17. Search Engine Marketing Glossary

1. Algorithm – An algorithm is a computer program used by search engines to crawling and indexing, which enables them to deliver relevant search results to the users. 
2. Algorithm update – Search engines regularly update their algorithm in order to ensure the relevance of the search engine results and to implement new technologies for indexing and ranking websites.
3. Alt text – Alt text, short for alternative text, is a word or a phrase that is inserted as attribute element in HTML to describe an image. This allows search engines to understand what the image is about. Alt text is also displayed to the online users if, for some reason, the image cannot be loaded and shown on the web page.
4. Banner – Banner is an advertisement, usually rectangular in shape, which is placed on the website. The banner can feature text, images, animated graphics, sound, etc. and it links to a certain location, assigned by the website webmaster. It is used for advertising.
5. Bid – In Google AdWords, bid is used to represent the amount of money you are willing to pay for an ad.
6. Bidding – AdWords payment system is based on auctions, i.e. bidding that allows companies to set bids, based on which the ads are then ranked.
7. Budget – Budget in Google AdWords, represent the total amount of money you are willing to invest into your campaign.
8. Cache – Cache is the component storing the data from the websites a user has visited.
9. Campaign – In terms of search engine marketing, a campaign refers to the organized paid endeavor where you use an advertising program, such as Google AdWords, to promote your website online. Each campaign has a structure, allowing you to organize your work.
10. Cloaking – Cloaking is a technique used in SEO in which the content is presented in one way for the search engines spiders, while website visitors see different content. This technique is considered black hat SEO technique, which is the reason why you should avoid it, having in mind that it may lead to search engine penalties for your website.
11. Contact page – A contact page is a web page on a website that allows online users to contact the website owner via contact form or using other ways to contact to owner, such as via an email address.
12. Content – Content refers to any type of information published on the website, which is created in the purpose of attracting search engine traffic. Various types of content can be used such as blog posts, articles, lists, guides, videos, images, product pages, etc.
13. Conversion – Conversion usually refers to converting a website visitor to customer, but occasionally, websites may use metrics other than sale as conversion, such as sign up for a newsletter, visiting a certain page, etc.
14. Cookies – Pieces of data that are sent and stored to your computer when you use a browser to visit a website are called cookies. The purpose of the cookies is to record user’s browsing activity and to adapt the website so that it matches the interests of the user.
15. CPC – Cost-per-click is the amount of money you pay for one click on your ad, which is specified in the advertising campaign settings.
16. CPM – Cost-per-mile represents cost per thousand impressions. It is one of the advertising payment plans, where you pay the price per thousands views.
17. Crawler – Crawler or spider is a program used by search engines to visit the websites and fetch the information for the search engine index.
18. Crawling – Crawling is the process in which search engines user spiders, also called crawlers, to browse the web and discover new content.
19. CTR – CTR stands for click-through-rate. This metric is used to measure the success of an online campaign, such as advertising campaign or email marketing campaign. Click through rate is calculated when you divide the number of clicks by total number of impressions, i.e. the number of users who saw the advertisement.
20. Customization – In search engine marketing, customization may refer to the customization of the website and adaptation of different website elements in order to follow SEO guidelines, as well as to the customization of advertising campaigns in order to increase the efficiency of those campaigns.
21. Display Network – This is a type of campaign available in Google AdWords where your ad is shown on Google’s network of partner websites, i.e. the websites that have enabled AdSense.
22. Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) – This bidding option is used in Google AdWords to automatically raise bid when the program detects that certain clicks are more like to lead to a conversion on your website.
23. Flash – Flash is a technology used to create interactive multimedia applications, such as websites, banners, games, etc. When it comes to websites, they commonly used Flash technology to display a photo gallery or animated video.
24. Generic keyword – Generic keyword is a keyword that is too general and thus too competitive to be used in paid advertising.
25. Google AdSense – This is a service provided by Google allowing website owners to assign a place on their websites where they would display Google’s ads and thus earn money each time website visitors click on those ads.
26. Guidelines – Guidelines are the statements or rules set to ensure the proper usage of a program or a tool. Following guidelines is the best way to ensure good results and proper usage of a program, a tool or a platform.
27. HTML – This stands for Hypertext Markup Language and it represents the standardized system for tagging text files, in order to alter the structure of the page (text, headings, tables, photos, etc.).
28. Impression – In internet marketing, impression, also called view, is achieved each time an online visitor sees the information, without the need to click on it.
29. Indexing – The process of indexing a website refers to the search engines collecting information about each website and gathering information inside the database, from which the results are fetched when the users conduct a search query.
30. Influence – In internet marketing, influence is defined as an ability one has to affect the people’s thinking inside the online community. It can also be called authority.
31. Internet marketing – Internet marketing, also called online marketing, is marketing that uses online media, such as a website, online advertising, social media, etc. in the purpose of promoting a business and generating leads.
32. Java – Java is a programming language used to create applications that can run on virtual machines and browsers.
33. Keyword – Keyword is a word or phrase that is used to describe the content of the web page. Apart from SEO, where keywords are used to optimize a web page and provide additional information to the search engine crawlers about that web page, keywords are also used in paid advertising. In this case, keywords allow your ads to be shown for the related search queries.
34. Landing page – Landing page, also called lead capture page, is a page, which appears after the user has clicked on the link displayed in the search engine results page, regardless if that page is displayed as organic or paid result.
35. Market analysis – Market analysis is the process of studying the dynamic of a certain market and the opportunities this market offers. When it comes to your own website, you should conduct the market analysis of the sector your business is in, so that you can find out how the situation changes, and what are the opportunities you can explore.
36. Markup – Markup is a collection of characters and symbols used in markup language, which is used for providing website code for formatting.
37. Meta tag – This is the coding system used in HTML to mark up the content of the website in order to allow search engines to understand the data. The meta tags provide the meta data about the HTML document.
38. Metrics – Metrics are measures that are used to track and monitor a specific element. When it comes to websites, you can track metrics such as the number of visits, average session duration, etc. Metrics are used to evaluate the website performance.
39. Mobile-friendly – Website content that is mobile-friendly is the content that is displayed correctly on mobile devices, such as mobile phone, tables, etc.
40. Negative keyword – Negative keyword is used to prevent your ad from appearing in searches related to that keyword. This way you manage to control the campaign, which leads to better performance of the campaign.
41. Off-page optimization – This refers to the optimization of the factors that affect ranking and which are not available on the actual website. These are external factors, such as links.
42. Online presence – Online presence refers to being present on the internet, in order to allow online users to find you. One of the most important aspects of search engine marketing is being present online and promoting your business through online media.
43. On-page optimization – This refers to the optimization of the factors that affect ranking and which are available on the actual website. These are internal factors, such as tags, keywords, content, etc.
44. Organic reach – The total number of unique people who saw your website or post through unpaid distribution.
45. Page speed – This term refers to the speed at which a certain web page loads. Your website pages should load as quickly as possible in order to provide best user experience. This factor also influences ranking as it is detected by the search engines.
46. Paid reach – The total number of unique people who saw your website or post through paid distribution.
47. Penalty – Penalty is a punishment that has negative impact on your website ranking. Search engines detect the website that use manipulative methods to increase ranking, and those websites are penalized by search engines, which means that their ranking is lowered, and it will remain that way as long as the issue is not resolved.
48. Plug-in – A plug-in is an application or a program that is installed on a website or a browser for a particular process, and thus it improves or enables additional functionality.
49. PPC – Pay-per-click is the form of paid advertising in the search engine marketing where you need to pay each time someone clicks on your ads.
50. Quality score – Quality score is a variable used by Google, and other search engines, to determine ranking in organic reach and to rank ads in paid reach. Quality score includes a lot of metrics and signals that allow search engines to determine the quality and the relevance of the website.
51. Reach – In online marketing, reach is defined as the number of people who are able to see your online campaign. When it comes to search engine marketing, reach is defined as the number of people who were able to see your ads through search engine advertising.
52. Redirect – Redirects are used for allowing a web page or a domain to be available under more than one address. This means that even if the users try to access a certain page, if the page is redirected, also called forwarded, a different page is going to be shown to the user.
53. Relevance – Relevance is used by search engine professionals to describe concept of website being relevant to a certain keyword or topic. Since search engines want to provide best user experience, relevance is one of the factors affecting search engine algorithms and their ranking process.
54. Remarketing – Remarketing is used with search engine advertising, where the ads are shown to the users who have already visited your website or mobile app.
55. Rich-media ads – Unlike regular ads, rich-media ads include images or videos that offer some kind of interaction.
56. ROI – Return on investment is a ratio used to help calculate profitability. ROI compares investment and results in order to determine benefits from the marketing campaign.
57. Search network – This is a type of campaign available in Google AdWords where your ad is shown in the Google search results and on the search partners’ websites.
58. Search partners – These websites have search available on their own website.
59. Search query – Search query or keyword query is the word or phrase that the users type into the search engines in order to find more information about that specific topic.
60. SEM – Search engine marketing represents a part of the internet marketing, which uses search engines results pages to promote a website, using both organic and paid reach.
61. SEO – Search engine optimization is a process of improving visibility of a website in the search engine results pages through organic reach.
62. SERP – Search engine results page is the list of results displayed by the search engines as the response to the search query.
63. Session – A session is a presence of specific IP address that has not visited website within past 30 minutes. In terms of website, a session is occasionally defined as a visit.
64. SMM – Social media marketing is a type of online marketing that uses social media websites to promote a business, increase traffic and generate leads.
65. Snippet – Snippet is a short text, which is usually displayed next to the link in search engine results.
66. Spam – Spam is irrelevant or unsolicited content, that can be posted on websites, shared via email or social media.
67. Strategy – Strategy is a plan you establish for your business in terms of how you want to develop your approach to a certain task. A strategy usually includes the plan and the analysis of the current situation, the goals that should be achieved by implementation of the strategy, the set of actions to be performed, as well as ways to monitor and measure the efficiency of the strategy. In terms of search engine marketing, the strategy involves the planning and tasks to be performed as a part of search engine marketing.
68. Target audience – Target audience or target group are those online users you want to reach through your online activity, as those are the people that could become your customers.
69. Targeting – Targeting is the process of selecting a group based on some characteristics, such as targeting based on location, language, device, etc.
70. Tool – Tool is an application or software used to perform a certain task. Different tools help you manage and optimize your website, help you increase the influence of SEO, while other tools help you with online advertising and optimization of paid campaign.
71. Traffic – In the online world, traffic refers to the flow of data. When it comes to websites, traffic represents the amount of data sent and received by the visitors of that website, regardless if those visitors came as a result of organic or paid reach.
72. URL – This stands for Uniform Resource Locator and it refers to the location of the file on the internet. It is the address of the website, which you type into the browser in order to find a particular website.
73. User experience – User experience refers to the sentiment of the users who are visiting the website, in terms of whether the person is satisfied using the product, which influences reputation the product and business have.
74. Visibility – This term refers to the chance of search engines showing your website in the search engine results pages. SEO tasks are conducted in order to prepare a website for search engine visibility and increase the probability of online users finding your website naturally, i.e. through organic reach.
75. Webmaster – Webmaster is a person who creates and manages a website.
76. Website analytics – Website analytics represents the collection of data related to your website, in terms of visits, page views, bounce rate, visit duration, etc. Analytics is used to understand the behavior of the visitors and the performance of your website.
77. Website ranking – Website ranking refers to the position in which a website appears because of a search query. The highest ranking websites tend to get the highest number of visits, which is why ranking high in the search engines is important part of search engine optimization.