Digital marketing has exploded into its own niche industry over the last 20 years and with it, the jargon. The following internet marketing glossary explains online marketing definitions and terminology in plain, easy-to-understand English. We update this glossary regularly and hope you find it useful. If you do, we'd love it if you gave this page some love from your favorite social media site.
Digital image advertisements placed on websites. Such advertising is a staple of internet marketing branding campaigns. Depending upon their size and shape, banner ads may also be referred to as buttons, inlines, leaderboards, skyscrapers, or other terms.
Bing Merchant Center is a tool that helps you upload your store and product data to Bing and make it available to Bing Shopping. In terms of e-commerce, this SEO step can significantly boost traffic and get products to a wider audience.
Each major search engine offers a form of content network within its paid search interface. These allow advertisers to choose specific sites for ads or use contextual advertising to match ads to web pages related to their keywords.
Links from other websites that point to any particular page on your site. Search engines use backlinks to judge a site’s credibility; if a site links to you, the reasoning goes, it is vouching for your authority on a particular subject. Therefore, Link Building is an incredibly important part of Search Engine Optimization. How many links, the quality of the sites linking to you, and how they link to you all are important factors, and the continued growth of the number and quality of these links is hugely impactful on rankings. Also called Inbound Links.
Serving primarily China, Baidu is the largest non-US based search engine in the world (although it was started in the United States). Sites can be optimized for Baidu and they offer their own paid search service.
When pages are removed from a search engine’s index specifically because the search engine has deemed them to be violating their guidelines. Although procedures are starting to loosen up somewhat, typically a search engine will not confirm to you that your site has been banned or why it has been banned. If you knowingly did something against the rules (written or unwritten) that got your site banned, you can probably clean up your act and get back in the game. We hear stories, though, from time to time of companies hiring Search Engine Optimization companies that deliver great, fast results, leave town, and then their website mysteriously disappears from the rankings. Google won’t tell them why their site got banned, so the company ends up left out in the cold unless another company can come in and reverse-engineer the issues, unravel the work, and get the search engine to reinclude the site. This is one of the dangers of Black Hat SEO, and why we as a company deal only in White Hat SEO.
is a form of technology that allows companies, primarily retailers and marketers, to connect and engage wirelessly with consumers via their mobile devices. The appeal is that companies can use the Bluetooth signal to deliver geo-targeted, personalized messages, and push notifications, when the customer is in range of the beacon, and can even act as an analytics tool to decipher steps taken to reach a purchasing decision.
An area of internet marketing that is becoming increasingly refined, behavioral targeting looks to put digital ads in front of people who should be more receptive to the particular message given past Web behavior, including their purchases and websites visited. The use of cookies enables online behavioral targeting.
Bing is Microsoft’s search engine, which replaced live.com in June 2009. Bing results now power Yahoo!’s search for paid search campaigns (except display; through Microsoft adCenter) and organic (except local listings) through an alliance entered into between the two Web giants in December 2009. The deal cleared regulatory concerns in early 2010 and was fully completed in November of the same year.
The opposite of White Hat SEO, these Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, tactics are attempts to trick the Search Engines to get better rankings for a website. Using black hat methods will eventually, if not immediately, get your site drastically lower rankings or banned from the search engines altogether. While there are completely legal and ethical techniques you can use to improve rankings, if you design and market a website mostly for humans and not for the search engines’ Spiders, you should be okay.
Short for Web log, blogs are part journal, part website. Typically the newest entry (blog post) appears at the top of the page with older entries coming after in reverse chronological order, and there is generally an option to further categorize these posts, including options like categories and tags. Several blogging platforms exist; our favorite is WordPress. These pages can help your website rank for terms that your homepage, service, product, and other high-level pages may not be able to rank for. As an example, be sure to visit our online marketing blog.
Bounce rate is a calculation in Google Analytics that indicates the percentage of website visitor sessions that fail to qualify as an engaged session. Essentially, this is when a user visits a page on your site, but takes no actions and leaves immediately, which signals to Google that they weren't an ideal user for that page. A decline in this metric is a sign of proper SEO practices. (updated January 2024)
Multiple page one listings from a single domain. Prior to 2010, a site would be fortunate if it had three first-page results for branded searches. Since Google tweaked its algorithm to include Brand Stacking, that number has risen to as many as eight of the top search rankings, taking up the majority of page 1 in a Google search. This dominance in the SERP significantly grows traffic, and with a well-designed site, it will grow conversions as well.
This is the default matching option in PPC advertising. With this bid type, your ad may show if a search term contains your keywords in any way. Your ads may show for synonyms of your keywords, related searches, and other relevant variations or phrases. This match type is best when trying to reach the largest possible audience with your keywords.
A fictional depiction of your target customers that serves as a valuable point of reference for various digital marketing strategies. Marketing professionals take considerations from buyer goals, industry research, customer data, demographics, and natural human behaviors when forming buyer personas. The ultimate goal of this practice is to create an image of your ideal customer. That way, you can personalize your site layout, develop new content, or tailor any marketing strategies to increase the chances of acquiring the customers you need to grow your business. This helps to align your web design, SEO, PPC, content, and social media advertising, with all of it designed and operated to attract your ideal customer.
A canonical tag tells (most) search engines which page is preferred when two URLs are similar or duplicate. In most instances, this tag is used when you have products or content that is accessible by multiple URLs or in some cases, even multiple websites. The tag is part of the HTML head code using the attribute rel=canonical. Improper use of canonical URLs can lead to severe drops in SEO performance.
Defines how HTML elements such as layout, colors, & fonts will be displayed. External style sheets can be stored in CSS files, which allows for faster loading pages, smaller file sizes, and other benefits for visitors, search engines, and designers. The advent of CSS has a huge impact in the way modern websites look, with Javascript bolstering this modernization. However, improper use of CSS and Javascript can lead to slow loading speed, improperly rendered pages, and user-unfriendly experiences, all of which are detrimental to SEO efforts.
Words or phrases that used to organize blog posts and other pieces of information, such as albums for photos. Categories are generally broader than tags and used in instances when there will generally be multiple posts or other data points per category. This helps to organize a blog both for the reader and for the site administrator(s). Categories and tags, on a WordPress site, will generally have their own pages, which may affect SEO for the rest of the site.
ccTLD’s are “Country-code” TLD‘s showing what country a site is focused on or based in. Using Google and the United Kingdom as an example, Google UK is google.co.uk. Sometimes these ccTLD’s are two sets of letters separated by a period (e.g. “co.uk” for the UK or “com.au” for Australia) and sometimes they are just one set of letters (e.g. “.fr” for France). The use of separate websites on unique ccTLD’s is typically viewed as the best way for exporters to target other countries via search engine optimization. However, site owners can also target outside countries through other means such as through country-focused subdomains or even subdirectories. Proper use of ccTLD's is crucial to international digital marketing efforts.
Number of clicks divided by number of impressions. Click-through-rate is a common internet marketing measurement tool for digital advertisement effectiveness. This rate tells you how many times people are clicking on your ad compared to the number of times your ad is shown. Low click-through rates can be caused by a number of factors, including copy, placement, and relevance, and may indicate that your ad needs to be modified for maximum effectiveness.
Showing a search engine spider or bot one version of a Web page and a different version to the end user. Several search engines have explicit rules against unapproved cloaking. Those violating these guidelines may find their pages penalized or banned from a search engine’s index. As for approved cloaking, this generally only happens with search engines that offer a paid inclusion program. Anyone offering cloaking services should be able to demonstrate explicit approval from a search engine for what it is they intend to do, otherwise, this practice falls under Black Hat SEO and brings similar consequences.
How an individual interacts with marketing efforts or a website. This is a very specialized, linear approach to interpreting digital marketing data, and allows a brand to hone in on key influencers, rather than the audience as a whole. Going off of this information, a brand can better target marketing efforts to a particular segment of their audience. While this is separate from standard website analytics services, it's tied to the capabilities that these analytics services provide.
Content Management Systems (CMS) allow website owners to make text and picture changes to their websites without specialized programming knowledge of software like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage. Content Management Systems can be edited by anyone with basic word knowledge via an internet connection. Templates within the CMS allow common pages, like blogs and service pages, to be replicated without the need to code a similar page. There is no need for length or costly web development contracts or the need to wait on someone outside your company to make changes. CMS examples include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. A CMS sometimes includes tools to help with SEO, or allows for plugins that assist with the same thing.
In opposition to traditional online advertising methods, content marketing is an inbound marketing practice that seeks to generate leads and traffic through the creation and distribution of content that caters to the needs of a defined audience of prospective customers. Content marketing as a strategy for SEO service providers achieved critical mass in the latter part of 2012 following the release of the Penguin algorithm update by Google, which adjusted spam factors and affected a high percentage of search queries.
Each major search engine offers a form of a content network within its paid search interface, typically referred to as content networks, although Google just renamed its content network as the Google Display Network. Within Google Ads, advertisers have two options for content network advertising:Pick sites. With this option, you can choose the actual sites, or in some cases, sections and pages of sites, on which you want to display your ads. Contextual advertising. Contextual advertising allows you to use keywords like you would in traditional paid search advertising and the search engines will display your ads next to articles, blog posts, and other Web pages that are related to those keywords. Interest categories. Target users who display a common interest like sports, travel, shopping, etc. Both options are great for inexpensive brand awareness on massive scales in addition to more direct means such as lead generation. The days of buying remnant display ads not being worth it are behind us.
HTML tags that define the essence of the content contained within the page, readable by search spiders. These include Header and Alt Tags. These generally convey the point of a page to a search engine, and proper use of them is a cornerstone of well-implemented SEO practices.
A feature offered by major search engine advertisers that allows your digital advertisement to be placed next to related news articles and on other Web pages. Contextual advertising seeks to match Web content from the display page with your advertised search term(s). Contextual advertising isn’t perfect (what in life is?), but it’s come a long way from its inception to the point where it can provide great value to advertisers when used correctly.
This statistic, or metric, tells you what percentage of people is converting (really!). The definition of a “conversion” depends upon your goals and measurements. It could mean a sign up for free information, a completed survey, a purchase made, or other.
Depending on what your site deems as a conversion, some steps can always be taken to improve the likelihood that visitors to your site will perform a conversion-driven action, like completing a form or a purchase. Typically, this means.
In PPC advertising, an average daily budget is set for each campaign. You choose the daily budget based on your goals and how much you would like to spend, and can adjust as necessary.
Day parting refers to serving digital ads at different times of the day and days of the week, or even changing bids or copy/creative at different times. For example, you may not want your ads to show from 11AM-2PM on Tuesdays. This can be done manually in most online platforms, or automatically in some such as Google Ads.
When pages or whole websites are removed from a search engine's index. This may happen because, but not necessarily, they have been Banned. This can also happen due to poor SEO practices, like keyword stuffing, improper use of doorway pages, false information, and other black hat SEO practices.