It may be a bit of an overkill to produce an online marketing & SEO glossary for you… but it’s better to be safe than sorry!
What follows are the terms you’re likely to come into contact with during your life as a blogger. Some of them you’ll probably already know and others perhaps not.
I intend this glossary to be a living document that I’ll add to as and when I think something is missing.
Affiliate Marketing
This is a way to promote products or services online and potentially earns a commission. The are many ways an affiliate might carry out such a promotion on behalf of a merchant (seller):
- Via a website
- Through a social media account
- A newsletter mailing list
- Direct to the merchant website via Pay Per Click advertising (PPC).
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways for bloggers and website owners to monetize their online activities. For some it can be VERY lucrative!
Bing Ads
Bing Ads is Bing’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program. See Pay-Per-Click below).
Blogger Burnout
Blogger burnout affects bloggers who have spent too much time working upon or thinking about their blogs. It results in an inability to work effectively and can make bloggers quit.
Find out more: Is Blogger Burnout Something Real?
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate defines the number of visitors arriving on a web page who leave having visited no other page on the site. It is represented as a percentage and calculated by taking the number of visit sessions to single pages and dividing it by the number of total overall visit sessions.
Find out more: What Does Bounce Rate Mean?
Browser
A browser has a double meaning. Firstly there is the software you are using to look at this page. Popular desktop browsers (there are mobile versions too) are:
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Internet Explorer
- Safari
- Opera
An alternative meaning of browser refers to a person using the Internet to search for things and look around the websites they find.
Canonical URLs (Canonicalization)
Canonicalization is a method used to tell search engines that the content on a specific web page has a master (canonical) version somewhere else.
It’s used in cases where content on one page is the same (or very similar) as content elsewhere (on the same site or elsewhere) to avoid confusing search engine about which page to display for a given search.
Find out more: What are Canonical URLs?
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the practise of publishing content for a specific online audience. Such content might be:
- Articles – Blog posts, news reports.
- eBooks – Tutorials, how-to guides.
- Videos – Entertainments, tutorials, information.
- Newsletters – Promotions, offers.
- Images – Photography, infographics.
- Podcasts – News, tutorials, promotions.
The intention of content marketing is to increase brand reach, grow visits and sales or engage an existing community.
Crawlers
Search engines use crawlers (also known as spiders or bots) to browse (crawl) Internet pages in order to add them to their indexes. Indexed pages are made available to searchers in search engine results pages.
Domain Name
A domain name is a memorable way to identify the IP address of the server where your website or blog is hosted.
They are used in URLs to locate specific pages in a site. As an example, https://example.com/pageexample, example.com is the domain name.
Domain names can include numbers, letters and symbols but must be registered before they can be assigned to a host IP address and used.
Find out more: Choosing a Domain Name
Domain Registration
The process of purchasing a domain name to use for a website.
Find out more: How to Register a Domain Name
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the act of sending a message to people via email most often with commercial intent to:
- Advertise or promote products or services.
- Build loyalty / trust with existing customers.
- Consolidate brand awareness.
- Increase engagement.
- Request action.
Hosting
Pay-Per-Click
Often shortened to PPC, pay-per-click refers to a form of online advertising designed to send traffic to websites.
PPC advertisers (usually website owners), pay search engines to show adverts in search results or on websites approved into their content network programs.
The advertiser might pay every time one of their ads accrue a click to visit their site (a cost-per-click model) or every time they accrue 1,000 ad impressions (a cost-per-mille model).
Googlebot
Googlebot is Google’s web crawler that browses pages on the web to include in it’s index to present to people making searches.
Google Account
A Google Account is a free account required to use a huge number of services that Google offers.
Find out more: How to Set Up a Google Account
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free (and paid) service that provides website owners with data about traffic and engagement related to their visitors. It is the most widely used analytics systems of its kind on the web and is access online or via an app.
Google Ads
Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program. See Pay-Per-Click below).
Google AdSense
AdSense is Google’s ad revenue sharing program through which members of its content network receive payment for allowing Google Ads to appear on their websites.
Google delivers the ads via code installed on the publisher site, which aims to send context relevant adverts. Revenue share is based upon either a payment per click or payment per impression model.
Google Manual Penalty
Google manual penalties are a negative reaction by Google applied to a website for breaching its Webmaster Guidelines. Most often they are applied as a result of Google deciding that a website is attempting to manipulate its position in search results by using black hat SEO tactics.
Find out more: What are Black Hat SEO Techniques?
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a service offered by Google that provides a variety of tools to help analyse, maintain and problem solve your blog / website.
It includes useful functions such as:
- How Googlebot views your pages.
- Inbound links.
- Problems with your site.
- How many visits you’re receiving.
- The keywords people use to find you.
- Processes to add your pages to Google’s index.
In order to access Google Search console, you must have a Google Account.
Find out more: How to set up Google Search Console Accounts
Hosting
Web hosting is a service offered by Internet hosting providers, whereby people can access a server to build a blog or website, for which the provider then serves pages to the Internet for people to visit. Hosting packages usually offer further features including email.
Web hosting providers often offer differently priced packages according to the bandwidth and storage requirements you have.
Find out more: A Review of SiteGround
Keywords
Keywords, or keyword phrases, are words of phrases used by people to make searches in a search engine.
Search engine marketers identify desirable keywords and optimize their pages for them in an effort to appear as high in search engine results as possible.
Meta Description
The meta description refers to an tag that appears in the <head> section of a web page’s HTML.
It includes text that doesn’t appear on the page itself, but is the description of a page shown by search engines in search results:
The purpose of meta description for SEO marketers is twofold:
- Describe the content of the page.
- Encourage searchers to click-through to the page.
Monetization
Monetization is the act of adding ways to potentially earn money from a website / blog.
Examples of monetization are:
- Affiliate programs.
- Advertisements.
- Courses and eBooks.
- Membership subscriptions.
- Product sales.
Monetization can be a very attractive reason why people start a blog.
Page Load Speed
Page load speed refers to the time it takes for a site, or pages in a site to render when visited.
The speed of a site is a significant for visitors (who won’t want to wait long, especially on mobile devices) and is a ranking signal for search. Page load speed is extremely important!
Find out more: Why is Page Load Speed Important?
Page Title
As with the meta description, the page title is another tag that appears in the <head> section of a web page’s HTML.
It also includes text that doesn’t appear on the page itself, but is the title of a page shown by search engines in search results:
SEO
SEO is an acronym meaning search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the collective name for a group of activities aimed to increase the prominence of a website in search engine results pages.
Consequently, the primary objective of SEO is to increase the volume and quality of visits through non-paid search engine traffic (organic traffic).
Find out more: What is Organic Traffic & Why is it Important?
SERPs
Another acronym, SERPs stands for search engine results pages. These are the pages of results that search engines like Google and Bing present to people who have made a search online.
People make searches with keywords or keyword phrases and the search engines returns SERPs.
URL
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator… it’s effectively the address where a website lives on a network.
URLs are displayed in a browser address bar and typically look like this: https://example.com/example.html.
Anything you’d like to see added to this online marketing and SEO glossary? Drop me a comment below and I’ll add an entry here!
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