Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms | Kinetic Knowledge

 

Glos·sa·ry: the alphabetical list of digital marketing terms or phrases including definitions, explanations & facts relating to businesses, the Internet, marketing, and our work here at Kinetic Knowledge

 

  • Ad Server: describes technology developed to place advertisements on web pages.
  • Alerts: Google offers a ‘free alerts via email system’ for when information, news, and/or articles surface on any targeted subject. For instance, maybe your name
  • Alt Text: short for alternative text, refers to descriptive copy tags [ALT tag or HTML tag] placed for images, search engines often use ‘alt text’ to understand what an image is and determine how to index it.
  • Anchor Text: descriptive text concealing a link to another document or web page, often highlighted or colored for reader identification and/ or to denote a link exists
  • Authorship: Google + (their social network) application to confirm an author’s affiliation with a site or blog’ content
  • BackLink: any link received by a website or web page from another website or web page, the number of backlinks is one signal to measure the popularity or importance of that website or web page
  • Bounce Rate: the percentage of site visitors that leave a page or a site without visiting any other pages
  • Client: a client asks a business to make something. A customer buys (or doesn’t) what a business makes. A customer has the power to choose, but the client has at least some power to define, insist, and specify.
  • Cloaking: showing a web page to a search engine spider to get it ranked for specific keywords, only to promote unrelated products to incoming traffic
  • CMS: stands for Content Management System and that is a web application designed to make it easy for a non-technical person to add, edit, and manage a website’s content. WordPress fits that definition, but it’s also much more. It can power Apps and E-commerce and just about anything a business might need. 
  • Crawl: (by search engines): when a search engine spider, defined below, reaches your site’s pages it is essentially crawling them. By using spiders to crawl web pages, search engines are able to identify keywords, to consume & rank them and to create links back to the pages where they exist – see What Does A ‘Google Crawl’ Mean AND How Will Your Site’s Blog Help Influence It?
  • Customer: a customer buys (or doesn’t) what a business makes. A client asks a business to make something. A customer has the power to choose, but the client has at least some power to define, insist, and specify.
  • Digital Footprint: It is a forever-growing record of digital interactions. A record used by search engines to rank a site’s pages versus the competition. If several people have bookmarked (or linked, shared, and liked) a page, possibly to recommend to others or to reference for when they are ‘ready to buy’, there’s a record that can correlate itself to more new business – See Is It My Digital Footprint? = Is It My Digital Footprint?
  • Disintermediation: giving a consumer direct access to information direct that otherwise would require a middle- man or mediator ( i.e. Newspapers, TV Broadcasters, Magazines & large web-based media which were the necessary to distribute a message )
  • Doorway Pages: creating a fake page purely for search engine spiders to trick them into indexing the site higher, but never available to a user
  • Feed: a means for a website to distribute content beyond just visitors using browsers; it permits subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically to individuals via a newsreader or email and to other sites via widgets; make it easy for users to keep track of websites or blogs, without having to remember to check each site manually
  • FTP: stands for ‘file transfer protocol’ and it allows for the transfer of files between two computers on the Internet
  • Ghost Writing: publishing copy or content for hire, on behalf of someone who either can’t write or maybe feels more comfortable having someone else do it for them
  • GDPR: a new set of laws concerned with the handling of European Union residents’ personal data. Effective May 25, 2018, the laws give EU residents more control over their personal data and how a business can use it. 
  • Hacked Website: often means a website that has been invaded by someone other than the owner or its Administrative users with an intention to harm it, its’ visitors, or to redirect visitors elsewhere. A hacked website can harm users by serving malicious software, collecting personal information, or redirect to sites they didn’t intend to visit – See The Truth About Hacked WordPress Websites
  • Hits: traffic metrics, unless solely reflecting human visitation, may be used to confuse site owners. To demonstrate, ‘hits’ may include non-human bot visitation AND/ OR the multiple files (often dozens) downloaded for a single page view. In the latter case, each file gets counted as a hit when a page is downloaded making the number of hits more reflective of complex page load than actual traffic. In the first scenario, bot (crawler or spider) traffic is typically a lot more than, if not the majority of, actual visitor traffic.
  • Keyword Stuffing: keyword density on a site or a page was an important signal for early search algorithms, but webmasters repeatedly tried to game the system by inflating the keyword density inside their websites, the practice now is of no use and may still cause a ban from search results
  • Link Bait: content, on a website, developed specifically to encourage others to link from their own site to this content.
  • Link Farm: a group of websites where each links to one another, the purpose being to artificially increase backlink counts and game search algorithms
  • Nofollow Link: link used to instruct search engines that it should not influence ranking, possibly used when linking to the external page you might want to share with visitors but NOT endorse as a backlink to search engines
  • Open Source Software: Open Source software might be summarized as leveraging the power of many to develop and improve existing software. It’s a base software source code made available by someone who will permit collaborative use, improvement, and even modified redistribution. For instance, from the core development team at WordPress, you have software code and regular upgrades. Understanding that development for WordPress leverages free base source code, the ‘open source community’ produces themes, plugins, and some support on bug fixes. – See Understanding WordPress
  • PageRank: an algorithm signal Google uses to estimate the importance of pages around the web, largely based upon the idea that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B, the theory the higher link count the higher the probability the page is important has been gamed to the degree pure link numbers are of less weight versus other signals
  • Permalinks: refers to a “permanent link”, readers can bookmark permalinks; writers can link to permalinks, and search engines can record or index keywords by their permalink
  • Pingbacks: a neat technology feature of WordPress that allows bloggers to be notified [via comment moderation notifications] when someone else links to them
  • Pings or Pinging: also referred to as an ‘XML RPC ping’ notify several ‘update services’ (some followed by search engines to gauge activity) when you either create a new or update an existing blog post 
  • Rich Snippets: sometimes featured in search results to summarize the answer to a search, these stem from the implementations of structured data, also defined in this glossary
  • RSS: an acronym for ‘Really Simple Syndication,’ or a content format making it easy for that content  to move from one site to another
  • Responsive Design: refers to a site that automatically conforms itself, regardless of browser, to any screen resolution. It uses a CSS media query to figure out what resolution a visiting device has and, using flexible images and grids, sizes itself accordingly to that screen
  • Schema: the Internet “language” of structured data is schema.org. It is a library of internet things, the primary function being to help a search engine to better understand pages and content. It supports a better way to convey the meaning of pages, URLs, and content for machines like the Googlebot. Schema markup powers rich snippets, also defined in this glossary.
  • Scraper Websites: Scraper sites use content from other sites using website scraping technology techniques, the typical reason being  to 1) create sites with content that advertising can be run against or 2) to manipulate search engine rankings for other sites by using all that content to link to them 
  • Search Algorithm: Google’s search algorithm is used to find the most relevant web pages for any search query, the algorithm is believed to consider over 200 signals, including PageRank or backlinks, social signals, meta tags, relevant content, SERP activity, bookmarks, subscriptions, age of the domain, etc.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the process of getting traffic from free, organic, natural listings on search engines, search engines list and rank web pages, websites, and other content, search engines rank based upon what they consider to be ‘most to least relevant’ to users.
  • SEO, Black Hat: use of unethical techniques to improve ranking in search engines and traffic, search engines filter for such techniques and they can result in a ban from search engine results, examples include keyword stuffing, doorway pages, cloaking, link farms, and the purchase of backlinks
  • SEO, White Hat:  use of ethical techniques to improve ranking in search engines and traffic, examples include content quality, content consistency, proper meta-tagging, keyword research
  • Search Engine Result Page (SERP): the page of results delivered by a search engine when someone enters a keyword query
  • SERP: an acronym for search engines results page, it’s the page with a list of links you get when you search a topic
  • Social Sharing: a potentially viral series of hyperlinked social icons applied to a site’s pages so that visitors can easily share & tout the content to their own social accounts
  • Slug: a few words that describe a post or a page, usually the ‘permalink’ friendly version of a longer maybe less specific title (which is otherwise added to the end of a permalink) and when used the ‘slug’ becomes part of a permalink instead of the title
  • Spam: the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social networking spam, and file-sharing network spam
  • Spider (bot, crawler, robots): programs are written to scour the web automatically for various reasons, like identifying & indexing pages with keywords – See: What is the ‘Google Crawl’?
  • Spoofing: a malicious practice in which email is sent from an unknown source disguised as a source (i.e. email address) known to its receiver – See: Be Careful With Email Links And Attachments
  • SSL: acronym for secure socket layers, SSL encryption establishes a secure connection between your server and any visitor’s web browser, and keeps personal data private. Having HTTPS in the address bar and displaying a seal of trust increases customer confidence in your website and drives more sales. It’s also, in theory, one signal in many that Google uses to compare or rank one site’s page to another. 
  • Structured Data: Google is already good at understanding the general context of website pages, but organized data can conform to a certain format that can, in some cases, more easily communicate the specifics of a page. It has also been referred to as an effort to “cheat” search results, so it doesn’t necessarily count as a signal or add to a site’s ‘quality’ in the eyes of Google; however, it may support the signals a) click through and b) dwell time.
  • Web Page: a web page is a single document on the Internet; whereas, a website is a collection of web pages all affiliated by a primary domain (i.e. kineticknowledge.com). While often interchangeable in informal speech, in modern times or the digital age, it is important to know the difference between the terms web page and website. 
  • Web Safe Fonts:  these are fonts likely to be present on most computers & MACs, used by most (informed) website designers to increase the likelihood that content will be displayed to the most visitors possible in the chosen font. If a visitor’s PC or MAC does not have the specified font, their browser will fall back on an alternative font based upon either 1) designer-specified fallback fonts or 2) substitution defined in the visitor’s operating system
  • Website: a website is a collection of web pages all affiliated by a primary domain on the Internet; whereas, a web page is a single document on the Internet (i.e. kineticknowledge.com/local-search-engine-optimization-services ). Often they are interchangeable in informal speech, but in the digital age, it is important to know the difference between the terms web page and website. 
  • WordPress.com: free website software, hosting, subdomain, updating, forum-based support with limited options for customization or 3rd party software integration available under the GPL at WordPress.com – See WordPress.com Versus WordPress.org For Business
  • WordPress.org: free website software better suited for the business that wants complete control of its web presence  available under the GPL at WordPress.org – See WordPress.com Versus WordPress.org For Business