Search Engine Marketing Glossary

By Aisling Brennan
Online Marketing Account Manager

Below are simplified explanations of Search Engine Optimisation lingo and jargon.

Adwords | Affiliate Program | Click Through | Cloaking | Conversion Rate | Crawler | Spider | Cross-Linking | CSS | Directory | Gateway Pages | Frames | Hit | HTML | Indexed | IP | Javascipt | Keyword | Keyword Stuffing | Link Farm | Link Popularity | Meta Data | Meta Tag | Page View | Pay for Inclusion | Pay-Per-Click | Reciprocal Link | Redirect | Referrer | Robot | ROI | Search Engine | Search Engine Optimisation | SEO | Submission | Spam | Spamdexing | Spider | Robot | ROI | Traffic | Unique Visitors

Adwords
Google's advertising program, Google Adwords, displays text-based advertising to the right of organic search engine results on its network.

Affiliate Program
A program that allows websites to sell a product on a commision basis.

Click-Through
When a web user clicks on a HTML link/graphic, this is known as a click-through. Some advertising systems are based on paying sites when someone actually clicks through to a new site.

Clickthroughs are often used to gauge the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign.

Cloaking
refers to hiding code or content from a human user, and delivering custom content to a search engine spider. There are three main types of cloaking:
- IP based cloaking custom delivers a page based on the users IP address (this can be used to deliver custom language based sites or target groups of users from particular ISP's such as AOL or @home users).
- User Agent cloaking sends a custom page based upon the users Agent (most often use to take advantage of a particular agents strengths or features).
- Combination of Agent and IP cloaking is used to target specific users with specific agents (such as search engines).

Cloaking is generally frowned upon by the search engines and considered SPAM.

Conversion Rate
The relationship between visitors-to-sales. If one person out of one hundred purchases a product, it has a conversion rate of 1%.

Conversion rates are used to gauge the sucess or failure of online marketing campaigns.

Crawler
A type of Spider that downloads multiple pages from the same web site. Crawling refers to the fact that the spider will look for links in the pages it downloads and then walk or crawl down through a web site. See Spider.

Cross Linking
The practice of linking together a group of web sites, normally for the benefit of search engines. Google has been known to penalise web sites that blatantly abuse this practice.

CSS
Cascading Style Sheets - used to add styles, fonts, sizing and positioning to web sites.

Directory
Refers to a web site that lists individual web sites by topic. Edited by humans, not 'crawled' results like Google. Examples include Yahoo! and The Open Directory.

Gateway Pages
A page designed as an entrance to a website. Many Gateway pages are specifically created to rank high on a particular search engine. Sometimes referred to as Doorway Pages.

Frames
An HTML tag construct for making a website appear to have multiple windows within one browser. A frame with links can remain static while clicks cause a different frame to be updated. Most search engines will not index a framed site.

Hit
This is a request for a file from a web server. It can be a HTML or graphic file. A unique visitor may generate hundreds of 'hits' during a visit.

HTML
Hyper text mark-up language - the language the Internet uses. Search engines deal with HTML pages with ease, as opposed to dynamic pages.

Indexed
Once a web page has been crawled by a spider and included in the search engine's database it is said to have been 'indexed'.

IP Address
A unique four number Internet Protocol Address how data from your computer is transferred to a website and back and forth.

JavaScript
A language embedded within HTML that is executed after a page of HTML is transferred to a users browser. Many search engines will ignore Java and JavaScript commands.

Keyword
Term entered into a search engine to make up a query. For example 'europe travel'.

Keyword Stuffing
The process of loading an HTML page with keywords in the Meta data or main body text.

Link Farm
Describes a network of web sites constructed solely with the purpose of inflating search engine rankings. Link farms often contain unrelated content and are of no use to the surfer.

Link Popularity
Refers to the number on links on external sites that a web site may have. Some search engines take this into account in their ranking algorithms - hence 'link farms' have emerged.

Meta Search Engine
A search engine that searches multiple other search engines and combines the results.

Meta Tags
Refers to the description and keyword tags found within the of an HTML page that can affect search engine rankings.

Page View
Web site 'Hits', or number of times a page is viewed.

Pay for Inclusion
Refers to Inktomi, Ask Jeeves, AllTheWeb's paid inclusion programs. Very simply, you pay so they spider your pages for inclusion in their database. There are no guarantees of ranking, just inclusion.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
A Pay-Per-Click search engine charges websites on a per click basis. Advertiser has the opportunity to bid for number one position for key terms on certain search engines.

Reciprocal Link
When two websites swap links to point at each other

Redirect
Redirects divert surfers from one page to another.

Referrer
The address (URL) of the web site where a user came from before entering another site.

Robot
Program that mimics a browser to download web pages automatically. A Spider is a type of robot. Some times referred to as Webbots.

ROI
Return on Investment. Used to gauge the success of online marketing campaigns.

Search Engine
A program designed to search a database. This refers to a web site that contains a database of information from other websites. Directories of sites, such as Yahoo, are *not* search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation refers to the finetuning of web pages so that they rank higher in search engines, however there are many other aspects to actual 'search engine optimisation' nowadays; this can include link building and other techniques to maximize the effectiveness of a campaign.

SEO
See 'Search Engine Optimisation'.

Submission
The act of submitting a web site to a search engine or directory.

Spam
A broad term mainly referring to unsolicited junk email. See spamdexing.

Spamdexing
The submission of pages that are intended to rank artificially high by various unethical techniques. These can include submitting hundreds of slightly different pages designed to rank high, small invisible text, or word scrambled pages. Most of these techniques are flagged by search engines as spam.

Spider
The main program used by search engines to retrieve web pages to include in their database. See Robot.

Traffic
A reference to the number of visitors a web site receives.

Unique Visitors
Refers to the number of visitors that visited a web site on given day. Not to be confused with 'Hits'.