MEDIA CENTRE

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Glossary

You have heard all these online terms but don't know what they mean? Want to be able to talk the lingo and impress the people around you. Here are a couple of terms to help you out...

• 404 Page:

  Comes up when a URL on your site not found. This means that search bots and humans lose their way and generally leave at this juncture. Sad situation for your SEO.

• Above the fold:

  The ad appears on the top part of the screen before the users scrolls down.

• Ad Server:

  Technology used to serve online advertising.

• Ad Specs:

  The pixel and kb specification of an advert.

• Adwords:

  Google Pay Per Click contextual advertisement program, very common way of basic website advertisement.

• Affiliate Marketing:

  Performance based online marketing.

• Affiliate/Affiliate Marketing:

  An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or commissions.

• Alt attribute:

  The text equivalent inserted into the hyperlink for an object like an image that can't otherwise be discerned by a search engine.

• Analytics:

  A program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program.

• Anchor Text:

  The text that a user would click on to follow a hyperlink.

• Authority Site:

  A website which has many incoming links from other related expert/hub sites. Because of this simultaneous citation from trusted hubs an authority site usually has high trust, PageRank, and search results placement. Wikipedia, is an example of an authority site.

• Avatars:

  Graphical images representing people. They are what you are in virtual worlds. You can build a visual character with a body, clothes, behaviors, gender and name of your choice. This may or may not be an authentic representation of yourself.

• Backlinks:

  Offsite links pointing at a particular web page.

• Bandwidth:

  The amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given time period.

• Banner:

  A graphical ad placed on a web site or newsletter usually 468x60 pixels in size.

• Black Hat SEO:

  The practice of using unethical techniques to make your search rankings go up. Also known as spamdexing. Practices that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines like link-farms, keyword stuffing or cloaking. Search engines actively hunt those employing these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

• Bot(robot, spider, crawler):

  A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to "scrape" content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.

• Button:

  A smaller graphical ad which is usually 120x60 pixels in size.

• Canonicalization:

  The process of picking the best URL when there are several choices; this usually refers to home pages.

• C.P.A:

  Cost Per Acquisition (eg. Lead, download, sales etc.)

• C.P.M:

  Cost Per Thousand ad Impressions.

• Cache:

  The storing of a web page on a server by an organization to reduce bandwidth load.

• Cloak:

  Delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by humans. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and generally results in an outright ban for that site.

• CMS (Content Management System):

  Programs such as Wordpress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so chose.

• Comment Spam:

  Posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an inlink to another site. The reason many blogs use link codes like “rel=nofollow” to avoid sharing their reputation with this dodgy breed of link seeker.

• Cookie:

  An anonymous number that is stored on a computers browser, generally used to aid the effectiveness and measurement of online advertising.

• CPA(Cost Per Action):

  Online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement.

• CPC (Cost per Conversion):

  Describes the cost of acquiring a customer, typically calculated by dividing the total cost of an ad campaign by the number of conversions. The definition of "Conversion" varies depending on the situation: it is sometimes considered to be a lead, a sale, or a purchase.

• CPC bid:

  The amount of money you're willing to pay for a keyword ad.

• CPI (Cost Per Impression):

  Phrase often used in online advertising and marketing related to web traffic. It is used for measuring the worth and cost of a specific e-marketing campaign.

• CPL (Cost Per Lead also PPL - pay per lead):

  Method of marketing that enables an advertiser to receive membership or advertising services in return for paying per lead received from the marketing venue used.

• CPM (Cost Per Mille):

  Used in marketing as a benchmark to calculate the relative cost of an advertising campaign or an ad message in a given medium. Rather than an absolute cost, CPM estimates the cost per 1000 views of the ad.

• Crawler:

  Also called a 'spider' or 'robot/bot', is an automated program sent out by a search engine “reads” page text contents and web page coding, and also follows links to hyperlinked pages. It takes copies of the web pages it's crawled and stores these in the search engine's index.

• CSS (Cascading Style Sheet):

  A stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language.

• CTR (Click -Through Rate):

  The number of clicks received on an ad divided by the number of impressions served, expressed as a percentage.

• Deep Link:

  A link which points to an internal page within a website.

• DMOZ (Open Directory):

  Directory MOZilla is a human reviewed directory, the contents of which appear on many sites, including Google. A listing in DMOZ is said to assist boosting rankings in Google's general search results.

• Domain Name:

  An internet web site address.

• Expanding Adverts:

  An advert which changes size and which may alter the contents of the webpage.

• Feeds:

  The means, by which you can read, view or listen to items from blogs and other RSS-enabled sites without visiting the site, by subscribing and using an aggregator or newsreader. Feeds contain the content of an item and any associated tags without the design or structure of a web page.

• Flash:

  Used for creating high class animated and rich media ads.

• Floating Adverts:

  An advert which moves across the user's screen or floats above the content.

• Fold Over Adverts:

  Fold Over that sits in an upper corner of a web page until a viewer rolls the cursor over it. It then rapidly unfolds to cover the entire screen with an ad that has the various rich media capabilities.

• Forums:

  A discussion area on websites, where people can post messages or comment on existing messages asynchronously - that is, independently of time or place time. Chat is the synchronous equivalent.

• Frames:

  Web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within its own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to correctly navigate them. Additionally, most users dislike frames because it is almost like having two tiny monitors neither of which shows a full page of information at one time.

• Frequency:

  The number of times an ad is seen by a user

• Fuzzy Search:

  Search that can find matching terms even with misspellings.

• Geo-Targeting:

  Ads distributed based on geographic location.

• GIF:

  Graphics Interchange Format - the most common type of online image which can be static or animated.

• Google bomb:

  A collaborative project of multiple site owners with SEO skills to change/hack the Google search results for a particular phrase - usually for humorous effect. The “miserable failure” for George Bush is one memorable example.

• GoogleBot:

  Google's search engine spider.

• Google Bowling:

  Knocking a competitor out of the search results by pointing hundreds or thousands of low trust low quality links at their website.

• Google Juice:

  Trust, authority and pagerank from Google, which flows through outgoing links to external pages. Hidden Text an SEO technique used to show search engine spiders text that human visitors do not see.

• Groups:

  Collections of individuals with some sense of unity through their activities, interests or values. They are bounded: you are in a group, or not. They differ in this from networks, which are dispersed, and defined by nodes and connections.

• Hit:

  A request for a file on a web page. A hit is not a measurement that determines the popularity of a site (see "Page impressions" and "Unique User")

• Hits:

  Counts every element/image on a page - outdated way of measuring.

• House Ad:

  A publisher's own ad that is displayed on his/her site.

• HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language):

  Directives or "markup" which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.

• HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol):

  Communications protocol for the transfer of information on the intranet and the World Wide Web.

• Hybrid:

  A combination of pricing models.

• Hyperlink:

  A text link that links to another page or web site.

• IBL (Inbound Link):

  Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and PageRank.

• Impression Ad /Page:

  The request to load a single page of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web a page request would result from a web user clicking on a link on another HTML page pointing to the page in question.

• Inventory:

  The available advert impressions from a publisher.

• JPEG:

  Joint Photographic Experts Group - uses the extension .jpeg and is used for high quality images which are not animated.

• Keyword / Key Phrase:

  The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.

• Keyword Density:

  The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.

• Keyword Research:

  The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.

• Keyword Stuffing:

  Adding great numbers of keyword terms into the HTML or tags of a web page. An old but now useless SEO standard practice.

• Landing Page (PPC Definition)

  The destination page that an ad clicks through to.

• Landing Page (SEO Definition):

  The page that a user lands on when they click on a link in the Search Engine Result Page.

• Latent Semantic Indexing:

  LSI uses word associations to help search engines know more accurately what a page is about.

• Link:

  An element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page or another part of the current page.

• Link Popularity:

  Link popularity generally refers to the total number of links pointing to any particular URL.If you have more “links” than your competitors, you are typically known to have link cardinality or link superiority.

• Link Farm:

  A group of sites which all link to each other.

• Long tail:

  Longer more specific search queries that are often less targeted than shorter broad queries. For example a search for "widgets" might be very broad while "red widgets with reverse threads" would be a long tail search. A large percentage of all searches are long tail searches.

• Mindshare:

  A measure of the amount of people who think of you or your product when thinking of products in your category.

• Nofollow:

  Attribute used within a hyperlink like rel="nofollow" to prevent a link from passing link-authority (see comment spam).

• OBL (Outbound Link):

  A link pointing from your site to another site.

• ODP (Open Directory Project, See DMOZ):

  Is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

• Opt - In:

  Permission-based subscription to a newsletter.

• Opt - Out:

  A request to unsubscribe from a newsletter.

• Organic link:

  Organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.

• Organic search:

  Listings on SERPs that aren't paid for. The listings for which search engines do not sell space (eg. main body of Google search results vs. paid-for right side).

• OWBL (One way back link):

  One way link from an authority site to your webpage.

• Paid Inclusion:

  Paying a fee to a search engine to be included in that search engine or directory.

• Page Impression / Page view:

  A full download of a web page.

• PageRank:

  The Google logarithmic scale developed by Page and Brin while still at Stanford University for denoting importance of pages and web sites. Today it is one of hundreds of factors in the algorithm that determines a page's rankings.

• Personalization:

  Biases our search results based on our searching precedence.

• PPC(Pay Per Click):

  Contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

• PR (Pagerank ):

  A value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors.

• Reach:

  The number of unique users who have been served an advert.

• Reciprocal Link:

  Different sites that link out to each other.

• Referrer:

  In clicking on a link from one website to another, the previous site you were on will be the referrer.

• Rich Media:

  Adverts that allow for users interaction and can include sound, video and/ or animation.

• Robots.txt:

  a text file in the root of your site used to direct the activity of search engine crawlers. This file is typically used to tell a crawler which portions of the site should be crawled and which should not.

• ROS:

  ROS refers to (Run of Site); in certain instances the campaign is not targeted to a specific section on the publisher's site but is targeted to run across the site in any open position that is available.

• RSS:(Really Simple Syndication):

  A family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format.

• SE(Search Engine):

  A program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.

• SEM (Search Engine Marketing):

  Often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation):

  The process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favorably ranked by the search engine.

• SEP (Search Engine Positioning):

  The ranking of your website on search engine results pages.

• SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management):

  Process employed by companies to proactively shield their brands from damaging content brought to light through search engine queries.

• SERP(Search Engine Results Page):

  The listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.

• SIM (Social Influence Marketing):

  Social Influence Marketing is about leveraging social media at every stage of a marketing campaign, going beyond the life time of a campaign.

• SMM: (Social Media Marketing):

  Website or brand promotion through social media.

• SMO (Social Media Optimization):

  Set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, adding a "Digg This" button, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides, galleries or YouTube videos.

• SNS (Social Networking Site):

  Online places where users can create a profile for themselves, and then socialise with others using a range of social media tools including blogs, video, images, tagging, lists of friends, forums and messaging.

• Social Bookmark:

  A form of Social Media where user's bookmarks are aggregated for public access.

• Social Media:

  Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.

• Sponshorship:

  Exclusive placement within a particular area of a website or newsletter.

• Third Party Ad Server:

  An independent server which hosts ads not belonging to the publisher, advertiser or its agency.

• Threads:

  Strands of conversation. On an email list or web forum they will be defined by messages that use the same subject. On blogs they are less clearly defined, but emerge through comments and trackbacks.

• TR (Trust Rank):

  Link analysis technique described for semi-automatically separating useful WebPages from spam.

• Tracking:

  The study of website visitors and the unique behavior they exhibit.

• Trafficker:

  The person responsible for loading ads on an ad server.

• UGC (User Generated Content):

  Refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users.

• Unique Browser /Viewer:

  Number of individuals that see an impression - only counted once during the month.

• Unique User:

  One individual who has either visited a site or viewed an ad.

• URL (Uniform Resource Locator):

  The web address of a site or page.

• User:

  An individual who uses a computer.

• White Hat:

  SEO techniques, which do conform to current best-practice guidelines, and don't actively try to deceive or “game” the search engine results.

• Widgets:

  Stand-alone applications you can embed in other applications, like a website or a desktop, or view on its own on a PDA. These may help you to do things like subscribe to a feed, do a specialist search, or even make a donation.

• Wiki:

  Web page - or set of pages - that can be edited collaboratively. The best known example is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia created by thousands of contributors across the world. Once people have appropriate permissions - set by the wiki owner - they can create pages and/or add to and alter existing pages.

• WWW: (World Wide Web):

  A system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet (Commonly shortened to the Web).

• XML: (Extensible Markup Language):

  General-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own elements.