Glossary Of Internet Marketing Terms
One of the key missions of Empire New Media Ltd is to educate people to online jargon so they can understand what sales people mean. Whether they are a SEO Company from Manchester or a Burnley Website Design Company, all the terms that an Internet Marketing Company. uses are the same and by understand these terms you greatly reduce the risk of being misinformed and ultimately save you being ripped off.
AdSense — is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts you’ll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages.It’s also a way for website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.
AdWords – Google’s CPC (Cost Per Click) based text advertising. AdWords takes click through rate into consideration in addition to advertisers bid to determine the ads relative position within the paid search results. Google applies such a weighting factor in order to feature those paid search results that more popular and thus presumably more relevant and useful. Google has also started taking into account the quality of the landing page and applying a quality score to the landing pages.
Algorithm — A set of instructions or procedures used in order to accomplish a task, such as creating search results in Google. In the context of search, algorithms are used to provide the most relevant results first based on those instructions.
Alt tags — Alt tags alternate text associated with a web page graphic that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the graphic. Alt tags should convey what the graphic is for or about and contain good relevant keywords. Alt tags also make web pages more accessible to the disabled. For example, a vision-impaired user may have a web browser that reads aloud the text and alt tags on a page. (For those familiar with HTML, “alt” isn’t actually a tag by itself but an attribute to the “img” tag.). Note that the value of Alt tags for SEO have been discounted over time by the search engines to the point that now it is of minimal valueBack links-Back links are inbound links pointing to a web page.Banned – When a search engine blocks your site from appearing in its search results.
Black Hat SEO — Black Hat SEO is sometimes called spamdexing (the opposite of White Hat SEO). Black Hat SEO can be any optimization tactics that cause a site to rank more highly than its content would otherwise justify or any changes made specifically for search engines that don’t improve the user’s experience of the site. In other words, Black Hat SEO is optimizations that are against search engine guidelines. If you step too far over the mark, your site may be penalized or even removed from the index.For example, adding product reviews to e-commerce site is encouraged, because it adds useful content to the site. However, using bait-and-switch techniques to create a doorway page that hooks people querying for information on soccer, it then leads to information about health products will be unacceptable.
The following Black Hat SEO tactics should be avoided to keep your site away from penalties: Keyword, anchor text and domain name stuffing, Using hidden text or links Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your pages, such as link farms Excessively cross-linking sites to increase link popularity, Cloaking, delivering different pages depending on the IP address and/or agent who is requesting it, Doorway / Gateway / Jump Pages, Duplicate content taken from other sites, Auto-generated content of no value to the end user, Spamming forums or blogs, Excessive outbound links to websites that use high risk techniques or spam.
Blog — One of the first widespread web-native publishing formats, generally characterized by reverse chronological ordering, rapid response, linking, and robust commenting. While originally perceived to be light on reporting and heavy on commentary, a number of blogs are now thoroughly reported, and legacy media organizations have also launched various blogs. Originally short for “web log,” blog is now an accepted word in Scrabble.
Blogger — A simple, free blogging platform created by Pyra Labs, which was sold to Google in 2003. It was one of the first mass blogging services and is credited with popularizing the format. Unlike WordPress, it is not open source. Many Blogger sites are hosted at blogspot.com.
Bot– Short for robot. See “spider”
Broad Match — Broad Match is a form of “keyword matching” and refers to the matching of a search listing or advertisement to selected keywords in any order. This means if selected keywords are “running shoes”, then ads or a search listing may be displayed if the users searches upon the following example keywords: Any Order: “shoes running” Synonym: “running sneakers”Plural, Singular: “running shoe” Broad match terms are less targeted than exact or phrase matches
Button — A clickable graphic that takes the user to another page or executes a program, such as a software demo or a video playerCache – copies of web pages stored locally on an Internet user’s hard drive or within a search engine’s database. A cache is the reason why web pages load so quickly when a user hits the Back button in their web browser, since the page is not being re-downloaded off of the Internet. Google is unusual among search engines in that it allows Internet users to view the cached version of web pages in its index. Simply click on the word “Cache” next to the search result of interest and you will be taken to a copy of the page as Googlebot discovered and indexed it. This feature of Google makes it easy to spot cloaking…
Call To Action — A call to action is copy used in advertising to encourage a person to complete an action as defined by the advertiser. Call to action words are “doing words” such as “Click here”, “Buy Now”, “Enter Now” or “Click to download”.
Clickthrough — The action of clicking an ad element and causing a redirect to another web page
Clickthrough rate — the rate at which people click on a link such as a search engine listing or a banner ad. Studies show that clickthrough rates are six times higher for search engine listings than banner ads.
CMS (Content Management System) — Software designed to organize large amounts of dynamic material for a website, usually consisting of at least templates and a database. It is generally synonymous with online publishing system. The material can include documents, photos or videos. While the first generation of content management systems were custom and proprietary, in recent years there has been a surge in free open-source systems such as Drupal, WordPress and Joomla. Content management systems are sometimes built custom from scratch with frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django.
Conversion — the act of converting a web site visitor into a customer or at least taking that visitor a step closer to customer acquisition (such as convincing them to sign up for your e-mail newsletter) [edit]Conversion rate – the rate at which visitors get converted to customers or are moved a step closer to customer acquisition.
Cookie — information placed on a visitor’s computer by a web server. While the web site is being accessed, data in the visitor’s cookie file can be stored or retrieved. Mostly cookies are used as unique identifiers (i.e. user IDs or session IDs) to isolate a visitor’s movements from others’ during that visit and subsequent visits. Other data that may get stored in a cookie include an order number, email address, referring advertiser, etc.
CPA (Cost Per Action) — A pricing model in which the advertiser is charged for an ad based on how many users take a specific, pre-defined action–such as buying a product from an online store–based on viewing an ad. This is the “gold standard” for advertisers because it most directly matches the cost of an ad to its effectiveness. However, it’s not commonly used since it’s extremely difficult to measure: it is often unclear when or how to attribute an action to a specific ad. (Also sometimes referred to as Cost Per Acquisition.)
CPC (Cost Per Click) — A pricing model in which the advertiser is charged for an ad based on how many users click it. This is a common model for “search advertising” (the all-text ads associated with search results) and for text ads in general. CPC is well-suited for “directed” advertising, intended to prompt an immediate response, because a user’s clicking on an ad shows engagement with it. Google AdWords is generally priced on a CPC basis.
Cost Per Lead (CPL) — Pricing based on the number of new leads generated. For example, people who click from an ad and then complete an inquiry form is considered to be a lead. The advertiser would pay based on the number leads received.
Cost Per Order (CPO) — Pricing based on the number of orders received as a result of your ad placement. Also known as cost-per-transaction. [edit]Cost Per Sale (CPS) – Pricing based on the number of sales transactions your ad generates. Since users may visit your site several times before making a purchase, you can use cookies to track their visits from your landing page to the actual online sale. Also known as cost-per-acquisition or pay-per-sale.
CPM (Cost Per Mille) — Cost per one thousand (often views). Much of online advertising — particularly display advertising — is priced on a CPM basis. (Mille = Latin for one thousand; we use “K” for “kilo” almost everywhere else in tech, but “M” for “mille” here, which causes some confusion.) CPM is well suited for “brand” or “awareness” advertising, in which the primary purpose of the ad is not necessarily to prompt an immediate response.
Crawler — see “spider”
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) — Instructions used to describe the look and formatting for documents, usually HTML, so that the presentation is separate from the actual content of the document itself. If you watch a web page that loads slowly, you will often see the text first load and then “snap into place” with its look and feel. That look and feel is controlled by the CSS. CSS, which was first introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium in the late 1990s, helped eliminate the clumsy and often repetitive markup in the original HTML syntax. W3cschools.com has a great introduction to CSS with tutorials.
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) — An extremely simple data format which stores information in a text file. CSV is popular precisely because it can be easily read by many different applications, including spreadsheets, word processors, programming text editors and web browsers. Thus it is a common way for people, including governments, to make their data available. Each row of data is represented by a line of text. Each column is delimited/separated by a comma (,). To prevent confusion about commas in the data, the terms are often surrounded by double quotes (“). Many applications support the use of alternative column delimiters (the pipe character, |, is popular). Example below:”Name”,”Address”,”email””Jack”,”1 Main St., Town, NY”,”jack@hill.com””Jill”,”2 Elm St., City, CA”,”jill@hill.com”
Custom error page — You can customize the content and the look-and-feel of the default page that is displayed on your web server when a 404 File Not Found error occurs. A good 404 error page has a friendly message explaining that the page they requested doesn’t exist at the location, a site map to encourage the user to continue exploring the site, a search box so the user can conduct a search, and a look-and-feel that matches the rest of the site, including navigation of course. Creating a custom 404 error page not only helps keep visitors in your site, it is also an important part of the search engine optimization process. Inevitably pages on your site will get moved and removed over time. When a search engine spider returns to your site to reindex those now non-existent pages, they will have a set of links to explore in the form of the site map on the custom 404 page. You can test for whether a site has a custom 404 error page by trying to access a web page with a nonsense filename after the domain name in the web site address. For example: www.yourcompany.com/blah
Directory — Human editors group websites into categories and provide site descriptions or edit descriptions that are submitted to them. With a directory, picking the right category and composing a description rich in key phrases will ensure maximum visibility. Contrast this with a search engine, which is unedited and concerned primarily with the HTML of a site’s constituent pages
Doorway page –– Also known as a “bridge page” or a “gateway page”. A doorway page is a web page full of keyword-rich copy that doesn’t deliver any useful information on it other than a link into the site, and whose sole purpose is to be fed to the search engines
Dynamic — generated ‘on-the-fly’ from a database. Also see “database-driven.” Dynamic Rotation – Delivery of ads on a rotating, random basis. Dynamic rotation allows ads to be served on different pages of the site and exposes users to a variety of ads.
Embed — A term meaning to place a specific piece of content from one web page inside of another one. This is often done using an embed code (a few lines of HTML and/or Javascript) that you can copy or paste. This is a common way for video content to be spread around the Internet and is increasingly being used for interactive components. A recent example is PBS Newshour’s oil spill tracker widget, which was placed on many news sites around the country. Note: This is different from the newsroom sense of “embed,” popularized during the 2003 Iraqi invasion, which means to have a journalist work from within a military unit.
Error page — A web page stating an error message such as “File Not Found”
Facebook Connect — A technology from Facebook that allows a reader to log into a third-party website with their Facebook account, rather than creating a new profile for that website. Facebook Connect, which is an API, also allows the third parties to pull certain data from the user’s profile, such as his or her name and age. In turn, the reader’s activities on the website can also be displayed on her or his
Facebook profile. Launched in 2007, Facebook Connect was one of the first examples of Facebook extending itself into a platform for the entire Web. (Also see OAuth, Open ID)
Facebook Community Page — Introduced in April 2010, community pages were created as a counterpart to “official fan pages,” which are built around a specific person, company, organization, product, or brand. In large part, community pages are mostly auto-generated around interests or affiliations found in people’s profiles, like cooking. There is not a way to actively add content to the page, unlike with Facebook groups. But because they are autogenerated, based on likes, they can quickly build gigantic memberships. Cooking, for example, has over 2 million fans. These pages are a bit confusing, and Facebook is still working on the kinks.
Facebook Fan Page — A Facebook profile for a specific person, product, company or organization, usually administered by official representatives. This is different from a Facebook personal page, which must be owned by an individual, and different from a Facebook community page, which is built around an interest not related to a brand, such as “cooking.” It is also different from a Facebook group. Fan pages can gather thousands or millions of fans though “likes,” and official posts by the page administrator generally go into the fans’ news streams. Once a page has more than 25 fans, it can claim a short form URL, such as facebook.com/nytimes or facebook.com/wikileaks. Facebook community and fan pages are strong players in ongoing efforts to bring content to people where they already are, instead of requiring them to come to the content.
Facebook Group — Facebook groups are analogous to offline clubs. Unlike Facebook fan pages, groups do not have to be administered by official representatives. In addition, the activity posted in groups does not get pushed into users’ feeds. But as long as it has fewer than 5,000 members, Facebook groups are allowed to mass-message all their members.
Facebook Personal Page — A profile page tied to a single individual. What information is controlled (in theory) by the individual. However, because there is a 5,000-person limit to friends, some celebrities have fan pages instead. As of 2009, individuals can choose a username, which makes their page available at facebook.com/username.
Flash — A proprietary platform owned by Adobe Systems that allows for drag-and-drop animations, program interactivity, and dynamic displays for the Web. The language used, ActionScript, is owned by Adobe; this contrasts with many other popular programming languages that are open source. Creators must use Adobe’s Creative Suite products and web surfers must install a Flash plug-in for their browser. Many claim that Flash players are unstable and inefficient, slowing down web pages and crashing operating systems. Apple has not allowed Adobe to create a Flash player for the iPhone operating system, which has created a feud between the two companies.
HTML5 is emerging as an open alternative to Flash.
Flash intro — an animated ‘short’ created using Flash that Internet users are made to sit through upon entry to a home page. Flash intros annoy users. They also typically take the place of text content on a home page, and since search engines can’t ‘read’ content embedded in Flash, the rankings of a home page that’s just a Flash intro will suffer.
Forums — A virtual community. Also known as discussion forums. Used by search engine optimizers and webmasters for information exchange. Users can post messages in different forums, either to the group at large or to certain users. However, all postings can be seen by anyone else who has access to that forum, so save sensitive materials for private email. Forums are also threaded, which means a reply to a particular posting becomes part of the “thread” of that posting that can be followed to provide a cohesive progression through a particular topic.
Frames — when separate web pages are combined into one, each potentially with its own scrollbar. You know you’re on a framed website when part of the page scrolls while the rest of the page stays in place. Frames frustrate people because much of the time when the person tries to bookmark a specific page, it doesn’t actually work but instead bookmarks the “frameset” page which is typically the home page. Search engines don’t like frames. A framed web site is at a severe disadvantage compared to non-framed sites in terms of search engine marketing. Most search engines support frames, but only, as Google says in its FAQ section, “to the extent that [we] can.” Searchers clicking through to a framed page from search results sometimes end up on an orphaned page. You can use <noframes> in HTML to make the page indexed normally by the crawler. [edit]Frameset – A web page that is made up of frames. A useful analogy: if the individual frames that make up the frameset are the ‘children,’ then the frameset is the ‘parent.’
Framework — A software package that makes writing programs easier by providing all the “plumbing” for a particular type of task (like writing a web app), allowing programmers to just “fill in the blanks” with their own project-specific needs. For instance, Web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails (written in Ruby, meaning programmers use Ruby to do the “fill in the blanks” tasks) and Django (written in Python), have easy-to-use, built-in support for common web development tasks, such as reading and writing to a database, writing content in html, and so forth.
Fresh content — The term that Google uses to refer to frequently changing home pages. When Googlebot ascertains that a given home page is changing frequently, Googlebot will revisit and reindex this page daily. Gateway page – Also called a “doorway page” or a “bridge page”. A gateway page is a low quality web page that contains very little content and exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. This is done through spamdexing, spamming the index of a search engine. Gateway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings.
Google — Google is the world’s number one search engine with a 50.8% market share, ahead of Yahoo! 23.6% and Live Search 8.4% (Dec 2006)Google was founded by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. At the time of the company’s initial public offering in August 2004 $1.67 billion was raised, making Google worth $23 billion. Google’s success should be attributed to its unique algorithmic ranking system PageRank a system that assigns a score to a web page based on the number of links to that page. Based in Mountain View, California the company now employs 13,748 people. The company has a relaxed corporate atmosphere that is illustrated in the companies philosophy “Don’t be evil”.Central to Google’s profitability is Google Adwords launched in 2000.
Google Adwords are text-based contextual ads relevant to keyword searches. In 2006 the company earned $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues about 90 times the revenue from other Google ventures.Google has acquired several start-up companies over the past few years including:• Pyra Labs creators of Blogger in 1999• Upstartle, creators of Writely in 2006.• Measure Map, a weblog statistics application in 2006.• YouTube for a huge $1.65 billion in stock in 2006.• JotSpot a developer of wiki technology in 2006.• DoubleClick purchased for $3.1 billion in 2007.• Postini an enterprise messaging security company in 2007.Current Google applications include: Web search, Image Search, Google News,Google Product Search, Google Groups, Google Maps, Gmail, AdWords, Google Video, Google Checkout and Google Earth
Google AdSense — Google’s online advertising network that allows content publishers to embed a piece of code to display Google ads on their sites. The ads are selected based on the content of the page. Ad revenue is split between Google and the publisher in an undisclosed proportion, generally believed to be two-thirds to the publisher. (Note: ads on Google’s own sites are covered by Google AdWords, not AdSense.)
Google AdWords — Google’s text-based flagship advertising product, which provides the lion’s share of the company revenue. Ads are displayed on Google’s own sites based on search terms that users type in, and advertisers pay only when the users click on them. The search terms, called keywords, are purchased by advertisers; availability of a given keyword is based in part on an auction system, and in part on the responsiveness of the audience. Google Analytics — Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offering detailed visitor statistics. The tool can be used to track all the usual site activities: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rates and average time on site etc. But it can also be used to specifically track Adsense traffic , therefore helping webmasters to optimize Adwords adverts based on where visitors come from, time on site, click path and geographic location. Modeled on Urchin’s analytics tool, after Google purchased Urchin Software Group in 2005, Google Analytics was first rolled out in late 2005. The response was overwhelming and Google had to suspend sign ups only a few days later. After a short period using a lottery type of invitation system, the tool made generally available in August 2006.
Features Include:*Updates in less than one hour*Users can add up to 50 websites*Integration with Google Adwords*User friendly interface – Dashboard format
Google bombing — Google Bombing is when a group of sites such as blogs join forces to link to an unflattering page about a company such that this page rises to the top of the search results in Google. Google bombing takes advantage of the power of hyperlink text and of PageRank. For example, if a group of sites with high PageRank all link to a page about XYZ Company’s inappropriate behavior with hyperlink text of “XYZ Company sucks” then the linked page can shoot to the top of Google’s search results for the term “XYZ Company.”
Google Bowling — Google Bowling is a black hat SEO technique used to knock competitors down or out of search engine results. It is a form of SEO sabotage that is conducted by pointing hundreds of questionable links from low quality sites at a competitor’s site so they end up banned or penalized by Google. Generally newer sites are more susceptible to Google Bowling as older sites are better established with a range of existing high quality links.
Google Buzz — Launched in February 2010, Buzz is Google’s attempt to counter Twitter and Facebook by leveraging the social graphs from users’ e-mail accounts. A more sophisticated version of Gmail “status updates,” Buzz allows users to post updates about what they are doing, link to what they are reading and post their current locations. The service can integrate with other Google services, as well as feed into Twitter. Despite an initial burst of publicity, Google Buzz has not gained tremendous traction. It attracted criticism when Google automatically and publicly connected users with people they had e-mailed most often in the past, making private information unexpectedly available. Google released enhanced privacy controls after the controversy.
Google cache — see “Cache”
Google Checkout — Google’s online payment processing service, Google Checkout, was designed to simplify the online purchase/payment process. It works by allowing users to store their credit card and shipping details on their Google Account. Therefore minimizing the amount of information they need to input at the point of purchase. Purchases can be made at the click of a button. Features include: * Fraud protection* The ability to track purchases* Easy transactions
Google Dance — The Google Dance refers to when Google indexes are updated. This period of time often results in fluctuations in the index size and some noticeable changes in search engine result positions.The term Google Dance was adopted as while an update is being processed the position of a website in Google seems to “dance” as it fluctuates. The fluctuation is due to each of Google’s nine datacenters being updated out of sync – meaning for a time the results are different.
Google Docs –– A free online service offered by Google, comprising word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and other software, all of which is “in the cloud.” Users can work collaboratively on documents, editing them simultaneously. The service is increasingly being seen as eroding Microsoft Office’s market share. The glossary you’re reading right now was collaboratively created in Google Docs.
Google Juice — Internet slang to refer to the substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks. Pages with lots of links pointing to them acquire much ‘Google Juice’ and pages which link to highly ‘juicy’ pages acquire some reflected ‘Google Juice’.
Google Labs – Google Labs is the home to Google’s latest innovations and beta products. It is a testing ground for new services in development.A number of popular products are graduates of Google Labs including: Google Reader, Google Docs & Spreadsheets,
Google Video, Personalized Search, Google Desktop and iGoogle.Current Google Labs products include:* Google Code Search* Google Transit * Google Music Trends* Accessible Search* Google Extensions for Firefox * Google Trends* Google Mars* Google Page Creator* Google Dashboard Widgets for Mac* Google Web Accelerator* Google Ride Finder* Google Suggest* Product Search for Mobile * Google Sets
Google Pack — Free software specifically selected by Google. There are no trial versions or spyware and it’s ready to use in just a few clicks. Currently includes:- Google Earth- Spyware Doctor- Google Photos Screensaver- Star Office- Norton Security Scan- Google Desktop- Google Talk- Picasa- Adobe Reader- Firefox with Google Toolbar- Skype- Real Player
Google Supplemental Index — Google’s Supplemental Index, is a secondary database containing Supplemental Results pages deemed to be of less importance by Google’s algorithm or are less trusted.The primary measure of a pages importance is the number and quality of links pointing to that page. Pages in the Supplemental Index can still rank in search results, but this will depend on the number of pages in the main index relevant to the search. Some reasons pages may be in the Google Supplemental Index:* Duplicate content* Low PageRank* Lack of trust* A site with a large number of pages (Page freshness) Excessively long URLsAs of July 2007 Google discontinued the practice of placing a Supplemental Result tag on search results making it near impossible to tell whether a result is in the supplemental index or the main one.Google Trends – Google Trends is a tool from
Google Labs. It allows you to see how Google search volumes for a particular keyword have changed over a period of time. It shows the popularity of search terms from the beginning of 2004 onwards. Google Trends data is presented in a line graph. The horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis shows how often a term is searched for. Data can be broken down further by region, city and language. You can also compare multiple search terms.For More: Google Trends
Google XML Sitemap — Google Sitemaps are XML files that list the URLs available on a site. The aim is to help site owners notify search engines about the URLs on a website that are available for indexing. Webmasters can include information about each URL, such as when it was last updated and its importance in the context of the site. You should try to make all pages on your site easily accessible to search engines without the use of google sitemaps. But there are situations when your site might benefit from Sitemaps Protocol like for instance if your site is built in rich AJAX or Flash, or if you have a large database driven site that isnt well linked.
Googlebot — Googlebot is a search bot used by Google. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.If a webmaster wishes to restrict the information on their site available to a Googlebot, or other well-behaved spider, they can do so by with the appropriate directives in a robots.txt file.
Googleware – The assortment of tools produced by google that can be used to search, report, play, research Includes (but is not limited to):Blogsearch, Google Analytics, Adwords, Adsense, Google Video, Google Scholar, Google News, Google search, Froogle, Google Maps, Google Images, Google Earth,
Google Wave — An online collaborative space introduced by Google in which people can communicate and work together in real time; it resembles a “souped up Instant Messenger.” Participants can add rich text, images, attachments, videos and maps to create a multimedia collaboration. A playback option allows new users to get up to speed on projects and creates an environment that is both real-time and asynchronous. Despite a massive amount of attention, Google Wave has not gotten much traction. It is, as some people have said, “a technological solution in search of a problem.”
Googlewhack — A Google search query consisting of two words, that returns a single result.
Grey Hat SEO — SEO using both Black Hat and White Hat techniques
Heading tag -An HTML tag that is often used to denote a page or section heading on a web page. Search engines pay special attention to text that is marked with a heading tag, as such text is set off from the rest of the page content as being more important.
Hidden keywords — Keywords that are placed in the HTML source in such a way that these words are not viewable by human visitors looking at the rendered web page.
Hidden Text — SEO Spam Tactic – Hidden Text is a SEO spam tactic to hide contextual html text from human visitors to a webpage, however making it available to search engines to spider the text. The theory is that if you place more relevant html text content on the page rich with targeted keywords, then it will assist the page gaining ranking within search engine results. Some website owners do like text content on their page because they believe it negatively affects their brand and user web experience. So, they hide the text in the hope that the page will still rank for targeted keywords. Hidden Text is an illegal technique as search engines consider it search engine spam. By undertaking this practice, it will eventually harm natural search performance of a website.
Hits — a download of a file from a web server. Hits do not correlate with web page visits. Every graphic on a web page counts as a hit. Thus, a single access of a web page with 20 unique graphics on it register as 21 hits – 20 for the graphics and 1 for the HTML page. Web metrics guru Jim Sterne says hits “stand for How Idiots Track Success.” People who talk in terms of hits are usually either ignorant or are trying to snow their boss into thinking the website is doing better than it really is. Empire New Media Ltd believe in conversion being the key factor of success.
Homepage — A homepage is the main page of a website. Like a cover of a book or the front of a store, its function is to welcome people and to inform them of the overall purpose of the website. The homepage offers an index of navigation that organizes content and leads to other parts of the website. The homepage usually accumulates the most PageRank score since its url is usually where other sites link to the most. The url of a homepage usually ends in a domain name extension such as .com, .org, .edu, etc. Other terms used to describe a homepage are front page, main web page and webserver directory index. It’s interesting to note that in some countries such as Japan, Korea and Germany, the term ‘homepage’ usually refers to the whole website, not just the first page. Even though the home page is designed to be the entry point of the website, people can go directly to other pageswithin the site without ever seeing the front page.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) — The dominant formatting language used on the World Wide Web to publish text, images and other elements. Invented by Tim Berners Lee in the early 1990s, HTML uses pairs of opening and closing tags (also known as elements), such as <title> and </title>; each pair assigns meaning to the text that appears between them. HTML can be considered code, but it is not a programming language; it’s a markup language, which is a separate beast. The latest standard of HTML is HTML5, which adds powerful interactive functionality.
HTML5 — The upcoming, powerful standard of Hypertext Markup Language, which has added advanced interactive features, such as allowing video to be embedded on a web page. It is gaining in popularity compared to proprietary standards, like Adobe Flash, because it is an open standard and does not require third-party plugins. Using HTML5 will allow web pages to work more like desktop applications. The latest releases of most browsers support HTML5 to varying degrees. HTML5 does not cover CSS and JavaScript, but often when people refer to HTML5, they often are using it as a blanket term, applying not only to changes to the HTML, but also to changes in CSS and JavaScript.
HTML Source The raw, unrendered programming code. It can be accessed in Internet Explorer by going to the “View” menu then selecting “Source”. [edit]HTTP 301 Status Code Definition -The 301 status code means the URI requested has ‘Moved Permanently’ and has been assigned a new URI. Any future requests should use one of the returned URIs.
It is best practice to use 301 Redirects when multiple copies of the same document reside on different URIs. This will ensure that duplicate content is removed from the site and each and every unique page will only have one URL.
HTTP 302 Status Code Definition – The 302 status code means that the document requested is ‘Found’ however temporarily resides under a different URL. Since a permanent redirect has not been used, the client should continue to use the original requested URL for future requests.
HTTP 400 Status Code Definition – The 400 status code means a ‘Bad Request’ stating that the server is not able to understand the document request due to a malformed syntax. The user is required to modify its request prior to repeating it.
HTTP 401 Status Code Definition – The 401 status code means ‘Unauthorized’. This server requests user authentication prior to fulfilling the document request
HTTP 403 Status Code Definition – The 403 status code means ’Forbidden’. The server understood the request, however is refusing to fulfil it. The webmaster may wish to alert the user why their request has been denied. If the organization does not wish to provide this reason then a 404 (Not Found) status code can be displayed instead.
HTTP 404 Status Code Definition – The response error message ‘404’ represents a document ‘Not Found’. This means that the client was able to communicate with the server, however could not find the requested document. Alternatively, the server could be configured to not fulfil the request and not provide a reason why.
HTTP 410 Status Code Definition – Similar to a 404 Not Found error message, the 410 status code states that the requested document is ‘intentionally gone’, is no longer available and there is no forwarding address. The 410 status code is usually used for limited display documents such as promotional information. It is up to the discretion of the web master to determine at what point to remove the 410 status message.
HTTP 500 Status Code Definition – The 500 status code error message states that there was an internal server error which has prevented the document from being fulfilled
HTTP 501 Status Code Definition – The 501 status code message is displayed when the server does not recognize the document request method. The server is not capable of fulfilling this request and states the request was ‘Not Implemented’.
HTTP Hypertext Markup Language – HTTP stands for hypertext markup language and is the main markup language for creation of web pages. It defines how data is structured and informs the web browser how the page is to be displayed with the use of formatting text and images. Some of the page elements that can be coded with HTML include Page Titles, Text (paragraphs, lines and phrases), Lists (unordered, ordered and definition lists), Tables, Forms, Basic HTML Data Types (character data, colors, lengths, content types, etc) and much more. The source html code of any webpage is available by simply clicking ‘Page Source’ in a web browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer. HTML is not a programming language and therefore is quite static in nature. It is considered to be a subset of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). Tim Berners Lee first described HTML and it was publicly available in 1991 via a document called ‘HTML Tags’. HTML became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000) and its specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)of which commercial software vendors offer input.
JavaScript — A Web scripting language used to enhance websites; it can make them more interactive without requiring a browser plugin. JavaScript is interpreted by your browser instead of by a web server, otherwise known as a client-side scripting language. JavaScript files generally end in .js. Despite its name, it is not related to the Java language.Metadata — Data about data. Examples of metadata include descriptors indicating when information was created, by whom and in what format. Metadata helps to organize information online and make it machine-readable. HTML is an example of metadata — it organizes the data in a web page so browsers can display it sensibly. Web pages often have hidden metadata that helps with their search engine ranks. Photos uploaded to Flickr carry metadata such as time taken, camera model and shutter speed. MP3s have metadata such as the artist name, track title, album name and so on.
Open Source (OS) — Open source refers to a philosophy and a means of developing and licensing software and other copyrighted works so that others are free to inspect, use and adapt the original source material. There are many open source licenses. Some licenses are considered permissive (e.g. MIT and BSD), allowing inclusion in proprietary works, while others (e.g. GNU GPL) require that the resulting derivative works remain under the same license if distributed. While the term originally stemmed from software practices, the concept has now been incorporated into other fields such as medicine and agriculture. Many of the most popular technologies used in content distribution, including languages and publishing platforms, are open source. The glossary you are reading was developed using open source methodology and is available under a Creative Commons license.
Operating System — A basic layer of software that controls computer hardware, allowing other applications to be built on it. The most popular operating systems today for desktop computers are the various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and the open-source Linux. Smart phones also have operating systems. The Palm Pre uses webOS, numerous phones use Google’s Android operating system, and the iPhone uses iOS (formerly known as iPhone OS).
PHP — A popular web scripting language to generate web pages that was first developed in 1995, when it stood for “Personal Home Page.” (It is now a recursive acronym, standing for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.”) Popular websites that are written in PHP are Wikipedia, Facebook and WordPress. It is criticized as being slow because it generates web pages on request. However, Facebook recently released its internally developed version of HipHop for PHP, which is designed to make the language dramatically more efficient.
Programming language — A special type of language used to unambiguously instruct a computer how to perform tasks. Programming languages are used by software developers to create applications, including those for the web, for mobile phones, and for desktop operating systems. C, C++, Objective C, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby are examples of programming languages. HTML and XML are not programming languages, they are markup languages.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) — A standard for websites to push their content to readers through Web formats to create regular updates through a “feed reader” or “RSS Reader.” The symbol is generally a orange square with radiating white quarter circles. (Also see Atom)
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — A suite of techniques for improving how a website ranks on search engines such as Google. SEO is often divided into “white hat” techniques, which (to simplify) try to boost ranking by improving the quality of a website, and “black hat” techniques, which try to trick search engines into thinking a page is of higher quality than it actually is. SEO can also refer to individuals and companies that offer to provide search engine optimization for websites.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) — A type of marketing that involves raising a company or product’s visibility in search engines by paying to have it appear in search results for a given word.
Semantic web — A vision of the web that is almost entirely machine readable, in which documents are published in languages that are designed specifically for data. It was first articulated by Tim Berners-Lee in 2001. In many implementations, tags would identify the information, such as <ADDRESS> or <DATE>. While there has been progress toward this front, many say this vision remains largely unrealized.
Social media — A broad term referring to the wide swath of content creation and consumption that is enabled by the many-to-many distributed infrastructure of the Internet. Unlike legacy media, where the audience is usually on the receiving end of content creation, social media generally allows three stages of interaction with content: 1) producing, 2) consuming and 3) sharing. Social media is incredibly broad and refers to blogging, wikis, video-sharing sites like YouTube, photo-sharing sites like Flickr and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Tag — A common type of metadata used to describe a piece of content that associates it with other content that has the same tag. Tags can be specific terms, people, locations, etc. used in the content it is describing, or more general terms that may not be explicitly stated, such as themes. The term “tag” is also used in the context of markup languages, such as <title> identifying the name of the web page. In HTML, tags usually come in sets of open and closed, with the closed tag containing an extra slash (“/”) inside. For example: <title>This is the Title.</title>.
Twitter — A microblogging and social media service where users can send out messages limited to 14o characters. Launched in 2007, Twitter became popular in part because it had a set of APIs that allowed other developers to build tools on top if it. Twitter users came up with their own conventions, including the @ symbol to denote user names (@nytimes), and #, the hashtag, to denote subjects (#sxsw). Twitter computes Trending Topics, which give a real-time view into the most talked about topics on the service.
UI (User Interface) — The part of a software application or website that users see and interact with, which takes into account the visual design and the structure of the program. While graphic design is an element of user interface design, it is only a portion of the consideration.
URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) — The way to identify the location for something on the Internet. It is most familiarly in “http:” form, but also encompasses “ftp:” or “mailto:”
URL (Uniform Resource Locator) — Often used interchangeably with the “address” of a web page, such as http://hackshackers.com. All URLs are URIs, but not vice versa. While humans are familar with URLs as a way to see web pages, computer programs often use URLs to pass each other machine-readable content, such as RSS feeds or Twitter information. In addition, words that appear in URLs often help boost search rankings, which is why many content sites are now shifting to URLs with headlines as opposed to data strings.
Web 2.0 — Referring to the generation of Internet technologies that allow for interactivity and collaboration on websites. In contrast to Web 1.0 (roughly the first decade of the World Wide Web) where static content was downloaded into the browser and read, Web 2.0 uses the Internet as the platform. Technologies such as Ajax, which allow for rapid communication between the browser and the web server, underlie many Web 2.0 sites. The term was popularized by a 2004 conference, held by O’Reilly Media and MediaLive, called Web 2.0. (Also see Ajax)
Web 3.0 — Sometimes used to refer to the semantic web. (Also see semantic web)
WebOS — Operating system used on the latest generation of Palm smart phones, including the Pre and the Pixi. Apps for webOS are developed using web standards (HTML, Javascript and CSS), which means there is a low barrier to entry for web developers to create mobile apps for webOS as compared to other mobile platforms. It allows for having several applications open at the same time, unlike the current iPhone.
Widget — In a web context, this refers to a portable application that can be embedded into a third-party site by cutting and pasting snippets of code. Common web widgets include a Twitter box that can sit on a blog, or a small Google Map that sits within an invitation. Desktop widgets, such as ones offered for the Macintosh Dashboard or by Yahoo!, can be placed on the desktop of a computer, such as for weather or stocks. Similarly, Android offers the ability to add widgets to the home screens.
Wiki — A web site with pages that can be easily edited by visitors using their web browser, but generally now gaining acceptance as a prefix to mean “collaborative.” Ward Cunningham created the first wiki, naming it WikiWikiWeb after the Hawaiian word for “quick.” A wiki enables the audience to contribute to a knowledge base on a topic or share information within an organization, like a newsroom. The best-known wiki in existence is Wikipedia, which burst onto the scene around 2000 as one of the first examples of mass collaborative information aggregation. Other sites that have been branded “wiki” include Wikinews, Wikitravel, and WikiLeaks (which was originally but is no longer a wiki).
WordPress — The most popular blogging software in use today, in large part because it is free and relatively powerful, yet easy to use. First released by Matt Mullenweg in 2003, WordPress attracts contributions from a large community of programmers and designers who give it additional functionality and visual themes. Sites that use WordPress include the New York Times blogs, CNN and the LOLCats network. It has been criticized for security flaws.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) — A set of rules for encoding documents and data that goes beyond HTML capacities. Whereas HTML is generally concerned with the semantic structure of documents, XML allows other information to be defined and passed such as <vehicle>, <make>, <model>, <year>, <color> for a car. It is the parent language of many XML-based languages such as RSS, Atom, and others. It gained further popularity with the emergence of Ajax as a way to send back data from web services, but has since lost ground to JSON, another data encoding format, which is seen as easier to work with.