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Internet Marketing Glossary

Algorithm - The formula that a search engine uses to determine rankings

Alt-tag - A attribute within an image tag that describes the image. Alt-tags should include keywords when possible.

Anchor Text - The clickable text in a hyperlink. The anchor text of a link should use keywords appropriate to the destination page.

Backlink - An incoming link from another website. Search engines place great importance on the quantity and quality of backlinks when determining the reputation of a website.

Cloaking - The practice of using programming to display a different page to web visitors than search engines. This is considered "black hat" SEO and can get a website penalized by serach engines.

Conversion Rate - The percent of web visitors that perform a given action. This action may be an ecommerce sale, filling out a contact form, newsletter signup, or viewing a specific page. Conversion rates are often used to measure lead generation and sales funnels.

Cost Per Click (CPC) - The cost incurred in a pay-per-click campaign when a user clicks on a given ad.

Directory - A list of websites grouped by category. Directories are different from search engines in that they are browsed rather than searched.

FTP - (File Transfer Protocol) A common method of accessing and editing websites.

Index - A search engine's "list" of webpages that have been crawled and recorded.

Link Popularity - A general term used to describe the strength of your backlink portfolio.

Long Tail - Concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities - usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The long tail approach can be applied to targeting keywords as well.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - A subset of Internet marketing that includes paid search marketing and organic SEO.

SERP - (Search Engine Results Page) This refers to the webpage displayed on a search engine after a query is performed.

Spider - The sofware within a search engine that actually "crawls" and indexes websites. Also called "robots".

Google Analytics - Free web analytics software created by Google.

Google Adwords - Google's paid search marketing (pay-per-click) platform

Honeymoon Effect - A fairly common trend experience at the beginning of a new SEO campaign, where big increase in rankings appear quickly and then drop shortly after

Keyword Density - The percentage a given keyword or phrase appears within a body of text. Search engines look at this when determining the subject of a webpage.

Keyword Distribution - Refers to how a keyword or phrases is distributed on a webpage. Search engines place more importance on keywords at the beginning and end of webpages.

Keyword Proximity - How close two keywords appear in relation to each other.

Meta-Search - A search engine that uses other search engines to generate results in aggregate.

Meta-tags - Meta-tags appear in the section of each webpage and share with search engines information about the webpage

Offpage Optimization - The area of SEO that involves building backlinks to the website. This is opposed to the actual editing of the website source code.

Onpage Optimization - The area of SEO that involves the actual editing of the website source code for maximum search engine ranking. This is opposed to "offpage optimization" that involves building backlinks.

PageRank - A system created by Google that is used to measure a website's link popularity.

Sitemap - A list of all the webpages within a website. Sitemaps can be useful in helping search engines and visitors find webpages.