With so many different online marketing terms being branded about I thought it was a good idea to put together this glossary.

I’ll be adding to the list below over the coming weeks so keep checking back for more explanations of important online marketing jargon.

A –Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is paying someone else to promote your products or services online.

When they generate a sale or enquiry for your business via their marketing efforts, you then pay them a pre-agreed commission.

Analytics

The most widely used analytics software is Google Analytics. This free tool lets you get an insight into how people are finding your website, how long they’re staying on it, what pages they’re visiting, where they come from in the world and much more.

Anchor text links

Anchor text links are the words you use to link from one page of your website to another or from your site to an external site.

For SEO purposes it’s better to use your keyword(s) within your anchor text links rather than generic terms like “click here”.

B –Below the fold

In terms of a website, below the fold means the part of your site that people have to scroll down to see.

Bing

Bing is Microsoft’s search engine and is Google’s main competitor in many parts of the world.

Bing Business Portal

The Bing Business Portal is their equivalent of Google Places allowing business owners to list themselves online for free. Bing’s Portal also provides a free mobile-friendly site to all businesses listed.

Blog

The word ‘blog’ is short for ‘weblog’ and is either part of your website or a separate site where you share your opinions, news and information with your website visitors. A regularly updated blog can benefit your search engine rankings.

Bookmarking

Bookmarking your original articles and blog posts on social sites such as StumbleUpon, BizSugar and SERPD will create inbound links to your website as well as driving additional traffic.

Bounce rate

A bounce rate refers to the number of people who visit your website and leave after only visiting one page. The bounce rate is usually expressed as a percentage and can be found using Google Analytics.

C –CPC

CPC stands for cost per click and is sometimes used instead of pay per click. It refers to how much you pay each time someone clicks on one of your paid online adverts through platforms like Google Adwords.

Call to action

A call to action is simply asking someone to do what you want them to. So in terms of your website your call to action might be something like “call us today to arrange your free home visit”.

Chrome

Chrome is Google’s internet browser which competes worldwide with Internet Explorer, Firefox and other browsers.

Click through rate

The term click through rate usually refers to pay per click advertising and is the number of times your advert has been clicked on as a percentage of the number of times it’s been displayed.

Copywriting

Copywriting in online marketing is the process of writing articles, pay per click adverts and website text to appeal to a target market and encourage them to take a particular action e.g. call for more information or make a purchase.

D – Directory

An online directory usually consists of many business listings arranged by location, industry or niche.

Domain name

Your domain name is just another name for your website address. For example, this site’s domain name is www.searchblogger.co.uk

There are thousands of companies in the UK that offer low cost domain name registration and hosting services.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content is when someone uses articles or bits of web copy that aren’t theirs and displays them on their website. Google is known to penalise sites with duplicate content, even more so after the recent update

E – e-commerce

E-commerce is the process of selling goods or services online. There are many different areas of e-commerce from conversion optimisation to choosing the right payment service provider

Email marketing

Email marketing is the sending out of newsletters or promotional emails to a list of people who’ve subscribed to receive them. It’s a fast and c0st-effective way to gain new and repeat business.

F – Facebook

Facebook began life as a purely social network but is now used by millions of businesses worldwide to promote their services and communicate with their customers online.

Feed

A feed is an automated process that lets people see when you publish new content on your website or blog by having it delivered directly to their email account or feed reader.

Firefox

Firefox is an internet browser developed by Mozilla.

G –Google Alerts

Google Alerts are a free automated tool which allow you to be notified by email whenever a new mention of a topic or person’s name is made online.

Googlebot

The Googlebot is the search engine ‘spider’ that crawls your site and its content regularly so that it can be indexed accordingly.

Google Places

Google local map listings are now officially known as Google Places. These listings are a must for any small business, are free and often given priority in the search engine results pages.

H – H tags

For search engine optimisation purposes it’s good to code your headings and sub-headings on a web page with H tags. The H1 tag is the most important and is used for your main headline. You should always try to incorporate your chosen keyword(s) within your H1 tag.

Hacker

A hacker is someone who uses illegal methods to ‘hack into’ a website or social media account that doesn’t belong to them.

Hosting

In order for your website to go live online it needs to be hosted somewhere. This means all your content and images have to be stored on a server so they can be accessed and displayed.

You can find a wide selection of hosting companies by typing “web hosting” into Google.

HTML

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is a very widely used coding language for websites.

I – Inbound links

Inbound links are when a site other than yours links to your website. Inbound links from relevant and trusted sites carry more weight than those from sites with a poor reputation.

Internet service provider

Your internet service provider or ISP for short is the company that provides you with access to the internet. This could be BT, Virgin, Talk Talk or one of the many other companies in the UK.

J – JPG files

If you’ve ever tried uploading pictures or photos to your blog, you’ve probably seen the term JPG at the end of image descriptions. The JPG file extension is a file format for compressed images.

K –Keywords

Keywords are the terms and phrases people type into search engines when they’re looking for something specific. Your site needs to contain the right keywords in the right places in order to be indexed properly by the search engines and be displayed as a relevant result when people search.

Keyword research

Keyword research is the process of looking for and choosing the most relevant words and phrases for your website.

As a small business you need to bear in mind that you probably won’t be able to compete for the most competitive keywords and phrases – so choose your keywords wisely.

L – Landing page

A landing page is the page at which someone arrives on your website. For example, if you’re running a pay per click campaign, rather than directing everyone to your home page, you should have different landing pages for different products/services.

Local search

Local search is the name given to the branch of search focused on local results i.e. those with a geographical qualifier such as “photographer London”.

M – Meta tags

Meta tags are used to let the search engines and users know what your site is about. The meta title appears in the browser bar and as the headline on the search engine results for your business.

The meta description tag is the two lines of text underneath the meta title in the search results and should be used to entice people to click through to your site.

Find out more about meta tags

Multivariate testing

This involves testing more than one element of your website in a live situation. For example, you may want to test different headlines and images to see which combination generates the best response rate.

N – Nofollow

Nofollow applies to links to and from your website. The Nofollow attribute means that less benefit is passed from one site to another by linking. The opposite of Nofollow is Dofollow.

O –Opt-in

Opt-in is a term used in email marketing. It is a short way of saying the recipients of your emails have given you permission to contact them.

When setting up an email signup box, many providers automatically send a confirmation email as a means of opting in.

Organic search results

The organic search results are the search engine results that are displayed on the left hand side of your screen. The paid search results from pay per click campaigns are usually displayed on the right hand side of the page and these listing have been paid for directly.

P –PageRank

PageRank is used as a visual representation of the link popularity of your site from 0 to 10, with zero being the lowest.

Google themselves have stated that PageRank is no longer an influential factor in calculating a site’s search engine ranking so it doesn’t pay to become too concerned by it.

Pay per click

Pay per click services such as Google Adwords allow you to place adverts on the right hand side of the search engine results by making bids depending on how much you want to pay.

Podcast

A podcast is an audio file than can be listened to online or via portable devices. Podcasts are a popular form of online marketing.

Q – Quality content

Quality content is now more important for your search engine rankings than ever, due to the recent Google update

Quality content means writing unique, relevant and interesting content that appeals to your target market. It doesn’t mean filling articles with multiple uses of keywords or writing nonsense to try and fool the search engines into giving your site a higher ranking.

Quality score

The quality score is used by Google for your Adwords adverts (pay per click).

It takes a number of things into account such as landing page relevance, site quality and more to calculate how much you should pay per click for certain keywords and phrases.

R –RSS Feed

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication which is used a lot by blogs so people can get new content into their email inboxes rather than having to go directly back to the website.

Return on investment (ROI)

Your return on your online marketing investment is the amount of money generated minus the cost. So if you spent £100 on pay per click advertising and generated £200 in sales, your ROI would be £100.

Reputation management

Managing your reputation online is the process of making sure the results are positive when someone Googles your name. It also means monitoring what others are saying about you on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

S – Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation or SEO is the collective name for a number of different processes such as article writing and link building which help to increase your website’s position in the search engine results for your chosen keywords and phrases.

SERPs

SERPs is an acronym for Search Engine Results Pages and is simply the pages that are displayed when you enter a word or phrase into a search engine such as Google.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is the process of sharing your own or others’ content on specific website for others to read, share and vote on.Examples of popular social bookmarking sites are StumbleUpon and Digg.

Social media

Social media is a broad term used to cover sites like Facebook and Twitter where people are more social and interactive rather than simply using the web to search for products/services.

Spam

In its most common form spam is an unwanted email or blog comment from someone trying to promote a product or service.

T –Tags

Tags are keyword or phrases usually separated by commas on blogs or social bookmarking sites. Tags help your content get categorised correctly.

Traffic

The term ‘traffic’ is used to refer to how many visitors come to your website.

Trust certificates

Online trust certificates otherwise known as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) can play a big part in creating online trust in your e-commerce site. Trust certificates give people the reassurance their details will be safe if they entrust their card details or personal information to you.

Twitter

Twitter is a social platform that has exploded in recent years in terms of business use. It lets you keep in touch with customers, suppliers and contacts by using messages of 140 characters or less in real time.

U – URL

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and in online marketing terms is best demonstrated by your website address e.g. http://www.searchblogger.co.uk is the URL for this site’s homepage.

User generated content

User generated content refers to things like product and service reviews. These can have SEO benefits but need to be closely monitored especially if they’re appearing on your own website.

V –Viral marketing

Viral marketing is the term for when you marketing is shared by lots of people and ends up going ‘viral’. For example you might produce a YouTube video that has a humorous take on your business and then gets shared by lots of people by email and on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Vlog

If you record a blog on video rather than using the written word, this is often referred to as a vlog.

W –Wonder wheel

Google’s Wonder wheel is a useful tool for keyword research as it drills down into words and phrases to give you more suggestions related to your search.

WordPress

WordPress is an open source content management system which allows you to design your own blog or website and update the content yourself. This site you’re reading now was developed using WordPress.

X – Xing

Xing.com is a global professional business network similar to LinkedIn. You can use it to network with other people in your industry, recruit new staff or participate in online group discussions.

Y – Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer is a useful free tool that lets you see how many inbound links you have to your site and also what websites these have come from.

YouTube

YouTube is an online video sharing website owned by Google. In a business sense it can help with SEO and by driving more traffic to your site if you upload your own videos.

Z – Zip files

Zip files have the extension .zip at the end and are a useful way to compress large files so they can be sent quickly and easily by email.