Digital Marketing Glossary
Trying to understand what marketing pros are saying? We are here to clear the air!
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301 Redirect
A 301 redirect sends a user from one URL to another, forwarding users to the new, correct URL when an outdated or unused webpage has been permanently moved. 301 redirects are useful for ensuring you’re not confusing searchers – or being penalized by the search engines for canonical issues – when you change the web address of a page
404 Error
Also known as a “Page Not Found” error, a 404 error happens when a page is unavailable or the webserver cannot find the page a web user has requested – usually because the URL doesn’t exist, or the page has been moved, but not redirected.
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Above the Fold
“Above the fold” was originally a newspaper term that referred to the upper half of the front page – making it a prime spot for stories to get the most exposure. The phrase has now been adapted for webpages, too, referring to the content on a page that site visitors can see without having to scroll. This space has the most visibility and is important to use strategically for the best search engine optimization results.
Adwords
Adwords is Google’s Pay Per Click Advertising program for those looking to display their ads on Google. Advertisers bid on keywords in order to get their ads displayed when searchers look for those or similar terms. This is one of the most common methods for online advertising, and Google’s main source of revenue. These ads offer exposure, without having to rank naturally in the organic search results.
Ad Network
Connect with publishers and target your ads to specific audiences to maximize your reach and impact.
Ad Placement
Strategize the best location on a webpage or app to showcase your ads and draw in potential customers.
Ad Targeting
Identify the most relevant audience for your product or service and target your ads specifically to them for maximum engagement and conversions.
Affiliate Marketing
A form of marketing in which one site or individual agents (an affiliate) is rewarded for marketing the products or services sold by another business.
Algorithm
A complex program that search engines use to determine their rankings. These programs analyze a number of factors to interpret, value and rank webpages that they put in their SERPS.
Alt Tag/Alt Text
An Alt Tag is the text describing an image on a webpage that appears when you hover your mouse over that image. Adding Alt Tags to your images helps search engines understand what’s being depicted.
Analytics
Programs like Google Analytics are tools that can help you gather, measure, track and analyze important data about your website; the ways people are interacting with it; your advertising ROI; social networking sites; videos; and more.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the actual clickable, visible text that is displayed when you’re linking to another page. This part of a hyperlink usually describes the site, or specific content that is being linked to, and should relate to the subject of the linked page. Search engines use anchor text to determine the relevancy of the relationship between the pages being linked, so if your anchor text involves the terms “content marketing,” then it should be linking to a page about content marketing, not PPC advertising, for example.
Audience Segmentation
Divide your target audience into smaller groups based on specific characteristics or behaviors to better target your messaging and reach more customers.
Automated Email
Automate your email marketing campaigns to save time and ensure timely and relevant messaging to your subscribers.
Authority
Also known as “trust” or, sometimes, “link juice,” having authority means that a site is seen by the search engines as one that is an authority online, and one that is strongly related to a specific search query. The search engines determine which sites have the most authority by looking at the site’s content, the domain age, and the quality of its link profile, especially the inbound links coming to that site from other related trusted sites.
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Business-to-Business (B2b)
Short for “Business to Business,” B2B refers to co
Business-to-Consumer (B2c)
Short for “Business to Consumer,” B2C refers to businesses that market their products and services directly to consumers.
Business-to-Government (B2G)
Leverage your expertise and unique value proposition to win government contracts and grow your business.
Business-to-Millennial (B2M)
Understand the unique needs and preferences of millennials as a target audience, and tailor your marketing strategy to effectively engage and resonate with them.
Business-to-Small Business (B2SB)
Build strong relationships with other small businesses, collaborate on joint ventures, and support each other’s growth and success.
Business-to-Vendor (B2V)
Sell your products or services to other businesses as a vendor, providing valuable solutions to meet their needs and grow your revenue.
Black Hat SEO
SEO tactics, such as keyword stuffing, spamming, link schemes, and so on, are search engine optimization methods that aim to “game” the search engines. These practices are not in keeping with the best practices or guidelines set out by the search engines, and while these unethical tactics can produce temporary results and higher rankings, they can often end up getting those sites banned, in the long run.
Blog
A specific portion of your website designed to house new, fresh content on a regular basis. Blogs are helpful for SEO and give you more opportunities to get found online, because each blog post is ultimately a new page for search engines to see and crawl, giving your site more substance and keeping it full of relevant, useful, user-friendly content.
Bounce Rate
When a user visits a site, but leaves before doing anything or viewing any other pages, they’ve “bounced” off your site. The bounce rate is the percent of users leaving your site without completing any actions. If you want to get the most out of your site and increase conversion and sales, lowering your bounce rate is crucial: clear titles and site navigation, calls to action, optimized site design and more can all help.
Branding
Develop a unique and memorable brand identity that speaks to your target audience, sets you apart from your competition, and captures the essence of your business.
Buyer Persona
Create a detailed profile of your ideal customer to better understand their needs, interests, and behaviors, and tailor your marketing strategy to speak directly to them.
Buzz Marketing
Generate excitement and buzz around your product or service through creative and innovative marketing campaigns that get people talking.
Brand Equity
Build a strong and positive brand reputation that enhances the value and perception of your business in the eyes of your customers and the marketplace.
Brand Ambassador
Find passionate and enthusiastic supporters of your brand, and empower them to spread the word and build a community around your business.
Brand Identity
Craft a cohesive and consistent brand identity across all channels, including your logo, messaging, visuals, and voice, to build brand recognition and loyalty.
Business Plan
Develop a clear and comprehensive plan that outlines your vision, mission, goals, strategies, and tactics, and helps guide your business towards success.
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Call-to-Action
You want your site visitors to take action, whether that’s downloading an eBook, filling out a form, calling your business, or making a purchase right there. A call to action is something – such as a button, a text link, an image, etc. – that motivates a web user to take that action. An opt-in form, a “Sign up Today” or an “Add to Cart” button are a few examples.
Canonical Issues
A canonical URL is the best or primary webpage that a user can locate a particular piece of content. Sometimes, there are multiple ways for users to come across one page’s content on more than one URL on that site. This can cause canonical issues (duplicate content issues), where Google sees these pages as duplicates and penalizes them. Avoid canonical issues by specifying one URL as the primary, so the search engines know which page is the official version.
Conversion
Conversion can mean a lot of things, whether you want a site visitor to click on a call-to-action, fill out a form, or buy a product or service right then and there. Ultimately, conversion is any measurable goal on a website.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate describes the percent of site visitors who convert. Improving your conversion rate is the key to getting the most from your site – like more actions taken, more new leads gained, or more sales made.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO is the process of enhancing a website’s conversion through tactics involving site design, optimization, split-testing and more.
Crawler
A complex program or web “bot” that systematically browses or “crawls” sites around the web gathering data, most often implemented by search engines in order to index those sites.
CPC (Cost Per Click)
The rate paid per click for a PPC (Pay Per Click) ad campaign.
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Directory
Just like offline directories of phone numbers or individuals, online directories list sites that are submitted to them. Submitting your site to an online directory gives you an inbound link – making it great for SEO – but it also allows more people to see and find your business.
Domain
The primary or “main” address of a website. For example: www.nationalpositions.com.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is any content that is identical to or almost entirely copied from another page or site. Google wants each site to serve its own purpose; and since duplicate content isn’t offering anything of new value to searchers, it’s not going to be rewarded by search engines. Duplicate content can cause search engines to penalize your site, or, at the very least, will encourage essentially no authority or trust (meaning none of that content will help your SEO or rankings).
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HTML code
Short for Hyper Text Markup Language, HTML is coding that allows plain text to function and be formatted on the web. This is the code portion of your website and is what search engines use to read and comprehend your site.
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Impression
Also known as a page view, an impression is when a user visits a page on a website one time.
Indexed Pages
These are pages of a website that have been stored and indexed by the search engines. Search engines don’t crawl every webpage that exists, and they don’t index every page their algorithms crawl. Submitting an updated sitemap to Google can help make sure all the pages of your site are showing up.
Internal Pages
All the pages within a site that are not the homepage.
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Keywords/Key Phrases/Keyterms
The words, phrases, or combination of terms that a searcher enters into the search engine when making a query. Determining which keywords your customers are searching is key to targeting those terms. Optimizing your site and implementing SEO services that are based around the best keywords means you’ll be driving the most targeted traffic and gaining the most valuable new leads.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a taboo SEO technique that abuses the use of keywords and attempts to “optimize” a page to rank for specific keyterms by stuffing a page’s content with an inappropriate and unnecessarily high keyword density.
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Landing Page
A landing page is the page of a site on which a visitor lands after clicking through from an ad, a result in the SERPS, or a link from another site.
Lead
A lead is someone with the potential to convert; in other words, a prospective sale, client or customer. Leads have often shown some form of potential consumer interest or inquiry, whether that’s by filling out a form, responding to a newsletter, entering your site, clicking on your ad, etc.
Link
A selectable or clickable element of a site (a piece of anchor text, an image, etc.) that takes a user from one webpage – or a part of a page – to another.
Inbound Link: Links from one site to another site. Quality links coming from outside sites with higher trust, PageRank, and relevance are great for SEO.
Internal Link: Links from one page within a site to another page within that same site.
Link Building
Link building is a search engine optimization strategy that is based on generating inbound links to a site in order to show search engines the site’s relevance and authority and improve its rank in the SERPs.
Longtail Keywords
A key phrase involving a more specific combination of words or phrases. Longtail keywords are more precise and detailed than broad search terms, can be easier to rank for, and can often drive more qualified traffic.
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Meta Data
Names data that describes what’s going on within a specific webpage and which helps search engines understand what that page is all about. Meta Descriptions, for example, are short descriptions of what’s contained in a specific page’s content, and give users and search engines an idea of what to expect from that webpage, and are often displayed in the search results below the hyperlinked page title.
Metrics
Metrics are performance indicators often displayed within analytics programs. Metrics are important to record and analyze, in order to track the progress of your Internet marketing campaign, and for businesses to define and reach specific goals.
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NoFollow
This is coding which tells the search engines not to index the page or the particular link at hand. These outbound links no longer “count,” preventing them from affecting your link profile or SEO.
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Organic Search Results
These are results on the search engine results pages that are not paid ads. Most searchers click on the top organic search results, which is why SEO services and implementing the top search engine optimization strategies are so important.
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PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising
PPC is a specific type of advertising where advertisers only pay the ad agencies (like Google) when web users click on their ads.
PageRank
PageRank operates on a scale from 1-10 and is a value assigned to your site by Google based on the quality, relevance and trust of your links, as well as other SEO factors.
Panda Update
A series of algorithm updates and refreshes done by Google in order to improve their search results, particularly by discouraging sites with high-volumes of lower quality content.
Penguin Update
A series of changes to Google’s algorithm designed to enhance the search results by penalizing “spammy” sites and sites with bad link building or low-quality link profiles.
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Ranking
A site’s positioning in the search engine results pages. One of the main goals of the top SEO companies and search experts is to help sites improve their rankings. Better rankings mean your site will be one of the top results when users search your keyterms, meaning more visibility and ultimately more business.
Redirect
A way of letting search engines know that a webpage has been relocated. Redirects forward users from the URL that’s not in use, to the correct URL.
ROI (Return on Investment)
The success of a campaign can’t be measured by money earned or spent alone. Analyzing your return on investment is a more relevant indicator of success and will allow you to understand the cost/benefit of a given SEO or Internet marketing strategy.
RSS Feed
RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication and essentially allows web users to subscribe to get updates of new content from specific websites/sources. Offering an RSS feed for your podcasts, blog, or site updates helps keep your followers updated on your latest content.
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SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
Like SEO, SEM is designed to get your site maximum exposure online. Search engine marketing can include SEO, but the term is more commonly meant to include tactics like paid ads, paid listings, and so on.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is the process of increasing a site’s exposure, traffic and leads by getting that site a higher ranking in the search engine results pages. Getting to the top of the results is key to generating more web traffic. Examples of some of the best SEO services and strategies include: high-quality content creation, technical SEO, content marketing, natural link building, blogging, and a whole host of other top Internet marketing strategies.
SERP
Search engine results pages (SERPs) are the pages that show top listings of results returned by the search engines. They are displayed in response to a user search. Getting your site ranked at the top of the search engine results page using SEO is key for getting more visibility and generating more leads.
Sitemap
An XML Sitemap is created by a program or webmaster, and specifies a map of every page on a website, to make it easier for the search engines to find and index all the pages correctly.
Social Media Marketing
Brand or website promotion through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
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Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the element of search engine optimization that deals with optimizing a site by fixing any technical errors that could be affecting user-experience, and harming rankings, such as canonical issues, faulty redirects, broken links, etc.
Traffic
The web-users visiting your website.
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URL
Uniform Resource Locator; or, in other words, a website’s address.
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White Hat SEO
SEO services and techniques that conform to best practices and search engine guidelines. White hat SEO is designed to optimize a site to rank at the top of the SERPs, not by “fooling” the search engines, but by optimizing the site, enhancing the user experience, and showing search engines the value of that site for their searchers.
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