Digital Marketing Glossary of Terms

An ad serving platform run by Google. You can use Adsense to create an income stream through ad placement on your site.

A Google network that allows advertisers to place ads across Google products.

An affiliate is a company or service that is connected/ affiliated to you. Affiliations usually involve commission-based sales or advertising of goods and services.

The collection and analysis of data from your website, including the number of visitors, time spent on pages etc., using Google Analytics.

Article Spinning – taking an original or seed piece of content and ‘spinning’ through the use of alternative words and sentences to produce new articles. This practice is not advisable.

Domain Authority is the authority of your website is based on the analysis of data such as popularity, traffic, social media shares and so forth. A site with high volume traffic and a low bounce rate will have a high authority ranking.

Is a form of search engine optimisation that often involves unethical practices and automated tools.

Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who leave a site without visiting other pages. The lower your bounce rate percentage, the better!

A link that points the user to a nonexistent page and returns a 404 error. All links on your site should be regularly checked to avoid broken links.

CTA – words or buttons designed to encourage the site user to perform a particular For example, clicking on a link, leaving a comment or making a purchase.

DNS and Nameserver Modifications

When you change from one web hosting company to another you will need to update your nameservers. This basically tells the internet that your website is now sitting on a new server with a different web hosting company. If your website is through We Push Buttons you will need to change the nameservers to:

ns1.explainafide.net.au
ns2.explainafide.net.au
Name Server IP: 202.40.166.49

Please note that updating your nameservers take between 4-24 hours to migrate across.

(CTR) – measures the percentage of users who view and advertisement compared to the percentage who click on it. If your ad were seen 100 times and clicked on 80 times, you would have an 80% click-through.

(CMS) – user-friendly systems that help you manage and publish online content including text, images and videos. WordPress, Magento, Joomla and Drupal are all examples of a Content Management System.

A user is ‘converted’ when they take up a CTA on your site. Conversions include a range of activities such as signing up to a news feed or email list, buying a product or downloading eBooks.

A link created by you to an internal page of your website (excluding the homepage).

Digital Footprint – every web user leaves data behind, and this data or ‘footprint’ can be either active or passive. Passive footprints are collected without the user’s knowledge – tracking a user’s IP address and web movements is the most common form. Active footprints are the result of actively sharing personal data on websites or social media.

If two or more of your web pages feature duplicate or very similar content, this is classified as duplicate content and will earn your site a Google Panda penalty.

Digital books that can be accessed in a variety of formats including PDF and for ebook readers like Kindle and Kobo.

When previously registered domains are not renewed; they become an expired domain that can be bought and used again.

Domain authority is a nominal measure of the power of a website out of 100 and is one of many search engine ranking factors. Domain authority is based on three factors: Age, Popularity, and Size. A new website will have a domain authority of 1, whilst huge websites such as The GAge newspaper have a Domain Authority of 91. Most small businesses generally have a ranking between 12- 25. Once an SEO campaign has been running for 3 months or so the domain authority should increase to 25+. If a small business website has a domain authority over 35+ they are a well regarded website with a solid online profile.

How many pages did each visitor go to when they visited your website. This is on a per session basis reset every 30 minutes if that user is idle on your site.

A session represents the number of individual visits all users have made to your website. Each session is reset every 30 minutes. Therefore a visitor viewing your website at 9am and then revisiting it at 3pm is counted as having two sessions.

Google Bot – search/ crawler software that indexes the web.

Google Penalty – a search engine penalty that may be applied either from an automated audit or manually after a site review.

Hits – every time a user visits your site, a hit is recorded.

Apache web server configuration file that creates redirects, blocks spammers and increases your websites security.

Inbound Link – a back link that points users to your website from another site.

Keyword – an important word or search term that you use to optimise and rank your website. See our in depth article on Keywords here…

Keyword Density – this refers to the number of times (percentage) a keyword occurs within the text on a page. If you have 100 words and five are your keyword – your keyword density is 5%.

Keyword Stuffing – overusing a keyword or phrase increase keyword density falsely. This type of SEO is bad practice and should be discouraged.

Link Bait – a piece of content created to attract back links from other websites.

Link Pyramid – a back link structure in the form of the Pyramid with your website considered the peak. For example your website may have 50 links pointing to it; each of those 50 may have 100 pointing to them, and each of those 100 may have 200 pointing to them.

Made For Adsense (MFA) – websites purpose-built to make money through the Google Adsense program.

Meta Tags – a collection of tags that serve different purposes, including Meta Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords & Meta Robots.

Opt In – when a user joins your mailing list or news feed.

Organic Link – a naturally created backlink from another website.

Page Rank – this metric determines the authority ranking of a site or web page based on incoming back links. Page Rank ranges from 0 (least important) to 10 (most important).

Panda – Google Panda update and penalty was introduced in February 2011 to target low-quality sites engaging in content duplication and negative SEO.

Pay Per Action (PPA) – the advertiser pays when an action such as email subscriptions confirmed sales or inbound inquiries are completed.

Pay Per Click (PPC) – the advertiser pays an amount for every click the advertisement receives, regardless of the outcome.

Popunder – an unobtrusive advertisement, banner or webpage that automatically triggers underneath the current web browser.

Popup – an obtrusive advertisement, banner or web page that automatically triggers on top of the current web browser.

Return On Investment (ROI) – percentage of profit made above your initial investment. If you invested $100 and earned $150, you would have a 50% return on your investment.

Rich Snippet – tags that are used to mark up specific data that Google uses to display in search results, such as a reviews and ratings and addresses and phone numbers.

RSS stands for really simple syndication and is basically a simple way to view news and blog posts. RSS feeds are used regularly in automation programs.

Sales Funnel – usually involves multiple calls to action to encourage users to interact with a site and buy products or services. A predefined funnel will have multiple calls to action, navigate to internal pages, join newsletters; take a quiz; buy products, etc.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – optimising your site to gain a higher ranking in organic search engine results.

Site Audit – performing a review and analysis of site data to ensure smoother user experience and check for problems such as broken links.

Target Audience – the demographic or group of people who would be interested in your product or service.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) – a web page address.

Usability – the more user-friendly a webpage is; the more likely it is to attract visitors and increase conversion rates.

UI or User Interface Designer is a professional that works solely on the usability of a website. Can the visitor find what they are after within a few seconds? If they can’t then either the UI designer hasn’t done their job or you need one.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) – a virtual server usually running Windows or Linux that can be accessed.

Webmaster Tools – you can get additional information about your website status with tools such as Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools.

Breadcrumbs are used to help people navigate successfully through large websites. They generally appear underneath the menu and tell the visitor which page they are on and how they got there. If you have a complex website such as an eCommerce website, a huge blog, or deep levels of page categories then breadcrumbs are advisable to assist users in being able to navigate through your website. If you have a small site then breadcrumbs can be an unnecessary distraction.

As of August 2015 Google now treats people searching on a mobile phone different from visitors searching on a desktop computer. Often mobile search rankings are similar if a website is mobile responsive. However if a website is not mobile responsive rankings for Google mobile search will be significantly worse than the standard desktop search rankings.

A 301 Redirect is the safest way to redirect a visitor from one page (URL) When you change the website address of any page, you need to set up a 301 redirection so Google knows that you have a new URL for that page.

This ensures that not only does the search engine update their index, anyone that previously linked to that page is updated and of course any SEO value the old page had is passed onto the new page.

Say you’re changing your blog post categories and your old URL was www.yourwebsite.com/marketing/tips-for-ecoomerce and the new URL is www.yourwebsite/design/tips-for-ecommerce

Your web page is identical in every way to your previous web page except the URL has changed. The seemingly simple task of reorganising your website’s navigation has now taken on a a more complicated edge.

A 301 redirection informs the search engines that the requested URL has permanently changed. This means that any links your previous URL had and all that URLs SEO quality will now be passed onto the destination URL.

When a website provides a link back to your site, or vice-versa. Only use backlinks from authoritative sites.

CMS stands for Content Management Systems which basically allows businesses to take control of their website with only a few hours training. If you are looking at designing a new website make sure your web designer uses a CMS that is well regarded, has a large user base and is Open Source so you can change web designers if things don’t work out.

WordPress is by far and away the best CMS for small business, artists and freelancers and is now running 24% of all websites on the internet.

If your needs are more advanced and you need a complex website running to 10,000+ pages then Drupal is our CMS of choice.

If you are looking for E-Commerce solutions then do your homework as there are choices galore. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like a 2nd opinion.

The number of different pages a visitor goes to when viewing your website. If a visitor goes from your homepage to your pricing page then your contact page this is registered as three pageviews.

Why is a Sitemap important?

A sitemap is an index of all your pages on your website making it easier for Google to understand all the various pages of your website.

Sitemaps can include:

• Pages
• Blog Posts
• Media Files
• Categories
• Author Bio Pages
• Tags (though not recommended)

These are website sketches that shows the complete layout of the website and how it functions, without graphics so you can see the functionality of the website without distraction.

If you see the term SSL every time you log into an eCommerce website there is good reason.

SSL is the web standard security technology that encrypts confidential information such as credit cards. If you are looking at setting up an eCommerce website you will need an SSL certificate. There are a number of companies offering SSL certificates from $45 per year to $500 per year so do your homework into what SSL company is best for your business.

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets refer to a coding language that is responsible for the visual aspects of your website but not the actual content of your website.

Examples of CSS include:

• Typography
• Colours
• Menu Colours
• Menu Size
• Font Size
• Thumbnail Size
• Background images

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. HTML is the basic programming language that controls how the worlds web pages are formatted.

JQuery is a library of JavaScipt functions collected to make coding in JavaScript easier and more efficient for web developers. JQuery is used to create animation, graphics and applications on websites.

PHP is an open-source coding language used for websites and online applications such as WordPress.

PHP is a server side scripting language so the PHP code is processed before it reaches visitors computers. With websites that have been built using PHP a visitor cannot see any of the PHP code as it is processed on the server prior to the HTML or CSS being sent to the visitor browsing on the web.

Logos are a stand alone graphic interpretation of your business. Logos are vital as they will be used on your website, letterhead and business cards but branding is the full picture of your business.

Effective branding ties your advertising, marketing and image together so clients understand what your business is about what you stand for.

White hat SEO – increasing your site’s popularity and ranking through the use of ethical SEO practices.

White space is vital

White space refers to spacing amongst the various elements in a website such as text, images and menus. Having a balanced amount of white space and content means the visitor can read the information more easily rather than having information crammed in so tightly that the content is over looked.

Getting the balance right between having the right amount of white space and content is a difficult one and keeps plenty of passionate web designers up at night.

XML Sitemap – A list created in standard XML format of the pages you want search engines to find.