Exporters Almanac

A comprehensive Glossary of eCommerce terms and acronyms.

N.B. If you think we are missing anything please let us know.

#	This symbol represents a tag for categorisation on Twitter. See "hashtag".
200	This error occurs if your content management system is poorly developed. It says that the file was not found. However, the correct form of that error would be a 404.
301 Redirect	This is the most search engine friendly method for redirecting web pages or entire websites, which is referred as Moved Permanently.
302	The equivalent to the 301 Redirect, basically the old URL is redirected to a new one.
404 Error	This error refers to “Page not found error”, which means the server couldn’t find the requested page.
Abandonment Rate	See "Bounce Rate".
Absolute Unique Visitor	See "Unique Visitor"
A/B Testing	This is testing a new technique (A) of online marketing (whether it be PPC or SEO) against a control (B) to see if the new technique is more effective.
Accelerator	That part of a message intended to speed the reader's response or visit: a present, a discount, an opportunity to try the product, a game or contest, etc. – all generally with a time limit.
Accidental Click	Accidental clicks are clicks which occur by mistake or clumsiness. On mobile devices, accidental clicks are often called "fat fingers" clicks. According to different studies, accidentals click are estimated from 20 to 40%. Unintentional clicks are usually detected and measured by observing post click behaviours.
Acquisition	Refers to the point in time when a visitor to a website becomes a qualified lead or customer.
Acquisition Cost	See "Cost-Per-Acquisition"
ACR	See "Automatic Content Recognition"
AdCenter	See "Microsoft adCenter"
AddThis	A bookmarking service that gives a code people can use on their websites so when people visit they can share your content.
AdSense	Google AdSense is a pay-per-click advertisement application which is available to bloggers and Web publishers as a way to generate revenue from the traffic on their sites. The owner of the site selects which ads they will host, and AdSense pays the owner each time an ad is clicked.
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)	The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is an encryption algorithm used by U.S. government agencies to secure materials. It is predicted that AES will soon be used in the private sector with commercial transactions.
Adwords	The pay-per-click search-engine marketing program provided by Google. These ads mainly work on a keyword based and are sold on a cost per click basis; comparable to an auction with the maximum bid or the click through rate.
Affiliate Marketing	Affiliates promote and sell products or services, which are actually owned by another website or business for a certain fee.
Aggregator	An Internet-based tool or application which collects and curates content (often provided via RSS feeds) from many different websites and displays it in one central location.
Akismet	A widely used application for blogging platforms, such as WordPress, that functions as a filter for trapping link spam, comment spam and other forms of undesirable user-generated content.
Alerts	Alerts are usually sent to an individual via email. Email alerts can be set up for various search terms, events or website actions e.g. whenever a company/product name appears on the Internet in newly published content.
Alexa Internet	This is a search site focused on marketing and webmaster communities, which measures website traffic for free. A website and toolbar that tracks the number of hits to a particular website and ranks them based on this amount.
Algorithm	An algorithm is used by search engines to identify which pages would be the most relevant for the given search command.
ALT Attribute	A line of text used to describe the content associated with a non-text based file, typically an image.
Analytics	Information resulting from the systematic analysis of data or statistics. In digital marketing, analytics is the information resulting from systematic analysis of data gathered from marketing activity such as email marketing, landing page A/B testing, or Google Adwords purchases.
Anchor Text	The non-URL text that is displayed in a hyperlink e.g. Insert Anchor Text
API	See "Application Programming Interface"
App	Short for application, an app performs a function on your mobile phone or computer.
Application Programming Interface	A document interface that allows software applications to interact with other applications e.g. the Twitter API.
At tag(@)	The @ symbol is used in email, but it is now also being used to tag users in messages on social networking websites. Both Twitter and Facebook use the @ tag.
Attribution	Determining which part of a marketing campaign had the greatest effect on the consumer.
Audience	A group of people identified by a brand for ad targeting purposes. Facebook and Twitter, as examples, offer Custom Audiences and Tailored Audiences, respectively. Some audiences are also known as "segments," groups of people that share the same characteristics or took the same online actions.
Authority	This factor shows how trustworthy a site is for a particular search query, which helps your domain or page to rank better in the search engine.
Automatic Content Recognition	The process is used to recognise audio content on radio or TV content. In both cases, the recognition is based on audio content through audio fingerprinting. In digital marketing context the first use was to give radio listeners the possibility to buy online music or merchandise tied to the broadcasted song. Nowadays, it is the main usage to tie in real time TV programs and commercials to online content and to develop interactivity.
Avatar	An image that represents an account on social networks and forums.
Average Order Amount	The amount of all orders divided by the total number of orders; used in digital marketing to help calculate the necessary reach, along with CTR and conversion rate.
B2B	Business to Business
B2C	Business to Consumers
B2G	Business to Government
Back Link	See "Inbound Link"
Ban	Removal from a search index when a page and/or entire website is deemed inappropriate for a given engine’s results, usually on a temporary basis until the offending site corrects itself.
Banner Ad	These advertising units are images that advertisers place on known publishers’ websites in order to attract or re-attract their target audience. A banner ad is, strictly speaking, a long rectangular image displayed on a webpage or other type of content (mobile application, digital game, etc.) for advertising purposes. The typical banner ad is clickable and redirects users to the advertiser’s website.
Baseline	An established level of normalcy; in digital marketing, for example, the normal or regular number of unique visitors per day to a website.
Behance	An online design portfolio-based community recently acquired by Adobe, developers of industry-standard design software such as Photoshop and Illustrator.
Behavioral Email	An email generated when a known user performs a certain action – such as completing a video – on a website, and the owner of the website then contacts the known user regarding that video as a follow up to the user’s behaviour.
Bid Management Services	Services designed to get the most value for each search term (pay-per-click).
Bitly	A free URL shortening application. They also provide analytics on your links.
Black Hat SEO	This type of Search Engine Optimisation is against the guidelines of the search engine, such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Counter to that best practice SEO is referred to as White hat SEO.
Blekko	A relatively new search engine that aims to better Google. It claims to be spam-free, and it also contains functionality that makes SEO easier.
Blip	A “blip” can refer to a music or video clip which a user has posted via the popular media hosting sites, Blip.fm and Blip.tv.
Blog	Short for weB LOG, a blog is a website that is maintained by one user, or a group of users, where the users post updates. This kind of website presents their visitors content in usually reversed order. That content can be time relevant, but doesn’t need to be. Moreover, as a user you are able to share that content on social networks or leave a comment on the post. Some are used as online diaries, but others may be corporate. A company that maintains a blog gives it a personable front for the potential clients, and it also maintains an interesting online presence that can be used for SEO.
Blogger	A person who writes a blog. Reasons for being a professional blogger are many: delivering timely commentary; showcasing expertise; engaging with audiences and fellow bloggers; and building personal brands. Some professional bloggers generate levels of esteem and prestige equivalent to that of journalists, an occupation which has also found value in blogging for the above reasons.
Blogger (1)	A person who writes a blog. Reasons for being a professional blogger are many: delivering timely commentary; showcasing expertise; engaging with audiences and fellow bloggers; and building personal brands. Some professional bloggers generate levels of esteem and prestige equivalent to that of journalists, an occupation which has also found value in blogging for the above reasons.
Blogger (2)	Blogger is a free blog platform by Google. You are able to publish sites on a subdomain (blogspot.com) or to your own domain.
Blogging	From the term “web log”, in which a user actively updates a visible section of a website in order to inform or attract users and customer on a regular basis.
Blogosphere	A term given to the sum of all blogs on the internet.
Blogroll	A traditional method for bloggers to list all the other blogs they have read.
Bookmarking	The act of saving a website address for future reference.
Bot	(Sometimes called a crawler, robot, spider or WebCrawler). A program that visits web sites and reads through the pages, in order to gather data and to create entries for the search engine.
Bounce Rate	This rate is the percentage of visitors of a website, who have left the site after only viewing one single page. This metric helps you to understand the quality of the content, such as a high bounce rate can be due to irrelevant content or low attractiveness of the site.
Brand	A business’s brand is the sum total of all its users’ and customers’ opinion of that business; a business can choose to intentionally shape its brand or allow the market forces to shape its brand.
Branded Keywords	All keywords associated with a brand belong to this category. These keywords have the highest value and a high conversion rate.
Breadcrumb Nav	This refers to a horizontal navigation bar, where the user knows where he is and how to get back to the beginning.
Broken Link	See "404 Error". This is a non-functional link, which doesn’t lead the user to the desired location. There are a couple of reasons for this error, such as the website is currently offline, or due to a move of the page’s location. These links usually serve pages with the “404 error” message.
Browser	This is the main software application to use the internet. The most popular browsers are Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari.
Business model	An entity’s business model defines how the business creates its product or service, delivers the product or service to the intended audience, and then collects payment for the service or product from the intended audience.
Cache	This is basically a copy of a web page, which is stored by the search engine.
Campaign	A campaign is made up of marketing messages with a specific aim. A campaign may aim to raise awareness, raise funds or increase the sales of a product.
Canonical	If there are multiple versions of similar pages, the canonical rel tag tells the WebCrawler that the page linked is the definitive version. Each non-canonical page must link to the canonical version with this link.
Captcha	CAPTCHA is an acronym standing for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Captchas are used to prevent bots to register fake accounts at scale for different free online services - webmail accounts, social media accounts, forum & comment profiles, etc. A traditional captcha requires people to type in a set of distorted letters and numbers appearing in an image and difficult for a bot to decipher. From a marketing standpoint, a captcha is often a strong deterrent or obstacle for real users.
Categories	A means to organise content on a site, especially blogs. One typical way to store both current and archival blog posts is by an alphabetical list of topical categories.
Channels	A delivery mechanism; in digital marketing, a business’s message is delivered via one or more marketing channel such as email, social media, blogging, advertisements, etc.
Circles	Groups of friends on Google + network. Circles can be categorised into colleagues, family etc. You can share certain information with certain groups if you wish.
Click & Collect	Click and collect is the process by which the consumer orders online (click) and collects his merchandise at a local store.
Click Fraud	Click fraud is illegal and refer to people, who click on PPC adverts, in order to increase the profit of the company. This means increasing the payable number of click-throughs to the advertiser.
Click Through Rate	The percentage of the targeted audience that is exposed to the marketer’s message that click on the link provided in the message and land on the marketer’s web property. The percentage of people who actually click on a link (e.g. in an email message or sponsored ad) after seeing it.
Cloaking	This black hat SEO tactic tries to show the search engines different content compared to the human users. This could lead to a ban of the site by the search engine. However, there are some legitimate situations, where you can use cloaking, such as changing the user experience based on the location.
Collaboration	In reference to Web 2.0, this concept states that shared contributions of large numbers of individuals, using social media tools, is a main driver of quality content on the Internet.
Collective Intelligence	The idea that a community or group of individuals is more efficiently capable of higher thought processes than an individual. Social-media applications of this concept include online communities which provide user-created informative content, such as Wikipedia.
Comment	Blogs and other Content Management Systems allow readers to leave any kind of comments or feedback.
Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart	See "Captcha"
Conceptual Links	These sorts of links aren’t just focused on the anchor text. The search engine tries to understand the link beyond the words basically, such as the words near to the link. More advanced search engines do try to find out the concept links rather than the anchor text.
Congoo	Congoo is a news-sharing social network that offers free subscription content across hundreds of broad and niche topics.
Connection	A term used on LinkedIn to describe the people you are associated with.
Consistency	The importance of continuing with a course of action, such as blogging, in a regular frequency in order to repeatedly expose the intended audience to the marketer’s message.
Content	Any text, image, video, audio, app or other material published on the Internet for audience consumption.
Content Gating	This is the practice of requiring some kind of sign up information on a webform for giving access to specific web content. Most common forms of content used for content gating strategies are viewable or downloadable contents like ebooks, whitepapers and webinars.
Content Management System	This tool helps you edit and add content and information to your website; such as Wordpress without any coding skills or understanding.
Contextual Advertising	This form of advertising is related to the content of the page.
Contextual Link Inventory	An extension of search engines where they place targeted links on websites they deem to have similar audiences.
Conversion	A desired action taken by a website visitor, such as making a purchase, registering for an event, subscribing to an e-newsletter, completing a lead-generation form, downloading a file, etc.
Conversion Cost	See "Cost-Per-Acquisition"
Conversion Rate	This is the percentage of users who converted. The percentage of unique visitors to a website that are “converted” into customers, users, or leads.
Conversion Rate Optimisation	The conversion rate is how many people go from just browsing to making a purchase, or becoming a customer.
Cookie	A small data file, which is placed on a visitor’s computer by a web server, in order to track them. Cookies are used to help websites to improve use experience and help tracking conversions.
Cost-Per-Acquisition	Represents the ratio of the total cost of a pay-per-click campaign to the total number of leads or customers; often called “CPA” or “Conversion Cost.”
Cost-Per-Click	A method of paying for targeted traffic. For a fee, sites like Google or Facebook direct traffic to your site. You agree to pay a set amount for every click.
Cost-Per-Thousand	This is the cost-per-thousand views of an advertisement. Often, advertisers agree to pay a certain amount for every 1,000 customers who see their ad, regardless of conversion rates or click-throughs.
CPA	See "Cost-Per-Acquisition"
CPC	See "Cost-Per-Click"
CPM	See "Cost-Per-Thousand"
Crawl Depth	This shows how deeply a website has been crawled and indexed.
Crawler	(Sometimes called a bot, robot, spider or WebCrawler). A program that visits web sites and reads through the pages, in order to gather data and to create entries for the search engine.
Crawl Frequency	How frequently the website has been crawled.
CRO	See "Conversion Rate Optimisation"
Cross-Device	Involving multiple screens—those of laptops, tablets, phones, desktop computers or TVs. Marketers are trying to understand when their messages reach consumers on different devices throughout the day, identifying users accurately as they switch screens. Cross-device data lets marketers avoid repeating messages to the same person on different screens more than they want to.
CSR	Corporate Social Responsibility, the ethical behaviour of a company while serving to improve the welfare of their employees as well as the local community.
CTR	See "Click Through Rate"
Cybersquatting	Registering domains related to big trademarks or brands, in order to get money by representing these brands and trademarks.
Dashboard	Any area of administrative control for operating applications, especially social media settings, blogging software, and user profiles for websites that offer multiple customisation options.
Data Management Platform	The systems that brands use to make sense of any information they can find about consumers and the marketplace. Brands upload first-party data (consumer emails, sales figures, etc.) to a DMP and combine it with other data sets to make better decisions for their marketing.
Dayparting	Limiting or shutting down ad campaigns at certain times of the day in Google Adwords. Moreover, you could change ad bidding prices or increase the activity at other times. In the end it’s all about maximisation of profits in the campaign.
Deep Link	Deeplinking means making a link that points to an internal page within the website. Therefore, many high authority websites start deeplinking within their site, in order to get visitors directly to the product or service.
Del.icio.us	A popular social bookmarking site which allows members to share, store and organise their favourite online content.
De-listing	See Ban.
Delivery	When the good or service provided by a business is provided to and accepted by the user or customer; in digital marketing, also the receipt of a message from the marketer to a group or individual in the target audience.
Demand-Side Platform	A demand-side platform is one of three key technologies used in the buying and selling ecosystem. This software allows marketers and agencies to buy digital ads in an automated fashion. A DSP is often coupled with a data management platform (see "DMP") for additional help reaching key audiences. They plug into ad exchanges and ad-supply platforms known as Sell-Side Platforms.
Deterministic	Data that can accurately identify a consumer for targeting ads, such as a visitor's login information for a website. Other deterministic data points are credit cards, phone numbers and addresses. (See also Probablistic.)
Digg	An online news website which has a unique algorithm. The site lets its readers submit articles and also allows people to vote whether or not they liked the article. The articles with the highest number of votes appear at the top of the page while the less popular stories move down the page.
Digital Marketing Calendar	A tool that provides for time-based structure and discipline for the digital marketer in planning, assigning, creating, and delivering content to the marketer’s target audience.
Digital Marketing Funnel	A visualisation of the calculations that starts with the total universe of targeted audiences, then measures those who click on a link from marketing content, the click through rate , the conversion rate, total conversions, order amount, and revenue.
Directory	Sites which have a categorised list of websites targeted on specific niche topics.
Display Ad	See "Banner Ad"
Distribution	The means by which a product or service is delivered to its end user or customer.
DMOZ	See "Open Directory Project"
DMP	See "Data Management Platform"
DNS	See "Domain Name Service"
Domain	Most commonly the website name or the URL is called website domain.
Domain Name Service	This is a name service which allows letters (and numbers) that constitute domain names to be used to identify computers instead of numerical IP addresses.
Domain Name System	See "Domain Name Service"
Doorway Page	A low-content page traditionally created expressly for the purpose of ranking on a search engine. These pages are purely focused and designed to achieve higher ranking for a specific search query.
Dribbble	A community for designers to upload snapshots of their work.
DSP	See "Demand-Side Platform"
Dynamic Content	This refers to content on another website or page, which is obviously identical or nearly a duplicate. This leads to a lower trust ranking by the search engine of the website, because there is no unique content on your website. This type of content changes over time or uses a dynamic language (PHP) to render the page. Although the search engine are indexing more and more dynamic content, but the best way is to rewrite the URL, in order to give the content a static look.
Earned Content	Content not created by the marketer, but rather created and shared by fans of the marketer’s message to the fan’s social and other digital connections.
Editorial Link	Editorial means quality and the search engine basically counts a link as a vote of quality. Hence, a link from sites without any editorial control, such as link farms, will automatically lose rankings. Otherwise sites with a strong editorial guideline will definitely receive more trust!
Engagement	In digital marketing, the term for user interaction with a particular piece of shared content: Likes, shares, comments on Facebook; RTs, replies, favourites on Twitter, and link clicks on all social media.
Entry	A piece of writing posted to a blog, microblog, wiki, or other easy-access Web publishing platform.
Entry Page	The first page of the website a user lands on.
External Link	A link which points to another domain or related resource.
Facebook Ads	The program operated by Facebook that enables paying customers to use hyper-targeting via Facebook profile tags and traits to reach a certain specific audience via advertisements placed in the users’ timeline.
Favicon	This little Favorites Icon is located next to the URL in the web browser.
Feed	Feeds are used to deliver users a updates of new blog entries or similar things via notifications on RSS or XML feeds. However, feeds can also refer to product feeds in the Google merchant centre or feeds on PPC.
Filter Bubble	Search engines attempt to pre-empt what you want when you are searching. Geo-Targeting is one example of this, but the search engine will also try to guess what you want, and tailor your results, by your past search history.
Flash	Refers to a form of video software developed by Adobe Macromedia that creates vector-based graphic animations that occupy small file sizes.
Flash Mob	A large group of people organise to get together at a specific time and place to surprise the public. They will put on a performance that is random and pointless for a brief time and then they will disperse as if nothing has happened.
Flickr	A social network based on picture sharing. Users can store and share photos here.
Follow	The act of choosing to see the tweets of someone on Twitter. Your following are all those people that have chosen to view your tweets.
Forum	An online discussion board. People post about whatever topic they wish to generate an online discussion.
Foursquare	A social network for users to share their location with friends who are within a close proximity.
Frames	See iFrames.
Frequency	In digital marketing, how often a task is performed; e.g. the frequency of a blog post or twitter update.
Freshness	Links tend to decrease in their power over time. A backlink may do better for your website today than it will in a year if it remains unchanged. Therefore it is necessary to always get new, fresh, links and content.
Gated Content	This refers to web content only accessible behind a webform or for registered users. Popular gated content are ebooks and webinars. Gated content is used for lead generation strategies.
Gateway Page	See "Doorway Page"
Geo-Targeting	The practice of search engines displaying results dependant on where you are.
Gizmo	A little application with specific functions, such as a hit counter or an IP address display, which can work perfectly for link baiting.
Google	The world’s leading search engine.
Google+	This offers the benefit of merging all other Google services under one social networking site.
Google Adwords	The program operated by Google that enables paying customers to use hyper-targeting via Google Search Engine Results Page to reach a certain specific audience via advertisements placed at the top and right sides of the search results.
Google Analytics	A free, browser based tool that allows users to track many different statistics concerning an owned website.
Google Base	A free database created by Google for useful internal information.
Google Bomb	This allows webmasters to change the search results for a specific search query, such as having entering the search query - miserable failure - and getting results on George Bush on the first page.
Google Bot	The Google bot or so-called Google spider is a search bot software, which is designed to view webpages and take all results to the central database, where Google starts scoring or ranking websites.
Google Bowling	This is used to kick competitors out of the search results or lower their site rank by linking a great amount of low quality and dodgy links to their website.
Google Checkout	This is Google’s payment service providing a quick and secure checkout process with one single login.
Google Dance	This out-of-date term was used to describe discrepancies in the SERPs due to the constant updates of Google and their algorithm.
Google Grants	Google offers up to $10,000 in free PPC advertising for eligible charities.
Google Juice	This term is used as a slang term for the Google PageRank.
Google Keyword Planning Tool	A free tool provided by Google within the Google Adwords interface that helps users find and plan which keywords to target with their advertising campaigns.
Google Sitelinks	These sitelinks appear on the bottom of the top website on the search result. These links are numerous deep links with relevant content within your sitemap.
Google Sitemaps	Webmasters use this program to help Google index their contents.
Google Trends	A tool helps you to see changes in search volumes for particular search queries over a period of time.
Graphical Search Inventory	Images and banner ads that are tied to particular search terms on a search engine. They are then displayed to the user after a related search term is entered.
Graphical User Interface	A user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation, instead of text-based user interfaces, typed command labels or text navigation.
Groups	Micro-communities within a social networking site for individuals who share a particular interest.
GUI	See "Graphical User Interface"
Hangout	A video service provided by Google + which allows up to 10 people to talk at one time.
Hashing	A way to hide personal information when it's shared between ad-tech partners e.g. if a brand asks a publisher to target ads to its customer email list, the emails can be masked.
Hashtag	A symbol (#) placed directly in front of a word or words to tag a post on Twitter. It is often used to group tweets by popular categories of interest and to help users follow discussion topics.
Header Bidding	Where publishers offer ad inventory to multiple ad exchanges at the same time.
Header Tags	These page elements represent different levels of headings in HTML. From the largest (H1) to the smallest (H6), these define the titles/headings and sub-headings of Web copy. For SEO and reader benefits, headers should contain keywords wherever possible.
Hit	Saying a website got X many hits is saying how many people visited that website.
Home Page	This is the main page of your website, which presents your brand and sets up the navigation through the whole site.
H-Tags (H1, H2, etc.)	See "Header Tags"
HTML	See "HyperText Markup Language"
Hub	This is a well trusted page with a great amount of high quality and relevant content, which link to other related pages within the community.
Hyperlink	Text that is highlighted and takes you to a certain destination. They are used to reference other content or to navigate you through a website.
HyperText Markup Language	This refers to the text-based language which is used to create websites.
Hypertext Preprocessor	Hypertext Preprocessor is basically an open source server scripting language, which is mainly used to render web pages or including any interactive elements to it.
iFrames	These HTML tag devices allow 2 or more websites to be displayed simultaneously on the same page. Facebook now allows companies to create customised tabs for its fan pages using iFrames.
IM	See "Instant Messaging"
Impression	An impression is simply someone seeing an advert. They may not click on it or buy anything.
Inbound Link	A link from another website directed to yours. Related marketing areas that focus on inbound links include link popularity, social media and online PR, all of which explore ways to collect quality links from other websites.
Index	The actual collection of data and websites obtained by a search engine. An index is a list or database of web pages found for one specific user search query.
Influencer	Someone who is an expert in a certain field and, or has a large following. Influencers therefore hold a lot of power in communicating their opinions to their following, perhaps affecting their opinions and behaviour.
Instagram	A photo sharing social network which differs from others as it runs as a mobile application. The application allows users to take photographs which they can then apply filters to. Your photos are automatically shared on Instagram and then you have the option to share them on other social networks.
Instant Messaging	Texts that are delivered in real-time. This can occur one-to-one or in group messages.
Internal Link	This type of link points from one page to another on the same site.
Interstitial	An ad that pops up while a user is clicking to a new page online. An interstitial can take over the home page on a website or occupy the whole screen when someone clicks on a link in an app and opens the mobile web. Most of these types of ads have been flagged by companies like Google as too disruptive of the user experience, and websites that use them face penalties in search rankings.
IP Address	This series of numbers and periods represents the unique numeric address for each Internet user.
Java	Java is a powerful programming language which is independent of platforms, meaning it can run on multiple computers and operating systems.
JavaScript	JavaScript is a relatively simple scripting language which can be seamlessly integrated with HTML and is used on many websites. JavaScript is less complex and consequently, less powerful than Java. This programming language can be easily embedded into HTML and offer several dynamic features.
Kaboodle	A social shopping network where members create their own shopping lists and find, suggest and share products and reviews.
Keyword	This is the word or phrase, which users enter into search engine. Hence, it is useful to target keywords, which are more likely to be searched. It is important to have your business’ website associated with relevant keywords so that it will appear when these words are searched for.
Keyword Cannibalisation	This basically describes the repeated use of the same keyword across different web pages within the same site. However, this technique makes it more difficult for search bots to determine which page will be the most relevant for that keyword.
Keyword Density	The proportion of keywords to the total number of words in the face copy of a website. This measure gives the percentage of a keyword that appears within a page.
Keyword Proximity	The relative placement of keywords in prominent areas of a Web page, including the distance between keywords in the visible text.
Keyword Research	This research is required, in order to discover all relevant and high quality keywords and phrases to target in your campaign.
Keywords	The terms that a user enters into a search engine. They can also signify the terms a website is targeting to rank highly as part of an SEO marketing campaign.
Keyword Stemming	The practice adopted by search engines to group search results not only by exact keyword matches, but also by variations of keywords in semantic groups, such as singular-plural, related suffixes, and synonyms.
Keyword Stuffing	Excessively high keyword density. A webpage has a section that is hidden from users, but contains all the words relevant to the page. Keyword stuffing is a black hat technique whereby this section is abused and filled with a high amount of irrelevant keywords, in the hope that it will be associated with these words and found when these words are searched for.
Klout	A measure of social influence, Klout connects your social accounts and provides each user with a Klout score. The higher your score is the more influencer you have in the social world. The Klout score is out of 100.
KPIs	Key Performance Indicators.
Landing Page	A stand-alone Web page that a user “lands” on, commonly after visiting a paid search-engine listing or following a link in an email newsletter. This kind of page often is designed with a very specific purpose (i.e. conversion goals) for visitors. While this could simply be the homepage, often it is more helpful to the customer (and therefore your profits) if they are taken to a page that is specific to their search terms.
Lifetime Customer Value	The total sum of all revenue estimated over the lifetime of a repeat customer; often used as a metric in evaluating the pricing and value of a SaaS business.
Like	An action made by a Facebook user that represents approval.
Like Button	A little graphic button encouraging linking between a website and a social media profile. The “Like” is Facebook’s own version, Google has a “+1” button.
Link	By using a hypertext, clicking on that link can get you from the current web page to another page of another site or the same site.
Link Bait	A webpage with really interesting content that people will share with others. They may share it through email, or over Facebook or Twitter, or even social news and bookmarking sites like Reddit or Digg.
Link Building	It describes the process of building high quality links to your site. It may involve generating more interesting or newsworthy content, creating a blog, asking clients to link, plus many other techniques. One of the main goals of SEO to build many good links to a website.
Link Bursts	Link bursts are a rapid increase in inbound links to your site e.g. a popular and time relevant article can receive a huge amount of links.
Link Churn	This rate shows the loss of links on your site.
Link Condom	This technique is used to avoid possible link juice passing from bad quality sites or untrustworthy and spammy content.
Link Development	See "Link Building"
LinkedIn	A corporate social network used to connect professionals.
Link Equity	This measurement shows how strong your site is looking at the quality and authority of the inbound links.
Link Exchange	Directories have this scheme to allow links to sites with no or low quality and at the same time not adding any value to themselves.
Link Farm	This can be either a website or a group of sites, which link to each other. A website exclusively devoted to listing a very large number of links without groupings, categories, or structure. These sites are largely discredited by major search engines, and your site’s engagement with one can potentially lead to ranking penalties.
Link Hoarding	This method tries to keep your link popularity to a maximum by not linking to many low quality sites.
Link Juice	The quality of inbound links and outbound links between two sites.
Link Popularity	A measurement of the number and quality of sites that link to a given site, especially as catalogued in a search-engine index. This measurement shows the value and popularity of a site, based mainly on the amount and quality of inbound links.
Link Rot	The percentage of website links, which are broken. Reasons for those broken links can be either that the website went offline; the webmaster changed the domain’s CMS; linking to content which was only available temporarily; or moving a page’s location.
Link Spam	In SEO, spam refers to manipulative techniques to increase the rankings of a page in the search engine using Black Hat SEO techniques; some people try to create vast amounts of links to a website in an attempt to increase its apparent popularity.
Link Text	See "Anchor Text"
Listing	A listing is a website’s presence in a search engine or directory, and is not necessarily indicative of its search-engine positioning.
Local Marketing	The term local marketing can have two different meanings in the marketing field. In its most common usage, local marketing refers to all the marketing actions used to reach a local population. It is used by retailers and physical stores networks who want to reach consumers in their catchment areas. The most frequently used techniques in the context of local marketing are: (i) Local advertising (ii) Unaddressed admail / door-to-door leaflets (iii) Direct marketing (iv) Local SEO and (v) Mobile marketing. N.B. In a different perspective and in the context of a multinational marketing policy, the term local marketing can designate marketing actions which are specific and appropriate to the scale and distinctiveness of a given country.
Long Tail	These are keywords at least longer than two words and low-volume keywords, which don’t get typed often in Google. Long tail keywords are more precise and specific, which gives them a higher value. Therefore a large percentage of all searches are basically long tail searches.
Lookalikes	People who are not the exact ones a brand wants to target with an ad, but look and act like them in certain ways, suggesting an openness to the brand's sales pitch and product. Brands seek lookalikes, for example, for their most loyal customers, whom they already know how to reach.
Malware	“Malicious software“ is any software used to disrupt computer or mobile operations, gather sensitive information, gain access to private computer systems, or display unwanted advertising.
Mashup	Mashups are basically quick and easy content to produce for any web page, which can be a way of link baiting e.g. tool collection pages can be mashups.
Meme	An idea, joke or concept that people share. Meme’s can be images or videos or text. Typically a meme comes in the form of an image with supportive text.
Metadata	Explanatory notes and other technical details for statistical tables (literally, a set of data that describes and gives information about other data).
Meta Description	This HTML tag within the section describes the content of the page with one or two sentences. Although the Meta description isn’t visible on the page, it is still of greater advantage to have unique and precise Meta title and description tags.
Meta-Description Tag	A tag on a Web page located in the heading source code containing a basic description of the page. It helps search engines categorise the page.
Meta Keywords	This tag highlights the specific keywords or phrases which you want to target on that page.
Meta-Keywords Tag	In the past, this tag allowed page authors to insert a massive list of keywords related (and occasionally unrelated) to a page in order to game search-engine results.
Meta-Search Engine	A search engine that does not compile its own independent results, but rather pulls data from two or more search engines, such as Dogpile.com.
Meta Tags	Meta descriptions and meta keywords are usually referred to as meta tags.
Meta-Tags	Also called meta-data, this information found in HTML page headers. Still used today despite widely perceived diminishing relevance to search-engine rankings, the most common are the “title,” “description,” and “keyword” tags.
Metric	This is the official measurement in most of the analytics programs.
Microblog	Is similar to blog but with a strict limit to what can be posted e.g. Twitter.
Microsoft adCenter	The pay-per-click search-engine advertising program provided by Microsoft in conjunction with its Bing search engine, now also populating Yahoo! search results.
Mirror Site	Duplicate copy of a website already in existence, used to increase response time for high-volume sites; basically an identical site on a different address.
Natural Listings	See "Organic Listings"
Natural Search Results	These are all the results, which aren’t sponsored or paid.
Navigation	The navigation helps web users to see where they currently are on the site and how they get to other pages of the site.
Negative Keyword	The opposite of a keyword: if a user searches using a negative keyword, your results will not show. This is useful if a link is easily confused with something else.
Neighbourhood / Link Neighbourhood	Search engines evaluate the trustworthiness of a website based on how many links point to that website. But links from trustworthy sites are better than links from untrustworthy, and potentially spammy, websites.
News Feed	The hub of everyone’s posts. For Facebook, the news feed is made up of friend’s posts. On Twitter, it is known as Timeline as is made up of tweets of those you follow. The news feed is constantly refreshed with the latest posts.
Ning	A hosting service with a set of community-building tools that allows anyone to create a social network.
Nofollow	“Nofollow” is an append which is coded into the HTML markup of a hyperlink. It is used to prevent a search engine from indexing a link to a particular Web page. Some strategic uses of external “nofollow” are associated with link popularity management e.g. for site owners that do not want to give full “follow” credit to links posted by users in their forums or blog comments. This command prevents a link of passing any link juice/ authority, which is a form of link condom. The tag is within the section: rel=”nofollow”.
Noindex	This command prevents the page to be indexed by the search engine. Moreover, it is also a form of link condom.
O2O	See "Online to Offline"
Online to Offline	This refers to the process of finding consumers online and bring them into physical stores.
OODA loop	Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. A teaching tool originating from military training that promotes the use of a constant cycle of learning; in digital marketing, used to instil the use of hypothesising, experimentation, data capture and measurement, and then re-stating a new revised hypothesis based on information gathered in previous experiments.
Open Directory Project	This continually expanding directory is run by volunteers. It claims to be the largest (and is one of the most famous) of the human-edited directories.
Open-Source Software	Computer software with a special license that allows users in the general public to edit and improve the source code. Famously exemplified in the Firefox Web browser and Wikipedia encyclopaedia, it is an example of the kind of collaboration that is encouraged under the Web 2.0 ethos.
Organic Link	These types of links are considered to add value for users. That’s why many webmasters publish high quality articles or posts on their blogs.
Organic Listings	These are search-engine results that have not been purchased. They are calculated solely by an engine’s algorithm and are based on the merits of the listed pages. Typically, most search engines will display several sponsored ads related to search terms before displaying the non-paid listings.
Organic Search Result	See "Natural Search Results"
Outbound Link	If a link on your website points to another website. Any link on a Web page to an external Web page.
Owned Content	Content created or curated by the marketer in order to promote the marketer’s message to the target audience. Owned content typically consists of blog posts and social media posts and images, and includes any message that proceeds out of the marketer’s company and into the target audience; such as email signatures.
P2P	See "Peer-to-Peer"
PageRank	It is named after Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and not webpages. The measurement is believed to be influenced chiefly by the number and quality of inbound and outbound links associated with a given page. Updated infrequently, this is usually seen accompanied by a number i.e. ‘PR6’. A score of 10 is the highest, and unattainable by all but the most popular websites on the web.
Pages Per Visit	The average number of pages viewed by a single visitor during a given time period.
PageView	See "Impression"
Page Views	The number of times a web page or set of web pages are viewed during a given time period.
Paid Content	This is content pushed out by the marketer via any paid means such as Facebook ads, Google Adwords, Twitter Ads, or banner (display) ads.
Paid Inclusion	This method involves charging a certain fee for including a link on a website. Google tries to avoid most of the paid links, although some of them can have a relevant exposure.
Paid Listings	Listings sold to advertisers for a fee. Also known as “paid placement.” See “pay-per-click.”
Paid Placement	See "Pay-Per-Click"
Partial/Exact Match Anchor Text	The anchor text is the text that the user clicks on for a link. It is also what a WebCrawler uses to decide what the linked page is about.
Pay-For-Performance	A paid-search system nearly identical to (and essentially synonymous with) pay-per-click.
Pay-Per-Click	While Search Engine Optimisation improves a websites standing in the unpaid section of a search engine, paid results are also found on search engines. On Google, they are above, and to the right, of the main (unpaid) results.
PDF	See "Portable Document Format"
Peer-to-Peer	Refers to any type of interaction between two or more people within a specific social network. Most viral media by definition get their popularity via such P2P sharing. The term is also widely associated with file-sharing networks for music and movies; though it is not exclusive to that realm.
Penalty	Search engines can penalise or permanently ban you from ranking in the results, due to spammy actions.
Penguin	Google Penguin is the latest version of its PageRank WebCrawler which improves its spam detection. It is better at detecting cloaking, keyword stuffing and duplicate pages.
Persona	The ideal compilation of all the traits of the “perfect” user or customer for a marketer’s product or service.
Personally Identifiable information	This is any data that can be directly connected to a consumer and reveals who they are. Many ad-tech companies and platforms take measures to avoid sharing any PII from their users.
PHP	See "Hypertext Preprocessor"
PII	See "Personally Identifiable information"
Pins	Images that are chosen from websites or within the Pinterest community. These images are then placed onto image boards.
Pinterest	A social network for people to create image boards.
Pixel Tag	Code that brands put on their ads before placing them online so they can track performance and view who sees the ad. Pixels also help brands track who visits their websites and target those consumers with ads later. Pixels are sometimes blamed for slowing down the web and cause some privacy concerns.
Platform	Framework that runs software and presents content.
Podcast	A series of audio or video content which can be downloaded and listened to/viewed offline (or a particular episode in that series).
Poison Words	Poison words are words that are known to decrease your pages’ rankings if the search engine finds them in the title, description or URL.
Pop-Up Ad	A form of advertisement which automatically opens (or “pops up” in) a new window in a browser to display an ad. Also seen in the form of “pop-under” ads, a slightly less intrusive version. Many browser-based and stand-alone software programs exist to block these ads.
Portable Document Format	This is a type of file for viewing documents, created by Adobe. PDFs are especially suitable for print-out viewing, so the format is a good choice for sharing high-value collateral like white papers and guides.
Position	See "Ranking"
PPC	See "Pay-Per-Click"
PR	See "PageRank"
Precision	The accuracy the search engine shows a relevant list of results for one search query e.g. if 10 of the 50 results actually match the search query, the precision would be around 30%.
Privacy Notice	Privacy notices refer to different forms of messages displayed on a website to give visitors information about data collection and cookie usage during their visit. Visibility of privacy notices varies according to different national legal frameworks (e.g. UK cookie law imposes a cookie notice). Some privacy notices are also sometimes made mandatory for members of professional associations.
Private Marketplace	An exclusive auction that is invite-only. The publisher makes inventory available to only select brands, who then buy through real-time bidding. It's different from programmatic direct, because it's still an auction-based system.
Probabilistic	Using data points to guess who the consumer is on the other side of the screen. Knowing where a person is, what time it is and the device in use help, but not with nearly 100% confidence. This type of data is considered less accurate than deterministic (see "Deterministic"), though many say a blend of the two yields the most accurate results.
Profile	A profile is a personal page within a social network created by a user for sharing with others on the network. The profile provides basic biographical information and often links to the profiles of the user’s friends/connections.
Programmatic Direct	When a publisher sells ad inventory directly to an advertiser for a set price, not through an auction. It gives the advertiser assurances over where ads run, and the publisher price stability. The ads are still served programmatically.
Programmatic Guaranteed	See "Programmatic Direct"
Proprietary Method	Many SEO service agencies use this term, which promises top ten rankings with unique methods.
Quality Link	A quality link counts more than a low quality link from a poor authority website.
Query	See "Search Term"
Ranking	The rank of a website’s listing(s) in search-engine results pages. The higher a rank for a specific keyword, the more generally visible a page is to search-engine users.
Rapid Inclusion	The indexing of websites in search engines and directories based on a per-page fee. As opposed to free submissions, where indexes are updated every few weeks (or less frequently), rapid indexing occurs every 48-72 hours.
Reciprocal Link	A link to a website that is reciprocated in the form of a backlink, often prearranged by sites with mutually benefitting audiences. If abused e.g. two sites with no topical relation decide to link to each other (and many other sites) exclusively for the sake of linking, penalties from search engines could result.
Reddit	A social news site that is made up of users who share and leave comments on stories.
Redirect	This warning alerts the browsers and the search engines that a page has been moved to another location. There are several methods to do this: 301 redirects or 302 redirects.
Referrer	This is the source; where the user came from.
Regional Long Tail	This type of keyword includes a city or region, which is useful for companies offering services around the country.
Registration	The process of signing up to participate in an online forum, community or social-media network. At a minimum, this act usually involves sharing a name and email address in order to set up a username and password.
Reinclusion	Google can lift a penalty for a site and ask for reinclusion. However, in order to get re-indexed on the search index, it severely depends on the brand’s reputation of the site and the severity of the penalty,
Rel	Part of the code for a link may include a ‘rel’ signifier, which is short for relation. It tells a WebCrawler something about the link, and is used to fine tune certain aspects of SEO.
Repins	The action a Pinterest user takes when pinning an image from someone’s board onto one of their own.
Results Page	See "Search Engine Results Page"
Retargeting	The technology, driven by web browser cookies, that enables a marketer to continually put a digital message in front of a user who has visited that marketer’s web property.
Return on Investment	Return on Investment e.g. if you put money into an ad campaign, a return on investment is any net revenue generated above that initial investment.
Retweet	An action on tweets for users to share that tweet with their following. The action resends the message with the original users name tag.
Robot	(Sometimes called a bot, crawler, spider or WebCrawler). A program that visits web sites and reads through the pages, in order to gather data and to create entries for the search engine.
ROBOTS.TXT	A small text file included on a website that directs a search engine to include/exclude specific pages from its index. It can be submitted manually to search engines to ensure the latest version is followed regardless of the “crawl cycle.”
ROI	See "Return on Investment"
RSS	Really Simple Syndication, delivers content enabling readers to stay up-to-date with any blogs or sites they read without them having to visit each individual site.
RSS Feed	Users subscribe to news feeds to get all the latest information in one place. See "RSS Reader"
RSS Reader	Taking all the information from subscribed news sites and blogs, the reader puts all this information in one easy-to-digest place. It is displayed in a format that is constantly refreshed to get up-to-date information.
Sales Cycle	The time required for a sales conversion to be completed after the prospect initially becomes aware of the marketer’s brand or product.
Scambaiting	Entering into a dialogue with scammers, simply to waste their time and resources. Whilst you are doing this, you will be helping to keep the scammers away from real potential victims and screwing around with the minds of deserving thieves.
Scrape	Copying content from a site using automated bots.
Scumware	This sort of malware installs itself without the computer owner even knowing. It focuses on ads and violates privacy.
Search Engine	A website that allows users to search the Web for specific information by entering keywords. Can include paid or organic listings of websites and sometimes specific images, products, videos, music, place entries or other enhanced results. A search engine mainly consists of a spider, index algorithm and a search results. Therefore, the program/spider searches a group of documents for relevant results, in order to match the user’s search query.
Search-Engine Marketing	This refers to the broad range of search-marketing activities including Search-Engine Optimisation.
Search-Engine Optimisation	The process of using website analysis and copy/design/structural adjustments to ensure both the highest possible positioning on desired search-engine results pages and the best experience for a given site’s users.
Search-Engine Referral	This statistic represents a visitor who arrives at a website after clicking through a search-engine results listing.
Search Engine Results Page	The Page that is displayed after a query is entered on a search engine.
Search Engine Spam	This form of spam misleads search engine results and delivers pages with inappropriate or irrelevant results.
Search Index	See "Index"
Search Term	The precise word or phrase(s) entered into a search engine by a user.
Seasonality	A business cycle driven by calendar-based events during the year.
Second Life	A 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.
Segments	See "Audience"
SEM	See "Search-Engine Marketing"
SEO	See "Search-Engine Optimisation"
SEO Service Agency	An agency offering Search Engine Optimisation services.
SEO Spam	In the context of SEO, “spam” can be any Web page that a search engine views as harming the credibility of its results. Examples of these can include doorway pages, link farms, keyword stuffing, cloaking and other duplicitous or otherwise user-hostile practices. The standards for what constitutes SEO spam varies by search engine and current algorithm factors.
Sequential Messaging	Hitting a consumer with one message, then a different one and then another to guide them toward buying or taking some other action. Sequential messaging, also known as sequential targeting, often requires cross-device capabilities to accurately reach the same consumer across screens when they visit different digital properties.
Sequential Targeting	See "Sequential Messaging"
SERP	See "Search Engine Results Page"
Server	The computer that hosts the files (e.g. web sites) and sends them to the internet.
Server Log	This shows traffic trends and sources of your website from the files on the server.
Share	An action made by internet users to pass on any form of information (whether a photo, video, article etc.) to their friends, followers and connections.
Sharing	One feature of social networking sites is that users can share links. If your website has a really interesting page, a user may want to share it with all their friends. Most social networking sites have features that make this process very easy.
Shopping Search	A specialised type of search or dedicated search engine that indexes groups of products, prices and reviews for side-by-side comparison, especially helpful for shopping online.
Siphoning	A blackhat SEO technique to steal another website’s traffic using malware or cybersquatting.
Sitemap	This page gives users another possibility of accessing all the different pages on the website. Moreover, it shows the navigation and helps immensely the site usability for all users. XML sitemaps are used to help search spiders find all the pages on the website.
Skype	A video chat programme that is free to use. You can also use it for texting and leaving video and voice messages to other users.
SlideShare	A popular presentation- and document-sharing social network, especially useful for B2B marketing.
SMM	See "Social Media Monitoring"
SMO	See "Social Media Optimisation"
SMP	See "Social Media Policy"
Social Media	Refers to all online tools and places that are available for users to generate content and communicate through the Internet. These media include blogs, social networks, file-hosting sites and bookmarking sites, among others. These types of websites allow users to create their own content, such as in social bookmarks, social news or social networking sites.
Social Media Monitoring	The act of pro-actively monitoring and tracking applicable social media activity.
Social Media Optimisation	The act of driving traffic through social media channels to reach a certain goal.
Social Media Policy	A written document that outlines how employees should talk about work on social media as well as advising them on how to best use social media sites. This is written for the protection of the company and clarifies what employees can and cannot say.
Social Network	A site or community on the Internet where members can interact with one another and share content. This term is more or less used interchangeably with “social media” in reference to Internet marketing.
Spam	In email marketing, this refers to any message that is deemed by users or email providers to be an unsolicited commercial offer. Also called “junk mail.” “Spam” may also refer to links or comments that are left on blogs, forums and message boards designed exclusively to steer users to a site for commercial gain. For guidance on what is and what is not permissible see https://thedma.org/
Spamdexing	This black hat technique tries to modify a page dishonestly with spammy techniques, in order to receive a higher ranking in the SERP.
Spammy	An adjective meaning “of poor quality, consisting mostly of spam”.
Sphinn	A niche social-bookmarking website for online marketers.
Spider	(Sometimes called a bot, crawler, robot, spider or WebCrawler). A program that visits web sites and reads through the pages, in order to gather data and to create entries for the search engine.
Spider Trap	This method is used to trap the spider in an endless loop of automatically generated links, in order to avoid automated scraping.
Splash Page	These pages have a very poor usability and don’t have any SEO focused content to index. However, they are more graphical and animated designed, in order to grab the attention from page viewers.
Splog	This machine generated blog mostly consists of stolen or broken links and content.
Squidoo	A popular UGC site that allows members to create easy-to-build, single-page websites (called “lenses”) featuring whatever topic they choose. Typically, marketers use these pages to aggregate other content from across the Web under a common theme.
SSP (Sell-Side Platform)	While marketers use DSPs to buy digital ads, publishers use SSPs to sell them. Publishers use SSPs to offer inventory to ad exchanges, networks, trading desks etc. They also use SSPs to set the terms of the auctions and manage private auctions, known as private marketplaces, where select advertisers are invited to participate. An SSP gives them control over who can advertise and the types of ads that run.
Static Page	These pages are more spider friendly and easy to index, because there is no dynamic content generated.
Stemming	In general, stemming involves taking the root words and leaving out plurals or gerunds of the particular keyword (running - run). In a search prospective, the search engine will include sites with “running” as well as with “run” as the search query. Hence, the search engine favours stemming, which results in more diversity of the used word and focuses more on exact matches for search queries.
Stickiness	Basically this factor shows how much time was spent at your site over a given time period. Hence, if the bounce rate is high, improving the ‘stickiness’ of a site will reduce the bounce rate.
Stop Words	The words that are removed from the search query, such as: ‘a’, ‘to’ or ‘and’.
Style Sheet	A design template used for defining the layout of multiple pages within a website, most commonly seen in the form of “CSS” (cascading style sheets).
Submission	The process of registering a site with a search engine or Web directory. It does not guarantee inclusion, but can lead to it being reviewed or crawled. It offers no guarantee of ranking. The process can be done manually or by using commercial software packages.
Subscribing	The process of opting in to an email newsletter or adding an RSS feed to an aggregator (e.g. for reading blog updates).
Supplemental Results	Pages with a low PageRank still ranked in the search index, because they are relevant to the search query.
Tag	A keyword (often in a string) which is attached to a: web page, blog post, tweet (see “hashtag”), social bookmark or media file. Tags help categorise content by subject.
Technorati	A leading blog search engine that aggregates blog content and scores blogs’ popularity or influence.
Term Frequency	This metric shows you how often a keyword appears on a page.
Text Link	This is a normal HTML link without any special coding or and pictures involved.
Text Link Ad	Text links which are transformed into ads.
Thread	A stream of conversations, for example, a list of comments on a blog post or exchange of emails on the same subject.
Time On Site	The average time that a website visitor remains active on a particular website.
Title Tag	A form of meta-data used by search engines to categorise Web pages by title. Search-engine algorithms traditionally value title tags to determine and categorise page content.
Toolbar	Many browsers have toolbars, which includes pop-up blockers, spellcheckers and autofill. However, more importantly it also helps search engines track relevant usage data.
Total Reach	The total exposure (measured in web users or “eyeballs”) of an advertisement or piece of content.
Trackback	You are automatically notified if a website mentions your site on another website. Many blogging software programs have this notification system installed.
Trading Desk	Advertisement agency trading desks often buy large pools of digital media and re-sell it to clients; theoretically getting a better price buying in bulk.
Transactional Email	Automated email driven by a certain type of transaction on a web property; for example, an order or email subscription confirmation.
Trending	An event or topic that is popular and is widely discussed online.
Troll	Someone who has the intention to get an emotional response from others online. They generally post controversial, provocative & irrelevant messages for their own amusement. Their views do not necessarily reflect the ones they post about.
Trust Rank	This metric takes the trustworthiness of a website you are linking from into account.
Tumblr	A microblogging platform and social network that allows users to post images, text, video’s, links and quotes.
Tweet	A “tweet” is the special name for an entry made on the microblogging site, Twitter. Up to 140 characters long, tweets can consist of random status updates, news, commentary, or anything an individual wants to communicate to followers at that moment, including personal messages to other users or groups and links to external content (articles, photos, videos).
Tweetchat	See "Tweetup"
Tweetup	A take-off on “meet-up,” a Tweetup is a meeting organised for friends, fans and/or strangers on Twitter. It can be used in marketing for consumer engagement and brand awareness by building and educating large communities of people.
Twitter	Twitter is a microblogging platform which allows users to create profiles, share short updates on a timeline, and engage with other users, much like a social-networking site. Users can post short messages, known as tweets (up to 140 characters) for anyone who is following them to see.
Twitter Ads	The program operated by Twitter that enables paying customers to use hyper-targeting via Twitter users’ profile data to reach a certain specific audience via advertisements placed in the users’ timeline.
UBM	See "Unsolicited Bulk Email"
UCE	See "Unsolicited Commercial Email"
UGC	See "User-Generated Content"
Uniform Resource Locator	See "URL"
Unique Visitor	Also known as “absolute unique visitor,” this statistic represents visitors to a website that are counted once in a given time period despite the possibility of having made multiple visits. Determined by cookies, unique visitors are distinguished from regular visitor counts which would classify two or more visits from the same user as multiple visitors.
Universal Resource Locator	See "URL"
Unsolicited Bulk Email	See "Spam"
Unsolicited Commercial Email	See "Spam"
URL	This string of letters and numbers separated by periods and slashes is unique for every Internet page. A page’s address must be written in this form in order to be found on the World Wide Web.
Usability	It measures the user- experience on a website, when performing desired actions.
User-Generated Content	User-Generated Content is term given to all user-created data such as blogs, comments, reviews, podcasts and more for use on that website. Wikis (and Wikipedia) are examples.
User Sitemap	A page containing structured links to every other important page on a particular website grouped by topic or navigational hierarchy. These pages are equally useful for people and search-engine spiders alike, as they provide a categorised look at every page on a website at a glance (with hyperlinks).
Viral	Certain bits of information are said to ‘go viral’. This means they spread from person to person very quickly, much like a virus.
Viral Marketing	To quickly pass on the marketing message to customers, viral marketing is used widely in the World Wide Web using all the channels available including: social media, YouTube, email, blogging, or even word of mouth.
Virtual Server	You can host multiple top level domains from a single computer on this virtual server.
Vlog	Much like a blog, but documented using video instead of written content.
Voice Over Internet Protocol	See "VOIP"
VOIP	An acronym for “Voice Over Internet Protocol.” This technology allows a user to make phone calls (with potential video) via a computer with an Internet connection or a wireless-enabled mobile device. The most famous example of a VOIP provider is Skype.
Walled Garden	If several pages are linked to each other, but don’t link to other pages, you can call it a walled garden. However, if these pages appear in the sitemap, the search engine can still index them. Beware; the page rank for those pages will be very low though.
Web 2.0	This complex term covers many dimensions of the contemporary Web, including quick user access to streaming video, audio, images and other popular content. It can be generally used to describe interactive, community-driven content, namely blogs, file-hosting, UGC, and social-networking sites. Web 2.0 is also a philosophy that the Internet should be used more as a public-access platform and less as a vehicle for traditional, one-way publishing. Related concepts include collaboration, crowdsourcing and the use of open-source software.
Webconference	A “virtual” meeting of attendees where audio and visual content (including computer screens or live video feeds) can be shared freely over the Internet. Webconferencing takes advantage of a number of different social tools, including VOIP and instant messaging.
WebCrawler	(Sometimes called a bot, crawler, robot or spider). A program that visits web sites and reads through the pages, in order to gather data and to create entries for the search engine.
Webinar	A Web-based seminar containing audio and video, often in the form of a slide deck.
Wetpaint	A UGC website that combines aspects of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks, allowing any user to create and share online content.
White Hat SEO	This SEO method follows best practice guidelines and SEO strategies. This is the opposite approach to Black Hat SEO.
Wiki	Refers to any page or collection of pages on the Internet or an intranet that can be easily edited by the public or a select group of registered visitors. Wikis are examples of collaboration. See “Wikipedia,” the most famous example of a wiki, below.
Wikipedia	A free, open-source, multilingual encyclopedia consisting of heavily edited user-generated content on topics of nearly every sort. The largest encyclopedia in the world, Wikipedia is administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit group. One defining characteristic of Wikipedia is its insistence on not publishing original research, but rather being an authoritative clearinghouse of citations of other material already published on the Web.
WordPress	An open source CMS which is used for blog publication. There are currently over 70 million WordPress sites in the world.
XML Sitemap	An XML file for search engines containing a list of URLs on a particular domain. This file can be used to supplement regular indexing, where a bot/crawler goes out and visits each page of a site by itself.
Yahoo! Answers	An online question-and-answer community where anyone can ask a question on any topic and get immediate answers from real people, which are in turn rated or voted on. These types of communities are popular, and multiple websites follow a similar model of using the “wisdom of crowds” for answers.
YouTube	It is also currently the largest search engine after Google (incidentally, also owned by Google). Users can view, upload and comment on video content for no charge, though companies can pay for sponsored promotion of videos or to have enhanced branding and design capabilities on their profile pages, known as “channels.”
YouTube Channel	A YouTube channel is a dedicated space on YouTube where a brand can promote relevant videos and gain subscribers. For a brand, a YouTube channel has many benefits: (i) all brand videos can be grouped together (ii) the channel is promoted on related brand searches (iii) the brand can gain channel subscribers which are alerted of new videos (iv) the graphic capabilities of a channel are more brand immersive and (v) the brand can create play lists.

Digital Glossary