SEO Terminology
An absolute link is a hyperlink that includes the complete URL, which is the domain name, folder or subdirectory name and the file name.
A set of rules that a search engine uses to rank the listings contained within its index, in response to a particular query. No search engine reveals exactly how its own algorithm works, to protect itself from competitors and those who wish to spam the search engine.
More commonly known as the "alt tag". The alt attribute is an HTML element specified within an image tag. The syntax is:
The text in the alt attribute, "Hitwise Logo" in this example, will be displayed in the place of the image "main-logo.gif" while the image loads or if the user has images turned off. In most browsers the text also appears as a "tool tip" when the user hovers the mouse pointer over the image after it has loaded.
Also called link text, it refers to the text that appears in a text link (hyperlink). For example, if I link to the Hitwise Search Marketing web site like this: Click here, then "Click here" is the anchor text for the link. Some search engines - notably Google - take anchor text into account when ranking sites. It is therefore beneficial to have keywords in the anchor text of links pointing to your site.
All the links pointing at a particular web page from other different domain names. Also called inbound links
When pages are removed from a search engine's index, specifically the search engine has deemed the webpage or website to be spamming or violating some type of guideline.
The practice of delivering content based on the IP address of the client. The practice is sometimes defended by saying it's a way of protecting code from theft. It should be noted that the practice of cloaking can get your site banned from the search engines.
A log file that tracks visitors, search terms, referrers and access points to a web site. A combined log file typically includes additional information on user agents, referrers etc.
Sometimes referred to as the log file or common log file.
A type of HTML tag that is used to hide text from browsers. Although some search engines will read and index the content contained within these tags, most engines ignore it and some may penalize those who attempt to use it to artificially increase keyword density. Comment tags are common in pages that use scripting languages like php and asp.
Generally refers to the visible bodytext on your Web page, links leaving your Web page, the text in relation to those links, etc.
Referring to links between groups of domains - for example your business site, your personal homepage and your cat's homepage. Cross linking is sometimes used to inflate link popularity. Although not yet proven, excessive cross linking is widely believed to be penalized by the search engines.
An add-on to HTML that allows for more accurate control over the way a web page is rendered. CSS allows designers to create custom styles that are then applied to the web site in one of a variety of ways. The main benefit is that something like text colors for an entire site can be changed by editing only the CSS file. CSS can also be used in SEO, but most SEO techniques that involve CSS are considered spam.
A HTML tag that gives a general description of the contents of the page. This description is not displayed on the page itself, but is largely intended to help the search engines index the page correctly. Some search engines use the description found in the description tag on their SERPs. A growing number of search engines are completely ignoring the description tag because of spam.
Web site content generated automatically, usually from a database and based on user actions / selections. Dynamic content typically changes at regular intervals, for example daily or each time the users reload the page. SERPs are dynamically generated pages, changing depending on user input.
The practice of adding fields to a database and page templates, like for an ecommerce website, where just as each page has a different product, the optimisation elements are also different. Usually limited to the page title, meta description and meta keywords.
An HTML tag of 6 sizes. The syntax is etc., with H1 being the largest. Heading tags have significance in SEO. Search engines normally assign more weight to documents where the keywords used in the query are found inside heading tags. Pages that use heading tags generally rank higher, but excessive use might get the page de-listed.
One hit is one request for a file on a web server. A visitor opening a page with 5 images will in the process generate 6 hits (1 each for the images and one for the HTML page itself). The term is sometimes also used with reference to the number of results (hits) a search engine returns for a specific query.
The main "index" page or navigation hub of a web site. The homepage is not necessarily the first page. Many sites use splash pages to welcome visitors and lead them from there to the homepage. At most search engines you can simply submit your homepage and leave it to the spider to crawl the rest of the site from there.
Clickable content on a web page usually leads to another page, another site or another part of the same page. The clickable content therefore is said to link to the other page / site / part of the same page. Spiders use links to crawl from one page to the next as they index web sites.
An image that has different clickable areas linked to different pages. Image maps can either be imbedded in the HTML code or called as an external file. Search engines usually have difficulty spidering image maps when they are included from external files.
Text on a web page that is exactly or almost the same color as the background. The use of invisible text to load a page with keywords was once a popular SEO technique, but search engines can now detect invisible text and penalize sites that use it. Although there are examples of sites that use invisible text and "get away with it" on Google, the general consensus is that it is not worth the risk. The same results can usually be achieved by working the keywords into the visible body text.
A controversial technique for reporting a false IP address. In the context of search engines, IP spoofing is sometimes used to refer to the practice of cloaking.
A word used in a query. In SEO, pages are typically optimized for specific keywords. Keywords are targeted based on what users looking for the specific information or product are most likely to use as part of a query. Accurate keyword targeting is considered by most to be essential to effective SEO.
A measure of the percentage of words on a page that are specifically chosen keywords. When a user enters a query, search engines display a list of pages containing the search terms. These are ranked based on (amongst many things) the percentage of words on a page that are similar to the words used in the query (keyword density).
A meta tag listing keywords associated with the page.
LSI is the Acronym of Latent Semantic Indexing, also known as Latent Semantic Analysis. It is a kind of Information Retrieval (IR) which switches the current lexical functioning of every search engine to a semantic one. In this kind of indexing, it is possible that a query returns results which do not contain the keyword or the keywords searched; without any doubt this is the future of search engines;
A measure of the quantity and quality of inbound links. Link popularity is an important factor in SEO. For more on its role in SEO as well as legitimate ways to improve a site's link popularity
Referring to the analysis of records stored in the log file. In its raw format, the data in the log files can be hard to read and overwhelming. There are numerous log file analyzers that convert log file data into user-friendly charts and graphs. A good analyzer is generally considered an essential tool in SEO because it can show search engine statistics such as the number of visitors received from each search engine, the keywords each visitors used to find the site, visits by search engine spiders etc. For more on log file analysis and analyzers
A type of spamdexing where one website gives another website enough fake hits so as to get into their top referrer logs and obtain backlinks. Most often done to high PageRank sites with publicly available site usage logs that are spidered by Google.
The process of manually submitting a web page to a search engine or directory as opposed to using submission software or a submission service. Manual submission is considered by many to be the only reliable form of submission, although some programs and services have begun distinguishing themselves as viable options.
Metarefresh
An HTML tag that is used to reload or refresh the page after a specified interval, often use to automatically redirect visitors to another page. Most search engines penalize pages that use meta refresh or any other type of automatic redirection.
Metatag
An HTML tag placed in the head section of a web page. The tag provides additional information that is not displayed on the page itself. The initial idea was that webmasters should use these tags to help search engines index the page correctly by providing an accurate description of the page content and a list of keywords associated with the page. Unfortunately this left the door open to abuse. Many webmasters used these tags to gain an unfair advantage, forcing search engines to begin disregarding meta tags.
Describes the hypertext links found on web sites that are part of text content and that link to expanded or additional information on a subject without consideration of their value in link popularity.
If you don't want Google to follow a link and index it from your site, you can use the following tag in your her links: reel="nofollow"
Possible uses include channeling of PR away from non-monetary pages such as an "about" page. So, instead of having a live link to the about page, by having the html href="http://www.example.com/about.html"
rel="nofollow">About Us, Googlebot will not:
1. Index the page from that link;
2. Consider the anchor text of the link; or
3. Pass any PR to the linked page.
Those factors that impact the ranking of a web page but that are not located on the web page itself. Inbound links, anchor text etc. are examples of off the page factors.
The act of duplicating a (usually high ranking) web page and presenting the duplicate as the original. This kind of blatant theft is fairly uncommon. In most cases the legitimate author / owner can easily prove ownership of the material.
Google's measure of the link popularity of a page.
Most spiders will not crawl an entire site in one session. Instead, they crawl a couple of pages and return after a day or two to crawl a couple more and so on until they have indexed the entire site. This is a self-imposed limit in order not to overburden a server. These gaps between sessions are collectively known as the politeness window. Nice spiders.
Referring to the position of a web page on the search results for a particular query. For example, a page that is listed third for the term "bubblegum" is said to have a ranking of 3 for that term.
A link placed on site A, pointing to site B, on the condition that site B returns the favor. Also called a link swap. Contrary to popular belief, reciprocal linking does not necessarily improve a site's PageRank. In some cases it can have a negative effect on PageRank.
Users can be redirected from one page to another either by asking them to click on a link or by means of automatic redirection, most often done with the meta refresh tag. Automatic redirection has been misused to the point where most search engines now penalize sites that use it, typically by de-listing the offending site.
When a user follows a link from page A to page B, page A is called the referrer. The referrer is identified by the URL of the referring page. Referrer information can be accessed through the log file.
A relative link is a hyperlink that does not include an entire domain name, folder or subdirectory name and file name together in the URL. A link that is defined by its relative position to the current URL. For example: searchmarketing.html
The measure of the accuracy of the search results - in other words it's a measure of how close the documents listed in the search results are to what the user was looking for. The ability to return relevant results is a big thing in the search engine world - and arguably the one thing that made Google stand out of the crowd and gain much popularity in a short time.
A text file (with the ".txt" extension) that tells spiders which pages it may not index. Every time a spider (that complies with the Robots Exclusion Standard) visits a site it will first request a robots.txt file to see where in the site it is not allowed to go.
Search engines usually arrange search results from the most relevant to the least relevant (as determined by the search engine's algorithm). In order to rank documents, the search engine assigns a score to each page and those with the highest scores are listed first. Most search engines simply give the maximum score to the most relevant document and score all other relevant documents relative to that document. Others compare all documents to a theoretically perfect document. The score of a web page therefore refers to its relevance as perceived by a specific search engine.
A variation of spamdexing where pages are optimized for popular search terms even though those terms are not related to the page content. In the long run this technique makes little sense, as it attracts mostly untargeted visitors.
An acronym for Search Engine Optimisation. The process of ensuring that your web site is easily accessible to search engines so that they are more likely to present the site high up in the list to users who run searches.
Search Engine Results Page(s). The term refers to the page of search results a search engine displays in response to a query.
A collective name for the different techniques used to steal traffic from another site. For example the use of another’s trade name in the title tags etc.
Also see obfuscation and spamdexing.
A map to your site. A sitemap contains links to every page of your site (check out Google's sitemap). The important benefit of having a sitemap (apart from helping your visitors find what they are looking for) is that spiders can find all pages on a site quickly and with fewer hops. For maximum benefit, insert a prominent link to your sitemap on every page of your site.
A piece of software run (sent out) by a search engine to collect information about sites on the web. Spiders navigate through each site collecting information about the words they encounter so that the site can be listed in the spider's engine. There are things you can do structurally with the site to make it easier or more difficult for spiders to get to your content.
A browser-like program that forms part of a search engine. Its task is to "surf" the web by following links from one page to the next and from one site to the next. It collects information from the sites it visits and that information is stored in the search engine's database.
A page that is displayed before users enter a site. Splash pages are often comparatively empty except for a logo, welcome message and "click here to enter" type of link. Splash pages are often used to house introductory Flash animations. Splash pages are generally considered annoying since they offer very little value. Even very impressive splash pages offer only entertainment - which normally distracts from the sales effort and hampers SEO.
Characters in URLs (like question marks, equal signs and ampersands) that signal the search engine spiders to stop crawling beyond a certain point.
Words like conjunctions, prepositions etc. that are so commonly used that they have little or no influence on relevance. Most search engines ignore stop words entered in a query.
The process of sending information about your site to search engines so that they know you exist without their having to go out and find you. Submissions can be manual or automated. Automated submission uses tools to send the information. Many of the more sophisticated engines strongly dislike automatic submissions, and it's important therefore to be very selective about which engines you submit to using this approach. Software tools that do this typically allow you to submit to hundreds or thousands of engines at once, and it's common to see spam email for these types of services. Manual submission is done by accessing the search engine directly, finding the right place for submitting your site, and following the instructions for doing so.
The title of a page is displayed in the title bar right at the top of the browser window. Almost all search engines consider the title when determining a document's relevance to a query and most search engines consider the title the most important element. In the page, the title is specified as an HTML element and placed in the header section of the page.
Used to describe one person visiting a site. That one person may generate multiple visits over a period of time, therefore log files normally show more visits than unique visitors. The shortened version "uniques" is sometimes used to refer to unique visitors.
Validation means the CSS, HTML or XHTML of your Web page is error free and that you have tested your HTML or XHTML and CSS to make certain that it contains only W3C-approved tags and properly authored Cascading Style Sheets. It's the process of Kosherizing your XHTML and CSS. A validator is a computer program that checks the HTML of a Web page to ensure that the syntax of the HTML is correct.
Refers to information that is passed to the server with the URL that the server uses within the context of a script or server-based program.
Describing the technique search engines use to compare the relevance of different documents to a query. Search engines effectively "weigh" different pages based on things like the occurrence of keywords in the title etc. in order to list documents in order from most to least relevant.
Also see score.
Industry Terms
Term used to describe when customers visit a website, but fails to complete a purchase or otherwise intended action.
With reference to the top part of a newspaper, the term is used on the Net to describe the top part of the page that the user can see without scrolling down.
Web accessibility means access to the Web by everyone, regardless of disability whether it be physical, visual, hearing, and cognitive or neurological disabilities. An accessible Web site allows all users to access it, regardless of their browser, resolution, settings, or eyesight. Not only does accessible mean allowing the Web to be used by people with disabilities, but also allowing Web pages to be understood by people using browsers other than the usual ones - including voice browsers that read Web pages aloud to people with sight impairments, Braille browsers that translate text into Braille, hand-held browsers with very little monitor space, teletext displays, and other unusual output devices.
A term used in Internet marketing to describe the point at which a visitor becomes a qualified lead / customer. Generally this is the point where the visitor
An Internet advertising specialist. Ad brokers act as middlemen between web site owners with advertising space to sell and advertisers.
Referring to the relationship between words, particularly words used in a search engine query. Search engines typically assign higher value to pages where the search terms appear next to one another (as in the query) than to pages where the search terms are separated by other words.
Google's contextual based ad program.
Affiliate programs allow other people to sell your products on a commission basis. All your affiliates really do is place link to your site. When a visitor arrives at your site, your affiliate program "makes a note" of the site that referred him. If a visitor buys something and the referring site belongs to one of your affiliates, you pay that affiliate either a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount - according to your agreement
Algorithms are sets of rules according to which search engines rank web pages. Figuring out the algorithms is a major part of SEO. The thinking is that if you understand how they calculate relevance, you can make specific pages on your site super relevant for specific search terms.
Active Server Pages. A server-side scripting language used to deliver dynamic content.
In the context of search engines, the term refers to the percentage of the total Internet population that uses a particular search engine during a given month. Together with search hours, audience reach is an important measure when calculating the popularity of the different search engines.
A link on another page that links to the page you are viewing. Also called an inbound link.
The term "blog" is used to refer to sites that can best be described as mini-directories, often populated with the site owner's personal favorites and his/her comments. Blogs often contain message boards, chat rooms, articles archives etc.
Filtering documents by extracting some or all of the content contained in each document. Modern search engines all use content-based filtering in combination with either filtering mechanisms. Best known of these other mechanisms is Google's PageRank system that measures inbound links from other documents.
A contextual ad is an advertisement that dynamically appears on a website. A contextual ad system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns ads to the web page based on what the user is viewing, either through ads placed on the page or pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a site about sports, and the site uses contextual advertising, the user might see ads for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia dealers or ticket sellers. Contextual advertising also is used by search engines to display ads on their search results page based on what word(s) the users has searched for.
What search engine spiders do. It refers to the action of following hyperlinks to navigate from page to page and site to site.
The practice of buying domains that contain popular trade names (for example fordmotors.com) or are common misspellings of popular trade names (for example gogle.com). The intent is usually to either resell the domain or to pull traffic through misspellings, rather than to develop a serious, unique site. Traffic gained through misspellings is often automatically redirected to another domain.
Referring to the removal of pages from a search engine index. De-listing can occur at the request of the site owner or a variety of other reasons. Most often, de-listing occurs when a page breaks one of a search engine's submission rules, making itself guilty of some sort of spamdexing.
A type of search engine where listings are gathered through human efforts, rather than by automated crawling of the web. In directories, web sites are often reviewed, summarized in about 25 words and placed in a particular category.
The address or URL of a particular Web site, it is the text name corresponding to the numeric IP address of a computer on the Internet.
Also known as bridge pages, bridging pages, entry pages and landing pages. Referring to a page designed to rank well for a selected keyword and redirect visitors to another, "real" page. Important here is that there are two kinds of doorway pages: those generated automatically based on a template and manually created keyword focused content pages (KFCPs). The first kind is considered spam and penalized by most search engines. The second is an important and usually very effective SEO technique.
A coding technique used to combine multiple HTML documents into a single web page. Frames are often used to allow certain areas of a web site to remain in place (i.e. navigation, header, footer) while other areas of the site are scrollable. Most web crawlers are unable to read and index the content within a frameset.
Banners and other types of advertising units which can be synchronized to search keywords. Includes pop-ups, browser toolbars and rich media.
Text on a web page designed to be visible to spiders but not to human visitors. The aim is to load the page with keywords without deterring from the visitor's experience. Of the various techniques of hiding text, the most common is to set the text color to exactly or nearly the background color.
Hypertext Markup Language - the main language used to write Web pages
Clickable content on a web page usually leads to another page, another site or another part of the same page. The clickable content therefore is said to link to the other page / site / part of the same page. Spiders use links to crawl from one page to the next as they index web sites.
One display of an image or advertisement.
Index is a directory. Index also refers to the database of Web pages maintained by a search engine or directory.
The Internet is actually a network of networks. It is a system of linked computer networks, international in scope that facilitates data transfer and communication services, such as Telnet or remote login, FTP (file transfer protocol), email, newsgroups, and the World Wide Web.
Internet Protocol. Essentially a set of standards that is necessary to ensure that data sent between networks are readable on both sides. IP provides the standard for the way data is scrambled and sent over the Internet, while TCP (transmission control protocol) provides a standard for the way data is unscrambled. These two standards are essential to the working of the Internet.
Every Internet user and every server has a numeric address. For example 123.45.67.890. is an IP addresses that provide essential identification online. Domain names can be set up to have a unique IP address, something that is useful in SEO.
A keyword phrase is a phrase which forms part of a search engine query. Keyword phrases are usually a combination of two, three, four, etc. keywords.
Keywords used in your Meta tags must be relevant to the content or theme of your Web page, or overall theme of your Web site.
Similar to Free For All pages, it refers to a page where anyone can list a web site to be linked to. Link farms are used to artificially boost link popularity. Most search engines penalize sites associated with link farms.
Metasearch engine
A type of search engine. Meta search engines usually do not maintain databases. Instead, they query other search engines' databases and return results from all of them - usually with a mention of the search engine next to the each result. The Search Engine Yearbook discusses meta search engines in more detail and lists some of the more popular ones.
Referring to sites that offer authorized duplicates of content also found on other sites. The initial motivation was to ease bandwidth load and increase availability by distributing popular files to many servers. In the context of SEO, the term is mostly used to refer to sites that attempt to deceive search engines into indexing more than one instance of a site by duplicating it on another server and domain. Most search engines now have filters in place to detect mirror sites and many of them penalize these sites by de-listing both the original site and the mirror site.
The practice of using scripts to prevent a user from leaving a web site. Typically these involve disabling the back button and the close button or using pop-ups that seem to multiply each time the visitor closes one.
A system that allows search engine users to type a question rather than keywords. There are a couple of ways to do this kind of processing. At the simplest level, the search engine simply removes the stop words in the question to leave keywords that are then processed as if it was a regular query. At the other end of the scale there are very advanced systems that use statistics and linguistic analysis to accurately match documents to the user's question. The best-known example of this kind of approach is the AskJeeves search engine (www.askjeeves.com).
A massive directory continually expanded by volunteers. What sets this directory apart is that it makes its database of indexed documents available to other directories & search engines. A listing here results in the page automatically being listed in many other directories and search engines. The model of using volunteer editors is fairly ambitious - and surprisingly successful. It is a big achievement and an asset to the online internet community.
Listings that are not pay for placement or pay per click. They are web sites who appear in a search engines index or listings because the search engines have deemed them significantly important for them to be included. Paid inclusion is considered organic even though it is paid for because they appear intermixed with unpaid organic results.
Paid inclusion means that, in exchange for a fee, a search engine will guarantee to list web pages from a web site. Paid Inclusion services are basically a way to guarantee your web site is kept in a search engines database and regularly indexed. The major benefit to paying for inclusion is that it ensures your web site title and description is regularly updated in the search engine, meaning users of the search engine will always see your most up to date listing. Inktomi, Fast and Ask Jeeves have paid inclusion programs.
A supposedly less annoying variation of the pop-up. It creates a new browser window, usually containing an advertisement that is displayed behind the current window. The user then only sees the pop-under when the current window is closed or minimized. In truth, many users find pop-unders as annoying as pop-ups, with the added irritation of feeling tricked into not closing the new window immediately.
A new browser window (usually containing an advertisement) automatically opened when the users performs a specified action - like opening a page, clicking a link, closing a page etc.
Also see pop-under.
A web site that functions as a kind of starting page or entry point to the web. Portals typically have a wide variety of features such as search, free web-based e-mail, news etc. Well-known examples include Excite and Yahoo.
A keyword, group of keywords or phrase, with or without special instructions like Boolean operators, used in a search. In simpler terms, it is what the user enters into the search box. It is what the search engine compares documents to in order to return only relevant documents.
A measure of a search engine's ability to return all relevant results. Search engines must find a balance between recall and precision (The measure of a search engine's ability to return only relevant results). If there are 10 pages about "blue bananas" in a search engine's database and a search for "blue bananas" returns only 8 of those pages, the recall is scored at 0.8 or 80%. It's important to note that recall has nothing to do with database size. If another search engine has only 3 pages about blue bananas and returns all 3, its recall is 100%, even though there are other relevant documents not included in its database.
The actual amount of time (in hours) all visitors to a search engine spent there during a given month. Audience reach and search hours are the two major factors when calculating the popularity of a search engine.
Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, a non-profit, formed to increase the awareness of and educate people on the value of search engine marketing.
A search utility that allows the user to search through documents on a particular site. Different from a search engine in that its database contains only documents found on that site as opposed to a wider collection of documents from all over the web.
A collective name for those marketing techniques that is intrusive, offensive and/or unethical in some way. A major characteristic is that it aims its message at a wide (often in the millions), untargeted audience - which it can afford because electronic distribution is very cheap. The most common form of spam is unsolicited commercial e-mail. In the search engine world, regular mass submission of web pages to search engines is also referred to as spam or spamdexing. The term spamdexing is also used to refer to all SEO techniques that are deceptive or unethical.
All attempts to deceive search engines or gain an unfair advantage in the search results of a search engine. Spamdexing decreases the value of a search engine's index by reducing the precision with which the search engine can return relevant documents. Most search engines have measures in place to detect spamdexing and guilty pages are usually either penalized or de-listed. Many webmasters inadvertently make themselves guilty by braking search engine submission rules.
A type of HTML command that allows webmasters to insert code from an outside HTML document. It is especially used with things like menus, headers and footers that are the same for all pages. To change the menu, for example, the webmaster changes only the external menu file and the menu changes across the entire site. SSI can also be used to insert non-HTML elements like scripts.
In the context of search engines, the term is often used to refer to the information created by some type of reporting software. The web server log files for the site are used as the source of the information. Also known as Web stats, web reporting, statistics, and traffic reports.
The use of linguistic analysis to get to the root form of a word. Search engines that use stemming compare the root forms of the search terms to the documents in its database. For example, if the user enters "viewer" as the query, the search engine reduces the word to its root ("view") and returns all documents containing the root - like documents containing view, viewer, viewing, preview, review etc.
Every business has a target market. If you believe your target market is 'everyone', your web site will fail to achieve any significant results. Your target market allows you to focus your marketing towards a specific group of people who want/need your products/services. And a web site is the perfect medium to promote your offerings to them.
The content on your web site has to appeal to your target audience if you want to achieve site traffic that actually converts to sales. Your content must be written so that it shows the reader you understand his/her problems and are able to solve them. Your marketing message must clearly answer their specific questions if you want to turn these prospects into paying customers.
A domain where the name itself has little value to the owner. Throwaway domains are typically used to experiment with. It's common among search engine spammers to register throwaway domains to experiment with things like cloaking. Unethical SEO providers sometimes use throwaway domains to build link popularity to a client's site. This can backfire though as search engines are continually finding better ways to combat spam.
With reference to search engines, toolbars are browser add-ons provided by the search engines. These toolbars often include a search box, shortcuts to the different sections of the search engine, additional page information etc.
The process of transferring information from a local drive to a server - specifically when that information then becomes accessible via the Internet.
Uniform Resource Locator / Universal Resource Locator. A unique Internet address (for example http://www.hitwise.com.au) that every Internet resource must have in order to be located.
When a domain is hosted on a virtual server, it means that it shares that server with other domains. This is a very cost effective way of hosting web sites, but access speeds are not as high as for domains hosted on dedicated servers.
The term is sometimes confused with unique visitor. The difference is that one unique visitor visiting a site repeatedly over a period of time will show up on the site's log files as many visitors. The term therefore refers to the number of times people visit a site - not the actual number of people visiting a site.
Copywriting specifically aimed at an online audience. It shares many of the ground rules of offline copywriting, but has quickly evolved to become a stand-alone science. Recently it has also begun taking into account how spiders see web pages. Although there are many who feel copywriters should focus on converting visitors to customers and not be concerned with getting visitors, there are strong arguments for SEO considerations to form part of web copywriting.
Any number of measurement criteria’s used to evaluate the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. Common measurements include unique visitors, page views, return visits, visit duration, conversion rate, and conversion by campaign, etc.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines or recommendations on how a Web page should be markedup with HTML, XHTML and CSS and how browsers should display that markup.
Extensible Markup Language. A web programming language that allows web authors to define their own, custom tags. Especially useful in the creation of web-based applications.
Some search engines allow users to limit a search to specific zones - better described as topic areas. A user may, for example, elect to search only documents from a certain geographic area or only documents created within a specific timeframe.
Pay Per Click Terminology
Total cost of an advertising / marketing campaign divided by the number of visitors (visitor acquisition cost) or divided by the number of customers (customer acquisition cost). Monitoring of acquisition cost is an important factor in effective PPC advertising.
The number of page views a site has available for advertising.
A group of advertisements, commercials, and related promotional materials and activities that are designed to be used during the same period of time as part of a coordinated advertising plan to meet the specified advertising objectives of a client.
This is the name of the Goggle based PPC advertising system they use. It lets advertisers run adverts on their search results with a view to sending more qualified traffic to sites that pay.
A means by which your bid on a given keyword is automatically changed by 1 cent if your nearest competitor changes their bid. Although you set a maximum bid, you may pay less if auto budding works in your favor.
The amount you are willing to pay for keyword ranking on PPC search engines.
Your campaign dashboard is a quick snapshot of key information relating to your search marketing campaign. It also provides quick access to all reports available within NEO.
Referring to the action of clicking through from, for example, a search engine's results page to a web site. Click through rates are especially useful in Internet advertising where it is an important factor in determining the success of an advertisement.
Search engines can track user clicks in order to "learn" from users which pages are most relevant to a query. The best-known example is that of "Direct Hit", a discontinued search engine that not only tracked clicks but also logged the amount of time users spent on pages returned in order to improve relevance.
Conversion points are the points at which your customers have completed a specific action on your web site. Common conversion points are: Newsletter sign up - the "thank you for subscribing" page, Order/Sale - the "thank you for your order" page, Download - the "Your download is complete" page.
Total cost per sale, calculated by dividing the total cost of an advertising campaign by the number of resulting sales. For example, if $1000 is spent on an advertising campaign and that campaign results in 20 sales, the conversion cost per sale is $50 ($1000 / 20). That means it costs $50 to generate one sale.
The percentage of site visitors that deliver the most wanted response (MWR). The CR is an important measure of the effectiveness of the online sales effort. For example, if 4 out of every 100 visitors to a site deliver the MWR, the CR for that site is 4%.
Hitwise Search Marketing offers conversion tracking to help you measure successful actions derived from your search marketing campaign. By placing Hitwise code on your thank you and/or receipt pages, we provide extra reporting to show key conversion metrics including search terms and search engines that delivered the online conversion which may be a sale, newsletter subscription or enquiry depending on your marketing campaign.
System where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for each click someone makes on a link leading to their web site. Also known as CPC.
The calculation of the advertising cost to acquire a new customer. When you receive the desired information from a potential customer in direct response advertising, this is the lead you pay for in per inquiry programs. With lead generation systems, you pay only for the number of inquiries, or leads, that result from your ad campaign, regardless of the type of media.
Cost per click. The total cost of an advertising campaign divided by the resulting number of unique visitors. Sometimes also used as a synonym for PPC.
Cost per thousand impressions (M= Roman numeral for 1000). A pricing system often used in the banner advertising industry. Typically a fixed price is offered for 1000 impressions of a banner. The price is usually influenced by the topic of the site (how targeted the audience is) rather than the popularity of the site.
Earnings Per Click. A unit of measure used to determine a site's ability to convert visitors into customers. Calculated by dividing total sales amount by total page views.
Earnings Per Visitor. A unit of measure used to determine a site's ability to convert visitors into customers. Calculated by dividing total sales amount by total number of visitors to the site.
The opposite of Auto Bidding. A type of keyword bidding in which you pay exactly the agreed amount for each clickthrough. For example, if you bid $0.10 on a keyword, you will pay $0.10 for each clickthrough, regardless of other advertiser bids. See "Auto Bidding" for further explanation.
Keyword Bid
The maximum amount of money you are prepared to pay for every time that a user clicks on your pay-per-click ad on a search engine and thus visits your website.
Landing Page
The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking a search engine listing. Marketers attempt to improve conversion rates by testing various landing page creative, which encompasses the entire user experience including navigation, layout and copy.
Minimum bid
This is the minimum amount of money that you are willing to pay for a single click on an ad.
These are filtering words. If your keywords contain a negative keyword, and that word is included in a search term, your ad will not show.
NEO is an acronym for the Next Evolution in Optimisation. Our tracking technology allows Hitwise Search Marketing clients to access cutting edge real-time information on their search marketing campaign. NEO reports provide important information to allow you to make advanced optimisation and management decisions in conjunction with your dedicated account manager. You have the ability to access NEO as frequently as you like during the course of your marketing campaign and run a full spectrum of advanced campaign reports, many with drill down options for micro analysis. Our reporting allows you to see as much or as little as you require together with a summary Campaign Dashboard for a quick snapshot.
A Yahoo! owned PPC company. As well as providing Yahoo! with their PPC listings they also supply several other notable search engines and portals with PPC listings such as MSN.
Often confused with a hit, the term refers to the actual number of pages (not files) viewed by all visitors to a site in a given time period. The number of page views (and other statistics) can be obtained through log file analysis.
A listing on a SERP that is achieved through outbidding competitors (as in PPC). The term is sometimes also used to refer to keyword-targeted advertisements, where the advertiser pays the search engine a fixed amount to have its ad shown on the SERP for a specific keyword.
Some search engines will consider not only exact matches, but also partial matches. This means that if the search term is contained within a word in a document in its index, the search engine considers the document a match. It's not as complicated as it sounds though. If the user enters "word" as the query, the search engine will consider a document a match if it contains word or wordiness or foreword or MSWord etc. So the search term should be contained in the word.
A search for documents containing an entire phrase - as opposed to one or more keywords. The important distinction here is that in a phrase search, the words have to appear side by side in the document (exactly as in the query) for that document to be considered a match. If the words appear scattered or they appear side by side but in the wrong sequence, it is not considered a match. Phrase searching can be done on most search engines by simply enclosing the phrase in quotation marks.
Pay-Per-Click. An advertising payment model where the advertiser pays only when the advertisement is actually clicked. In other words, the advertiser literally pays only for visitors rather than per advertisement impression. The term CPC (cost per click) is sometimes used in the place of PPC and the plural PPCs is sometimes used to refer to PPC search engines.
The ratio of the number of web sites which contain a keyword or keyphrase ("R", the supply) to the number of search engine searches for that keyword or keyphrase ("S", the demand). Used as to identify attractive keywords for which there is little competition.
Return On Investment. In the context of SEO, the term refers to sales generated as the direct result of a search engine marketing campaign.
Uncaptured is a term used to explain search engines, websites and portals that partner with Tier 1 search engines such as Google and Overture in order to extend the reach of your campaign by providing search results from these organisations. These sites can list in the thousands, so to keep the reporting succinct we group the traffic into one overall engine.
Hitwise Search Marketing continues to review the websites included in 'Uncaptured' to determine if any website should be removed and placed into you’re reporting on its own. The main contributors to this total are usually smaller 3rd Tier search engines and content targeted advertising such as Overture's Content Match and Google's Adsense program.
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