If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance that you’re either an internet marketer, or part of a dev team. The problem with these two people, is that usually, they don’t know each other’s jobs.
Situation: John Marketer goes to Susan Developer about a technical issue. Susan Developer spits out tech mumbo jumbo and John Marketer is confused and frustrated.
or
Susan Developer needs to tell John Marketer about a potential problem with SEO, but John Marketer has no idea and writes a blog post full of Google red flags.
This happens more than you think because of a simple disconnect between the two teams. Well to fix this problem, I have created a big glossary for you guys to clear up confusion. Trust me, you’ll need this, I still refer back to this everyday. You’re welcome
1. Anchor text , anchor link – When a word is clickable thus containing a link.
2. Backlink, back-link – a link from an outside website (outside source) that redirects to the original website. (i.e. the links that point back to your blog)
3. Broken link – a link that fails to connect to it’s intended destination
4. Cloaking – When a website shows one version to the user and a separate falsified version to a search engine. For example, showing your users the normal page, and then having the search engines see a keyword stuffed splash page thus boosting your ranking. DO NOT DO THIS. If a search engine finds out you are employing this black hat SEO practice, you will be severely penalized and potentially banned from Google (i.e. BMW Germany and Google)
5. Contextual marketing – Based on what a user searches and which pages he visits, how an advertiser takes that information and markets specifically to that individual.
6. Conversion ratio – This is the number of sales or leads generated divided by the number of visitors to your site. Conversion ratio could be applied to any number of business goals.
7. CSS – Cascading Style Sheet – Used for programming, this document will tell the browser how to display websites.
8. Domain Name – website name – Domain name is or URL (Universal Resource Locator) is a unique alphanumeric name and attached to a certain IP address. While every address has an IP address they also have domain names for simplicity. (i.e. www.google.com, www.cnn.com)
9. Duplicate Content – This is when there is similar content on one site and another. Basically I posted this glossary on another blog, so I have created completely new content here for best practice SEO.
10. Email marketing – business promotion and brand recognition/management through the use of email contacting. While this has worked from some marketers, this has gained a bad reputation because of spammers.
11. External links – any links that point to a website
12. High quality links – links from highly ranked and relevant websites
13. Hit – a single visit to a website from a person or automated program
14. Host / webhost / hosting server – The host or webhost is the company you choose to put your website online. If you need to know more, check our about us.
15. HTML– Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a language of programming used to display websites elements which the browser reads and shows the viewer.
16. Impression – a single view of the web page or an advertisement by the Internet user.
17. Internal links – links in a website connect the user to other elements or pages within the same website.
18. Internet Marketing – a broad term, internet marketing refers to the business promotion and brand management of a company through the use of various avenues via the internet.
19. Internet Traffic – The number of visitors a website receives
20. IP address – Internet Protocol is a unique numeric address identifying any device connected to the Internet.
21. Delivery – The use of IP addresses search engines use to show the user local search engine results. I.e. when you type in dry cleaners, Oleg’s cleaners in Moscow doesn’t appear. This method is being used not only by Google but by many internet marketers.
22. Keyword – Popular words employed by search engines to find relevant websites in organic searches.
23. Keyword Phrase – Combination of keywords
24. Keyword stuffing – Another blackhat SEO practice, this is the overuse of keywords in a page. This practice will actually penalize your ranking from the search engines.
25. Landing Page – a landing page is a web page designed to be highly relevant to an advertisement or query. These are very useful for pay per click advertising.
26. Link bait – Any compelling article or content that brings attention to a website. (i.e. lolcats)
27. Link building – an essential SEO practice, to create links to a page and in and around a page to increase conversion ratio and page rank for a search engine results page (SERP).
28. Link juice – this refers to the authority of th links that link to your page. Different SEO practices are utilized to maximize the ‘link juice’ your page obtains. For instance, if there is duplicate content, then the 2 pages will share the juice unless you tell the search engine to give one site all of the authority.
29. Long tail keyword –similar to keyword phrase, this is multiples permutations of keywords to create a search query. T
30. Low quality link – Links from low-ranked or irrelevant websites. Cnn.com is a high quality link, jimbobsblog.com is not
31. Market analysis – A broad term, Market Analysis is tthe researching of a market. This includes who the potential consumers are, and all aspects of their commercial interests.
32. Market value – this expression refers to the expected price obtained for sold goods or services in a given time period.
33. Meta Description– This is the short description beneath a title tag in a search engine results page. There is no need to stuff this with keywords as it does not carry much SEO weight. However, with a captivating meta description it can bring more users, which does affect SEO.
34. Meta tag – Information enveloped in the head portion of an HTML document. Meta tags provide various information about the website to the search engine allowing for better indexing and cataloging.
35. Nofollow link – This can be a bit confusing, allow me to clarify. This is a meta tag that tells a search engine not to follow (click on) a certain link. There’s certain pages that have duplicate content that need to link juice, like the archives page on your blog. You can tell the search engines to not go to these parts of your blog, thus preserving all link authority where it belongs.
36. Off-page SEO – These are the SEO practices you employ off your page to increase page rank and visibility. This includes external link building, link baiting, being active in online communities, and many more.
37. On-page SEO – In contrast to off-page SEO, on-page are the SEO practices you employ directly on your own website. This includes title tag optimization, meta description optimization, keyword phrase strategies, internal link building etc.
38. Organic Search Results – These are the results that show up through a search. For example, Google search ‘webhosting’, and those results were found organically.
39. Page Rank – a hypothetical value of a web page. In an organic search which entry you are on that page. This is very dynamic, and hundreds of factors can determine your rank.
40. PPC – Pay-Per-Click – PPC is an online marketing strategy where a businesses pay based on the traffic they receive. Examples of PPC are the advertisements on the right hand side of a SERP in a Google search, or the advertisements you see on facebook.
41. Redirecting – This is an instruction telling a search engine to go into another page. This is a crucial technique when it comes to fixing duplicate content issues. Instead of always creating unique content (which is the best SEO practice), there are times when duplicate content is unavoidable. Therefore, by redirecting search engines, you avoid penalties and preserve all link juice.
42. RSS – Rich Site Summary- This allows subscribers to get laters updates from a specific website.
43. Search Engine – A computer program which searches internet documents for certain keywords. They then index those documents and display those documents in a certain order of results. The big three search engines are: Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
44. Search Engine Marketing – SEM –SEM is a branch of internet marketing that deals with business promotion through the use of search engines. SEM deals with very closely with SEO to maximize exposure using search engines.
45. Search Engine Optimization – SEO – This is the practice of using different techniques to increase exposure and to ultimately increase page rank for websites.
46. Search Engine Spider – A computer program deployed by the search engines to travel the internet and gather data from websites and index them for the search engines.
47. Search engine submission – An online request to a search engine to catalog your website or a web page.
48. Search term or search query– Words or phrases input into search engies to bring up search results.
49. SERP – A Search Engine Result Page – The indexed results that appear when you search in a search engine.
50. Social media marketing – Specific marketing strategies based on the utilization of online social media sites i.e. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc.
51. Unique Visitor – Unique visitor is a new person who visits a website once in a certain period of time.
52. Web Analytics – This is the analysis of a given website that tell the webmaster number of visitors, conversion rates, and other performance factors intended to understand and optimize web usage
53. Website Traffic – The number of total visitors a website receives in a given period of time.
I’m sure there are some I have left out. Leave a comment if you think I should add to the glossary!
Excellent post…very informative and clear. All too often, developers and marketers end up confused and this should provide the two “teams” clarity.
So helpful! Thank you so much for this article. The terms were explained very clearly for my non-high tech brain. I have been really confused about these terms, this will be a great resource to reference instead of asking my internet-savy friends the same questions over and over again (embarrassing!)