Glossary of Terms

In Internet marketing alot of strange sounding terms like "viral marketing" get thrown around.  Here are our definitions of a few of the words we use to help you understand what we are talking about:

Affiliate Programs - Affiliate programs enable affiliates to leverage their traffic and customer base in order to profit from e-commerce while merchants benefit from increased exposure and sales.

Algorithm - In the context of search engines, it is the mathematical programming system used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results.

Co-branding – This is a system that provides your website's content with the look of your partner’s website creating a seamless transition for the visitor.

Directory - A directory is a web site that focuses on listing web sites by individual topics; it is a quasi table of contents. A search engine lists pages, where a Directory (such as Looksmart or The Open Directory Project) lists websites.

E-mail Campaign - These campaigns contain appealing content concerning your product, and are targeted at a specific market.

Hits - A request for a file on a webserver. Most often these can be graphic files and documents.

Keyword - A singular word or phrase that is typed into a search engine search query. Keyword mainly refers to popular words which relate to any one website. For example, a web site about real estate could focus on keywords such as House, or phrases such as Home for Sale.

Link Exchange - When two websites swap links to point at each other.

Link Popularity - A count of the number of links pointing (inbound links) at a website. Many search engines now count linkage in their algorithms.

META Tags - Author generated source code that is placed in the header section of an HTML document. Current popular meta tags that can affect search engine rankings are keywords and description. The meta KEYWORDS tag is used to group a series of words that relate to a website. These tags can be used by search engines to classify pages for searches. The meta DESCRIPTION is used to describe the document. The meta description is then displayed in search engine results.

Off-line Promotion – This refers to the marketing and promotion of your site in such traditional manners as networking, print advertising, media, event sponsorship, and merchandising.

Paid Placement - A paid placement search engine charges websites on a per visitor basis.

Qualified Traffic – Visitors who are specifically seeking websites with content such as yours.

Referral Program – Referring a customer to your website in a manner outside the realm of the Internet.

Return on Investment - In relation to search engine advertising, it often refers to sales per lead.

Robot - A program that automatically does "some action" without user intervention. In the context of search engines, it usually refers to a program that mimics a browser to download web pages automatically. A spider is a type of robot. See also: Spiders.

Search Engine - A program designed to search a database. In the context of the Internet this refers to a web site that contains a database of information from other websites.

Search Engine Submission - A service that will automatically submit your pages or website to many search engines at once.

Site Optimization – This is the act of creating a page that is specifically intended to rank well on search engines. Basic optimization includes making sure that your META tags are narrowly defined for your site, your robots.txt file is in order, your keywords are optimized for your site, and the structure of your pages meets the various requirements of search engines and spiders.

Spiders - The main program used by search engines to retrieve web pages to include in their database. See also: Robot.

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

Unique Visitor - A single individual website visitor. Visitors (or users) can visit multiple pages within a site. Unique users are important because it is an indication of success of a website. If you have high visitor counts, but relatively low page per user counts, that indicates that people are not finding your site attractive enough to sit and read through it. On the other hand, if you have low visitor counts and very high page per user counts, that is an indication your site is providing good information to people and you should do a better job of promotion. High page per user counts indicate good site potential, while low page per user counts indicate you need to rework the site with more content or better displays.

Viral Marketing - Viral marketing is the extremely powerful and unique ability of the Internet to build self-propagating visitor streams, bringing about exponential growth to a company's Web site. This can consist of such things as affiliate programs, co-branding, link exchanges, e-mail campaigns, and off-line promotion.