Search Marketing Glossary

A brief glossary for popular terms related to search marketing and search optimization.

a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z

¬ A

Absolute Link
<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com">Click here for more information</a>.

The above is an example of an absolute link. See Relative Link.

It specifies a transfer protocol, domain name and/or a file name. Many uses for absolute links especially when linking in or out of a website.

Adsense
Google AdSense is a free program that enables website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads and earn money per clicked ad they display on their website. This is the most widely used revenue source for website publishers.

*note: Publishers (site owners) run Adsense to make money by user clicks. Adwords is for advertising on publisher sites and search results.

Adwords
Google's CPC (Cost Per Click) text advertising. AdWords takes clickthrough rate into consideration in addition to advertiser's bid to determine the ad's relative position within the paid search results. Ads run on search results and content networks (a.k.a. publisher websites).

Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the visible text for a link within the website or to another website. For example:

This is anchor text. This isn't anchor text.

¬ B

Back links
A link from another website to your website. Back links are inbound links pointing to a web page, video, or document on your website.

Bot
Abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

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¬ C

Canonical URL
Canonicalization, as used by Google, is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. When Google "canonicalizes" a URL, it tries to pick the URL that seems like the best representative from a set of URLs that refer to the same page, eg:

* yourdomain.com
* www.yourdomain.com
* www.yourdomain.com/index.html
* yourdomain.com/index.html

Make sure all your links to a page use the same URL. Also, use 301 Redirects to redirect URLs to the URL you want to be "canonical." The best way to address how the URL is processed is with a handy .htaccess file.

Clickthrough / Clickthrough Rate
The rate at which people click on a link such as a search engine listing or a banner ad. Studies show that clickthrough rates are six times higher for search engine listings than banner ads. This is widely measured for determing the right ad for the right market with A/B testing scenarios.

Cloaking
Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Conversion
Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose.

CPA (Cost-Per-Action)
The cost incurred or price paid for a specific action, such as signing up for an email newsletter, entering a contest, registering on the site, completing a survey, downloading trial software, printing a coupon, etc.

CPC (Cost-Per-Click)
Abbreviation for Cost Per Click. It is the base unit of cost for a PPC campaign.

CPL (Cost-Per-Lead)
Pricing based on the number of new leads generated.

CPO (Cost-Per-Order)
Pricing based on the number of orders received as a result of your ad placement. Also known as cost-per-transaction.

CPS (Cost-Per-Sale)
Pricing based on the number of sales transactions your ad generates. Since users may visit your site several times before making a purchase, you can use cookies to track their visits from your landing page to the actual online sale. Also known as cost-per-acquisition or pay-per-sale.

CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand)
The cost incurred or price paid for a thousand impressions.

CTR
A ratio of clicks per impressions in a PPC campaign. CTR is a measure of the number of clicks received from the number of ad impressions delivered.

The formula to calculate CTR is:

(# clicks / # ad impressions) x 100

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¬ D

DMOZ (click here to visit DMOZ)
A human-reviewed directory of the web and one of the hardest to get into. Still an attractive site to be linked from.

¬ E

Exact Match
Exact Match is a form of keyword matching where the search query must be exactly the same as the advertisement keyword.

¬ F

Floating Ad
One of the most annoying features we come across in advertising, it is a hit or miss. This ad appears on top of the page's normal content either by sliding in from left to right and stopping. It is an attention getter and works. This is so effective because it causes the user to take action, fill out the request form or click on the ad...fortunately their is usually an "x" to close the ad.

Frequency
The number of times an ad is delivered to the same browser in a single sessions or time period.

¬ G

Geo Targeting
Advertising that is distributed based on geographic location. Online advertising allows for targeting of countries, states, cities and suburbs (in some markets).

¬ H

.htaccess
One of the oldest and most overlooked files on the Internet. This is mostly associated wtih Apache and Linux hosted websites. This file is critical in fine tuning a website when it comes to page types, php and redirects. Many more uses for this and is a must for high performance blogs. Read more >>>

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¬ K

KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
KPIs help organizations achieve organizational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. The key indicators are agreed upon by an organization and are indicators which can be measured that will reflect success factors. The KPIs selected must reflect the organization's goals, they must be key to its success, and they must be measurable. Key performance indicators usually are long-term considerations for an organization."

Key Phrase
A search phrase made up of keywords. See Longtail.

Keyword Density
the number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a web page. The more times that a given word appears on your page (within reason), the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search.

Keyword/Keyphrase
Keywords are words, which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are multi-word phrases used in search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and keyphrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.

Keyword Stuffing
Refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the 'benefit' of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (i.e. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.

¬ I

Impression
The number of times your search ad is served to users by search engines.

Inbound Link (IBL)
Any link on another website that points to a page on your website. Also called a backlink.

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¬ L

Landing Page
A landing page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to single product or service. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase.

Link Farm
A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (eg Google PageRank). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning. Google defines a Link Farm as any one page having more than 99 outbound links.

Link Popularity
A raw count of how "popular" a page is based on the number of backlinks/inbound links it has. It does not factor in link context or link quality, which are also important elements in how search engines make use of links to impact rankings.

Long Tail
Are three and four keyword phrases which are specific to whatever you are selling.

Example: "atlanta pro shop", "atlanta gold pro shop"

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¬ M

Meta Robots
This tag, in the <head> of a Web page, instructs the search engine spiders about how to index the page. By default, search engines assume the values "index,follow,archive" for all pages, but it's good practice to include them anyway, just in case. Use "noodp,noydir" to tell the search engines not to use descriptions from the DMOZ and Yahoo! directories in their search results. Search engines will generally use your meta description tag — below the bolded title-tag content — if they see these values in your robots meta tag.

Meta Tags
As old as the hey day of the Internet, the meta tag describing keywords, description, refresh and more continue to play a vital role in website development. However, many across the industry play down the use. NOT! Don't be fooled! Many directories and bots still list this information in search results, oh and so does the biggest search engine...Google. Best practice is to keep them, use them and utilize them.

¬ N

Natual Links
Natural links are those that point to your website because the site owner found value your site as a source and/or related to their website offering. Links like these are the hardest to come by, yet prove to be important in organic search development. Natural link development requires gettting the word out and marketing across other channels to aquire the attention of others.

¬ O

ODP - Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. ODP data powers the core directory services for many of the Web's largest search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, and Alexa. More at Wikipedia.

Off-page SEO
"Off-page SEO" refers to efforts to improve a website's search engine rankings by increasing the number and quality of backlinks to the site. This includes getting the site listed in Web directories (eg Open Directory Project - DMOZ), Yahoo Directory), getting more backlinks from what are called "authoritative" websites (sites that have been around a long time, and have what is generally considered reputable content & eg .edu and .gov are considered authoritative), as well as improving the anchor text for the backlinks already existing by adding high-value keywords to the anchor text. Compare with "on-page SEO."

On-page SEO
"On-page SEO" refers to efforts to optimize your own website, its coding, use of structural markup, directory and file nomenclature, and content. Compare with "off-page SEO".

Organic Search Results
These are the search results that appear in the main, left column of SERPs, as distinguished from the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) results that appear, in Google, under "Sponsored Links", which are based on ad relevance and bid amount. Organic results are based solely on on-page and off-page SEO.

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¬ P

Page Rank
Page Rank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

PFI
Abbreviation for Pay For Inclusion. Many search engines offer a PFI program to assure frequent spidering / indexing of a site (or page). PFI does not guarantee that a site will be ranked highly (or at all) for a given search term. It just offers webmasters the opportunity to quickly incorporate changes to a site into a search engine's index. This can be useful for experimenting with tweaking a site and judging the resultant effects on the rankings.

PPC
Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads. For Google, this is Adwords and the links appear under "Sponsored Links" in the right column and (sometimes) at the top, before the organic results.

¬ R

Relative Link
<a href="index.html">Click here for more information</a>.

The above is an example of a relative link. See Absolute Link.

A relative link can only be used when linking within a website, rather, relative links are used to link within a website only.

Robots.txt
The "robots.txt" is a file that resides in your root directory, search engine spiders read it to determine parts of a website they will index.
Learn more about this crafty little file.

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¬ S

SEM
Abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing. SEM encompasses SEO and search engine paid advertising options (banners, PPC, etc.)

SEO
Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO covers the process of addressing the focus of individual pages in a website to ensure that the subject matter of each page is clearly focused and clearly communicated via the directory and file name, the title tag and meta tags, the header tags, the content, and the anchor text of any links on the page. The goal is to communicate clearly to the search engines the subject matter of each page and to utilize the HTML markup to communicate the relative importance of a page's content.

Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks (Web URLs) to a public website such as Digg or Delicious (formely Del.icio.us) so you can access these bookmarks from any Web-connected computer. Your favorite bookmarks are also available for others to view and follow, as well, hence the social aspect. To create your own social bookmarks, you must register with a social bookmarking website. Once registered, you can store bookmarks, tag your bookmarks, and/or share your bookmarks with others.

SERP
Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page. This refers to the organic search results page for a given search.

Spider
Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

Splash Page
Splash pages are introduction pages to a web site that are heavy on graphics (or flash video) with no textual content. They are designed to either impress a visitor or complement some corporate branding.

Stop Word
Stop words are words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries. Common words such as "the" or "and" or "it."

Semantic Markup
Structural Markup, aka Semantic Markup, is markup that is used to set out the logical structure of a page. The <strong> tag identifies that text as strongly emphasized, header tags are utilized (H1, H2 ... H7) to indicate priority of text headers, etc. Structural markup makes the structure of the document clearer both to browsers (which can then display it more usefully to their users, particularly when external style sheets are disabled), and to search engines where the relative importance of content can be indicated by the markup. The use of structural markup is strongly recommended.

¬ T

Title Tag
This tag — <title> — which is located in the <head> of the HTML page indicates the subject matter of a Web page and should be concise and descriptive. On a SERP, the content of the title tag is the bolded anchor text, the first line of each result. This tag is given a fair amount of weight by the search engines because of its purpose and the fact that its content is viewable in the browser, in the top upper left of the browser in the Windows operating system and centered at the top of the browser in Mac systems.