These are a collection of marketing and web terms that have been collected from a number of locations and they are provided to give you some guidance, many have slightly different meanings, but should give you a better idea of what you are talking about to your developers. They are here to give you a better understanding of the industry and this section will continue grow over the next few months as we refine the content. Often agencies will try and mask the work by trying to use a number of acronyms that may not really mean anything or maybe the same thing repeated several times to make it appear as if more work is actually been done.
If you don’t understand a term used by your existing agency, you will likely find it in this glossary of terms.
SE – Search Engine
SEs – Search Engines
SEM – Search Engine Marketeer, Search Engine Marketer, Search Engine Marketing
SEMPO – Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization
SEO – Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimizer
SEP – Search Engine Placement, Search Engine Positioning, Search Engine Promotion
SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages
SM – Service Mark (SM)
SMB – Small and Medium Sized Businesses
SME – Small to Medium Enterprise (less than 50 employees)
SMM – Social Media Marketing
SMO – Social Media Optimization
SMTP – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol
SOC – Source Ordered Content
SPAM – Sites Positioned Above Me, SPAM Food Products from Hormel Foods Corporation
SPF – Sender Policy Framework
SQL – Structured Query Language
SSI – Server Side Includes (file.shtml)
SSL – Secure Socket Layer
STATS – Statistics
SWF – Shockwave Flash (file.swf)
SYSOP – System Operator
Anchor Text – Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. eg: < a href=”http://www.seo-help.com/” >This is the anchor text< /a >
ATW – Abbreviation for AllTheWeb, a search engine powered by FAST.
Back Link – Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Also called inbound links or IBLs.
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.
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.
CPC – Abbreviation for Cost Per Click. It is the base unit of cost for a PPC campaign.
CTA – Abbreviation for Content Targeted Ad(vertising). It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.
CTR – Abbreviation for Click Through Rate. It is a ratio of clicks per impressions in a PPC campaign.
Doorway Page – Also called a gateway page. A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
FFA – Abbreviation for Free For All. FFA sites post large lists of unrelated links to anyone and everyone. FFA sites and the links they provide are basically useless. Humans do not use them and search engines minimize their importance in ranking formulas.
Gateway Page – Also called a doorway page. A gateway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Gateway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using gateway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Google Dance – Up to June, 2003, Google has updated the index for their search engine on a roughly monthly basis. While the update is in progress, search results for each of Google’s nine datacenters are different. The positions of a site appears to “dance” as it fluctuates minute to minute. “Google dance” is an unofficial term coined to refer to the period when Google is performing the update to its index. Google may be changing their index calculation method to allow for a continuous update (which will effectively end the roughly monthly dances).
IBL – Abbreviation for In Bound Link. Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Also called a back link.
Ink – Abbreviation for Inktomi, the back-end search engine acquired by Yahoo. The Inktomi search engine is being phased out as Yahoo built a new search engine incorporating Inktomi’s technology with elements of Yahoo’s other search acquisitions.
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 – 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 (ie. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.
Link Farm – A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (or PR). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Mirror – In SEO parlance, a mirror is a near identical duplicate website (or page). Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to target different keywords/keyphrases. Using mirrors is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
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.
Portal – Designation for websites that are either authoritative hubs for a given subject or popular content driven sites (like Yahoo) that people use as their homepage. Most portals offer significant content and offer advertising opportunities for relevant sites.
PPC – Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads.
PR – Abbreviation for PageRank – Google’s trademark for their proprietary measure of link popularity for web pages. Google offers a PR viewer on their Toolbar.
Robots.txt – Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.
Scumware / Spyware – Scumware is a generic/catch-all label that applies to software that:
* Installs itself secretly, dishonestly or without consent
* Does not allow for easy uninstallation / removal
* Monitors or tracks users actions without the users awareness or consent (aka spyware)
* Alters the behavior/default options of other programs without the users consent or awareness (aka thiefware)
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
* making web pages spider friendly (so search engines can read them)
* making web pages relevant to desired keyphrases
SERP – Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page/Positioning. This refers to the organic (excluding paid listings) search results for a given query.
Spam – In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds for banning.
Spamdexing – Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine’s index. Spamdexing is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
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.
Spider Trap – A spider trap refers to either a continuous loop where spiders are requesting pages and the server is requesting data to render the page or an intentional scheme designed to identify (and “ban”) spiders that do not respect robots.txt.
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.