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Glossary
Select a phrase from the list on the left or scroll down to find the definition you're looking for. If the word or phrase you're looking for isn't listed, let us know here and we'll put it up!
Affiliate Marketing
Online-based, commission-driven form of advertising. An affiliate usually places a special link on their website that redirects to the seller of the product's site. When that product is purchased, the affiliate obtains a commission for referring the sale. Affiliate marketing is a great way for new website owners to start out if they don't yet have a product or service to sell.
Banner Ads
A previously very popular form of online advertising. Websites would display graphical advertisements in the shape of an elongated banner, usually at the top of a page to grasp the visitor's attention. Click-thru rates on banner ads are not nearly as highs as they once were, leading to the decline of this form of online advertising.
Breadcrumbs
A form of navigation on a website. If you look at the top of this page near the left, you will see the words "home > glossary". This is an example of breadcrumbs - leaving a "trail" from where the site begins to which page is being viewed. Breadcrumbs have been found to be very search-engine friendly.
Blacklist
In short, something you do not want to have happen to you. This can occur if a certain ISP bans you from sending email to their clients (when emailing) or when a search engine detects you are trying to cheat your way to the top of the ranks by implementing certain strategies on your website.
Conversion Rate
A number derived from the total number of unique visitors to a webpage and the number of sales/signups/whatever level of success you wish to measure from that page.
Domain
The name of your website. This would be www.(domain).com, or .net, .org, etc. Domains should be selected very carefully to ensure the content of the site is relevant to the domain.
DMOZ/ODP
The ODP (Open Directory Project) and DMOZ is the largest network of manually indexed pages on the internet. Just as Google is the largest Search Engine, the ODP is the largest directory. Statistically, although directories do not drive as much traffic as search engines, it is still highly recommended your site be submitted to the ODP.
DreamWeaver
One of the world's most popular software for website editing and creation. Produced by Macromedia and purchased by Adobe, DreamWeaver helps make the process of website creation simple and flexible for the novice user as well as incorporating some of the most advanced tools in use today.
eBay
The world's most popular online auction website. Millions of different products and services are listed on eBay, ranging from camera batteries to cars. Many offline retailers are now using eBay as new "real estate" in wich to showcase their products. Through a payment system like PayPal, bidders can bid on a product and if won, have it shipped to the location of their choice once the auction for that item has closed.
Flash
A type of graphics displayed on a website used to grab attention, often using moving and animated images.
Form
When you have a section on your site that asks for a visitor's name/email/website and submit this information to you, you are most likely using a form. Once submitted, information taken from a form is sent to your webhost and relayed to you in templated email (in most cases)
Frames
A structure used for designing webpages that is not as popular now as it once was. Frames are now notorious for not being search engine friendly.
Google
The world's largest search engine and the primary search engine you need to be concerned about when optimizing your website. Don't get on their bad side.
Google AdSense
A targeted system of sponsored advertisements, billed either on a per-click or per-impression basis, that enables your site to advertise and be advertised on other content-related websites enrolling in the AdSense program. AdSense helps eliminate unrelated advertising and is less intrusive than many current forms of advertising.
Google AdWords
Google's famous pay-per-click advertising system.
Google PageRank
When the Google Toolbar is installed and used, there is an option on the toolbar to enable the use of PageRank. This technology gives the user Google's "score" of a webpage pased on a myriad of factors such as content, popularity and credibility. PageRank is a very useful tool when deciding which pages to link with and which to leave alone.
Head Tags
Part of the HTML code of a website that can be manipulated for on-page search engine optimization. Head tags include title tags, meta description tags and meta keyword tags, among others.
Hits
A measure of how many items a visitor to your website is shown when visiting a particular page. If you have 2 images on a webpage and that visitor only views that particular page, the hit-count would be 3 as the page counts for one hit and the 2 images count as separate hits. People typically speak of hits as a definitive form of website traffic, however a unique visitor count is much more accurate.
Hover Ads
Very similar to pop-up ads, but hover ads are usually built into a web page's code so the advertisement is not generated and viewed in a new window, but a part of that webpage. In many cases, hover ads are not blockable by standard pop-up blocking software.
HTML
The basic code used to form a website. In most cases, you can view a website's HTML code by right-clicking on the webpage and selecting "view source".
IP Address
Each time you access the internet, your computer is assigned a particular IP address which will look something like 7.14.16.9. Your IP address can either be static (does not change each time you're on the internet) or dynamic (randomly generated each time you access the net).
ISP
Short for Internet Service Provider, a company that enables you to access the internet for a monthly fee. In many cases, your ISP is the same company that provides your telephone service.
Javascript
A type of programming language enabling a site to have changing features on it. Javascript promotes an interactive environment between the visitor and the website.
Keywords
Words and phrases you want to use on your site so when these words and phrases are searched in a search engine, your site will come up in the listings. Keywords can be tweaked and used strategically to manipulate your search engine ranking.
Landing Page
A method often used in Web Marketing to direct targeted website traffic to a specific, highly optimized page. If you searched the words "Website Marketing Glossary" in Google and came across Astatic-Solutions.com, this page you're on right now would most likely be the Landing Page within Astatic-Solutions.com you'd "land on".
Layers
A structure type used in webdesign enabling the webpage to have overlapping features and fields of easily movable and adjustable sizes. Layers are more search engine friendly than frames but results can be inconsistent across different web browsers.
Link Popularity
According to search engines, the popularity of your site according to outbound vs. inbound links, the quality of the inbound links according to content and PageRank, amount of broken links, links to sites that are blacklisted, etc. Link popularity depends on more factors than anybody really knows, however people do know that link popularity is the most important factor used for ranking your site in the search engines.
MySpace
A popular social networking site that has rapidly grown in popularity over the last 2 years. MySpace offers templated, personalized webpages through the MySpace.com domain to individuals who use the service for self-exposure to others. MySpace was recently bought by media mogul Rupert Murdoch for $580 million, and has since been valued at around $15 billion.
Navigation Bar (NavBar)
A set of internal links setup somewhere on your page that helps direct your visitors to requested pages within your site. NavBars also help direct search engine spiders to other pages within your site.
Opt-in
A method of confirming an email address when signing up for something on the internet. After signing up for a free online newsletter for example, you may receive an email to that address asking you to confirm your request for subscription to this newsletter. The opt-in email method is great for visitors as it prevents people from signing you up to random programs and having you end up with loads of junk mail in your inbox, and great for websites as it provides them with a legit list of email addresses. Opt-in email marketing is also great for avoiding being blacklisted by ISP's.
PageRank
A feature provided when installing the Google Toolbar (available at toolbar.google.com). PageRank provides you with Google's rank of a page on a scale of 0-10 according to a number of largely unknown factors, but include link popularity, search engine ranking and content quality as some of these factors. PageRank is a handy tool to have installed on your computer when considering exchanging links with outside sites.
PayPal
An online payment system popularized by the online auction giant eBay. PayPal has the ability to link a credit card to a system that transfers payment from buyer to seller according to permissions set by the buyer. PayPal is considered an effective and more cost-effective form of online payment-taking than standard online merchant accounts.
Pay Per Click
A form of search engine marketing where you bid for link placement on certain search engines, and you are billed for this placement according to the number of times people have clicked through your link. As an example, bidding for the keyword "golf clubs" on a pay per click engine may yield a cost of 25 cents per click for a first place link and 5 cents per click on a 30th place link. If you chose to take the first place position for this search term and 1000 people clicked on this link in a given month, you would be billed $250. Google AdWords is the name of their in-house pay per click program.
Pop Unders
Pop under ads spawned from the previously popular pop-up form of online advertising. Instead of popping up on a screen, a pop-under ad would not become visible until a newly generated task window would appear and be clicked on in the task bar on the bottom of an operating system screen.
Pop Ups
A formerly successful type of online advertising, pop-up ads would generate a new viewable advertisement on a screen when a certain page would be visited on a website. Usually this pop-up ad would generate a new task window and could be closed separately from it's initiating web page.
RSS
An abbreviation for Rich Site Summary, RSS is a great way to help boost your search engine ranking. RSS is technology that enables outside sites to publish their information on your sites, often used for news headlines, sports scores and a variety of other information that is updated frequently.
SEO
Short for Search Engine Optimization. This is the process where websites are altered via onpage and offpage techniques to boost their search engine ranking for selected keywords.
Salescopy
The content on a webpage used to deliver a call to action. Depending on the nature of your website, the salescopy does not have to promote the visitor to buy a particular product or service; the salescopy can be used to entice the visitor so sign up for your free newsletter/contest/tip of the week, etc.
Search Engine
A source of the majority of traffic for most websites. Search engines and directories list websites according to their content and other variables and rank them by what they perceive are the most relevant results for a particular search term.
Spam
Unsolicited email sent to you from a source you have not requested contact from or you have had no previous contact with. NEVER consider spam as a method of marketing - you risk being blacklisted - effectively throwing your online marketing campaign out the window.
Also a moderately appetizing canned meat dish.
Spiders
Programs used by search engines to "crawl" through your website looking for content used to rank your website in their engine. Spiders are launched automatically and will help getting your site listed properly in the search engines.
Also small, eight-legged, multi-eyed creatures descending from the order Araneae.
Splash Page
More common with larger websites, a splash page is the first page you see that acts as a direction map - a page that you see that has the words "Enter Here" listed is most likely a splash page. Splash pages are common with multi-lingual websites. For example, if you come across a site that asks you what language you would like to view the site in, that page is most likely a splash page.
Tables
Another structure type for building websites. Tables are much more search engine friendly than frames, and provide virtually the same design flexibility as layers. The distinct advantage of tables is they often hold design constant across different web browsers.
Webeditor
Software used to design a website. Popular webediting software includes FrontPage, DreamWeaver, etc. Though software like this can cost some money to acquire and take a little bit of time to learn, it is well worth it in the long run...hiring a webdesigner can cost well into the thousands.
Webhost
A company charging a monthly fee to host your website on their server to be viewable on the internet. If you want to have a website, you need metaphorically "rent space" from them for your site to be on the internet. A good webhost should provide you with a complete report of statistics for your website and be readily available should you encounter any problems along the way.
Yahoo!
Currently the second most popular search engine on the internet. Recently, Yahoo! purchased Overture (a large pay per click company) and developed their Yahoo! Search Marketing program.
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