Glossary of Internet Marketing Terms

Affiliate Program: revenue sharing program where an affiliate web site receives a portion of income for delivering sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant web site.
Related terms: affiliate marketing, associate programs, affiliate merchants, affiliate network

Algorithm: mathematical formula used by search engines to analyze and score a web page for relevance. Some factors that a search engine algorithm looks at are link popularity, keyword relevance, meta tags, alt tags, and content.

Alt Text: HTML attribute that provides alternative text when non-textual elements, typically images, cannot be displayed.
Related terms: alt tag

Anchor Text: text used in the hyperlink when linking to a site or web page.

Backlinks: links that point to a web site.

Back-end Offers: products/services you offer to existing customers, i.e. to people who have already bought a first product from you.

Banner advertising: form of Internet advertising. Involves displaying an image with a sales message on a web site, and trying to get visitors to click on it. When clicking on the link visitors are directed to the site advertised for.

Banner exchange: network where participating sites display banner ads in exchange for credits which are converted into ads to be displayed on other sites.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM): cost per 1000 impressions (The M stands for the Roman numeral = thousand). You pay a fixed sum for displaying your banner to 1000 visitors.

Cost Per Click (CPC): you pay only for the visitors you get.

 

Click-through: click on a link (banner) that drives the visitor to another site.

Click-through rate (CTR): number of people who click on the ad divided by times ad is displayed, represented in percentages. Example: 1000 people clicks on an ad that has been displayed 100,000 times: 1000/100,000 x 100= 1%.

Cloaking: method used by some web sites in order to boost their search engine ranking. It involves delivering one page to a Search Engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else. Most search engines will penalize sites that use cloaking.

Conversion Rate: percentage of visitors that actually buy the product.
Related term: conversion ratio

Copywriting: process of writing text especially for a web page. Effective web copywriting can improve a sites position within the search engine results of a given keyword phrase.
Related terms: web copywriting, keyword copyrighting

Crawler: automated program that follows links to visit web sites on behalf of search engines to fill and update their database.
Related terms: search engine spider, spider, robot, bot

Directory: web guide organized by categories containing web sites that have been reviewed and compiled by human editors. Example: Yahoo, Go Guide, Joeant, LookSmart, Zeal, etc.

Doorway Page: a page made specifically to rank well in Search Engines for particular keywords, serving as an entry point through which visitors pass to the main content.

Ebook Marketing: the use of ebooks to promote your web site/product/service.

Email Ads: ads that are placed in emails.

FFA (Free For All): sites that accept listings with no restriction. Search engines try to ban FFA from their index.

Hidden Text: using the same color characters on the same color background. Your site can be penalized or banned from the search engine's index for using this technic.

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language): code that browsers read in order to display web pages. HTML is the most common language used to design web pages.

Internet Marketing: any action taken to market a web site or company online. This includes web site optimization, search engine submission, pay-per-click advertising and traffic analysis.

Keywords: words people use to search in search engines

Link Popularity: number of links that point to a site. Some search engines consider that a site with many inbound links is more popular.

Meta Tags: HTML code designed to give search engine robots instructions. There are many tags available, the most known tags are the "title"," keyword" and "description" tags.

Meta search engines: search engine that searches multiple other search engines and combines the results. Example: Mamma, Dogpile, Ixquick.

Newsletter: email sent out to a group of subscribers with relevant information on a topic.

Optimization: skill of adding elements to a web site so that search engines will rank it higher for a particular set of keywords.

Pay-Per-Click Search Engines: search engines where businesses can bid for which placement they want. Web site owners pay the search engines every time someone clicks on the link of the search engine.

Popularity: web site popularity is determined by the number of links that point to a site. Some search engines consider that a site that has many inbound links is more popular.

Query: word or phrase submitted to a search engine or directory to locate pages on the web.

Referrer: URL of the page that a visitor came from.

Robot: automated program that follows links to visit web sites on behalf of search engines to fill and update their database.

Search Engine: tool for finding information on the Internet. Search engines use keywords entered by users to find web sites that contain the information sought.

Search Engine Advertising: program that enables companies to place their web sites in whatever position they choose, based on bidding for the position

Search Engine Optimizer (SEO): search engine expert that can help you optimize your web page to get a high ranking.

Search Engine Optimization: skill of adding elements to a web site so that search engines will rank it higher for a particular set of keywords.

Search Engine Placement: program that enables companies to place their web sites in whatever position they choose, based on bidding for the position.

Spam: unsolicited email. Spam is email sent to people that haven't asked to hear from you. The term spam is also used by search engines to describe sites that try to fool the search engines to get a higher ranking by using methods that the search engines disapprove of, for example keyword stuffing.

Spider: automated program that follows links to visit web sites on behalf of search engines to fill and update their database.

Submission: the act of submitting a web page to a search engine or web site to a directory.

Traffic: number of visitors to your site, usually measured over a time period.

Unique visitor: an individual visitor to your site.

Web Marketing: any action taken to market a web site or company online including web site optimization, search engine submission, pay-per-click advertising and traffic analysis.

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