Use this glossary to look up Internet Marketing terms and concepts. If the terms are mentioned elsewhere on this site, there will be a link to this page so you can readily read an explanation of a term which may otherwise be unfamilar to you. |
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Alt Attribute
Used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify text (alternative text) that a web browser should display when the element (commonly an image) cannot be displayed. The text is useful for people with disabilities who use special devices such as screen readers and is also important for search engine optimisation. Search engines take notice of the keywords in this alternative text.
Alternative Text / Alt Text
See Alt attribute
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Backlink
Backlinks are incoming links (see hyperlinks) to a web page. Good quality backlinks (i.e. from reputable and relevant web pages) are important for good search engine rankings.
Banner Ad / Banner Advertising
A banner ad is a form of advertising devised for the World Wide Web. Such advertising which is constructed from an image is embedded into a web page, enticing visitors to click through to the web site of the advertiser. It is common for them to feature animation.
Blog
(also known as weblog).
A blog is a journal made available on the web and which is typically updated on a regular basis. The supporting software enables people to readily update the blog without necessarily possessing any technical knowledge. They are a good way of providing attention-grabbing content.
Broken Link
A hyperlink which does not function, for example because the target file is missing, has been moved, or has no public read permission
Bookmark
(also known as ‘favourite’).
A website marked as a favourite and noted as such using a browser’s bookmarking or favourites facility. |
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Click-through
The action of following a link or advertisement (e.g. a banner ad) from one Web page to another. The percentage of visitors who take such an action is measured as a click-through rate ( CTR).
Content Optimisation
Improving the textual content of a website, mainly paying attention to choice of keywords and how they are presented, so it has increased potential of ranking well on the search engines.
Code Optimisation
Improvements to the way a website is coded to make improvements such as leaner pages and conformance to the W3C’s ( World Wide Web consortium) standards which can result in increased ranking on the search engines.
Crawler
See ‘ Spider’
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
A data format which enables style to be separated from structure on Web pages. CSS offers the advantages of more flexibility (i.e. it makes it easier to adjust the look and feel of sites), less clutter and leaner pages through more concise HTML. As a result, web pages rank better on the search engines.
CPC
Cost Per Click.
A pricing model applicable to banner advertising where the advertiser only pays according to the number of clicks through to their site.
CPM
Cost Per Thousand.
The most common pricing model for banner advertising based on charging an advertiser a fee for every 1000 times their banner ad is seen by a consumer, even if the banner has not been clicked on.
CTR
Click-Through Rate. The number of visitors who clicked on a banner ad as a percentage of the total number of people who saw it.
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D |
Description Attribute
The attribute that appears in the header of a web page which is used to provide a description of the page's contents. Some search engines will display the text provided by this attribute when the page appears in the results of a search. Including keywords in this text can improve the search engine ranking of a page for those keywords, but some search engines will ignore the attribute altogether. Direct Marketing
Communication to a customer through which promotional materials are delivered individually via direct mail, door-to-door selling, telemarketing or by other direct means. |
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Email Marketing
A form of direct marketing making use of email to communicate messages which promote a product, service or a charity. |
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FFA Sites
Free For All sites. These are sites that contain extensive lists of unrelated links usually created in an attempt to act as a means of increasing sites’ rankings on the search engines. However, search engines have adjusted their algorithms so that acquiring links from such sites has little or no benefit (and can sometimes be damaging). |
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Hit
The request for and subsequent delivery of a file, such as an image on a webpage, on a server. Though it is common for web traffic to be expressed in terms of hits, a more appropriate measurement is page views. This is because it is more useful to know about visitors to a web page. Because a web page is made up of a variable number of files (such as images) one viewing of a web page by a visitor (measured as one page view) will constitute a variable number of hits.
HTML
HTML stands for Hyper-Text Mark-up Language. It is the coding that is used to create websites and the language which is understood by Internet browsers. Some of the elements of the language include the Meta Elements where a web site author provides extra information about a web page.
Hyperlink
A hyperlink is the clickable area attached to text or graphics on a web page that when selected leads to another document (or another position within the same document).
Related Terms :
broken link, one way link, back link |
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Information Page
A static web page that is appealing to a human audience, in that it is of topical interest, and at the same time is optimised to rank well on the search engines for particular keywords and keyword phrases. |
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Keyword
A word that a user of the Web types in when searching for information in the search engines. Search Engine Optimisation involves improving how target sites rank for select keywords and keyword phrases.
Keyword Phrase
A series of keywords (see above) that make up a phrase.
Keywords Attribute
The attribute that appears in the header of a web page which presents the words which are deemed signicant for that page. The attribute is becoming less and less important in influencing the search engine ranking of a page, some search engines ignoring it altogether.
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Link
see hyperlink
Link Exchange
Link Exchange ( or Reciprocal Link Exchange) is the practice of exchanging or swapping links with other websites. Link exchanges can be arranged by contacting the owners of other suitable sites by email. You would place their link on your own site and request that the owner of the other site links back to you.
Link Popularity
The number of sites which link to a particular site. Link popularity is a factor used by many search engines for determining how to rank a web site.
Link Farm
A website which exists for the sole purpose of boosting the link popularity of websites. Linking to a link farm in order to acquire the incoming link back from the link farm is considered a spam tactic. |
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Meta Element
Meta elements are HTML or XML elements that provide additional data for a web page. The data is not seen when the page is visited, however, depending on the actual element, they do have have an impact on how the web page is presented in the search engines. See Description Attribute, Keywords Attribute and Robots Attribute.
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One Way Link
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Page Views
Each time a visitor views a webpage it counts as one page view. Compare with ‘hit’. Measuring web traffic in terms of page views is preferred to measurements in terms of hits. |
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Reciprocal Link Exchange
See Link Exchange
Robots Attribute
The robots attribute is used to control whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page or not and whether they are allowed to follow links on that page or not. The attribute can also be used to influence how search engines index pages and present the pages in the search engine results. The preferred method of providing such controls is via creating a robot.txt file.
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Spider
(also known as crawler, robot or bot)
The term used for the applications that search engines automatically send out to find and crawl websites. Once they are crawled they save the associated data in their databases. Also known as robots or spiders. Some crawlers will only visit the home page of a website while others may visit and index many sub-pages (known as deep crawling).
Spam
Unsolicited email.
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Title Element
In HTML code, the title element is used to identify the contents of a web page. Ideally it should contain some contextual information (e.g. 'Summary of Wills and Probate advice', as opposed to just 'Summary') |
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World Wide Web Consortium
See W3C
W3C
The W3C defines and develops the protocols that ensure the universality of the Web. A web site that is engineered in conformance with these protocols will be verified as being accessible by the visually impaired and it can also help ensure that the search engines can crawl the site, picking out the keywords.
Weblog
See 'blog'.
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