a website is a link. When the links included in a content of a website are clicked on, the user is taken to a cross-linked website which may or may not have the same content as the one the user was on initially.
Link Bait
It is a strategy used by the content creators/website owners to generate more traffic. This is done by giving a catchy, alluring title to the link which when clicked on, will take the user to another webpage which contains content pertaining to the title. Link bait can be misleading as well.
Link Building
Link building is the process of obtaining the complete link or URL from a website back to your own personal website. Although highly critical for SEO practices, link building has recently become increasingly complex due to updated algorithms. With increasing strictness by search engines on the practices you can and can’t follow, irrelevant links and lazy link building can attract heavy fines for you as charged by Google. Search engines today won’t tolerate anything but purely white hat link building practices, that is, the concerned website involved in link building must be obtained organically. If a website manages to follow these norms and obtain relevant links from high ranking and authority sites, site rankings can greatly improve.
Link Burst
Link Burst is the marked phenomenon of a rapid and sudden increase in the number of links pointing to a certain website. While link popularity is a vital sign of quality, there are other similar but critical pointers as well such as increased usage data, increased search queries, higher traffic from link sources and completely fresh links coming from pages on highly trusted domains.
Link Churn
Link churn is simply the rate or speed with which a site starts losing its links.
Link Equity
Link popularity is another common way of judging the popularity of a website based on the number of inbound links pointing to it and the authority and trust associated with the sites which these links come from.
Link Farm
A link farm refers to a set of web pages that are set up with the sole purpose of increasing traffic towards a particular website (which is the target page). A link farm can be a single page having hyperlinks to the target site, or it can be multiple pages that have many links. This is a method of search engine optimisation as a site’s popularity increases when other sites add its link to theirs. Link farms are generally frowned upon and are often removed by the search engines.
Link Hoarding
Link hoarding is an unacceptable practice used for the purpose of maintaining your website’s popularity by simply not linking out to other websites, linking using JavaScript or even linking through redirects. Link hoarding almost never leads to satisfactory results. The reasons behind this are
- since it is a mutual give and take relationship, websites which don’t link out to others won’t receive many links themselves
- outbound links are largely responsible for improving the credibility of a website
Link Juice
The equity passed to a website through the use of links is often termed as link juice. This SEO term carries critical importance as sites with high traffic almost always have more link juice, which translates to a higher search engine ranking. The positivity with which search engines will view your website is directly proportional to the amount of link juice it has.
Link Popularity
It is a comprehensive measure of the popularity of your website including certain factors such as the number of websites linking to yours, the popularity of these websites and the relevance of their content to yours. Link popularity is extremely critical in terms of Search Engine Optimization, which even values the websites associated with yours.
Link Reclamation
Link Reclamation is the process of performing outreach to obtain backlinks. There can be various instances when such a practice is useful, such as when your domain name changes, re-branding takes place, or if your brand gets a mention in a popular blog or post but there’s no backlink leading back to your page. In such scenarios, it is acceptable to contact the blogger or owner of the content involved and request for a link to be added back to your website.
Link Reputation
Link Reputation is simply the combination of anchor text and link equity.
Link Rot
Link rot is a measure of the number and percentage of broken links of a website out of the total number of links associated with it. The possible reasons behind broken links are websites which suddenly go offline, linking out to temporary content, a page which has since moved from its original location and change in a domain’s content management system.
Link Velocity
Link velocity refers to the speed with which a website or a page gathers new and fresh inbound links.
Liquid Layout
It is a type of layout that resizes and reflows according to display needs. The layout changes with the width of the browser, ensuring that maximum content is displayed to the user. Liquid layout thus operates according to the browser’s window size.
Live.com
Live.com was a famous portal designed and developed by Microsoft which was utilized as their primary search portal after MSN. Live.com was later rebranded as Bing.
Local Search
Local search is currently one of the fastest growing and largest portions of the online search engine marketing industry. Local searches are almost similar to generic searches except that they allow the user to look for businesses or websites within the confines of a geographic range. This kind of search includes similar features on search engines or even the online yellow pages. Since the kind of search is different, local search requires many different practices for Search Engine Optimization as compared to traditional searches.
Local Business Listings
Almost all major search engines have certain local business listings offered which make an appearance next to maps at the very top of the page on numerous locally targeted searches. Businesses have the option to either submit new requests for listings over to the search engines or claim existing businesses. It is not mandatory to have a website in order for your business to appear as a local listing.
Log Files
Log files are nothing but files on the server which indicate your primary sources of engagement and traffic and the main keywords which are being utilized to search for your page or website.
Long Tail
Long tail refers to certain phrases which indicate that the aggregate demand for non-hits is much more than there usually is for the hits for any specific category or batch of products on sale.
Long Tail Keywords
A common alternative to going for the most common or overused terms in an industry is to opt for niche terms which are much longer phrases but are significantly easier to rank for. Such long tail keywords can typically amount to as much as 60 percent of a site’s incoming search traffic.
Looksmart
Looksmart is the name given to a company which was initially launched to serve as a directory service but later on adapted and changed itself to become a vertical content play and paid search provider.
LSI
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and is one of the ways through which search engines often try to understand and represent language in a mathematical fashion. LSI is primarily based on similarities between pages and keyword occurrences. There may be instances where the search query may not even be present in relevant search results, and yet the result may be fetched solely on the basis of similar or relevant words which may appear in relevant pages containing the search terms.
M
Malda, Rob
Rob Malda is the founder of one of the most popular and acclaimed editorially driven technology news forums called Slashdot.org.
Manual Penalty
Manual penalties are used to refer to penalties or fines imposed on certain websites when they are found to be in violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines by some Google engineer. Recovering from manual penalties can take a long time, even so much as a year in some cases. The alternative for a site owner is to file for a review as per Google Webmaster Tools after taking care of the initial problem which caused the penalty in the first place.
Manual Review
Almost all major search engines follow the practice of combining manual reviews with relevancy algorithms in order to better prevent search spam, discourage spammers and better equip their relevancy algorithms. Manual reviews may also get triggered due to abnormal or abrupt usage data and link growth patterns.
Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation refers to a collection of software specifically designed to combine a lot of the prominent marketing strategies such as CRM, social media and SEO on a single platform. It doesn’t just accomplish efficient and automatic completion of a variety of tasks relating to marketing but also allows teams to view a direct correlation between the efforts they have made and the results they are getting in terms of ROI.
Markup
Markup refers to the language that is used for coding, presenting and processing text. A document can be coded and changed into an HTML, XML, SXML, XBRL (all are Markup Languages) etc.
Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk is the name given to a program developed by major e-retailer Amazon.com as a means to hire people to perform minor tasks that computers may not be suitable for.
Meme
The term Meme has been given a formal definition by the English author Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. He defined it as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” In more loose terms, meme generally refers to a bunch of viral or self-spreading ideas.
Mention
It is simply when your brand gets a mention on a website or a webpage. Receiving mentions frequently is one of the best methods to build backlinks to your website, outreach and perform link reclamation or improve your website’s search engine ranking. A higher number of mentions for your website directly translate to a higher SERP ranking in case the mentions are from popular or high authority sources.
Meta Data
The data present in the header of a website that offers information about the site to the visitor is known as metadata. Metadata is contained within meta tags and only visible in the source code, not on the webpage. Metadata basically describes the other data on the website.
Meta Description
Meta descriptions are descriptions or summaries of your web page to the search engine so that they know what your page is really about and the content that you are going to promote and publish. Meta description plays a crucial role in respect to your rank in search engine optimization.
Meta Keywords
Meta keywords are a set of words which are used to tell search engines the themes or topic(s) your website consists of and is covering. These words are to be selected very carefully keeping in mind that they are also a factor considered by search engines when they rank a website or a webpage.
Meta Refresh
A meta refresh is basically a meta tag which is used to refresh the browser to a different URL location.
Meta Search Engine
A metasearch engine is one that lets go of crawling the web itself but rather relies on listings from other multiple search engines.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are specially designated keywords that let you highlight important keywords pertaining to the website in a way that search engines will instantly recognize your content, but remains largely unseen by your visitors. Meta tags have had a rough journey in terms of valuation by search engines as their weight keeps on constantly fluctuating although they still remain to be immensely important in terms of Search Engine Optimization. Alt tags and Header tags are popular examples of meta tags.
MFA (Made for Advertisements)
As the name suggests, there are websites which are built for commercial use. Some people turn their non-commercial websites into an MFA after they have gained recognition on the internet.
Microblogging
Microblogging refers to blogging platforms wherein members are allowed to post only 140 character snippets at a time through their phones or the web. The most prominent and leading player in this domain in undoubtedly Twitter, with a consumer base which is spread uniformly all over the globe. China, however, has placed a ban on Twitter and rather operates on its own versions of microblogging websites, such as Weibo.
Microsites
Microsites are special websites created by businesses or online publishers for the sole purpose of functioning independently from the main website of the publisher. These microsites have the capabilities to not just generate traffic for sales but also generate leads and referrals. They are typically created specifically for events or to gather data on some particular topic or service.
Microsoft
Microsoft is a pioneer and groundbreaking technological corporation founded by Bill Gates which is responsible for designing and distributing the most popular operating system in use today, the Windows OS. Microsoft also developed the famous Internet Explorer browser and owns the search engine Bing.
Mindshare
Mindshare is a direct measure of the success of your brand or commodity. It indicates the number of people from the general population who will think of your corporation or product when prompted with other similar products from the same category.
Mirror Site
A mirror site refers to the websites which do not consist of a unique content of their own but have an exact replica of some other site. They are distinguished by a URL which is different than the website the content is copied from.
Mobile Friendly
The world now runs at a much faster pace than it did a few years back. Almost all our major transactions and operations now take place on the move, which is why it is important for websites to recognize the importance of mobile networks and mobile-oriented websites. For a website to be properly optimized for mobile devices, it must have the capability to shrink down effectively to a smaller scale. The three primary ways by which this can be ensured are responsive web design, which doesn’t alter the HTML at all but relies heavily on screen rendering, dynamic serving, which creates different versions of the HTML code depending on the device being used but always uses the same URL and separate URLs, which creates different code as well as different URLs for different devices.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is simply a much-needed extension for online marketing which gives advertisers a means to reach their target audience from virtually anywhere. Providing new business opportunities and challenges alike, mobile marketing is the next step in the advertising industry.
Money Site
A website owner may operate more than one website but the money site will be the one which is generating income for him. The other sites he owns will be linked back to the money site to generate more money.
Movable Type
Movable Type refers to a blogging software on sale which allows the user to host a blog on their website.
MSN Search
MSN is a search engine designed and developed by Microsoft and is actually the default search engine in Internet Explorer.
Multi-Dimensional Scaling
Multi-Dimensional Scaling is the process of taking snapshots of certain documents from a database in order to point out topical clusters using latent semantic indexing. In comparison, multi dimensional scaling is much more efficient and accurate than singular vector decomposition since a rough approximate of relevance is essential when mixed with other ranking principles.
MySpace
MySpace is a widely used and popular social networking website, which largely revolves around forming connections between music artists and their fans and also doubles up as a convenient blogging platform.
N
Natural Listings
These are listings from search engines which have not been advertised in any way and are generally referred to as organic results. If you want your business to be included as a part of natural listings, you may even have to pay a fee to some search engines, while most will do it absolutely free. Among the many factors that decide the rank of your business among the natural listings, link popularity and content relevance are the most important.
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing refers to algorithms which have been made with the intention of better understanding the true purpose of search queries instead of simply matching keywords to results.
Naver
Naver is a search engine that operates only in Korea and happens to be their largest web property. Just like any other search engine, Naver offers paid search programs, with the closest competitor in terms of market value in Korea being Daum. As far as Naver’s pay per click programs are concerned, they are mainly offered through marketers like Yahoo!
Navigation
Navigation is the system that allows a user to freely use and explore a website. Drop down lists, links, breadcrumbs and everything else that allows the user to move across pages in the site comes under navigation.
Navigation Search
Navigation Search is used to refer to a search term used for the purpose of visiting a certain business or website.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is used to collectively refer to any attempts made to adversely affect the rank of some third-party website. Link building strategies are generally classified as white hat, grey hat and a black hat by Google. Black hat strategies are the ones which are condemned by search engines and the usage of which can lead to penalties or even bans on a particular website. Any competitor which tries to bring down its competition by pointing numerous low-quality links onto a competitor website faces the danger of a manual penalty or even a ban on the website.
Nesting
It refers to putting one HTML element within another. When they need to be closed they need to be done so in the reverse order in which they were opened. They are essential in building a web page.
Netscape
Netscape was originally a corporation that gave rise to a popular web browser with the same name. However, now it is simply a social news website along with the lines of Digg.com.
Neuromarketing
This upcoming branch of marketing deals in and engages with the principles of neuroscience in order to bring about better returns by predicting customer interactions and behavior. It involves studying and applying the brain’s behavior to popular marketing strategies, with special emphasis given to the rewards center of the brain. The primary aim is to create a campaign that markets can respond to on a deeper subconscious level.
Niche
Niche is simply the subject upon which a website is based. Niches are generally broad terms, but on closer inspection, one can find numerous smaller niches in a niche. As a convention, and also because it is much easier, brands generally try to compete in underdeveloped, developing, new or small niches because they are easier to dominate than larger and well-established niches. As the market for your company grows, you can even venture on to bigger and high paying niches.
NOFOLLOW
Nofollow is a tag given to any search engine for links on a page which are not supposed to be ‘followed’ or to be considered when a page is being ranked. Only the users can open the link. The search engines ignore it. They do not pass any link juice.
NOINDEX
By adding <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> in the HTML coding of a webpage, the owner/creator is informing the search engines that this particular page is not supposed to be added in the list of the search results. For example, ‘Members only’ page of a website isn’t supposed to be accessed/viewed by general users. Hence, the noindex directive is put to use.
Non-breaking Space
Also known as non-breakable space (nbsp), a non-breaking space is a space character that prevents an automatic break wherever it is placed. It adds spacing between words and paragraphs.
O
Off-Page SEO
This technique is used to get a better ranking in the search results. The work is done from outside the website that is promoting it on other websites, linking it with other websites or forums and gaining recognition and trust from other pages, links or people. The more the backlinks, the better rank the website will get.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to improving the rank of a website and optimizing it for search engines. It is done by applying certain settings on the website. These settings may include using proper URL structures, fast loading pages, giving quality content, mobile-friendly pages, optimized descriptions, and titles etc. This is all done on the website itself other than the gaining backlinks like in case of Off-page SEO which relies mostly on backlinks.
Ontology
Ontology is a study, more specifically the study of being. In relation to search and the web, ontology is a way of creating rigorous and exhaustive conceptual schema for a domain. It is most generally a data structure organized in a hierarchical manner which contains not just relevant pieces of information but also defines their rules and relationships within the domain.
Open source
When a source code of a system or software is made available to the general public it is known as an open source. It includes both web-based applications and desktop applications. People can modify and change its design because it is available to all.
Opera
Opera is a web browser based on fast standards.
Opt-in
As the name suggests, opt-in refers to a request put in by a person in order to be included in a list by submitting relevant information. This registration technique typically reduces lead flow and increases Costs per Acquisition from marketing campaigns.
Opt-out
The exact reverse of the opt-in registration technique, people can use opt-out to take their names off lists pertaining to calls, newsletters, etc any time they want.
Optimization
Every website has to gain a rank to be seen on the search engine results page. To earn this rank, the guidelines set by the search engines are to be followed by website owners and other strategies are put to work to optimize the search engine. One needs to come up with unique and trustworthy content as well gain more and more backlinks which will play a part in ranking the website.
Organic Link
Some links are shown in search engine results as they are seen to be natural and trustworthy to the search engine bots. Some links are shared by people when they find it useful, the website owner does not play a part in this as he does not tell the users to share it.
Organic Search
Produced by an individual algorithm of a particular search engine, organic search consists of all the search results to the words or sentences that a user has entered in a search box. It is not necessary that all the search engines will have the same sequence of the search results.
Organic Search Results
Organic search results are all the results that are listed on the search engine results page. These results are completely natural and are not paid for or influenced by anyone. They are ranked according to their relevance and credibility. The rank of a search result isn’t called an organic one if they are being paid for by advertisers or the website owner is using certain tactics.
Outbound Links
Outbound links can be best described as the links which the owner of a website has mentioned on his own website. This link, when clicked upon will redirect the user to a different website. Outbound links are of two types:
- Dofollow link
- Nofollow link
Overture
Overture is the name of the company which is behind pioneering search marketing through the sale of targeted searches on a pay-per-click basis. While the company was initially named GoTo, it was subsequently bought by Yahoo and renamed to Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Overture Keyword Selector Tool
The Overture Keyword Selector Tool is a popular tool used for keyword research and has been based largely on search statistics from Yahoo! While heavily inclined towards searches on a commercial level, this tool also has the unique feature of combining singular and plural versions of the same keyword into a single search term.
P
Page, Larry
Larry Page is the person responsible for co-founding Google.
Page Rank
Page Rank is an assessment and a subsequent value that is assigned to your page by Google, taking into account the factors it employs as per its complex algorithm. To get an idea of the page rank assigned to your page, you can check the external scoring page released by Google which rates web pages on a scale of 1-10. This external score, however, may be different from the internal page rank assigned by Google which happens to be a closely guarded secret. Page ranks are now being used by almost all major search engines and not just Google to effectively rate your page and its content.
Page Views
It refers to a number of times a website has been opened, viewed and clicked on by users in a given time frame. Page views are a matter of interest to the people who are into online advertising and internet marketing. This is because an advertiser would want to know how much Page view a website receives before he puts an ad on that website.
Paid Inclusion
Paid inclusion is a practice followed by certain advertisers as per which a certain sum of money is paid to search engines in order to ensure that your pages are included in the search engine’s index, although there’s generally no confirmation on the ranking your page will receive. A prime example is Looksmart, which lists websites and pages based on relevance. Marketers and advertisers need to pay some fixed amount in order to be included in the index of the directory, on a per-URL fee or CPC basis.
Paid Listings
These are a specific category of listings which includes listings that have been paid for by search engines, by virtue of programs like paid inclusion or paid placement. Organic or natural listings, however, are not sold.
Paid Search
Advertisers have a unique way of ensuring their content always appears on search results through the use of paid search marketing as per which they need to pay some amount to portals or search networks. Commonly known as Pay per Click, Paid placement and Search engine marketing, it usually takes place through an auction where specific keywords or phrases are assigned a cost per click fee. Although Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing happens to be the biggest networks, paid placements are also endorsed by other search engines like Microsoft Adcenter. Firstly, an exhaustive set of industry related terms are shortlisted by search engine marketing companies, accounts, advertising, and landing pages are set up and finally, bids and budgeting are controlled which subsequently refines your advertising for better accuracy and effectiveness.
Panda
Google Panda is an initiative taken by Google to maintain the search engines by bringing down the web pages with low-quality content, but have somehow managed to reach the top of the search list. On the other hand, it pushes up the web pages which have good-quality content, in the web search.
Pay For Performance
Used synonymously with Pay per Click, Pay for Performance is a term that means implying and indicating to advertisers that they are paying for only those ads which actually perform as expected with respect to bringing in the required amount of traffic.
Pay-Per-Action
An advertising model given to us by Google, it enables an individual to pay for the action that the individual has defined. These actions include lead, sale or page view. This is utilized mostly by people who are into online marketing.
Pay Per Click
PPC Marketing is a commonly used form of digital advertising cost structure. All major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! and much more use PPC in some form or the other. In fact, social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have been known to follow the same cost structure.
PDF
PDF stands for portable document format and is a document type in use universally to view and store documents in a printer friendly context. It has been developed exclusively by Adobe Systems.
Penalty
There are certain websites which are found guilty of fraudulent practices such as spamming. Such websites are then red flagged by search engines and subsequently prevented from ranking high in the search index. This process is commonly known as penalizing or banning. The nature of these penalties could either be manual or they could be applied via an automated algorithm. Penalized websites, especially the ones which have been penalized via the algorithm have the alternative of fixing the issue which led to the ban. Successful fixing of the issue will then lead to the removal of the ban after some time. However, in case of manually penalized websites, the ban may last for an unnaturally long period of time, which will only be resolved via contacting the search engine or requesting a re-inclusion.
Penguin Algorithm
The Penguin update was launched way back in April 2012 by Google in order to better equip their algorithm at cracking down on websites guilty of unnatural link profiles. With this game-changing update, the burden on links alone was lessened to some extent by also focusing on keyword stuffing classifiers which were given some major updates. While it was initially launched without a name and was simply called the spam update, subsequent blowback due to false positives led Google to give it a name and call it the Penguin update.
Permalink
It is a connection to an individual blog entry. They are imperative on the grounds that on the off chance that you ever need to connect to a correct blog section, you utilize the permalink as your connection. In the event that you don’t utilize permalink, you will be connected to your fundamental blog page. As the content keeps on changing, they act as a marker to a specific page even after the viewers have moved out of the site.
Permission Marketing
Similar to opt-ins, permission marketing is a type of registration technique as per which users are notified and asked for consent before being contacted. Permission marketing was developed and conceptualized taking into account the fact that advertisements are increasingly becoming disruptive and are disturbing the flow of web surfing for internet users. Such disruptive ads had to be done away with and thus a solution was formulated in terms of permission marketing. Ads will thus be received in a much better manner by the user if the permission is first sought out by the advertiser. Search engine marketing can be viewed as another form of permission marketing wherein only those advertisements are shown to users which pertain to the content that is already being searched for.
Personalization
Personalization is the process of changing or modifying the physical or functional attributes of the search results page based on the user’s search history, location, last viewed content or preferences in order to make the content much more relatable and to amplify user experience.
Phrase Match
A specific match type, phrase match lies somewhere between broad match and exact match, with the search results being more specific than a broad match but lesser so than exact match. Your ads may be displayed for searches containing your keywords, or even certain variations on them.
PHP
PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and is a server-side programming and scripting language which is open source in nature and primarily utilized in order to render web pages or add some major interactivity to increase user satisfaction.
Pigeon Update
This algorithmic update by Google catered to search results which led to more signals associated with normal web search being tied in.
Piracy Update
Piracy Update was a search algorithm update by Google which adversely affected the rankings of websites which were suffering from an exceedingly high number of DMCA takedown requests. BlogSpot and YouTube were, however, the two exceptions to the update which were promptly exempted from any such relevancy signal.
Plugin
Plugins can likewise allude to bits of outsider programming introduced inside a PC Program to expand its usefulness. It is mostly used in affiliation with CMS or blogging platform. Most of the applications back plugins for various reasons. Some of them are as follows.
- To lessen the span of application
- To isolate source code from an application as a result of inconsistent programming licenses.
- To introduce new features including highlights
- To empower outside designers to make capacities which broaden an application
POGO Rate
POGO rate refers to the proportion of users who actually end up clicking on the site suggested by the search results only to immediately jump back to the results page and try another listing. High POGO rates directly translate to an abysmal engagement metric, meaning that users are not able to derive relevant content from the search engine.
Poison Word
This term was used to refer to certain words which were conventionally thought of as being signs of low quality and untrustworthy content which is why search engines often demoted the rankings of such pages.
Pop-Under
Pop-Under advertisements are a form of advertisements that open in a new window whenever they are triggered due to some action by the user. Due to the fact that the new window appears behind the existing window, pop-under advertisements are generally not considered disruptive in nature.
Pop-Up
Pop-up advertisements are widely known and seen on the internet as an infamous marketing technique that disrupts the flow of web surfing for the average user by popping up on the screen obstructing the primary window which was being worked upon. Search engines have even been known to at times ban ads that work as pop-ups.
Portal
A portal is simply a website which offers some common and handy consumer services such as email, search, news and other content.
Precision
Precision is the capability of search engines to display results that meet the user’s informational goals, that is, display relevant results. It is generally measured in percentage. Factors like the complexity of language and search spam are major hindrances for search engines trying to achieve excellent precision.
Premier Google Partner
Google created this designation in the year 2016 to identify and facilitate the top agencies that not only met all the additional certifications offered by Google but even fulfilled all performance requirements.
Press Optimization
Press releases are often optimized for search engines and the process is called press optimization. Almost similar to Search engine optimization, the only way in which press optimization differs is that it focuses a bit more on keywords and their usage in content creation. These press releases are then promptly picked up by popular blogs and media.
Price Extensions
Price extensions are a form of additional information that is displayed along with mobile ads, displaying services and the complete glossary of products and their costs.
Private Blogs Network
It is a network of websites that you have complete control on and are based on a domain you own. Your money site is also included in this network. Since these domains are expired, they still have a good amount of backlinks which in turn become beneficial for your money site as it receives link equity in great amount.
Profit Elasticity
The term profit elasticity is used to refer to a measurement of the amount of potential for profit for varying economic conditions. The basis for this profit could be adjusting supply, price or other similar variables which leads to a different profit potential.
Progressive Enhancement
It is a system for website formation that makes the usage of web advances in a layered manner that permits everybody to get to the fundamental substance and efficiency of a site page resorting to any program or Internet association. Not only this, they also provide with a better transmission capacity or further developed program for programming. Knowing Progressive enhancement is quite basic, just think of the substance out. The information or the substance shape the strong base on which you layer your design and intelligence. Getting acquainted and knowing about progressive enhancement is really pretty simple when you apprehend the concept and begin putting it into exercise; perhaps even simpler than making soup!
Property
It belongs to the CSS family. One of its other forms is property name by value. It gives an idea of how to design your webpage. Without a good information and knowledge about them, you will fail to take the advantage of the powerful site management talents of favor sheets. Do not just forget about them. They help us keep the focus on important information rather than distracting from the fundamental motive.
Proximity
Proximity refers to the closeness with which words are placed. The reason why this is important is that for a page with two search terms placed near to each other will always be more probable to satisfy the search query.
Pseudo-Element
They contribute effects to specific selectors. In the sphere of CSS, certain selectors are close at hand and at the same time, they operate like as if you have infused an extra HTML into the sheet. Not only this, they possess the adaptability to design those newly invented substance.
Pseudo Class
A pseudo-class is an essential part of CSS. It helps in styling the characters when a particular action is being done to them. Pseudo-classes are always preceded by a colon ‘:’. It determines the variation in style of the characters after they have been manipulated through mouse hovering over them, clicking, and selecting.
Push Notifications
Push Notifications are short messages that are displayed on mobile devices in the form of pop-ups, originating from a particular server. Push notifications are not limited to usage of the mobile device, or even being inside the app. They are a highly effective method of keeping user engagement high or perhaps even extract certain actions from the user.
Q
QDF
QDF stands for Query Deserves Freshness and is basically an algorithmic signal that is completely based upon sudden changes in volume such as that caused by a burst in news publications on a particular agenda or a burst in search volume. Such occurrences indicate to Google that a certain search query must now yield fresh results.
Quality Content
Quality content refers to all types of content that are high enough in quality to be linked to.
Quality Link
Links are basically votes of trust for search engines. While a high-quality link counts as a high number of votes, a lower quality link will conversely count for a significantly lower number of votes. The basic characteristics of a high-quality link are the following:
- Trusted Source- A high-quality link will almost always come from a high ranking and trusted source.
- Hard to Get- It is a proven fact that high-quality links are significantly harder to get than low-quality
- Aged- Conventionally, links from older sources are trusted more than links from fresh sources.
- Co-citation- Certain pages which link to websites from the same category as yours and also link to your website make it more convenient for search engines to grasp the nature of your webpage.
- Related- Generally links from related sources are given more importance than links from completely unrelated sources.
Query
Yet another terminology used synonymously with keyword or search term, query reports present detailed information on the terms that were most commonly employed to click on your advertisements, irrespective of the original keywords that were advertised in your account.
Query Refinement
While some searchers are prone to try and attempt a different combination of search terms if the present search does not fetch them the results they are looking for, there are certain search engines which work with certain verticals or may offer relevant search suggestions based on your search query. The suggested search queries will most like be relevant to the searcher’s informational goals. Query refinement has been termed both an automated and a manual process. Certain techniques for refinement of search queries which search engines often use are Google OneBox, Spell Correction, and Inline Suggest.
Quality Index
More commonly known as AdWords Quality Score, Quality Index is the Yahoo! Japan’s version for ranking or rating advertisements based on certain performance factors. It affects not only the bids made but also the advertiser’s ad position and cost per click. It works in a similar fashion to Google’s Quality Score.
Quality Score
Another rating system designed by Google which basically assigns a certain score determined by Google AdWords to numerous account components. The Quality score is given out on a scale of 1-10. Although the exact mechanism through which the score is decided is not explicitly revealed by Google, it is a well-known fact that the three primary factors taken into account are ad quality, relevance and landing page experience. A higher quality score directly translates to more appearances for your ad at lower bids as well as cost per click.
R
Rank
Rank is a direct measure of how well a website is listed in the search engine’s results. While rank does not concern itself with whether or not a page even appears in response to some query, it does, in fact, indicate the location at which the page was listed in case of an appearance. The point to note here is that a listed page can only be said to have appeared in response to a query, but the position of the page can only be indicted through the rank it receives.
Rankbrain
This Google algorithm concerned itself with machine learning and artificial intelligence which has been deeply incorporated into Google Search and has rapidly risen to become the third most important search ranking factor available. With AI integration, Google is trying to find answers to some deep questions such as the diverse ways in which users often employ search engines.
Ranking Factor
These are the factors which are taken into consideration by search engines to rank the websites and links on in their search results page. There are a number of factors which include:
- Quality content on the website.
- The number of backlinks a website is receiving
Really Simple Syndication
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or earlier known as Rich Site Summary is a web feed which helps in collecting and delivering latest updates related to different preferences on one page. It is a form of subscription where users subscribe to their preferred feeds and if any new post is added or any other changes take place then they are informed about it. RSS can be used for sharing blogs, images, videos, and music from different sources at one place.
Recall
Recall refers to the collection of relevant documents and contents that were recalled when compared to all relevant contents.
Reciprocal Link
A form of link exchange that takes places between two websites as per which both the participating websites need to incorporate a link to the other on one of their pages.
Redirect
The term initially means moving from one place to a different one. By clicking on a link that is mentioned on a webpage or simply entering the URL, the user is taken from that website to another website automatically.
Referrer
Referrer refers to the source through which a visitor has come to your website.
Registrar
A Registrar is simply a corporation which lets register or buy domain names.
Reinclusion
A website may at times be banned from a search engine’s index it is found to be in violation of certain protocols put forward by the search engine. In such cases, the banned site may apply for a reinclusion if the issue which caused the ban in the first place has been firmly resolved.
Relative Link
Relative links indicate the relationship between the URL of the page being linked at and the URL of the current page. It is a general practice followed by certain links to display only the relative link path instead of the complete reference URL.
Relevancy
Relevancy is a measure of how helpful or relevant a searcher finds the search results displayed to them.
Remarketing
Remarketing is simply a term given by Google to the practice of retargeting.
Repeat Visits
Repeat Visits corresponds to visitors of a certain website who also happen to have visited the same website in the recent past. A high value of repeat visits or a uniform stream of repeat visits may positively influence the search engine ranking of a website. Repeat visits are a sure sign of unbreakable user engagement, which in turn is highly critical for Google algorithms like Panda.
Reputation Management
It is the practice of ensuring that a company or an organization is perceived in the best shape by people on the internet. They see to it that only the best results are shown in the search results when the name of the organization or company is typed in the search box by the users.
Resolution
Resolution in a computer means the number of dots/pixels on the screen; and when it comes to images, resolution means the number of pixels in an image both horizontally and vertically. It is very important to consider screen resolution during designing a website because a website with less resolution would fit perfectly in a small monitor, but the same website would cover less space and seem smaller in a big monitor.
Responsive Ads
Responsive ads are those which are not limited to screen size as they are programmed to automatically adjust their visual properties such as size, format, and appearance to fit into any available ad space. This means that the same ad could show up as a banner ad on some devices and as a plain text ad on others.
Resubmission
Resubmission is another frowned upon practice similar to search engine submission and is most typically a useless program which is run by simply cheating the average consumer out of their finances for a useless service which is not beneficial in any possible way.
Results Page
It is simply the page where all the results of conducted searches are displayed and also known as Search Engine Results Page.
Retargeting
Retargeting is a way of delivering targeted content by placing cookies on the user’s browser such that whenever they navigate to other web pages or browse the web, in general, your ad will appear to them in the form of a banner or any other form of a display ad. The only condition is that the site they are visiting must accept external ads from the network your ad is from.
Return on Investment
ROI happens to be the primary characteristic for a number of companies in terms of whether your ads are generating enough profits, taking into account the amount that you have had to pay.
Reverse Index
Reverse Index refers to an index of search terms which keep a track of matching documents which have those keywords inside them.
Rich Media
These are another form of internet advertisements that are slightly more interactive than plain pages or static banners.
ROBOTS.txt
This protocol is used by the website owners to inform the search engine bots about the areas of the website that the owner wants to get scanned or indexed and also the areas which remain exclusive to the owner only and are not be scanned.
RSS Feed
Rich Site Summary or more often called Really Simple Syndicate comes under the category of web feed. The users of a certain website can always stay updated and informed of any changes that are made on the subscribed website. This allows the user to stay as updated as the website itself is. The news aggregator software is used to present the RSS data to the users.
Run of Site (ROS)
It is a clause appearing in contracts which specifies that any form of online advertisements such as banners is free to appear on any page and in any open space of a website.
S
Safari
Safari is the name of a popular web browser developed by Apple.
Salton, Gerard
Gerard Salton is the scientist who performed ground breaking work in the field of information retrieval.
Sandbox
Employed by Google to monitor and stop spam activities on the internet, Sandbox keeps fashions a halt between a website and its good ranking. It doesn’t matter how good the content of the website is or how many backlinks it receives from other websites; the website is put under strict supervision until it is fully optimized. The rank of the website is set to a lower level in the search results.
Schema
A schema markup is a part of the code that does the work of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) more profoundly. Using schema markup, a designer or a developer inserts the data about the website i.e., not just the keywords, but also the kind of information is included in the website and the way it can be used, which helps the search engine in providing better results if someone wants to know about any relevant information.
Schema Markup
Schema Markup is nothing but a snippet of code that is generally added to the HTML code of a web page in order to give away information about your page and the purpose of the page to search engines. Specific values are assigned to a word which makes it easier for search engines to carry out indexing of the content and categorize it accordingly. In other words, you are not leaving anything up to the search engine to find out as whatever information it might need about your page is provided by the schema markup itself.
Scraping
Scraping is simply plagiarism. It is the act of stealing content from one page and using it on another. With evolving technology, our methods of keeping content safe have also evolved. We now have services dedicated solely to helping to keep your content safe from scraping.
Script
A web script is a set of instructions which is written in a textual format so that it can be easily changed according to the requirements. These instructions include various rules and exceptions which help in formatting and styling of documents on World Wide Web. All the web designing and web developing languages, when written in a sequence for proper execution of a website or application, form a script.
Scumware
Scumware is the name given to a collection of intrusive programs and software which usually violate privacy, target ads and are typically installed of their own accord without the system owner even being aware of the purpose of the program.
Search Engines
Search engines need no definition whatsoever, simply because of the immense popularity, they enjoy in today’s world. They’re online tools used to search for all sorts of information on the internet. Some of the frontrunners of this service are Google, Yahoo! and Bing. In order to appear in a search engine’s search results, you can follow any one of two ways. Either you can appear as a natural or organic listing, which is not influenced by anything else but simply the search engine’s own formula for fetching search results, or you can choose to appear as a paid listing, which as the suggests, are influenced by some payment you need to make to the search engine. Search Engine Optimization is a widely popular method of ensuring your content stays on top of search engine results. Paid listings typically appear above or beside organic listings in search results as advertisements while Pay per Click happens to be the most commonly seen cost for advertising.
Search Engine Marketing
Any sort of marketing that revolves around search engines is referred to as search engine marketing. Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search Marketing are prime examples. Often this term is used interchangeably with Paid Search.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is a widely used method of ensuring your content stays on top in search results. However, it can be difficult to carry out on your own since it requires studying the rules for each search engine individually and then incorporating changes that satisfy each of them separately. For better search engine optimization, two of the most important factors shown to exist is link popularity, which is nothing but a measure of how many high ranking websites are associated or linked to your own, and relevant content, which is a measure of the relevance of your content to the search terms.
Search Engine Rankings
Considering a number of factors, search engines rank websites in their search engine results page accordingly. Some web owners get a better ranking by paying for it while some simply stick to the many guidelines provided by the search engines for the web owners to follow to get ranked.
Search Engine Reputation Management
It can be thought of as spin control for search engines. Search Engine Reputation Management grants a person or an organization a better position through the use of certain techniques such as Paid Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Blogging, Press Optimization and Social Media. The crucial aspect of SERM is to start working before some problem even begins to take shape. It is aptly named an online reputation management technique.
Search Engine Results Page
Search Engine Results Page, SERPs for short, is simply the pages displayed with all the results whenever searches are carried out. Natural as well as paid listings are displayed simultaneously with paid listings appearing as advertisements. The order of the results and decision to a place which result on top is influenced mainly through Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search Marketing.
Search Engine Spam
It is a technique to manipulate the ranking of a website where the search engine results receive spam from a website or it uses Black Hat SEO techniques. The spamming helps a website get more exposure even for its low-quality content. This practice can get the website get shut down permanently by Google.
Search History
It is a common practice among search engines to store recent searches carried out for a particular user. This stored information is later utilized to either make old information more accessible or for better ad targeting.
Search Marketing
Search Marketing refers to the process of marketing a website within search engines. This can be through SEO, paid inclusion or buying pay-per-click ads.
Search Retargeting
It is a form of targeted advertisement wherein searchers who have searched for a particular set of keywords matching with your ad are shown your advertisement even though the searcher may have never visited your page before.
Search Terms
Search terms are simply words or groups of words typed into the search bar of search engines in order to carry out your searches. If you are an advertiser, then you must include all the relevant and most popular keywords in your ad so that it shows up on a maximum number of searches. A search engine marketer’s job is to find out the best set of words or terms to be used to put into a website.
Selector
Selectors are tools in CSS that are used to select elements in order for the elements to be styled. They play a major role in CSS.
SEM
Short for Search Engine Marketing and used to refer to persons or organizations engaged in SEM, this technique involves either one of Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search or both.
Semantic Markup
The word ‘semantic’ refers to the correct use and interpretation of words. In web development, Semantic Markup refers to the act of placing content within specific HTML tags that not only announce the nature of the content to a human developer (human readable) but also make the content more readable to a browser (machine readable). Semantic Markup is necessary to make a site look exactly like the one envisioned by the designer.
SEO
Short for Search Engine Optimization, the term may also be used to refer to individuals or corporations engaging in search engine optimization.
SEO Copywriting
SEO copywriting is the process of formulating your documents or copies in a way that makes them more SEO friendly and relevant for a wide range of potential search terms. This is typically done using either or two methods:
- Titles are made literal so that they align well with the terms searchers usually search for.
- Page titles are written in a way that websites are often compelled to link to them.
Server
Servers are computers utilized for hosting files and serving them on the World Wide Web.
Server Logs
Server logs are files hosted on servers whose main purpose is to indicate web traffic sources and popular trends.
Server-Side
Server-side refers to the actions performed by a web server in a computer network. There are other actions as well that are performed by the user’s browser. For example, Java Scripts are run by a browser while CGI scripts are run by the web server. The latter example is an instance of server-side scripting.
SGML
It’s an acronym for Standard Generalized Markup Language. It is a text markup language that acts as the standard for common markup languages like HTML and XML. It is derived from GML (generalized markup language) and does not depend on any specific application.
Shopping Ads
Ads that are displayed along with search results on popular search engines such as Google or Bing in the form of pictures of products are known as shopping ads. Also known as Product Listing Ads, these are designed particularly for eCommerce markets and are displayed only when searches matching with the product’s description or title are conducted.
Singular Value Decomposition
Singular Value Decomposition is the process of breaking down a significant database into much smaller volumes to determine document relevance for numerous items via carrying out comparisons with other documents and items. The first step in the process is stemming which involves taking into account the various versions of a term. The next step is local weighting as per which the relevance of documents on the basis of the number of times a certain term appears in it is increased. The third step is called global weighting which involves increasing the relevance of search terms while the final step is normalization which is the process of penalizing or rewarding copies as applicable.
Siphoning
Siphoning is the name given to techniques utilized for stealing traffic from other websites through the usage of cybersquatting or spyware.
Site Map
As the name suggests, it is a map which helps both user and the search engine to go through the entire website. The users get the HTML file of the site which contains all the information topics that the website covers. The contents of the website are indexed in case of search engines.
Site Retargeting
Another form of retargeting, and also perhaps the most common of them all is site retargeting. This takes place whenever a visitor has been to your site before, and ads are shown to the user depending on their visit, or on individual pages from your website. This form of retargeting is cookie based and the ads are free to appear throughout the ad network. You can toggle settings to only display ads whenever a page has been visited or the user carried out a particular action.
Slashdot
Slashdot is the name of community driven social news site which focuses primarily on nerd culture and technology related topics.
SOAP
Standard Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a messaging protocol used by programs running under different operating systems to communicate with each other in a network. SOAP enables the programs to exchange information using HTTP.
Social Commerce
The sale of goods through social media on the online medium is referred to as social commerce. As electronic commerce is abbreviated as e-commerce, social commerce is also sometimes written as s-commerce.
Social Media
The latest buzzword and perhaps the most popular form of online communication in the present age, social media have taken the world by storm. Users on such websites upload all sorts of information which goes into the database and is later available for viewing by whosoever the user decides to allow access. Blogs and forums happen to be established forms of social media while VR, Wiki, and podcasts are some of the up and coming forms.
Social Media Marketing
Product promotions and services are often advertised through social media as they seem to have the biggest reach of all forms of communication available today. This form of marketing is thus called social media marketing which is a mix of traditional online advertising as well as trending and upbeat content that can easily be shared and distributed among social media users.
Social Networking
Social networking is nothing but a form of social media wherein such websites let users upload all sorts of information on the website which can then be shared or distributed accordingly. There are all kinds of social networks available such as those used for marketing purposes, sharing photographs, microblogging or recommending information to other similar users, also called social bookmarking websites. Geographic location-based social networks, such as Foursquare are also being developed.
Spam
Spam is a collection of all of the unwanted content on the internet, such as unsolicited advertisements sent in the form of emails. Although strict laws have been put in place against spamming, such as the CAN-SPAM act, spammers continue to exploit such laws and carry out their activities. Spam acts as nothing but a deterrent for search engines, working against letting them deliver relevant or quality content. Some of the prime examples of spam are unnecessary doorway pages designed for no other purpose than to please search engines but serving no purpose whatsoever to human visitors or repeating the same search terms again and again on a page, in the hopes of getting a higher search result ranking.
Spammer
A spam is a message or a link which is sent to a large number of people from one single source. This spam may contain information of a service or a product. These messages are entirely unwanted and users usually tend to block such sources and links. The spammer is the source of this spam. Some of the spammers are skilled hackers as well which is why is it is recommended to block them right away.
Spamming
The act of posting, distributing or creating spam is referred to as spamming.
Spider
A spider is a technique employed by search engines to go through the content of various websites it indexes in order to get a better idea of what are they all about. This is done whenever a site is included in the natural listings and its ranking is to be determined.
Splash Page
A splash page is a page typically rich in features and designed in an elegant and beautiful manner but is quite low in terms of usability and doesn’t offer much to search engines as well.
Splog
Splog is short for spam blog, which most commonly consists of automated or stolen low-quality content.
Spyware
Spyware is the terminology used for software programs designed with the purpose of spying on other web users or keeping track of one’s activities in order to accomplish behavioral targeting on advertisements.
Squidoo
Squidoo is a website designed by Seth Godin as a topical lens site.
SSI
SSI stands for Server Side Includes and is an intuitive way to call for certain sections of a page from another page. Using SSI, it becomes much more convenient to install updates on websites. There are certain limitations though, for to use SSI, you must meet either of the following conditions-
- file name must end with .shtml or .shtml extension
- usage of a programming language that makes it easier to include files such as PHP
- change of .htaccess file to process .html files as if they were .shtml files
Static Content
Static content refers to the contents of a page which do not change with time. These are the direct opposites of dynamic content. Static content most typically do not have any do not have social elements associated with them and do not use any dynamic programming language either.
Stemming
Stemming refers to the practice of making use of the stem of a certain word to meet the searcher’s search goals. This process generally amplifies search experience for the user since the quality of search results is improved due to the fact that the extreme diversity of the word in the English language is taken into account.
Stickiness
Stickiness is a measure of how frequently a visitor who has been on your website at some point or the other returns back to browse some more. Updating periodically and relevant content lead to higher stickiness.
Stop Words
Stop words are some commonly used words added to a search query with the purpose of increasing the relevancy associated with it. As a consequence, these words are often removed from search queries when it comes to finding relevant search results.
Structured Snippets
Structured snippets are small bits of information that highlight certain aspects of your services or products and are used as ad extensions which are generally used for the purpose of deriving some context for your services.
Subdomain
A subdomain is nothing but a smaller part of a primary domain, such as in the case of 54.236.248.236/dom.com where 54.236.248.236/dom is the subdomain whereas .com is the primary domain. There is no limit to creating subdomains and they are usually created to categorize a particular section of your business.
Submission
Submission is the process of submitting a URL over to a search engine with an adjoined request of including it in the search engine’s index. While a popular way of doing this is through the paid inclusion program, submission does not always necessarily mean a listing of the URL. Also, simply submitting a URL will have no effect on the ranking of the page as that can be influenced only through Search Engine Optimization. There are two ways to carry out submissions, which are either automatically or manually by filling a form.
Subpage
In a hierarchical display of pages of a website, pages that appear below the primary pages are referred to as subpages. These pages are often not directly displayed but can be viewed by clicking on them through a drop-down menu in a navigation bar. Sub pages are sometimes referred to as child pages of the main pages of a website. As an example, www.yoursite.com/about-us/ would be a subpage for the primary page www.yoursite.com.
Sullivan, Danny
Danny Sullivan is the lead editor and founder of a major search engine news website called searchenginewatch.com and who even later went on to launch searchengineland.com.
Supplemental Results
Supplemental results are documents which are prone to be trusted less and even have search engine rank lower than the documents which are a part of the main search index. Some search engines, Google, in particular, are known for having multiple search indices. The reason behind negligible trust being placed in such documents could be anything from limited link authority to complex URLs.
T
Tags
These are special words used to categorize similar posts or content or any other forms of information for the purpose of organizing your content in a manner that makes it easier for users to access and find relevant content.
Takeover Ads
Takeover ads are a form of advertising as per which high ranking brands and popular products on hugely frequented online publications are advertised by placing creative ads in each and every ad spot which is a part of their layout. This advertising strategy is commonly seen on pages like Yahoo! or MSN and is more commonly referred to as homepage takeover.
Targeting
Targeting refers to placing ads keeping in mind the likes and preferences of the user as an individual. Such targeted campaigns are designed for distinct groups of consumers such as women, Medicare recipients, etc.
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is a system of classification as per which controlled vocabulary is utilized to organize topical subjects. Such a classification is usually hierarchical in nature.
Technorati
Technorati is the name of a search engine for blogs which tracks link relationships and trending stories.
Template
A Template is a file that contains pre-formatted information about specific aspects of a web page. It serves as the starting point for a new document. It contains information about the structure and looks of a page so that the developer doesn’t have to build everything up from scratch.
Teoma
Teoma is a search engine based on the topical community which hugely relies upon Kleinberg’s principles of authorities and hubs. Teoma even powers Ask.com.
Telnet
The telnet is an internet service using which anyone can use a remote computer to log into or access a local one used for projects such as manipulation or script initialization.
Term Frequency
Term Frequency refers to the number of times a keyword makes an appearance amongst a collection of different documents.
Term Vector Database
Term Vector Database refers to a weighted index of different documents which have the sole purpose of helping the user better understand the agenda of the documents based on how similar or different they are to each other, and then subsequently match the relevant ones to a suitable search query based on vector angle and length.
Text Ad
Text ads are nothing but a form of advertisement consisting of just plain text and nothing else. Paid listings on search engines are commonly seen in the form of text ads.
Text Link
It is an ordinary HTML text link which when clicked upon redirects you to a new website. They can also be referred to as hyperlinks depending on their location. It is a medium between two websites.
Text Link Ads
These advertisements are mentioned on websites in the form textual links instead of an image form. When the user clicks on the given link, he is redirected to the initial location of where the advertisement is placed.
Thesaurus
The thesaurus is similar to a dictionary and is basically a directory of synonyms that search engines often utilize for increasing the relevancy of search results.
Three Way Linking
One way links are widespread and most commonly used between pages wherein clicking on a page takes us to a certain different page but the act of creating two one way links between pages is referred to as three-way linking. As per this strategy, site A links to site B whereas site B links to site C and thus a three-way link is completed.
Title
The title is a brief description of content, mostly image content. The Title tells the users what the given content is about. On the basis of the Title, the users are able to perceive the meaning behind the content and also whether they are really interested to see the rest or not.
Title Tag
The title of a search result is described through this HTML element. To get a better ranking, it is important to have accurate title tag which is also entered by users in the search box.
TLD
Acronym for Top Level Domain, TLD is simply whatever portion of the URL comes at the end of a domain name. TLD happens to be .com for a majority of websites.
Toolbar
An intuitive way of increasing market share for search engines is to effectively distribute search toolbars. These toolbars come with interesting features of their own such as spell checkers, form auto-fill and even pop-up blockers. Another application for them is to help search engines in tracking user data.
Top Heavy
Top Heavy is the name given to an algorithm introduced by Google which places penalties on websites which are found to have an unusually high ad density above the fold, thus making it extremely difficult for the user to look for the content they were searching for before coming on to the website.
Topic Modeling
Topic Modeling is a popular search engine optimization technique as per which secondary keywords are identified and set which are nothing but close relations of the primary keywords and subsequently these secondary keywords are utilized to carry out content optimization for search engines.
Topic Sensitive PageRank
The Topic Sensitive PageRank is a common way of computing the PageRank for a page which works by creating topic related PageRank scores rather than producing a unique global score.
Trackback
Trackback refers to an automatic notification system such that you are notified whenever another external site mentions your website. Since they are completely automated in nature, trackbacks are quite highly prone to spam, which is why a large number of publishers turn it off owing to an abysmal signal to noise ratio.
Tracking Code
The tracking code is information discreetly included in the URL of a webpage that serves the purpose of tracking the efficiency or working of an advertisement. Referring Search Engine and Search Term is the most commonly tracked items through Tracking code.
Traffic
It is the total number of people that are actively using a website at the same time for a given time frame. Web owners use various techniques to attract more and more traffic to their website. This is because the amount of traffic also plays a role in earning a better rank for a link or website. Excess of traffic can cause the website to become inaccessible for a time period until the traffic has decreased for that moment.
Traffic Rank
The total estimate of the amount of traffic a website is getting at a given time period is Traffic Ranking. One can compare their website traffic with other by using Alexa.
Tragedy of the Commons
The Tragedy of the Commons is a story which explains in detail how a few righteous people need to give up some personal rights to ensure protection for the common populace. In marketing terms, user attention is the analog for the commons.
Trueview Ads
Video ads that have been specifically designed in Google AdWords are known as Trueview ads. These ads may come in either of two formats. In-steam ads are generally displayed before Youtube videos while in-display ads are displayed in search results on Youtube or Partner.
Trust Rank
It is a technique of analyzing the websites so that the good websites can be distinguished and saved by the spam websites. This is done by evaluating the linking relationship.
Twitter Retargeting
Another common form of retargeting specific to the microblogging website Twitter, Twitter Tailored Audiences are utilized to design campaigns which can serve relevant ads to users previously associated with the brand. Lists, twitter tags, and mobile app interactions are some common ways to utilize tailored audiences.
Typepad
Typepad is the name given to a hosted blogging platform designed by SixApart, which is also responsible for creating Movable Type. Typepad lets you publish websites either on the domain typepad.com or to create your own domain.
U
Unethical SEO
Search engine marketers, in some cases, try to falsify their services or products as being ethical while in reality they simply lack creativity. SEO services can never simply fall under ethical or unethical categories. They can, however, be either effective or ineffective.
Unique Value Proposition
UVP is nothing but a brief description of what makes your services unique and gives them the edge that they enjoy over other similar brands or services.
Universal Search
A universal search is a form of search where all types of search results are displayed as one as a part of a general search so that a user carrying out the search doesn’t have to navigate to other pages to look for videos, images or news articles.
Update
Updates are what search engine algorithms have to periodically go through in order to always stay ahead of the curve and dish out the latest services to its consumers. They ensure that search results always stay relevant and the search index always remains accurate.
URL
Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the address of a website. It contains the information about the location of a website on the World Wide Web. A website can only be accessed by entering its URL on a web browser.
URL Rewrite
URL Rewrite is a simple technique utilized for making URLs more descriptive and unique to guarantee and implement much better indexing all over the website by all major search engines.
Usability
Usability of a site refers to how well a site has been optimized for the users who visit the site. If it is easy for a user to navigate through a site and if all the features are functioning as intended by the developer, then the site is said to have a high usability.
Usage Data
Some common signs of quality for search engines may be a high proportion of repeat visitors, a high clickthrough rate, multiple page views for a single visitor, high frequency of brand based search queries and longer dwell times. Taking advantage of any of these signals, some search engines may try and boost the rankings of documents and websites, using algorithms such as Google’s Panda.
Usenet
Usenet is an archive of newsgroups where users typically post messages for multiple categories, termed newsgroups. It is quite similar to a bulletin board system and is the predecessor of the internet forums which are in wide use today.
User Generated Content
While creating content for websites influenced by users, some dedicated customers of a particular brand may try to include their brands in the content. Such content is generally referred to as user generated content or UGC for short and comes through social media or by virtue of direct posts on the brand’s website. UGC is a fantastic way of drastically increasing user engagement and gaining some perspective on the brand’s value.
V
Valid
If the codes used in an HTML/XML document conforms to that version of HTML/XML, the web page doesn’t display any errors when the document is finally tried on a browser. Such a web page is called a valid web page. The validity of an HTML/XML document can be checked through various validation services.
Vertical Search
Vertical Search is a search service which works with only a particular type of field, information or information format.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is a form of online marketing or marketing strategy that studies and makes use of the vast consumption of videos on the internet to look for specific patterns that can be utilized for promotions. Video marketing has grown exponentially with advances in smartphone technology with marketers now making active use of promotional videos to sell their content and create interactive marketing campaigns.
Viral Marketing
The latest form of internet marketing which makes use of the vast trend of information sharing on the internet by making such interesting and informative marketing ads that people are convinced to share promotional content without feeling the need to get paid for doing so.
Virtual Domain
A virtual domain is simply a website which is being hosted on a virtual server.
Virtual Server
A virtual server is one which lets more than one top level domains be hosted on an individual server or computer. While it is a beneficial form of hosting for smaller applications from a financial point of view, it does get tedious for grand commercial platforms which are best served by dedicated hosting.
Vlogs
Just as there are blogs which are in a text format, created by people regarding any topic of their liking, there’s Vlog which means blogging in the form of video. It follows the same concept; content is regarding any topic of creator’s choice. Vlogs came into being and got huge recognition on YouTube. Lots of YouTubers make vlogs which are mostly about their entire day.
W
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 has become a buzzword for the marketing industry based on the internet and is currently a raging idea that if properly implemented seeks to utilize the internet as a platform and make Wikis and all user-edited search operate under the same premise.
Web Browser
Web browsers are the software components necessary to connect to and view web pages on your desktops or mobile devices. Common examples are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple’s Safari.
Web Page
A Web Page is a single document linked with the World Wide Web that is meant to be displayed in a web browser. Web Pages are commonly written in HTML or XML, but sometimes other coding programs such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, and ASP are also used.
Web Server
Web Server is a collective noun for computers and programs that host websites and web pages. Web Servers use all kinds of software to connect to the network and make the websites they host available to users all over the world.
Web Standard
Web Standard is a set of guidelines and rules given by the World Wide Web Consortium to ensure consistency in web designing. In other words, Web Standard refers to the guideline that determines what a webpage should basically look like. One of the most important purposes of it is to establish a referable design for both browser and web page developers so that sites maintain their consistency across a range of platforms.
Webinar
Webinars are short for web seminars which are basically virtual seminars which can be attended by anyone in the world provided they have an internet connection. These webinars are fantastic opportunities for businesses to expand and like-minded individuals to collaborate.
Weibo
Weibo is the Chinese counterpart of Twitter since Twitter doesn’t really exist in the Chinese market. The only two services competing in the microblogging domain are Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo both of which have the distinct advantage over Twitter that they’re able to convey much more information in 140 characters as Mandarin happens to be a concise language.
Wales, Jimmy
Jimmy Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia.
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO is nothing but a distinct category of Search Engine Optimization practices that are distinguished for all of them are completely legal and aboveboard practices that are actively recommended by search engines themselves. While the opposite happens to be Black Hat SEO, which is a category of shady SEO practices which are in no way prescribed by search engines and following the same may even lead to a ban on your website.
Whois
Each domain has a separate and individual Whois record which stores ownership data. While a few domain registrars let you hide the ownership data for your website, large scale spammers have been found using fake or planted Whois data.
Widget
These are components of Graphical User Interface (GUI) which allows a user to interact with a website better. The interaction may include certain actions which the user may have to take. Widgets include pull-down menus, several icons, small applications, scroll bars and so on.
Wiki
A wiki is a user-submitted piece of information containing pictures or text and concerning a particular topic. The distinct feature of Wikis is that they are user controlled, which means anyone with an internet connection is free to use and modify the information as they please. The leading player in this domain happens to be Wikipedia.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free of cost online encyclopedia which is collaborative in nature and uses Wiki software.
Wordnet
Wordnet is a lexical archive of words from the English language which is used to study the relationships between different words by search engines.
WordPress
WordPress is a content management system that has grown to be extremely popular in the recent years and has been developed specifically for blogs. The reason why WordPress has reached such levels of success is that it offers great flexibility to build content and some amazing functionalities as well.
Wordtracker
Wordtracker is a paid keyword research tool which does not just feature rich but also extracts data from multiple famous and leading meta search engines, such as Dogpile.
X
Xenu Link Sleuth
Xenu Link Sleuth is a widely used software utilized for checking whether a given website has any number of broken links, be it internal or external. Another application of this tool is that it can create accurate sitemaps for websites.
XHTML
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) is a markup language used to write web pages. It’s a part of the family of XML languages. XHTML is similar to HTML 4.01 apart from a few exceptions.
XML
XML is a programming language short for Extensible Markup Language that developers often use to easily introduce pictures, videos or audio clips to pages and let users create their own custom elements. The ongoing transformation of the Web to Web 2.0 has been made possible only through the dedicated usage of XML.
XML SITEMAP
An XML sitemap guides through all the important web pages that are on a website. This enables Google to inspect the website thoroughly and then rank it accordingly on the search results page. An XML sitemap also helps a lot when it comes to search engine optimization.
Y
YAHOO
It is one of the most used web services providers. Services such as blogging, chatting, sending emails and messaging are provided. It is also into small businesses, advertising, and commerce. Even though its usage has declined since the 2000’s, it is still used widely as a search engine.
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo offers to its customers a free of cost questioning and answering service that is run completely by the visitors themselves. In this way, Yahoo! can easily create a bottoms-up network for free content for everyone.
Yahoo! Directory
Yahoo! Directory happens to be one of the first of its kind to have existed and still remains one of the most authoritative, popular and original web directories to date. It was started by Jerry Yang and David Filo way back in 1994.
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo! Search Marketing is the name given to Yahoo’s paid search platform, which was initially called Overture.
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer is simply a research tool to be used by webmasters in order to check what pages have been indexed from a certain website by Yahoo!, and the subsequent pages linked via those pages.
Yandex
Yandex is a search engine that has been recognized as the fastest growing search engine in the world. It mainly serves Russia and has markets in some other former Soviet Union nations as well. While the primary base of operation for Yandex is in the Cyrillic engine, it has now started experimenting with an English based search mechanism as well. Yandex Direct is a paid search program by Yandex similar to Google AdWords.
Youtube
Youtube is one of the most popular video sharing platforms of the world today and is also one of the most leading products owned by Google at the current time. It highly features rich and works through amateur video uploads and syndication.
Z
Z-Index
Z-Index is a CSS property used primarily for styling of web pages that allows for a better positioning and better control of the overlapping elements on a page. Z-Index is sometimes also associated with Black Hat SEO practices.
Zeal
Zeal was a web directory which was non-commercial in nature and was subsequently bought by Looksmart for the heavy amount of $20 million. Shockingly, soon after that, the directory shut down completely almost without any sort of a warning.
Zip
This is a file format which is used to store huge data in compressed form. That is, Bits are reduced from the original size of the data. One Zip file may consist of more than one compressed files. The file extension for Zip is usually ‘.zip’.
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