Search Engine Optimization & Marketing Glossary -Part 6

• Title - An important Search Engine Optimization element, the title is used to describe the contents of a document. It is unique to the particular page, descriptive in nature or simply catchy and appealing, and rather short. Titles appear as links for users to click on or as link anchor text on documents. When used well it can help drive traffic to your website.

• Title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific Web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

• TLP – Acronym for Top Level Page, a reference to the home page, category pages, or product pages that have unique value for the site and so are structured in the top levels of the site directory.

• TLP Feed – Acronym for Top Level Page feed, the often automatic and on-subscription feed of an advertiser’s home page or unique category pages.

• Tail Terms – Search terms that are very specific, long phrases that include one or more modifiers, such as "cheapest helicopter skiing near Banff BC." These longer, more specific terms are called "tail terms" based on a bell-curve distribution of keyword usage that displays the low numbers of little-used terms at the “tail” end of the bell curve graph. (See “The Long Tail” by Wired editor Chris Anderson.) Although long, specific and lesser-used tail terms have low CTRs, they are less competitive (and therefore cheaper) and often catch buyers at the end of the purchase decision process. This means that, even with low click-through numbers, tail terms can have good conversion rates.

• Targeting – Narrowly focusing ads and keywords to attract a specific, marketing-profiled searcher and potential customer. You can target to geographic locations (geo-targeting), by days of the week or time of day (dayparting), or by gender and age (demographic targeting). Targeting features vary by search engine. Newer ad techniques and software focus on behavioral targeting, based on web activity and behaviors that are predictive for potential customers who might be more receptive to particular ads.

• Themes - A theme is an overall idea of what a web page is focused on. Search engines determine the theme of a web page through analysis in the algorithm of the density of associated words on a page.

• Tier I Search Engines – The top echelon, or top three, search engines that serve the vast majority of searcher queries. Also referred to as Major Engines, Top Tier Engines or GYM, for Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search.

• Tier II Search Engines – Smaller, vertical and specialized engines, including general engines, such as Ask.com and AOL; meta-engines that search and display results from other search engines, such as Dogpile; local engines, shopping and comparison engines, and business vertical engines. Tier II Search Engines don’t offer the search query market share or features of the Tier I engines; however, Tier II engines can target specific, niche markets and are usually lower cost.

• Tier III Search Engines – Contextual distribution networks, through which marketers’ ads appear on pages within the PPC engine’s content network, triggered by user web site page views at the moment that contain the advertiser’s keyword in its content. Cost is usually through Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions (CPM) charges, rather than Pay Per Click (PPC). As discussed in Fundamentals coursework, Google’s contextual distribution program is called AdSense; Yahoo!’s is called Content Match.

• Trackbacks - A protocol that allows a blogger to link to posts, often on other blogs, that relate to a selected subject. Blogging software that supports Trackback includes a "TrackBack URL" with each post that displays other blogs that have linked to it. Source: Blog Terms Glossary Tech at Whatis.techtarget.com

• Tracking URL – A specially designed and/or unique URL created to track an action or conversion from paid advertising. The URL can include strings that will show what keyword was used, what match type was triggered, and what search engine delivered the visitor.

• Trademarks – Distinctive symbols, pictures or words that identify a specific product or service. Received through registration with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Tier I search engines prohibit bids on trademarks as keywords if the bidder is not the legal owner, though this keyword bid practice is still allowed by Google.

• Traffic – Refers to the number of visitors a website receives. It can be determined by examination of web logs.

• Traffic Analysis – The process of analyzing traffic to a web site to understand what visitors are searching for and what is driving traffic to a site.

• Trusted Feed – Also known as Paid Inclusion, a trusted feed is a fee-based custom crawl service offered by some search engines. These results appear in the “organic search results” of the engine. Typically, the fee is based on a “cost per click,” depending on the category of site content. It has been called a “Trusted Feed” due to the ability to actually alter the content in the feed, without changing the existing website.

• TXT//AD – Text ads as mobile device text messages.

• Taxonomy - Classification system of controlled vocabulary used to organize topical subjects, usually hierarchical in nature.

• Universal search: Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page. Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories.

• USPTO – Acronym for United States Patent & Trademark Office. See also Trademarks.

• Unique Visitor – Identifies an actual web surfer (as opposed to a crawler) and is tracked by a unique identifiable quality (typically IP address). If a visitor comes to a web site and clicks on 100 links, it is still only counted as one unique visit.

• Usability – This term refers to how "user friendly" a web site and its functions are. A site with good usability is a site that makes it easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for or to perform the action they desire. Bad usability is anything that causes confusion or problems for the user. For example, large Flash animations served to a visitor with a dial up connection causes poor usability. Easy, intuitive navigation and clear, informative text enhance usability.

• User Agent - This is the identity of a web site visitor, spider, browser, etc. The most common user agents are Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

• Unethical SEO - Some search engine marketers lacking in creativity try to market their services as being ethical, whereas services rendered by other providers are somehow unethical. SEO services are generally neither ethical or unethical. They are either effective or ineffective.

• URL - Uniform Resource Locator. The web address of a site or page.

• Unique Visitor: A visitor that interacts with a site. They may interact more than once, but within analytics reporting, they are only counted one time.

• Universal Search: Google's process of blending listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.

• Viral Marketing:Any marketing technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect. See article,

• Visitor Session: Interaction by a site visitor. The session ends when the visitor leaves the site.

• Value Propositions – “A customer value proposition is the sum total of benefits a customer is promised to receive in return for his or her custom and the associated payment (or other value transfer).“ A customer value proposition is what is promised by a company's marketing and sales efforts, and then fulfilled by its delivery and customer service processes.” Source: Wikipedia

• Vertical Creep – Positioning trends when vertical listings appear at the top of organic search engine results and below top sponsored listings (when they are displayed on the SERP).

• Vertical Portal / Vortal – Search engines that focus on a specific industry or sector. Such vertical search engines (also called “vortals”) have much more specific indexes and provide narrower and more focused search results than the Tier I search engines.

• Verticals – A vertical is a specific business group or category, such as insurance, automotive or travel. Vertical search offers targeted search options and PPC opportunities to a specific business category

• Web 2.0: A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

• Web Forwarding - Web forwarding allows for redirects to exist within an .htaccess file on a separate server.

• Web Server Logs – Most web server software, and all good web analytics packages, keep a running count of all search terms used by visitors to your site. These running counts are kept in large text files called Log Files or Web Server Logs. Useful for developing and refining PPC campaign keyword lists.

• Web TV – Television set-top boxes that allow users to browse the Internet from their televisions without a computer system. Perennial future opportunity as new PPC ad channel offering the option to use rich media formats.

• Wiki -- Software that allows people to contribute knowledge on a particular topic. A wiki is another web publishing platform that makes use of technologies similar to blogs and also allows for collaboration with multiple people.

• Wikipedia – “Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers; its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the web site.” Source: Wikipedia

• Word Count - The total number of words contained within a web document.

• White hat - legitimate optimization techniques employed that are agreeable to search engine companies, such as the proper use of meta-tags, an adequate keyword saturation and spider friendly page design.

• Whois - records store the identity of the owner of each domain online, except for those that hide such information. Indeed, some domain registrars allow the ownership information to remain hidden, a feature often taken advantage of by large scale spammers.

• XML – Stands for “Extensible Markup Language,” a data delivery language.

• XML Feeds – A form of paid inclusion in which a search engine is fed information about an advertiser’s web pages via XML, rather than requiring that the engine gather that information through crawling actual pages. Marketers pay to have their pages included in a spider-based search index based on an XML format document that represents each page on the advertiser site. Advertisers pay either annually per URL or on a CPC basis – and are assured of frequent crawl cycles. New media types are being introduced into paid inclusion, including graphics, video, audio, and rich media.

• XML Maps - XML maps are specially formatted links to your pages. They will never replace the need for HTML site maps

• Xenu-Link verification is important to ensure that internal and external links on a website are not broken. Xenu is free software, popularly used for checking broken links of any kind, text, graphic or other, and reporting to the website owner the status of his links.

• Yahoo!-Sunnyvale, California based Internet services company founded by Stanford students Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994. Its products include a search engine and the Yahoo! Directory, email service and a popular web portal.

• Yahoo! Search Marketing -Yahoo! Runs a PPC or Sponsored results advertising service, based on keyword that are based on a bidding system over keywords and placement. The platform was formerly known as Overture.

• YouTube - Feature rich amateur video upload and syndication website owned by Google.

• Zeitgeist (Google Zeitgesit) Weekly, monthly, and annual reports released by Google and based on millions of searches. The service reveals emerging and declining trends in real time of searches conducted on the Google search engine.

• Zeal- Non-commercial directory which was bought by Looksmart for $20 million, then abruptly shut down with little to no warning.