Search Engine Optimization & Marketing Glossary -Part 1

• Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing is a process of revenue sharing that allows merchants to duplicate sales efforts by enlisting other web sites as a type of outside sales force. Successful affiliate marketing programs result in the merchant attracting additional buyers, and the affiliate earning the equivalent of a referral fee, based on click-through referrals to the merchant site.

• Advertising network: A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple Web sites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site.

• ALT Image tag - Search engines aren't able to read images as such, so the alt tag or text attribute describes what the image represents.

• Algorithm: A set of rules that a search engine uses to rank listings in response to a query. Search engines guard their algorithms closely, as they are the unique formulas used to determine relevancy. Algorithms are sometimes referred to as the ”secret sauce.”

• anchor text: The clickable text part of a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

• Automatic Optimization – Search engines identify which ad for an individual advertiser demonstrates the highest CTR (click-through rate) as time progresses, and then optimizes the ad serve, showing that ad more often than other ads in the same Ad Group/Ad Order.

• Alexa ranking - Alexa is a search engine that provides extra information such as traffic rankings. An Alexa ranking is an indicator used to gauge site performance, based on comparisons drawn against other sites.

• Black hat - A person engaged in or tactic used to increase search engine rankings using methods frowned upon by search engine companies.

Bot - usually used in reference to a search engine robot or spider; software applications that retrieve web page information to feed into a database.

• Backlinks Also called incoming links, inward links and inlinks, backlinks are incoming links to a Website or page. They measure the Website or page rank and also affect SEO considerations and calculations. By looking up backlinks on the search engine, Website owners can keep track of the number of pages that link back to them. Backward links See Backlinks

• Black Box Algorithms – Black box is technical jargon for a when system is viewed primarily in terms of input and output characteristics. A black box algorithm is one where the user cannot see the inner workings of the algorithm. All search engine algorithms are hidden.

• Blog a derivation from Web logs, are user-generated Websites for personal use, much like journal entries. Blogs evolve around a certain subject, be it a personal blog where the "blogger" writes in first person, or a political blog, commentary on local news and so on. It is often used as a Search Engine Marketing method, promoting a certain Website by generating links and driving traffic to it, for example.

• Bot -Internet bots, short for robots, also known as spiders and crawlers, are automated tasks that the search engine uses to scan the Internet. They perform mostly large-scale, repetitive tasks, consisting of downloading HTML non-graphic content. See also Spider.

• Bid-In Search Engine Marketing, a bid is the amount a Website owner is willing to pay for the placement among the sponsored links on the search results page. The ranking is based on the bid as well as on keyword ranking as determined by the search engine.

• Broken Link-
Links are clickable text that refers a user to a Webpage, a document or any image by clicking on them. Broken links fail to do so, sending the user to an error page.

• Click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

• Content network: A group of Web sites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. For example: Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network.

• Contextual advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a Web page based on the page's content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.

• Cost per action (CPA): A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the ad. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

• Cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

• Click Bot – A program generally used to artificially click on paid listings within the engines in order to artificially inflate click amounts.

• Cloaking - The process by which a web site can display different versions of a web page under different circumstances. It is primarily used to show an optimized or a content-rich page to the search engines and a different page to humans. Most major search engine representatives have publicly stated that they do not approve of this practice.

• Crawl - the process by which search engine spiders retrieve web page information.

• Conversion: A site visitor completes a desired action. Generally a download, signup, purchase, etc.

• Cache:A search engine may save time in accessing Web pages by accessing a cached copy of the page, temporarily saved on the computer, instead of the original data.

• Content Network – Also called Contextual Networks, content networks include Google and Yahoo! Contextual Search networks that serve paid search ads triggered by keywords related to the page content a user is viewing.

• Content Targeting – An ad serving process in Google and Yahoo! that displays keyword triggered ads related to the content or subject (context) of the web site a user is viewing. Contrast to search network serves, in which an ad is displayed when a user types a keyword into the search box of a search engine or one of its partner sites.

• Contextual Advertising – Advertising that is automatically served or placed on a web page based on the page’s content, keywords and phrases. Contrast to a SERP (search engine result page) ad display. For example, contextual ads for digital cameras would be shown on a page with an article about photography, not because the user entered “digital cameras” in a search box.

• Custom Feed – Create custom feeds for each of the shopping engines that allow you to submit XML feeds. Each of the engines has different product categories and feed requirements.

• Cascading Style Sheets is a method for adding styles to web documents. Note: Using external CSS files makes it easy to change the design of many pages by editing a single file.