Useful Terms & Glossary - Search Engine Marketing

A concise description of the most likely terms you are likely to come across during your SEO campaign. Your online marketing consultant should have a thorough understanding of all of these

Ad - For Web advertising, an ad is almost always a banner, a graphic image or set of animated images (in a file called an animated GIF) of a designated pixel size and byte size limit. An ad or set of ads for a campaign is often referred to as "the creative." Banners and other special advertising that include an interactive or visual element beyond the usual are known as rich media.

Ad rotation - Ads are often rotated into ad spaces from a list. This is usually done automatically by software on the Web site or at a central site administered by an ad broker or server facility for a network of Web sites.

Ad space - An ad space is a space on a Web page that is reserved for ads. An ad space group is a group of spaces within a Web site that share the same characteristics so that an ad purchase can be made for the group of spaces.

Ad view - An ad view, synonymous with ad impression, is a single ad that appears on a Web page when the page arrives at the viewer's display. Ad views are what most Web sites sell or prefer to sell. A Web page may offer space for a number of ad views. In general, the term impression is more commonly used.

AdWords - Google's advertising system which serves text ads related to search terms.

Affiliate marketing - Affiliate marketing is the use by a Web site that sells products of other Web sites, called affiliates, to help market the products. Amazon.com, the book seller, created the first large-scale affiliate program and hundreds of other companies have followed since.

Backlinks - Simply links pointing to any website. Backlinks to a given website can be measured using the Google Toolbar.

Blog - A frequently updated journal or diary usually, often hosted by a third party.

Brand, brand name, and branding - A brand is a product, service, or concept that is publicly distinguished from other products, services, or concepts so that it can be easily communicated and usually marketed. A brand name is the name of the distinctive product, service, or concept. Branding is the process of creating and disseminating the brand name. Branding can be applied to the entire corporate identity as well as to individual product and service names. In Web and other media advertising, it is recognized that there is usually some kind of branding value whether or not an immediate, direct response can be measured from an ad or campaign. Companies like Proctor and Gamble have made a science out of creating and evaluating the success of their brand name products.

Caching - In Internet advertising, the caching of pages in a cache server or the user's computer means that some ad views won't be known by the ad counting programs and is a source of concern. There are several techniques for telling the browser not to cache particular pages. On the other hand, specifying no caching for all pages may mean that users will find your site to be slower than you would like.

Click Through - or Click Thru - what happens when a user clicks on a link and enters a new page. The term refers to the noise a mouse makes when pressed.

Click rate - The click rate is the percentage of ad views that resulted in clickthroughs. Although there is visibility and branding value in ad views that don't result in a clickthrough, this value is difficult to measure. A clickthrough has several values: it's an indication of the ad's effectiveness and it results in the viewer getting to the advertiser's Web site where other messages can be provided. A new approach is for a click to result not in a link to another site but to an immediate product order window. What a successful click rate is depends on a number of factors, such as: the campaign objectives, how enticing the banner message is, how explicit the message is (a message that is complete within the banner may be less apt to be clicked), audience/message matching, how new the banner is, how often it is displayed to the same user, and so forth. In general, click rates for high-repeat, branding banners vary from 0.15 to 1%. Ads with provocative, mysterious, or other compelling content can induce click rates ranging from 1 to 5% and sometimes higher. The click rate for a given ad tends to diminish with repeated exposure.

Cookie - A cookie is a file on a Web user's hard drive (it's kept in one of the subdirectories under the browser file directory) that is used by Web sites to record data about the user. Some ad rotation software uses cookies to see which ad the user has just seen so that a different ad will be rotated into the next page view.

Cost-per-action - Cost-per-action is what an advertiser pays for each visitor that takes some specifically defined action in response to an ad beyond simply clicking on it. For example, a visitor might visit an advertiser's site and request to be subscribe to their newsletter.

Cost-per-lead - This is a more specific form of cost-per-action in which a visitor provides enough information at the advertiser's site (or in interaction with a rich media ad) to be used as a sales lead. Note that you can estimate cost-per-lead regardless of how you pay for the ad (in other words, buying on a pay-per-lead basis is not required to calculate the cost-per-lead).

Cost-per-sale - Sites that sell products directly from their Web site or can otherwise determine sales generated as the result of an advertising sales lead can calculate the cost-per-sale of Web advertising.

Cross Linking - the practice of linking together several domains usually owned by the same person/company. Main purpose of which is to increase link popularity, but SEO overuse can lead to search engine penalties.

Demographics - Demographics is data about the size and characteristics of a population or audience (for example, gender, age group, income group, purchasing history, personal preferences, and so forth).

DESCRIPTION Tag - Meta information tag inserted in the head of a web page script to describe the contents.

Doorway Page - Web pages, often specifically engineered to rank highly on search engines - also known as Gateway Pages. Excessive use of such pages can lead to search engine penalties (Over Optimisation Penalty – OOP)

FFA - Free For All link pages, see Link Farms.

Fold - "Above the fold," a term borrowed from print media, refers to an ad that is viewable as soon as the Web page arrives. You don't have to scroll down (or sideways) to see it. Since screen resolution can affect what is immediately viewable, it's good to know whether the Web site's audience tends to set their resolution at 640 by 480 pixels or at 800 by 600 (or higher).

Freshbot - A Google spider which updates the engine with recently updated pages

Gateway Page - see Doorway page

Google - The world's most popular search engine at http://www.google.com.

Googlebot - Google's main spider which scours the web for pages

Google Dance - The name given to the period when Google updates its search engine rankings. Google's main and secondary server results will be different during this time.

Google Toolbar - software provided by Google which inserts the Google search bar and other features into a user's browser.

Hit - the occurence of a single file being downloaded from a server due to a visitor viewing a webpage. A hit also includes all graphics files, style sheets, etc. So if a visitor visits a single page, this action may create multiple 'hits'. Beware of anyone claiming to have had 1000 hits in a day, since this could actually mean only 50 web pages have been viewed in reality!

KEYWORDS Tag - Single or multi-word phrases which describe what the content of a webpage is about - inserted into the Meta Tags at the top of a page.

Keyword Density - The number of times any keyword is repeated within a web page, expressed as a percentage of the total number of textual words on the page.

Link Farms - Free For All link sites which exist for the sole purpose of increasing the site rankings for their members. Not recommended unless you want your site banned - best to use traditional search engine optimisation strategies.

Link Popularity - The measurement of inbound links to a particular webpage by search engines, often to determine the relative importance of a page.

Meta Tag - The group of page definitions coded into a website - the most important from an SEO point of view being the TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS tags.

MSN Search - Microsoft's search engine at http://www.msn.com

Open Directory - Massive directory of websites reviewed by humans at http://www.dmoz.org. Results also appear on many search engines primarily Google.

PageRank - The name given to Google's method of ranking pages according to a number of factors such as link popularity. The Pagerank will display as a number out of 10 in a green bar of the Google Toolbar whenever you visit a website.

Page View - The single instance of a web page being viewed by a user. Useful for measuring web site traffic popularity.

Pay-per-click - In pay-per-click advertising, the advertiser pays a certain amount for each clickthrough to the advertiser's Web site. The amount paid per clickthrough is arranged at the time of the insertion order and varies considerably. Higher pay-per-click rates recognize that there may be some "no-click" branding value as well as clickthrough value provided.

Pay-per-lead -In pay-per-lead advertising, the advertiser pays for each sales lead generated. For example, an advertiser might pay for every visitor that clicked on a site and then filled out a form.

Ranking - Term used to describe the relative position of a webpage in any search engine results. The higher, the better of course.

ROBOTS Tag - Meta information tag used to tell visiting search engine robots how to behave (e.g. not to index a certain page, or not to archive a certain page)

ROI - ROI (return on investment) is "the bottom line" on how successful an ad or campaign was in terms of what the returns (generally sales revenue) were for the money expended (invested).

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation (or Search Engine Optimization if you're from the U.S)

Search Engine - Web sites which allow users to query a database of other sites, e.g. Google, MSN Search.

Search Engine Optimisation (or Search Engine Optimization for those in the US) - the practice of priming web pages to enhance their rankings in search engines. Now a massive industry.

Splash page - A splash page (also known as an interstitial) is a preliminary page that precedes the regular home page of a Web site and usually promotes a particular site feature or provides advertising. A splash page is timed to move on to the home page after a short period of time.

Submission - the process of informing a search engine or index of the existence of your website. Not required for many search engines, since Google will most likely find your site first.

TITLE Tag - Meta information tag inserted at the top of a web page, and displayed in the browser bar.

Unique visitor - A unique visitor is someone with a unique address who is entering a Web site for the first time that day (or some other specified period). Thus, a visitor that returns within the same day is not counted twice. A unique visitors count tells you how many different people there are in your audience during the time period, but not how much they used the site during the period.

Yahoo! - The world's leading search engine and directory before Google exploded. Still a strong second in the rankings and worthy of a visit at http://www.yahoo.com

If you have any questions or suggestions for our Search Engine Optimisation Terminology, please email us.