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Internet Marketing Glossary

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  • 301 Redirect
    A way to make one web page redirect the visitor to another page. Whenever you change the web address of a page, apply a 301 redirect to make the old address point to the new one. This ensures that people who have linked to or bookmarked the old address wi
  • Adware
    Adware is advertising supported software which automatically plays, displays or downloads advertisements to a computer.
  • Advertiser
    An Advertiser on the web is conceptually similar to an advertiser in traditional media - someone who individually or as an organization promotes their product or services through a public medium. However, the mechanisms of advertisng online, as well as the organizational capabilities needed for success, are quite different. Advertisers love the web because the results from the dollars they spend online are much more measurable than in traditional media. However, advertising online requires a very different mindset as the web is a conversational medium and ads cannot interrupt that conversation, especially as social media becomes an increasingly large part of the web's focus and content.
  • Affiliate
    An Affiliate is a website which links back to an e-commerce site such as Amazon.com (which was the first to use the concept) with the goal of making a commission for referred sales. The term is somewhat related to the broadcasting industry (especially in North America), where a network affiliate (or affiliated station) is a local broadcaster which carries some or all of the program line-up of a television or radio network, but is owned by a company other than the owner of the network.
  • Affiliate Network
    An Affiliate Network is a company that acts as market maker between advertisers who need affiliates and publishers who wish to earn revenue as affiliates. There are hundreds of these networks, the largest of which are Commission Junction and Linksys.
  • AOL Email
    AOL is mainly known as an ISP and for its front end proprietary client software which was one of the earliest interfaces to the world wide web (and which has now been supplanted by html front ends). However AOL has a more critical role for email marketers, as it is a major backbone for web traffic and thus email traffic. AOL has very strict spam controls on its network, and their front end makes it incredibly easy to report spam abuse. As a result, AOL is the first and primary vendor with whom you can be blacklisted when sending bulk emails. Once blacklisted, it is extremely difficult to clear your IP address(es) from that list, and the size of AOLs email traffic effectively prevents you from doing any email marketing.
  • Attitudinal Segmentation
    Attitudinal Segmentation categorizes target customer groups by a shared set of attitudes they maintain about the world they live in, people, products, or services.
  • Automated Bid Management System
    An Automated Bid Management System is a software tool that will continuously monitor bids and performance for CPC campaigns and automatically adjust bids for specific keywords based on specific goals, such as avg cost/click, avg position on page, etc.
  • A/B Testing
    A/B Testing is a technique that is used to test two different variables which could include comparing two elements of a landing page (e.g. page headline), two different creative ad units (one with red background, the other with green), offer (25% off, 30% off) or some other campaign variable, in a controlled environment. One of the two variations will be the baseline and the alternate solution, devoting 50% of the visits to baseline and alternative so that performance comparisons can be made once a statistically significant amount of data has been collected. It is important that tests change only one variable at a time so that changes in performance can be clearly attributed to the aspect being tested.
  • Above the Fold
    The portion of a web page that is viewable in the Internet browser window without scrolling. Ad units above the fold perform better and thus fetch higher prices than ad units below the fold.
  • ACRank
    ACRank stands for A-Citation-Rank and is a metric alculated and tracked by us at the domain level. ACRank values are between 0 and 15 and are designed as a measure of the authority of a webpage based on the number unique root domains that point at a webpage. See the SEO definition of ACRank for the precise details of how the number of domains linking to another domain are mapped to ACRank values. ACRank is viewed as a proxy to Page Rank by many Internet marketers, though the scales of the two metrics are different.
  • Adsense
    the Google advertising program where Internet publishers can sign up to be paid for agreeing to display advertising sold by Google on their website. Publishers who sign up can dedicate and specify specific locations within their website where ads will be shown. Publishers are provided a small piece of code from Google where the publisher will place that code at each location within their website where they wish to show ads. Oftentimes publishers will use AdSense revenue to offset publishing costs.
  • Adsense Arbitrage (Garbitrage)
    Adsense Arbitrage is a specific approach to Affiliate Arbitrage where the traffic is purchased through Google AdWords to a landing page made up of primarily PPC ads and affiliate links. Garbitrage is a phrase coined by Kris Jones at an animated SES “Dealing with Affiliates” panel in April of 2007.
  • Advertising Metrics
    Advertising metrics in Internet Marketing can be broken down into performance metrics and purchasing models. Common advertising performance metrics include: CTR, CPA and CTC. Common internet advertising models for Internet Advertising include: CPM, CPC and CPA
  • Affiliate Arbitrage
    Affiliate Arbitrage is a specific affiliate marketing strategy where affiliate marketers bid on keywords from programs such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft Advertising with Bing. The paid placement ads, purchased on a PPC model, link the ads to either their own affiliate marketing web site, or directly to the merchant website. Some merchants disallow direct linking from a PPC advertisement such as Amazon.com. To profitably implement affiliate arbitrage, the affiliate marketer must factor in cost per click bid price and conversion rates as compared to the commission or payout to ensure a profitability.
  • Alt Text
    The Alt text is an HTML attribute that specifies alternative text to be displayed (or to be “read aloud” by special accessibility software) when non-textual elements of a web page cannot be displayed; Not only is the Alt text is used for accessibility to enrich the online experience for those with disabilities, search engines use the alt text to help determine page relevancy and index content.
  • Analytics
    Sometimes referred to as web analytics which are tools used to measure number of visits to a website differentiating between new visits versus repeat visits, where those visitors come from, what content they interactive with on your website, how long they spend time on the site as well as other key information.
  • Autoresponder
    A software solution that is automatically invoked when a user sends an e-mail to a certain email address, this software automatically responds back an e-mail; autoresponder applications can be used to provide users with some valuable information such as a while paper or product brochure. It is a good mechanism to capture customer email addresses while promoting your business. Auto responders are sometimes bundled in with web hosting packages and are the e-mail equivalent of a fax-back service.
  • AdExcellence CompanyadCenter
    Microsoft adCenter powers paid search results on Microsoft’s bing, Yahoo! (as of November 2010), and other sites within its network. Microsoft adCenter is now the second largest paid search provider in the United States.
  • Advertising Network
    A group of websites where one advertiser controls all or a portion of the ads for all sites. A common example is the Google Search Network, which includes AOL, Amazon,Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves), and thousands of other sites. In Google AdWords, they offer two types of ad networks on the internet: search and display (which used to be called their content network).
  • AdWords
    AdWords is Google’s paid search marketing program, the largest such program in the world and in most countries with notable exceptions such as China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex). Introduced in 2001, AdWords was the first pay per click provider offering the concept of Quality Score, factoring search relevancy (via click:through rate) in along with bid to determine ad position.
  • Affiliate Marketing
    A type of internet marketing in which you partner with other websites, individuals, or companies to send traffic to your site. You will typically pay on a Cost per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost per Click (CPC) basis.
  • Algorithm
    The term search engines use for the formulae they use to determine the rankings of your Natural Listings. Search engines will periodically send a Spider through your website to view all its information. Their programs analyze then analyze this and other data to value your site and fix whether or not, and how high or low pages on your site will appears on various searches. These algorithms can be very complicated (Google alone currently uses 106 different variables) and search engines closely guard their algorithms as trade secrets.
  • ALT Tags
    HTML tags used to describe website graphics by displaying a block of text when moused:over. Search engines are generally unable to view graphics or distinguish text that might be contained within them, and the implementation of an ALT tag enables search engines to categorize that graphic. There is also talk that business websites will all be required to utilize ALT tags for all pictures to comply with certain American Disability Act requirements.
  • Astroturfing
    The process of creating fake grassroots campaigns. Astroturfing is often used specifically regarding review sites like Google Places, Yelp, Judy’s Book and more. These fake reviews can be positive reviews for your own company or slander against your competitors. Not a good idea.
  • A good search engine marketing company offering Paid Search will select an exhaustive set of industry
    related Search Terms, set up your accounts, write advertising copy, create Landing Pages, control your bidding (how much you’re willing to pay per Search Term click) and budgeting, and test and refine your advertising for effectiveness.
  • Banner Ads
    A Banner Ad is an embedded advertisement in a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser. Banner Ads are usually an image (gif, jpeg, png), JavaScript program or multimedia object constructed with Silverlight, Java, Shockwave or Flash, often employing animation, sound, or video to maximize presence. Images are usually in a high-aspect ratio shape (i.e. either wide and short, or tall and narrow) hence the reference to banners. These were the earliest, dominant form of online advertising using a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model until the economic downturn in 2001. At that point, Google introduced Adwords, based on a cost per click (CPC) model that has become the more dominant ad type and pricing model. Several types of banner advertising have also moved to the CPC model, although CPM still dominates the banner ad world.
  • Behavioral Segmentation
    Behavioral Segmentation groups target or existing customers by their behavior. Behavioral segmentation can categorize individuals by either specific behaviors or general behaviors, depending on how detailed the segmentation needs to be.
  • Bid-Based Advertising
    Bid-Based Advertising is a form on online advertising in which an advertiser makes a bid for an available slot on a publisher's site or within a bid-based network. The position of the ad on the page, or whether it is displayed at all, is determined by how the bid compares to other advertisers who are bidding for the space at the same time. Google's Adwords program is one form of bid-based advertising. Many other networks have bid-based advertising programs. Examples include vertical search engine shopping.com and the online directory superpages.com.
  • Blacklists
    Blacklists are maintained by email providers and spam filters of email spammers that prevent them from sending email across the Internet. One common mechanism for implementing blacklists is a DNS Blacklist. A DNS Blacklist, or DNSBL, is used by an Internet site to publish lists of IP addresses that should be avoided. The technology is built upon the Internet Domain Name System, or DNS. DNSBLs are chiefly used to publish lists of addresses linked to spamming. Most mail transport agent (mail server) software can be configured to reject or flag messages which have been sent from a site listed on one or more such lists.
  • Blogs
    A web log. Usually maintained by an individual to record on-going, or near real-time activities or thoughts. Often includes images and video. Like an online diary.
  • Brand
    A Brand is the promise made by a product or service. It consists of many elements, including product or service features, ancillary services (e.g. technical support), values espoused by the company, words and images the company associates with its businesses, and the media it uses to communicate about itself. The brand, when delivered, must meet the "expectation of the brand" (the mental model) in customers' minds. If it is does not, customers will lose trust in the brand and devalue it.
  • Brand Ladder
    A Brand Ladder is a tool used by marketers to express the features of a brand.
  • Brand Reach
    Brand Reach is the number of individuals exposed to a brand or product in a given period.
  • B2B
    Stands for Business to Business and represents a market focus where a business is marketing and selling its products and services to other businesses as opposed to consumers.
  • B2C
    Stands for Business to Consumer and represents a market focus where a business is selling its products and services directly to consumers as opposed to other businesses.
  • Below the Fold
    The Portion of a web page that is viewable in the Internet browser window only after scrolling; this includes the entire web page excluding the portion that is above the fold. Ad units below the fold perform worse than those above the fold and thus can be purchased at a discount relative to ad units above the fold.
  • BlackHat SEO
    A term referred to unethical tactics used to improve a website’s postion in the natural/organic search traffic. In this context, unethical means tactics that violate Google Webmaster Guidelines or Bing Webmaster Guidelines for successful indexing, both of which include best practices for having the search engines find, crawl and ultimate index your sites. These webmaster guidelines are updated with the most recent versions avaiable online (see preceding links). The guidelines have specific rules about what each search engine views as acceptable practices on how to effectively deploy and manage a website to best ensure that the website will be included in the search results.
  • Blended Search
    also referred to as Universal Search by Google, is used to describe the practice by search engines returning search results comprised of links to web pages, videos, audio clips and images as opposed to just returning website links in the search results. Blended Search Results provide the user with an interesting mix of multimedia resources and is a good way for search marketers to use engagement objects to get on the first page of Google Search Results for competitive search terms. Blended Search Results Example.
  • Bounce Rate
    The percentage of visitors to a website who view only one page before leaving the site. This is a key metric to track and is a good indication of landing or entrance page’s ability to monetize traffic to that page. This Bounce rate is calculated by the number of visits viewing one page divided by the total visitors entering that page. Bounce rate is associated with a defined period of time.
  • Brick and Mortar
    Term used by Internet marketers to refer to the portion of a business that is conducted at a physical address, as opposed to online; the opposite of e-commerce.
  • Browser
    Software used to navigate to and view websites. The following video is a good high-level overview of what a browser is and as importantly, what it is not. Simple enough for your parents to understand.
  • Backlinks
    Links from other websites pointing to any particular page on your site. Search engines use backlinks to judge a site’s credibility; if a site links to you, the reasoning goes, it is in effect vouching for your authority on a particular subject. Therefore, Link Building is an incredibly important part of Search Engine Optimization. How many links, the quality of the sites linking to you, and how they link to you all are important factors. Also called Inbound Links.
  • Baidu– Serving primarily China, Baidu is the largest non
    US based search engine in the world (although it was started in the United States). Sites can be optimized for Baidu and they offer their own paid search service.
  • Banned
    When pages are removed from a search engine’s index specifically because the search engine has deemed them to be violating their guidelines. Although procedures are starting to loosen up somewhat, typically a search engine will not confirm to you that your site has been banned or why it has been banned. If you knowingly did something against the rules (written or unwritten) that got your site banned, you can probably clean up your act and get back in the game. We hear stories, though, from time to time of companies hiring Search Engine Optimization companies that deliver great, fast results, leave town, and then their website mysteriously disappears from the rankings. Google won’t tell them why their site got banned, so the company ends up left out in the cold unless another company can come in and backwards engineer the issues, unravel the work, and get the search engine to reinclude the site.
  • Banners
    Picture advertisements placed on websites. Such advertising is often a staple of internet marketing branding campaigns. Depending upon their size and shape, banner ads may also be referred to as buttons, inlines, leaderboards, skyscrapers, or other terms. When using specifics, banner ads refer to a 468×60 pixel size. Banner ads can be static pictures, animated, or interactive. Banner ads appear anywhere on a site: top, middle, bottom, or side. Banner costs vary by website and advertiser; two of the most popular pay structures are Cost per 1,000 Impressions (CPM) and flat costs for a specified period of time.
  • Behavioral Targeting (BT)
    An area of internet marketing becoming increasingly refined, behavioral targeting looks to put ads in front of people who should be more receptive to the particular message given past Web behavior, including purchases and websites visited. The use of cookies enables online behavioral targeting.
  • Bingbing
    Bing is Microsoft’s search engine, which replaced live.com in June 2009. Bing results now power Yahoo!’s search for paid (except display; through Microsoft adCenter) and organic (except local listings) through an alliance entered into between the two Web giants in December 2009. The deal cleared regulatory concerns in early 2010 and was fully completed in November of the same year.
  • Black Hat SEO
    The opposite of White Hat SEO, these Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, tactics are (attempted) ways of tricking the Search Engines to get better rankings for a website. If not immediately, using black hat methods will eventually get your site drastically lower rankings or banned from the search engines altogether. While there are completely legal and ethical techniques you can use to improve rankings, if you design and market a website mostly for humans and not for the search engines’ Spiders, you should be okay.
  • Brand Stacking
    Multiple page one listings from a single domain. Prior to 2010, a site would be fortunate if it had three first page results for branded searches. Since Google tweaked its algorithm to include Brand Stacking, that number has risen to as many as eight of the top search rankings.
  • Blog
    A part of your website where you should regularly publish content (e.g. commentary on industry/company topics, descriptions of events, photos, videos, etc.). Each blog post on your website is a new page that a search engine sees, and therefore a new oppor
  • Click Fraud
    Under the CPC model, Click Fraud occurs when a publisher generates fake clicks solely for the purpose of inflating revenues earned from advertisers. e.g. by having a person sit in the office and click on Google Ads that appear on the publisher's site. Click fraud can also be caused under other scenarios, e,g. by a competitor, who by clicking on an advertiser's CPC ads causes the advertiser to pay for ads that will never generate revenue.
  • Click-Through Rate
    The Click-Through Rate, or CTR, is a measure of audience receptiveness to an online ad or email. Click-Through Rate is the percentage of people that click on an ad or email N(c) divided by the total number of impressions N(p). CTR = N(c)/N(p).
  • Cohort
    A Cohort is a group of objects or individuals being studied in a statistical research program that share one or more common characteristics.
  • Conjoint Analysis
    Conjoint analysis, also called multi-attribute compositional models or stated preference analysis, is a market research technique in which research participants are required to make a series of trade-offs. Analysis of these trade-offs reveals the relative importance of the features or attributes that are being compared. Conjoint analysis has traditionally been carried out using some form of multiple regression, but in recent years a more probablistic approach using Bayesian analysis has become more prevalent..
  • Consumer Research
    Market research that focuses on defining attitudes, behaviors, preferences, or other characteristics of consumer cohorts.
  • Content Quality
    Two meanings. 1. Whether the writing, images, video, or flash on a web page meets generally accepted standards of semantics, style, and grammer. 2. From an SEO perspective, whether or not the content on a web page follows best practices for getting high search engine rankings on the desired keyword.
  • Conversion Rate
    Conversion Rate is the number of people who buy a product or service from a specific offer, divided by the number of people to whom the offer was presented (impressions). CR = N(b)/N(t) where N(b) equals the number of buyers and N(t) is the namber of impressions solicited to the offer. On the web, conversion rate often measures conversion from one page to another, or from a specific page to a purchase (on an ecommerce site).
  • Cookie Stuffing
    Cookie Stuffing is a blackhat online marketing technique used to generate fraudulent affiliate sales. It involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor's computer without their knowledge, As a result, the affected user generates fraudulent affiliate sales when they visit the target publisher's site and either creates an account or makes a purchase (depending on the terms of the affiliate agreement).
  • Cost Per Lead (CPL)
    A payment mechanisism that pays a publisher every time his website, email, or landing page delivers a lead to the advertiser.
  • Cost Per Thousand (CPM)
    Cost Per Thousand is a payment mechanism by which a publisher is paid by an advertiser for every thousand times an ad is presented on their website. This model is most similar to the more traditional print, radio, and tv advertising models and is the payment mechanism that has the most business risk. Under this model, the only performance promise made by the publisher is to show the ad in an agreed-to location on the website. If no one ever clicks on the ad, the publisher is still paid.
  • Cost Per Order (CPO)
    See Cost Per Acqusition.
  • Crisis Public Relations
    Crisis Public Relations is another name for the immediate triage response of a public relations team to a significant event that has an large negative impact on a company's, brand's, or person's reputation.
  • Customer Relationship Management System
    A system used to manage any or all customer facing activities, including pre-sales, sales, post-sales, and customer service.
  • Customer Segmentation
    Customer Segmentation is the act of categorizing a group of prospective or actual buyers into subgroups based upon some set of common criteria that those buyers share. Segmentation is often done on demographic, psychographic, geographic, behavioral, or attitudinal characteristics.
  • CAN-SPAM
    Stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. The CAN-SPAM Act is a federal law, passed by Congress in 2003 and signed into law by George Bush in January of 2004, which governs the circumstances in which a marketer can send email solicitations. Penalties for violating terms of CAN-SPAM include fines up to $11,000 per incident and possible jail time for repeat offenders.
  • Click-Through
    The act of clicking on an online advertisement, redirecting the user to the advertisers offer page, sometimes referred to as “clicking-through” to the advertisers offer. Advertisers who purchase ad space on a CPC (Cost per Click) or PPC (Pay per Click) basis are charge a fee each time their add is clicked.
  • Commission
    A fee paid to an affiliate or partner who drives traffic to the merchant’s website resulting in a sale. Commissions can be based on a flat fee or percentage of sale. Commissions can be one time, or for subscription based products, can be a recurring payment.
  • Cookie
    A cookie is a file sent by a website and saved by a users a web browser used to record a user’s activities on a particular websites. Cookies can be used to track where a users came from (referring link), what ads they clicked on, if made a purchase or submitted their information in a lead form. Cookies can provide functionality like remembering passwords to commonly visited websites or maintain persistent shopping carts even after you have left a website or turned your computer off. Cookies are used to implement re marketing and re targeting advertising strategies. As you can imagine, there are many privacy advocacy groups who view cookies as an invasion of privacy.
  • Content
    Content is the information contained in text, visual images, audio sounds and video formats providing value to Internet users. In SEM (Search Engine Marketing), unique, relevant content is one of the most important variables in attracting repeat visitors, inbound links to positively impact search engine page rank.
  • CPA
    Stands for Cost per Acquisition. In this Internet advertising model, the advertiser pays a flat fee or percentage of sale for each conversion, regardless of click-through or conversion rates. The publishers generally like this model least as click-through and conversion rates are generally outside of their control, yet their ability to monetize their inventory efficiently depend on these two key performance metrics. CPA is the how performance advertisers doing direct response, prefer to acquire their media is it fixes the cost per acquisition to enable them to manage their advertising ROI. Performance advertisers, large and small, get much of the advertisement distribution through affiliate marketers who are set up to manage campaigns on a CPA basis.
  • CPC
    Stands for Cost per Click. In this advertising model, the advertiser pays a flat fee for each click. When everything is tracking correctly and pages load to completion, their is a one to one correlation between clicks and visitors. In this model, publisher’s revenue is directly impacted by CTR (Click Through Rates), which is driven by offer differentiation, creative quality and call to action, all of which are generally outside the publishers control. Advertisers prefer this model over CPM since they are guarantee to get a certain amount traffic independent of the realized click through rate which can vary by publisher, even for the same offer, creative and call to action.
  • CPM
    Cost per a thousand impressions. In this advertising model, the advertiser pays a flat fee for 1000 impressions, where each impression is an instance of their ad being displayed. Publishers prefer to sell advertising space using this model as their revenues are more stable and correlated directly with their traffic level. In this model, the advertiser is going to monitor click through rates and conversion rates to judge the overall performance of their campaign and ROI on their advertising investment.
  • CRO
    Acronym that stands for Conversion Rate Optimization includes testing various aspects of a website to improve the rate at which website visitors perform some desired action prior to leaving a website. This can include changing the anchor text in links to increase click through rates, modifying buttons that correspond to some desired action, modifying an opt-in form used to capture email address for an email signup, changing the call to action and a myriad of other factors that can be tweaked while tracking the results.
  • Crowdsourcing
    The process of posing a question a large group of people to try to get to the best answer quickly. Crowdsourcing examples include asking a question on LinkedIn, posing a question on a blog or asking for input to a problem on a forum.
  • CTC
    Stands for Click To Conversion and is calculated by dividing the number of clicks (visitors) received from a specific ad unit or link divided by the number of resulting conversions, typically defined as a captured sales lead or completed sales transaction. CTC is on of the most important Internet Marketing performance metrics used to evaluate online campaign ROI (Return on Investment) and represents an online campaign’s efficiency of converting visitors to leads and/or customers.
  • CTR
    Stands for Click Through Rate and is calculated by the number of clicks received from a specific ad unit or link divided by the number of times that unit or link was shown. CTR is on of the most important key performance metric used to evaluate online campaigns when the goal of the campaign is primarily to increase website traffic.
  • Categories
    Words or phrases used to organize blog posts and other pieces of information, such as albums for photos. Categories are generally broader than tags and used in instances when there will generally be multiple posts or other data points per category.
  • ccTLD
    ccTLD’s are “Country:code” TLD‘s showing what country a site is focused on or based in. Using Google and the United Kingdom as an example, Google UK is google.co.uk. Sometimes these ccTLD’s are two sets of letters separated by a period (e.g. “co.uk” for the UK or “com.au” for Australia) and sometimes they are just one set of letters (e.g. “.fr” for France).
  • Click through Rate (CTR)
    # of clicks / # of impressions. Click through rate is a common internet marketing measurement tool for ad effectiveness. This rate tells you how many times people are actually clicking on your ad out of the number of times your ad is shown. Low click through rates can be caused by a number of factors, including copy, placement, and relevance.
  • Cloaking
    Showing a search engine spider or bot one version of a Web page and a different version to the end user. Several search engines have explicit rules against unapproved cloaking. Those violating these guidelines may find their pages penalized or banned from a search engine’s index. As for approved cloaking, this generally only happens with search engines that offer a paid inclusion program. Anyone offering cloaking services should be able to demonstrate explicit approval from a search engine for what it is they intend to do.
  • Content Management System
    Content Management Systems (CMS) allow website owners to make text and picture changes to their websites without specialized programming knowledge of software like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage. Content Management Systems can be edited by anyone with basic word knowledge via an internet connection. No need for length or costly web development contracts or need to wait on someone outside your company to make changes. CMS examples include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.
  • Content Network
    Each major search engine offers a form of content network within its paid search interface, typically referred to as content networks, although Google just renamed their content network the Google Display Network. Within Google AdWords, advertisers have two options for content network advertising:
  • Content Tags
    HTML tags which define the essence of the content contained within them and readable by search spiders. These include Header and Alt Tags.
  • Contextual Advertising
    A feature offered by major search engine advertisers allowing your advertisement to be placed next to related news articles and on other Web pages. Contextual advertising seeks to match Web content from the display page with your advertised search term(s). Contextual advertising isn’t perfect (what in life is?), but it’s come a long way from its inception to the point where it can provide great value to advertisers when used correctly.
  • Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
    An online advertising cost structure where you pay per an agreed upon actionable event, such as a lead, registration, or sale.
  • Cost per Click (CPC)
    A common way to pay for search engine and other types of online advertising, CPC means you pay a pre:determined amount each time someone clicks on your advertisement to visit your site. You usually set a top amount you are willing to pay per click for each search term, and the amount you pay will be equal or less to that amount, depending on the particular search engine and your competitors’ bids. Also referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC) or Paid Search Marketing.
  • Cost per Impression (CPM)
    A common internet marketing cost structure, especially for banner advertising. You agree to pay a set cost for every 1,000 Impressions your ad receives. Search engine marketing may involve CPM costs for Contextual Advertising. This internet advertising pay structure should really be called Cost per 1,000 Impressions.
  • Crawler
    Component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically “crawling” the Web. A search engine’s crawler (also known as a Spider or robot) follows links to Web Pages. It makes copies of those pages and stores them in a search engine’s index.
  • CSS
    CSS: short for Cascading Style Sheet: is a way to move style elements off individual Web pages and sites to allow for faster loading pages, smaller file sizes, and other benefits for visitors, search engines, and designers.
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
    Software solutions that help enterprise businesses manage customer relationships in an organized way. An example of a CRM would be a database containing detailed customer information that management and salespeople can reference in order to match customer needs with products, inform customers of service requirements, etc.
  • Database Marketing
    Database Marketing is the use of databases to determine target recipients to receive an offer. An email or direct mail campaign would almost always be considered a form of database marketing. What distinguishes database marketing from other forms of marketing is the fact that sophisticated analytic tools are applied to databases containing large amounts of data about individuals backgrounds and buying behaviors. These analytics cross-tabulate data in myriad ways to find the customer segments most likely to respond to a specific offer from the advertiser.
  • Data Mart
    A Data Mart is a company whose main business is collecting large amounts of data about individuals, their backgrounds, their attitudes, and their behavior and selling that data, as well as their analytic services, to companies who wish to better understand their customers and/or make offers to those customers. Data marts can collect both personally identifiable information (PII) or data for which the specific person is not known.
  • Directory
    A web directory or link directory is a web site that specializes in linking to other websites. Directory categorization is usually based on the web site overall rather than one page or a set of keywords. Sites are often limited to inclusion in only a few categories. Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness. The two most well-known directories are Yahoo! Directory (which was the first directory developed) and the directory of the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ.
  • Directory Submission
    A submission of a web site, its address, and description to a directory that allows submission by site owners.
  • Display Advertising
    Display advertising is a form of online advertising where an advertiser uses graphics, pictures, or other artwork as part of the ad. Banner ads are the most common form of display advertising, enough so that the two terms - banner advertising and display advertising - are used interchangeably.
  • DMOZ
    DMOZ is an abbreviation for directory.mozilla.org, which is the directory of the Open Directory Project (ODP). It is a multi-lingual, open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape. It is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. DMOZ is very difficult to get into, but very worthwhile as it propogates its entries to numerous other directories.
  • Double Opt-in
    The recommended approach for setting up an email newsletter or any email list where the person submits their email address for the first opt-in then clicks a link in an email automatically from the list owner which is the second time they perform an opt-in action, hence the term Double Opt-in. Support of this feature in email marketing software and service platforms, both paid and free, is common. The eBiz ROI Weekly Newsletter Sign-Up works this way. See how to collect email addresses for more information.
  • Domain Names
    The human readable name of a website address. Domain names must be unique and are the part of the URL or website address that is immediately following the “http://” or “https://” up to and including the first “/”. By way of example, the domain name portion of the URL for this page http://www.ebizroi.com/glossary is www.eBizROI.com, or more precisely, eBizROI.com. The Internet and software to access it converts domain names entered in a browser to an IP address necessary to connect to the appropriate web resource to request content.
  • Dwell Time
    The time that a user spends on a website, from the time they arrive on the website until the time they leave the website. This is referred to by some Internet marketers as time on site. Dwell time is a key engagement metric and perofrmance indicator for many marketers. The higher the dwell time, the better as it shows that a websites users are actively engaged in the content. The presumtion is that Internet users are actively engaged on a website until they exit, but dwell time is inflated by users who get interupted and exit from an attetention context but may not close out the browser or exit the page until much later. Therefore, dwell time should be viewed as a directional Internet marketing metric as opposed to absolute one. Advertisers purchasing on a CPM (cost per 1000 displays of an ad) will use dwell time as a comparison factor on media buys as it can help predict ad exposure, both in terms of how long an ad is potentially on screen (depends on ad position in page) and the likihood of that ad being viewed.
  • Day Parting
    Day parting refers to serving ads at different times of the day and days of the week, or even changing bids or copy / creative at different times. For example, you may not want your ads to show from 11AM:2PM on Tuesdays. This can be done manually in most online platforms, or automatically in some such as Google AdWords. Automated day parting is not currently available directly through many social media advertising platforms such as facebook ads and LinkedIn direct ads.
  • Delisting
    When pages or whole websites are removed from a search engine’s index. This may happen because, but not necessarily, they have been Banned.
  • Description Tags
    HTML tags which provide a brief description of your site that search engines can understand. Description tags should contain the main keywords of the page it is describing in a short summary: don’t go crazy here with Keyword Stuffing.
  • Directories
    A type of search engine where listings are gathered through human efforts rather than Web crawling. In directories, websites are often reviewed, summarized to a brief description and placed in a relevant category.
  • Doorway Page
    A Web page created to rank well in a search engine’s organic listings (non:paid) and delivers very little information to those viewing it. Instead, visitors will often only see a brief call to action (i.e., “Click Here to Enter”), or they may be automatically propelled past the doorway page. With cloaking, they may never see the doorway page at all. Several search engines have guidelines against doorway pages, though they are more commonly allowed through paid inclusion programs. Also referred to as bridge pages, gateway pages and jump pages and not to be confused with Landing Pages.
  • Domain Name Monitoring
    Watching Domains across various extensions. Some companies offer to do this for, say a .com site by checking the same domain name in .net, .org, .eu, etc.
  • Domain
    The main web address of your site (example: www.yoursite.com). It's good to renew ownership of your domain for several years. Search engine rankings favor websites with longer registrations because it shows commitment.
  • Earnings Per Hundred Clicks
    Earnings Per Hundred Clicks, also known as EPC, is the ultimate test to tell which of the affiliates you're promoting is performing the best. For example, is an affiliate program that pays $100 commission better than a program that pays $5 commission? EPC is a way of better understanding the business value of the relationship. EPC is calculated by dividing the commission generated by an affiliate C(a) by the the number of clicks N(c), so that EPC = C(a)/N(c)
  • eCommerce
    The ability to purchase online. eCommerce also goes by other super:snazzy names like etail. website features that allow ecommerce are commonly called shopping carts.
  • EdgeRank
    The algorithm facebook uses to rank a page’s or profile’s posts to determine which of those posts will appear in the newsfeeds of users connected to those pages and profiles (or pages and profiles tagged in the posts). The higher an EdgeRank, the more likely you will appear in the newsfeeds. Facebook does not release this data publicly, neither for the pages, nor individual posts.
  • Ego Keyword
    A keyword an individual or organization feels it must rank for in either or both natural listings or paid search results regardless of cost and Return on Investment. Read more about ego keywords.
  • Email Campaign System
    Email is perhaps the most overlooked and underutilized (based on cost and effectiveness) form of internet marketing today. Email campaign systems allow organizations to send out emails to their email lists with a standard look and feel. Features often include the ability to segment lists.
  • Enhanced Bidding
    A feature specific to Google AdWords. When you select to utilize enhanced bidding, you’re giving AdWords the power to adjust your bidding in order to increase conversions. With this feature, you can pay up to 30% over the keyword bid that you set. Think of it like a hybrid between CPC and CPA bidding, albeit still more heavily weighted toward cost per click. Be careful with enhanced bidding: many search engine marketers will tell you that they have had poor experiences with cost per acquisition bidding within AdWords.
  • Eyetracking
    A process that allows testing of websites for usability or any other purpose. Eyetracking is performed by a small number of companies utilizing high speed cameras to monitor and record where the eyes of test subjects actually move on screen.
  • Focus Group
    A Focus Group is a number of people brought together into a small group setting for the purpose of researching some aspect of their attitudes or behavior. A focus group allows researchers to interact directly with cohorts or customer segments and to probe individuals on a much deeper basis than can be accomplished with a survey vehicle.
  • Frequency
    Frequency is the number of times a member of a marketing cohort receives an impression for a specific product or brand within a specific period.
  • FSI
    Stands for Free Standing Insert; an FSI is a preprinted advertising message which is inserted into, print media unbound. These are most commonly found in newspapers.
  • Favicon
    Is a contraction of the words Favorite Icon and is pronounced fav-icon; A favicon is a customized icon that is displayed to the left of the to the website URL in the browser address bar.
  • FTP
    Stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP was designed to support the quick and easy transfer of files to computers connected by networks, either private networks and/or the Internet. Most applications that require the transfer of files such as web development environments or content management systems, support the FTP protocol.
  • Facebook Retargeting
    While this term can also refer to other forms of retargeting, it is most often used to mean serving ads to prior site visitors while those visitors are on facebook. Facebook opened its ad exchange in December 2012 to allow partners to offer facebook retargeting.
  • Feed
    feed buttonComing in an XML language that uses either RSS or Atom formatting are an extremely popular way for organizations to get their messages through the clutter and into the hands of interested parties. With the simple click of an orange button (right), users can stay connected to a site’s content (Blogs, news, podcasts, etc.) automatically anytime their computers are connected to the internet. That button will connect you to the feed for the Found Blog.
  • Forum
    A place on the internet where people with common interests or backgrounds come together to find information and discuss topics.
  • FacebookSocial Networking
    A type of Social Media, Social networking websites allow users to interact and create or change content on the site. These sites, of which businesses are now using for marketing purposes, allow users to create their own websites / online spheres (e.g. LinkedIn and facebook), share photographs (e.g. flickr), microblog / text small bits of information to their personal community (e.g. twitter) or recommend information for others to find on the Internet (e.g. del.icio.us and Digg). The sites in this last grouping are also referred to as social bookmarking or social news sites. There are also a growing number of sites that are heavily dependent on mobile and geographic locations, such as foursquare.
  • Googlebot
    A Google software program, often referred to as a “spider,” designed to continually discover and index new Internet content to keep current Google’s search engine database and search results returned to users.
  • Google Analytics
    A valuable analytics tool offered by Google that enables web site owners to track unique visitors to a website distinguishing between new and repeat visitors, how those visitors got to the website called traffic sources and what they did after they got there. Traffic sources are broken down into search, direct and referrals. Google Analytics is offered free and is used by many businesses to track website and Internet Marketing ROI.
  • Google AnalyticsAnalytics
    Also known as Web Metrics. Analytics refers to collection of data about a website and its users. Analytics programs typically give performance data on clicks, time, pages viewed, website paths, and a variety of other information. The proper use of Web analytics allows website owners to improve their visitor experience, which often leads to higher ROI for profit:based sites.
  • Geo
    Targeting: The ability to reach potential clients by their physical location. The major search engines now all offer the ability to geo:target searches in their Pay:Per:Click campaigns by viewing their ip addresses. Geo:targeting allows advertisers to specify which markets they do and don’t want to reach.
  • Golden Triangle
    Eye:tracking studies show an “F” shaped pattern that most people tend to look at most often when looking at Search Engine Results Pages. These patterns vary slightly among the different Search Engines, but show the importance of placement among Natural Listings and Pay:per:Click ads.
  • Google AdWords Certified PartnerGoogle AdWords Certified Partner
    Google AdWords offers the most extensive certification process of any of the paid search marketing providers. The Google AdWords Certified Partner program replaces the earlier Qualified Google Advertising Company / Individual program.
  • Graphical Search Inventory
    Banners and other types of advertising units which can be synchronized to search keywords. Includes pop:ups browser toolbars and rich media.
  • HTML
    Stands for HyperText Markup Language used to implement web pages. HTML provides web browsers (e.g. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.) with the instructions to display web pages
  • Hyperlink
    Often blue and underlined, hyperlinks, commonly called “links” for short, allow you to navigate to other pages on the Web with a simple click of your mouse. This hyperlink takes you to a page with more information about Direct Online Marketing™’s free consultations.
  • Headings
    Text on your website that is placed inside of a heading tag, such as an H1 or H2. This text is often presented in a larger and stronger font than other text on the page.
  • Integrated Online Presence
    Integrated Online Presence (IOP) is a OnlineMatters developed term describing an approach to internet- and multi-channel marketing. IOP focuses on creating a holistic presence for a brand and/or product on the World Wide Web that maximizes both reach and frequency of impressions to specific and well-understood customer segments.
  • Interactive Advertising
    Interactive Advertising is a term that describes a form of ad on a publisher website with which the viewer can perform an action that causes the ad to respond. Adwords and other CPC programs are one form, clickable banner ads are another. There are also interactive ads that only respond upon mouse rollover but are not clickable.
  • Insertion Order
    Offen referred to as an IO. Insertion Orders are contracts between an advertiser/agency and a publisher/ad network. Insertion orders detail pricing model (CPM, CPC, CPA), total contract amount, payment terms, the duration of the contract/advertising campaign and the out clause which is how much official notice on a cancellation that an Internet advertiser or agency must provide the publisher or ad network displaying the ad.Advertisers prefer shorter out clauses, especially when testing a new publisher or ad network. Publishers and ad network always prefer a longer out clause. At a minimum, they will have to cover cost for campaign setup and management.
  • Insider Pages
    is an online “local search” service operated by IAC/InterActiveCorp. Before its acquisition by IAC the company was based in Redwood Shores, California, and had over 600,000 reviews of local merchants around the country.[1]. The following blog post shows how easy it is to get your free Insider Pages business listing, complete with screen caps and accompanying description of the process.
  • Image Maps
    Clickable regions on images that make links more visually appealing and websites more interesting. Image maps enable spiders to “read” this material.
  • Impressions
    The number of times someone views a page displaying your ad. Note that this is not the same as actually seeing your ad, making placement and an understanding of the site’s traffic particularly important when paying on a Cost per 1,000 Impressions basis.
  • Inbound or Incoming Links
    See Backlinks
  • Index
    The collection of information a search engine has that searchers can query against. With crawler:based search engines, the index is typically copies of all the Web pages they have found from crawling the Web. With human:powered directories, the index contains the summaries of all the websites that have been categorized.
  • Internet Marketing
    Any of a number of ways to reach internet users, including Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Banner advertising. Direct Online Marketing™ specializes in these internet marketing services.
  • Internal Linking
    Placing hyperlinks on a page to other pages within the same site. This helps users find more information, improve site interaction, and enhances your SEO efforts.
  • Interstitial
    An ad that appears between two pages a person is trying to view. The ad often appears near a hyperlink allowing someone to quit viewing your ad and go directly to the page he or she originally tried to access. Direct Online Marketing™ typically does not employ this type of advertisement as part of its internet marketing services.
  • Javascript
    A scripting language that allows website administrators to apply various effects or changes to the content of their website as users browse it. Search engines often have difficulty reading content that is inside of Javascript, but they are getting better
  • Keywords
    A Keyword is an index term, subject term, subject heading, or descriptor, in information retrieval. Keywords are used by search engines to determine relevance of entries in their indices to a specific query.
  • Keyword Density
    Keyword Density is a measure of the number of repetitions of a keyword on a web page. Keyword density is often one of the key metrics used by search engine optimization specialists to determine if a page is optimized for a specific keyword.
  • Keyword Optimization
    intentional use keywords within a web page to improve a pages position in search results for that keyword, targeting 2-4 occurrences of keyword per hundred words of copy
  • Key Phrase
    A group of words, usually surrounded by quotes, entered into a search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing) the purposed of finding related web content
  • Keyword Stuffing
    When the Web was young and search engines were strating to gain in popularity, some smart website owners realized that the search engine Algorithms really liked some Meta Tags. Really liked them. So they started stuffing a bunch of keywords, often with high search volumes and no relevancy to the site, into title, description, and keyword tags. Sites instantly rocketed to great SERPs. Soon thereafter the search engines changed their ranking formulae and the sites lost their positions or were outright Banned.
  • Keyword Tags
    HTML tags which define the keywords used on Web pages. Meta keyword tags used to carry great weight with some older search engines until they caught up with the spammers using this practice and modified their algorithms. Today Google is officially on record for not giving these tags any weight.
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
    Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are financial and non-financial metrics used to help an organization define and measure progress toward organizational goals. An example is checkout abandonment, when shoppers exit before completing an order. This KPI should be monitored closely by all ecommerce businesses. If it is typically 10 percent and suddenly goes to 15 percent, that may be an indicator that something is broken on your website, like your SSL, your shipping estimator, or your credit card authorization. By monitoring that KPI daily, you will mitigate the risk of losing business if something breaks
  • Keyword
    A word that a user enters in search. Each web page should be optimized with the goal of drawing in visitors who have searched specific keywords.
  • Landing Page
    A Landing Page is a content page on a website to which traffic is directed, either through paid search or email marketing.
  • Lead Nurturing
    Lead Nurturing is a process by which leads are tracked and developed into sales opportunities. Lead nurturing usually begins with an unqualified lead (suspect) entered into a CRM system. The CRMS is then used to send offers to the suspect to which they respond. Leads are categorized based on their behaviors and subsequent offers are made based on that categorization. Leads either move into the next step in a sales process or are set aside for future development/nurturing.
  • Link Analysis
    Link Analysis is the examination of links on a website to determine their effect on the site's rankings in the search engines. Link analysis covers both links into the site from other websites (inbound links), as well as links within a site (site cross-linking).
  • Link Building
    Link Building is an active program that increases the number of inbound links into a web site or cross-linking within a web site in order to increase that site's placement in the search engine rankings for specific keywords.
  • Long Tail Key Phrases
    Refers to a key phrase that is comprised of at least 4 words and is generally characterized by lower search volume. Search queries with long tail key phrases are generally enclosed in quotes returning only pages that are indexed on the exact phrase. Since Long Tail Key Phrases are very specific, the response rates tend to be higher when the anchor text, description or pay per click ad copy is tailored to a specific niche.
  • Landing Page
    The first page a person sees when coming to your website from an advertisement. This page can be any page on your website including your home page. Almost anytime you direct someone to your website from an advertisement, you should send them to a specialized landing page with tailored information to increase your landing page conversion rate. Radio advertisements are a notable exception as spelling out specific URL‘s can be time consuming and difficult to remember. Direct Online Marketing™ has extensive experience in creating, testing, and modifying landing page conversion rates to give your business the highest quality, least expensive, most cost effective leads possible.
  • Link Popularity
    How many websites link to yours, how popular those linking sites are, and how much their content relates to yours. Link popularity is an important part of Search Engine Optimization, which also values the sites that you link out to.
  • Local Search
    A huge and growing portion of the search engine marketing industry. Local search allows users to find businesses and websites within a specific (local) geographic range. This includes local search features on search engines and online yellow page sites. Optimizing for local search requires different practices than for traditional Search Engine Optimization.
  • Local Business Listings
    Each of the major search engines offer local business listings that appear next to maps at the top of the page on many locally targeted searches. Business may either submit new requests or claim existing local business listings if the search engines have already added the company to the results. Having a website is not required for having a local business listing.
  • Long Tail Keywords
    Rather than targeting the most common keywords in your industry, you can focus on more niche terms that are usually longer phrases but are also easier and quicker to rank for in the search engines. Long tail keywords can amount for up to 60% or so of a site’s search traffic.
  • Link Building
    The activity and process of getting more inbound links to your website for improved search engine rankings.
  • MSN Adcenter
    Microsoft's cost per click advertising program. Similar to Google Adwords
  • Multidimensional Scaling
    Multidimensional scaling is a statistical approach for exploring and visualizing similarities or dissimilarities in data. An analysis based on multidimensional scaling starts with a matrix of item-item similarities, then assigns a location to each item in an N-dimensional space, where N is specified beforehand. In marketing, multidimensional scaling usually uses an N <=3, so that the resulting "map" may be displayed in a graph or 3D visualisation. Multidimensional scaling is often used to create a "preference map" that shows the tradeoffs between product features that a typical individual in a customer segment is willing to make.
  • Meta Search Engine
    A search engine that gets listings from two or more other search engines rather than crawling the Web itself.
  • Meta Tags (see also keyword tags, description tags etc.)
    Meta tags allow you to highlight important Keywords related to your site in a way that matters to Search Engines, but that your website visitors typically do not see. Meta tags have risen and fallen in terms of valuation by internet marketers and search engines alike (see Keyword Stuffing), but they still play an important role in Search Engine Optimization. Examples of meta tags include Header Tags and Alt Tags.
  • Microblogging
    Microblogging refers to platforms allowing you to post information in snippets of 140 characters at a time via phone or Web. Twitter quickly became the dominant global player to the point where its name is synonymous with microblogging. In China, however, there are other popular microblogging services, generically called weibo.
  • Mobile Marketing
    As cell phone technology advances, advertisers can not reach their target audience virtually anywhere. While mobile marketing is really just an extension of online marketing, it provides businesses many new opportunities and challenges. How does your website look on your Blackberry or Treo?
  • Natural Language Search
    Natural Language Search is a term describing the act of making a query, and the return of results from that query, to a web search engine. Natural language search refers especially to the list of results at the center of a web results page, as compared to any of the CPC ads that surround those results. Search Engine Optimization focuses on this aspect of web search, attempting to maximize both the relevance and precision of results to a specific query.
  • Natural Search
    Synonym for Organic Search. The process of generating search engine results based on their perceived relevance to a search terms, or a keyword, entered by a search engine user. Also referred to as the unpaid search results.
  • Natural Listings
    Also referred to as “organic results”, the non:advertised listings in Search Engines. Some search engines may charge a fee to be included in their natural listings, although most are free. How high or low your website is ranked depends on many factors, two of the most important being content relevance and Link Popularity .
  • Naver
    Naver is Korea’s largest search engine and Web property. They offer paid search programs, although their pay per click program for non:Korean marketers has primarily been offered through Yahoo! / Overture: Korea. Naver’s closest Korean competitor is Daum.
  • Open Directory Project
    The Open Directory Project 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. ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.
  • Open Rate
    Open Rate is an email-marketing metric that is defined as the number of emails N(o) opened by receipients of a specific email campaign divided by the total number of emails sent N(t) or OR=N(o)/N(t).
  • Organic Search
    see Natural Language Search
  • Organic Search.
    Synonym for Natural Search; The process of generating search engine results based on their perceived relevance to a search terms, or a keyword, entered by a search engine user.
  • Off Page SEO
    Refers to optimization strategies outside of your website’s design such as link building with authoritative sites with relevant content
  • On Page SEO
    Refers to website implementation strategies to optimize position of a website in search results of particular words or phases
  • Opt-In
    The act of a subscriber requesting to be sent information via emails and providing you official, legal permission to do so. The application for Opt-in is typically for managing subscriber lists for a newsletter or ezine.
  • Opt-Out
    The action a subscriber takes when they request to be removed from an email list. Based on the Federal CAN-SPAM Act, it is illegal to ignore an Opt-out request and continue to send email to persons who have opted out.
  • Organic Listings
    See Natural Listings.
  • Outbound Links
    Links on any Web page leading to another Web page, whether they are within the same site or another website.
  • Page Headers
    A Page Header is the section of a web page that is contained within the and tags. Page headers contain general information, also called meta information, about a document that helps search engines identify the main topic or purpose of a web page.
  • Paid Inclusion
    Paid Inclusion is a hybrid of natural language search and paid search that places natural search engine results at the top of a search results page independent of how that page would otherwise rank in the SERPs. This manipulation of ranking, and the actual placement of a specific result, is based on a fee paid to the search engine. Paid inclusion was an invention of Yahoo!, and they continue to be the main proponent of that product in the web search engines (as compared to shopping search engines, which often practice a form of paid inclusion). Paid inclusion is very controversial as it can often compete with a company's organic search results.
  • Pay Per Click
    Pay Per Click is a form of online advertising where advertisers pay a publisher when someone clicks on an ad presented on the publisher's website.
  • Permission-Based Marketing
    Permission-Based Marketing is a term that describes marketing programs that only contact an individual who has given specific permission to have offers or other information presented to them. Permission-based marketing is usually used in relation to email marketing, where many unethical email publishers will send emails to a wide audience ("spam") without concern for whether the individual desires to receive the offer.
  • Persona
    A Persona is model of a specific customer segment based on behaviors and attitudes. Personas are used to define audiences for which products and marketing programs should be targeted.
  • PPA
    Another acronym for Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).
  • PPO
    Another acronym for Cost Per Order (CPO).
  • Precision
    Precision is the fraction of search results returned in a SERP by a search query that are relevant to the information need. In an ideal world, a search has 100% precision, which means that it finds all relevant entries in the database, and no more than those entries.
  • Primary Research
    Primary Research is market research that directly engages with the target customer segments or cohorts in order to collect needed data for analysis. One form of primary research is focus groups.
  • Publisher
    A publisher is anyone who produces a website for public viewing/consumption.
  • Page Rank
    An algorithm used by Google that assigns a value of 0 – 10 for each web page on the Internet; websites assigned a value of 10 deemed by google to be the “most important” within a set of related pages
  • Pingbacks
    Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with trackbacks. The makes pingbacks sound an awful lot like trackbacks: For example, Kristy published an interesting post on her blog. Judy reads Kristy’s blog post and comments about it, linking back to Kristy’s original post. Using pingback, Judy’s software can automatically notify Kristy that her blog post has been linked to, and Judy’s software can then include this information on her Blog creating a win-win situation.
  • PPC
    Stands for Pay Per Click. PPC is a pricing model used for predominantly contextual based text link advertising. In this pricing model, the advertiser only pays for clicks, regardless of how may times an advertisement is shown. This is a de facto pricing model for paid placements within search engine marketing.
  • PageRank
    PageRank is a value that Google assigns for pages and websites that it indexes, based on all the factors in its algorithm. Google does release an external PageRank scoring pages from 1:10 that you can check for any website, but this external number is not the same as the internal PageRank Google uses to determine search engine results. All independent search engines have their own version of PageRank. Potentially interesting fact: PageRank was named for Google’s Larry Page and it is calculated at the page level: pun fun!
  • Paid Listings
    Listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion programs. In contrast, organic (natural) listings are not sold.
  • Paid Placement
    See Paid Search below.
  • Paid Search
    Also referred to as Paid Placement, Pay Per Click, and sometimes Search Engine Marketing, paid search marketing allows advertisers to pay to be listed within the Search Engine Results Pages for specific keywords or phrases. Paid placement listings can be purchased from a portal or a search network. Search networks are often set up in an auction environment where keywords and phrases are often associated with a cost:per:click (CPC) fee. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are the largest networks, but Microsoft adCenter (live.com) and other sites also sell paid placement listings directly as well.
  • Pay
    for:Performance: Term popularized by search engines as a synonym for pay:per:click, stressing to advertisers that they are only paying for ads that ‘perform’ in terms of delivering traffic, as opposed to CPM:based ads, which cost money, even if they don’t generate a click.
  • Pay per Click (PPC)
    See Cost per Click (CPC), above. The most common type of search engine advertising cost structure is PPC search engine marketing. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and many more search engines all use PPC.
  • Permission Marketing
    Along the lines of Opt:in registrations, permission marketing focuses on receiving the consent of users before being contacted or, in some cases, even seeing an advertisement. Permission marketing is centered around the concept that people are increasingly tuning out the barrage of advertisements they see each day. Its focal tenet is that a business will have a better chance of gaining a client when the client first gives permission to be sent an ad or contacted. Search engine marketing by its nature can be thought of as a type of permission marketing: showing advertisements to people already searching for that information: as long as the ad is relevant to what they are searching.
  • Pop
    Under: An advertisement that opens in a new Web Browser window once you visit a particular page or take some other action. Considered less annoying than Pop:Up ads because the new window appears behind the existing one.
  • Press Optimization
    The optimizing of press releases for search engines. This process has many similarities to Search Engine Optimization, although it focuses much more on Keyword use in content creation in regards to how press releases are often picked up by Blogs and other forms of new media.
  • Quality-Score
    Quality Score is a variable used by Google, Yahoo! (called Quality Index), and MSN that can influence both the rank and cost per click (CPC) of ads in their bid-based advertising programs. To determine the order in which ads are listed, each ad has the following formula calculated: bid * Quality Score. Ads are then listed in descending order based on the result of that equation.
  • Query
    Query is another term for “keyword” or “search term.” Within Google AdWords, search query reports show the actual terms that searchers used to click on your ads, as opposed to the advertised keyword that is in your account. These two sets of words may or may not be the same.
  • Reach
    see Brand Reach
  • Relevance
    Relevance is the fraction of entries in a database that meet the information needs of s specific query.
  • Reputation Management
    Reputation Management is a relatively new public relations specialty that focuses on managing brand, product, or personal perceptions through an active, near real-time program of conscious engagement in social media outlets.
  • Rank
    How well a particular Web page or website is listed in the Search Engine’s Results. For example, a Web page about apples may be listed in response to a query for “apples.” However, “rank” indicates where exactly it was listed: be it on the first page of results, the second page or perhaps the 200th page. Alternatively, it might also be said to be ranked first among all the results, or 12th, or 111th. Overall, saying a page is “listed” only means that it can be found within a search engine in response to a query, not that it necessarily ranks well for that query. Also known as position.
  • Real Simple Syndication (RSS)
    An increasingly popular new technology that allows information to be easily shared on websites or given directly to users per their request. Click here for a feed to the Official Direct Online Marketing™ Blog. RSS feeds create new online advertising opportunities, although marketers are still debating how best to use them.
  • Reciprocal Link
    A link exchange between two sites. Both sites will display a link to the other site somewhere on their pages. This type of link is generally much less desirable than a one:way inbound link.
  • Remarketing
    Remarketing is Google AdWords’s term for retargeting.
  • Results Page
    Also referred to as a Search Engine Results Page.
  • Retargeting
    Think of retargeting like cyberstalking. Someone performs an action (often a visit to your site) and has a cookie placed on her or his browser. Then as they go visiting other sites around the Web, your ad appears in front of them, as a banner or other type of display ad, on whatever sites they visit: so long as that site accepts ads from the ad network you use for retargeting. Retargeting can be done through various ad networks and platforms.
  • Return on Investment (ROI)
    The key statistic for many companies: are your advertisements generating profits, and how much profit given the money you have had to pay. Direct Online Marketing™ always has its eye on ROI for all partners…and you should, too!
  • Rich Media
    Web advertisements or pages that are more animated and/or interactive than static Banners or pages.
  • Robot or Bot
    See Crawler.
  • Robots.txt
    A file used to keep Web pages from being indexed or to tell which pages you want a search engine to index.
  • Run of Site (ROS)
    A contract specifying Run of Site means that a Banner or other type of online advertisement can appear on any page, and usually in any open placement, of a particular website.
  • SB 1386
    SB 1386 stands for California State Bill 1386, which is a California law that regulates the use of personal identifiable information. The law was introduced by California State Senator Peace on February 12, 2002, and became operative July 1, 2003. SB 1386 requires an agency, person or business that conducts business in California and owns or licenses computerized 'personal information' to disclose any breach of security (to any resident whose unencrypted data is believed to have been disclosed).
  • Search Engine
    A Search Engine is an information retrieval technology that returns a set of relevant results from a database based on a specific query on the database.
  • Search Engine Consultants
    An individual or firm that specializes in one or more forms of online marketing that ties to a query on a specific keyword by a search engine.
  • Search Engine Index
    see Index
  • Search Engine Marketing
    Search Engine Marketing refers to any form of paid advertising that ties the presentation of an advertisement to a search by a web search engine on a specific keyword. see also Paid Search
  • Search Engine Optimization
    Search Engine optimization, or SEO, is the science of adapting web sites so that their pages show at the highest possible position in the search engine results page for a specific keyword or keywords.
  • Search Marketing
    see Search Engine Marketing
  • Secondary Research
    Secondary Research describes the collection of data for analysis that is based on the research of others - i.e. where information about a cohort or market trend is derived from second-hand sources such as third-party research or magazine articles.
  • Social Bookmarking
    Social Bookmarking is the act of tagging a specific web page for inclusion on a social bookmarking website. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
  • Social Network
    A Social Network is a website, or network of websites, specifically established to allow end users to communicate directly with each other on topics of mutual interest.
  • Supression List
    A suppression list is a database of email addresses of individuals who have opted-out from receiving emails from a specific email publisher. Maintaining a single up-to-date supression list can be a real challenge for firms that engage in email campaigns through multiple third-party distributors (e.g. affiliates). Even if affiliates conform to all legal standards, their processes may make it difficult to synchronize suppression lists within the times periods needed by a mass emailer to maintain a current suppression list for the next planned mailing
  • Slightly modified excerpt from
    WordPress.org. There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.
  • SEM
    Search Engine Marketing is the discipline of applying tools such as PPC – Pay Per Click adverting and techniques SEO – Search Engine Optimization to increase and maintain a websites prominence in the search results Keyword Optimization A Technique of intentional use keywords within a web page to improve a pages position in search results for that keyword
  • SERP
    Stands for Search Engine Results Page. SERP refers to the listing of links to web pages returned by a search engine query. The SERP listings of typically include titles, a link to the page, and a short description highlight the keywords or phrases which have matched content. The use of SERP may refer to an individual page of links or to the set of all pages returned for a search query.
  • SMM
    Stands for Social Media Marketing, the emerging busienss function that uses social channels and netowkrs to engage customers and prospective clients to support the following goals:
  • SMO
    Stands for Social Media Optimization which is the process of contributing and sharing content with you social media connects to gain online visibility of a company, brand, event, product and/or service. Social Media Optimization includes contributing and perpetuating a particular online body of knowledge with targeted, relevant content.
  • Suppression List
    A list of people who have registered to avoid receiving emails or who have chosen to opt-out of an email list after signing up initially. A suppression list is similar in concept to the National Do Not Call Registry used to suppress calls from telemarketers. The suppression list is designed to prevent any further emails to be sent to those suppressed email addresses on the list and is a key tool used by email marketers to avoid any potential CAN-SPAM non-compliance issues.
  • Scraping
    The process of copying content from one Web property and using it on another. In other words, stealing. Scraping technologies have evolved because of the needs for content and to stay ahead of legitimate content creators trying to protect what they’ve written. Some companies offer content monitoring to help protect against scraping.
  • Search Engines
    Search engines are places people go to search for things on the internet, such as Yahoo!, Google, or bing. Most search engines provide websites two ways of appearing: Natural (free) and Paid. Natural Listings, also referred to as organic listings, appear based on the search engines’ own formulae. You can’t pay to have your site listed higher (although some search engines require that you pay to be included in the Natural listings), but you can perform Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Paid Listings usually appear above or to the side of Natural listings and are typically identifiable as advertisements. The most common cost for advertising on Paid listings through Paid Search is Pay per Click (PPC).
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
    A fancy way of saying “making your site search engine friendly”. Search engine optimization is typically difficult to do on your own, especially given the increasing complexity and differences among all the search engines. Two important factors that rank highly in all major search engines are Link Popularity (how many websites: and how highly ranked those sites are: link to you) and relevant content (how pertinent information on your website or a particular Web page is to a search).
  • Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)
    Think of Search Engine Reputation Management as online spin control. SERM allows a person or organization better positioning through strategy involving Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search Marketing, Press Optimization, Blogging, and Social Media. The most important part of SERM is starting early: before a crisis. Also referred to as online reputation management.
  • Search Engine Results Page
    Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs, are the Web pages displayed by any Search Engine for any given search. They display both Natural (organic) Listings and Pay:Per:Click ads. How high you are listed and where your ad is shown depends on Search Engine Optimization; and paid Search Engine Marketing respectively.
  • Search Retargeting
    A specific type of Retargeting that allows an advertiser to show ads to searchers of given keywords who have never visited the advertiser’s site.
  • Search Terms
    A search term is a word or group of words that a person types into a Search Engine to find what they are looking for. Based upon what a company sells, a website should incorporate the most popular or most popular specific search terms into the copy as Keywords. Figuring out the appropriate search terms to put into a website and to advertise on is a huge part of a Search Engine Marketer’s job.
  • Site Retargeting
    The most common form of retargeting: displaying your ads to a visitor based on a visit to your site, or individual page of your site. These cookie:based can appear on any publisher throughout the ad network being used. Various targeting options exist, including only showing ads when a certain page has been visited (such as a landing page) and an action has not been completed (e.g. a conversion).
  • Social Commerce
    Selling goods directly online through through social media channels. Just like “electronic commerce” was shortened to “ecommerce”, social commerce is sometimes shortened to “s:commerce” or “f:commerce,” the latter short for “facebook commerce.”
  • Spam
    Can refer to unwanted data sent via email or put on a website to game a search engine. You’re probably aware of spam in the classic email sense and hopefully also aware of the strict standards and penalties associated with the CAN:SPAM Act. Spam to a search engine is Web content that the search engine deems to be detrimental to its efforts to deliver relevant, quality search results. Some search engines have written guidelines about what they consider to be spamming, but ultimately any activity a search engine deems harmful may be considered spam, whether or not there are published guidelines against. Examples of spam include the creation of nonsensical doorway pages designed to pleased search engine algorithms rather than human visitors, or heavy repetition of search terms within a page (i.e., the search terms are used tens or hundreds of times in a row). Spam derives its name from a popular Monty Python skit.
  • Stickiness
    How often people return to a website. Constant updates, news feeds, and exclusive content are all ways to make a site stickier.
  • Submission
    The act of submitting a URL for inclusion into a search engine’s index. Unless done through paid inclusion, submission generally does not guarantee listing. In addition, submission does not help with rank improvement on crawler:based search engines unless search engine optimization efforts have been undertaken. Submission can be done manually (i.e., you can fill out an online form and submit) or automated, where a software program or online service may process the forms behind the scenes.
  • Social Media
    Online media created by and shared among individuals. Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter are popular social media websites. Links from many social media sites now appear in searches. It's important to have links to your site spread througho
  • Spider
    A computer program that browses the internet and collects information about websites.
  • Tagging
    Within the field of information retrieval, tagging is the act of actively assigning keywords to a document, whether in a database or on the worldwide web. Tagging can be done programmatically or manually. In the case of the world wide web, tagging often means social bookmarking, which is a manual act performed by members of a social network of assigning specific keywords to a web page to make the content on the page easier to find by other members of the social network.
  • Text Link Ads
    Text Link Ads are simple paid advertisements consisting only of text. The business model for vairous text link ad networks varies, and can be cost-per-click (CPC), Cost-per-Thousand (CPM), Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA or Pay for Performance), or Cost per Lead (CPL).
  • Title Tag
    Title Tags are meta tags within the header of an XHTML document that define the title of the page that will appear in the browser toolbar. The title element is required in all HTML/XHTML documents.
  • Traffic
    Visitors to a website that can be measured and tracked are often referred to as traffic. Types of traffic include referral traffic search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing) including paid traffic generally purchased on a PPC basis, and traffic which results from clicks on the non-paid search results, otherwise known as organic or natural search results.. Other types of traffic include direct where the user types the website address directly into the browser address window and referral traffic originating from other websites linked to the visited website.
  • Tags
    Words or phrases used to describe and categorize individual blog posts, videos, and pictures. Correctly using tags organizes content for users and can help with visibility through SEO and social media optimization.
  • Targeting
    Shaping internet marketing campaigns to attract certain specific groups of prospective clients. Examples of Targeting include women, gun owners, and Medicare recipients. Behavioral Targeting is a newer, specific type of focus for advertisers.
  • Text Ad
    An online advertisement that contains only written copy. Paid listings found on the results pages of the main Search Engines are currently Text Ads, although this is starting to change. Soon you should expect to see video ads pop up here occasionally.
  • TLD
    TLD stands for Top Level Domain. The TLD is determined by whatever comes at the end of a domain name at its root: meaning without any page names. So for example, the TLD for our site, www.directom.com, is “.com.”
  • Tracking Code
    Information typically included in the URL that allows an advertiser to track the effectiveness of various aspects of an advertisement. Commonly tracked items include Search Term and referring Search Engine. Direct Online Marketing™ relies heavily on tracking code because tracking results is the only way to determine how effective our internet marketing services are.
  • Twitter Retargeting
    Serving ads to people who have visited your site (or performed some other action) as promoted tweets or promoted accounts while they are on twitter. These ads go across devices, so you can reach visitors on mobile as well as desktop. Twitter is currently offering this type of advertising in beta only through a few select ad network partners.
  • Unsubscribe
    Unsubscribing is the act of removing oneself from an email publishers opt-in list. Also known as opting out. Unsubscribe is also the most common word shown in links to landing pages that allow opting out for a specific publication. The unsubscribe link is a required element under most anti-spam laws, such as SB 1386, and can usually be found in small text at the bottom of any email.
  • User Experience Testing
    The User Experience is everything that happens to your users when they interact with your business or company via your website, application or online communications. It includes everything they see, hear and do as well as their emotional reactions.
  • Use of separate websites on unique ccTLD’s is typically viewed as the best way for exporters to target other countries via search engine optimization. However, site owners can also target outside countries through other means such as through country
    focused subdomains or even subdirectories.
  • URL
    Uniform Resource Locator. These are the letters and symbols that make up the address of specific Web pages. This page’s URL is http://directom.com/dom/semresources/internetmarketingtermglossary/.
  • Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
    In essence, what it is that sets your product, service, or company apart from others and why potential clients should care enough to choose you.
  • Universal Search
    The placement of multiple types of results within a general search so that a user receives images, videos, local search results, news articles, and more next to general Web pages. Also called blended search.
  • Usability
    How easy it is for a user to navigate a website and find the information he or she is seeking.
  • Visit
    The act of one Internet user going to a single Internet website. If the visitor remains idle on that website for some defined period of time, depending on the used to measure and track visitors, additional requests may be tracked as a new visit from a returning visitor.
  • Viral Marketing
    A newer method of internet marketing that attempts to make advertisements so interesting that viewers will pass them along to others free of charge to the advertisers.
  • Web Metrics
    Web metrics are established goals and standards for measuring website performance. There are standard metrics in online marketing (e.g. conversion rate) which are often used by web marketers to provide a baseline of website performance. However, more savvy companies develop web metrics unique to their business to help the, achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in their industry.
  • Web Spider
    A Web Spider is software that follows links, either on a specific site or across the web, Web spiders catalog the data contained within the pages to which those links point. This data is then analyzed and used to create the search indices which are used to speed search queries.
  • Webinar
    A webinar is a seminar that is presented through the worldwide web.
  • Website Analytics
    The tasks associated with analyzing activity on a website. Web analytics covers a wide range of analysis, including (among others) sources of traffic, internal flows within a site, and revenue generated with various parts of these site.
  • Website Architecture
    Website Architecture structure of the flows,links and metadata associated with a web site.
  • Website Audit
    A review of the performance of a website against online marketing best practices. The concept of a website audit is most often aasociated with Search Engine Optimization, but also is often applied to any aspect of online marketing.
  • Website Traffic
    The number of unique visitors to a website.
  • Whitelist
    A whitelist is the list of email addresses of individuals who have given specific permission to a publisher to receive emails for the publisher.
  • Word-of-Mouth Marketing
    Word-of-Mouth marketing is the act of creating programs specifically designed to initiate and maintain broad public discussion of a brand, product, or issue. This differs from the traditional concept of word-of-mouth, which has the implication that people refer other individuals to a business without the active intervention of that individual or business.
  • WhiteHat SEO
    A term referring to the application of to ethical tactics used to improve a website’s postion in the natural/organic search traffic. In this context, ethical means the SEO tactics used are aligned with Google Webmaster Guidelines, and Bing Webmaster Guidelines for successful indexing, both in terms of the spirit of these, both of which include best practices for having the search engines find, crawl and ultimate index your sites. These webmaster guidelines are updated with the most recent versions avaiable online (see preceding links) and have specific rules about what each search views as acceptable practices on how to effectively deploy and manage a website to best ensure that the website will be included in the search results.
  • Web 2.0
    A trendy buzzword for the internet marketing services industry, but also a legitimate idea and movement: the internet as a platform. Wikis, MySpace, and user:edited search all operate under this premise.
  • Web Browser
    The program you use to access the internet. Common browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), Apple’s Safari, and Mozilla Firefox.
  • Weibo
    Weibo refers to microblogging in the Chinese market. Unlike the rest of the world where twitter is the only major player at this point, China has two major competing weibo services: Sina Weibo (#1) and Tencent Weibo (#2). A key advantage of these weibo platforms over twitter is the amount of information individual Mandarin characters can convey. Therefore, a single weibo post (tweet) of 140 characters can convey as much information as two paragraphs in English and other languages.
  • White Hat SEO
    Used to describe certain Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods, being “white hat” means using only SEO techniques that are completely above board and accepted by the Search Engines. Doing the opposite (Black Hat) can lead to your website seeing its rankings drop drastically: or being banned altogether: even if the search engine optimization tactics aren’t currently banned by search engines.
  • Wiki
    A user written, controlled and edited site. Anyone with web access can change information appearing on Wikis, which can be about broad or specific topics. Wikis are becoming increasingly popular websites as people search for quality and (hopefully) unbiased information. The best known example is Wikipedia.
  • WordPressWordPress
    WordPress is an extremely popular Content Management System. Developed originally for blogs, WordPress offers a great degree of flexibility and functionality. This site: and the Found Blog: are examples of WordPress sites.
  • XML Sitemap
    An XML file that lists all the URLs for a website. The XML Sitemap file use enables a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling so that they are included in the search engine’s database. This file supports SEO and allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, used to also provide instructions to search engines about to include and exclude from its database of web pages. See XML Sitemap creation video for more details.
  • XML
    Extensible Markup Language. Content developers use this language with a variety of forms of content, including text, audio, and visual in order to allow users to define their own elements and pull the data at their pace. XML has played a huge part in the transformation of the Web towards Web 2.0.
  • Yahoo Search Marketing
    Yahoo!'s cost per click advertising program. Similar to Google Adwords.
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