Online Marketing Glossary / SEO Glossary

A.
Anchor Text or Link Text: The clickable – text – part of a webpage. Anchor text is usually underlined.

B.
Backlink or Backward Link: Links from other sites pointing to your site. This term is usually used in regards to a link exchange or reciprocal linking.

Bot: Short for Robot. See Robot.

C.
Conversion Rate: The number of visitors who completed the desired action. For example: signing up for news letter, buying your product, downloading a trial version of a software, etc. (conversion rate tool) Calculating conversion rate: the number of visitors who took the desired actions divided by the total number of visitors in a given period.

Competing on Google: The number of competing web pages for a particular keyword.

D.
DMOZ: Short for Open Directory Project. See Open Directory Project.

E.
External Link: A link that is pointing to some other page located on a different website. The opposite of external link is the internal link.

G.
Google 24 Queries: This is an estimated number of queries the particular keyword might appear in the current 24 hour period on Google

Googletestad: This keyword query is used for live checking of Google AdSense.

I.
Inbound Link or Incoming Link: A link to a particular page from elsewhere on the internet.

Internal Link: A link that is pointing to some other page within the same website. The opposite of internal link is the external link.

K.
KEI: Keyword Effectiveness Index. The higher the KEI, the more popular the keywords are, and the less competition they have, which means they have a better chance of getting to the top.

L.
Landing Page: This is the page visitors find themselves after clicking on a PPC or CPC advertisement.
(Additional advice: In order to maximize the conversion rate it is crucial to have a well thought out and well developed landing page.)

Link Bait: Useful, entertaining, creative web content or web tool that encourages website owners to link to it.

Link Popularity: The number of websites that link to a particular site. On most search engines link popularity along with the quality of incoming links are important aspects of determining the ranking of a website on SERPs.

Link Exchange: The process when two websites’ owners agree to display a link to each others site.

O.
Off-page SEO: The aspect of a website that is not located on the site itself, rather elsewhere on the web, but can influence the ranking of this website. More precisely this aspect is the incoming links from other websites. It is much more difficult to control the off-page factors, than the on-page SEO.

On-page SEO: Optimization of a website’s content, text, tags, links and other elements.

One Way Link: Getting a link from a site without linking back to that same website. One way links are very valuable.

ODP: Short for Open Directory Project. See Open Directory Project.

Open Directory Project: The largest human edited directory on the internet. Google and thousands of other websites are using its data throughout the web.

P.
PPC: Short for Pay Per Click. A type of online advertisement, where the advertiser pays to the publisher each time a visitor clicks on the advertisement. It is also called Cost Per Click (CPC).

PageRankTM or PR: Google’s patented method for measuring page importance on a scale from 0 - 10, where 10 is the highest. The PageRank algorithm analyzes the quality and quantity of links that point to a page.

R.
Reciprocal Link: see Link Exchange.

Robot: A software program that crawls the internet, by following links and indexing web pages.

S.
Search Engine: A website that performs keyword searches and returns relevant results, websites the user searched for. Today, the major search engines areGoogle, Yahoo! and MSN.

SE: Short for search engine. See search engine.

SEM: Short forsearch engine marketing. See search engine marketing.

SEO: Short forsearch engine optimization. See search engine optimization.

Search Engine Marketing: Utlilizing Search Engine Optmization and paid advertising for improved search engine results.

Search Engine Optimization: It is a process of optimizing a website in order to gain top positions on search engines for various keywords, and drive more traffic to the site.

Search Engine Results Page: This is the page the search engines return after a visitor entered a search query.

SERP: Short for search engine results page. See search engine results page.

Spider: A software program that crawls the internet, by following links and indexing web pages.

T.
Title or Title of a page: An HTML tag used to describe the title of a page. Generally this appears at the top of the browser window. This information is used by many search engines to display the title of each site in the search result listing.

V.
Visibility Percentage: Visibility Percentage is calculated by dividing the Visibility Score by the maximum possible score that would be achieved if all of your keywords were ranked number 1 for all engines. In other words, if a site was perfectly ranked at number 1 for all keywords on all engines, your Visibility Percentage would be 100%. In contrast, if a site was not ranked in the top 30 for any keywords on any engines, then the Visibility Percentage would be zero.

W.
Web Wide 24 Hour Queries: The number of times a particular keyword has appeared on major metacrawlers (metacrawlers query all the main search engines simultaneously).

Update - Monday, Dec. 19, 2011

Dead. This year everything from television, apps and the Web itself was declared “dead” by various industry commentators. If history is any guide, though, the technology of today will be with us far longer than we expect.

Disrupt. It became fashionable this year to claim a new technology would disrupt or destroy some existing one. For 2012, let’s resolve to simply make the things that already exist like a little better.

Agonistic. Mark Naples of WIT Strategy points out that saying something is “platform-agnostic” actually implies that the technology doesn’t work with anything.

Bifurcated. I first heard the word “bifurcated” spoken a few years ago by Rob Norman, CEO of GroupM North America, and it sounded really smart. Fast-forward to today, and this four-syllable word is now all the rage across media. Let’s agree to leave the fancy words to the CEOs.

Cloud-based. “The cloud” sounds so much better than “a bunch of servers housed in a big building that we don’t own” -- which is probably why most companies use the former to describe the technology.

Amazing. Detecting earth-like planets 600 million light years away is truly amazing, but at this point there’s little that’s amazing about a new mobile phone, ad platform or consumer app. Cool, maybe, but not amazing.

Leverage. Writer Brian Morrissey says he’s tired of hearing the word “leverage” used as a verb -- as in, “our company leverages amazing, cloud-based technology that disrupts markets.”

Chunky. Industry vet Sean Finnegan notes that the word “chunky” is on the rise. The term is used to describe a difficult problem, but given that “Chunky” is already the name of a soup and a candy bar, we should stop this new application immediately. 

Sports jargon: If you spend time in the testosterone-filled boardrooms of venture capitalists, you know that these firms speak in an endless stream of sports metaphors. “Hitting a home run” means building a business that makes everyone gobs of money. “Skating to where the puck is going,” describes a business that isn’t making any money yet -- but hopefully will someday.

Pivot. Another popular venture capitalist word, a “pivot” can mean that a startup has discovered a better way to make money, but it can also mean that their first (and sometimes second) business idea was really stupid.

Tradigital. Mashable’s Lauren Rubin has had enough with mashing the words “traditional” and “digital” together to form “tradigital” -- and who can blame her? For evidence, here’s an excerpt from an actual piece that Adweek published on the topic: “What excites me most about the future of marketing? That's easy: tradigital. Not just because I enjoy the crafty nature of neologism, but because I'm captivated by the artful venture of respecting traditional branding ideas in the face of a new digital reality. It's what a whole new breed of tradigital agencies is all about.”

Acronyms. Seasoned entrepreneur Dave Morgan points out that the media industry has become awash in acronyms -- to the point where it is now difficult to understand what anyone is saying. Using terms like DSPs, RTB or ATDs needs to stop, ASAP.

Proxy. Dylan Parks of Brand.net is tired of hearing the word “proxy.” I’ll take that as a sign that everyone else has, too.

At the end of the day. Most Brits working in media -- as well as a number of Americans -- feel compelled to use the phrase “at the end of the day” at every opportunity. Ultimately, though, we all need to find a better way of making a point.