Authority in life means a legitimate power or command over others or information. In the Internet world this translates mostly to an authority over information. The big news sites such as the BBC or the New York Times are considered to be authority sites because they provide vast amounts of high quality information that others rely on. Within individual niches an authority site might exist. For example one of the top SEO blogs might be considered an authority site by Google in the SEO niche because it is referred to by thousands of other high quality sites and not only provides high class information but links to other high quality sites in the niche almost as if unafraid to give away links which you will note is very different to many smaller sites and businesses.

Backlinks most commonly means a type of incoming link from another site to yours. They can be from any source for example a blogger mentioning your excellent information on widgets and linking back to your widgets page or a mention on a forum by one of your customers. Related Terms: Inbound Link, Anchor Text

There are a huge number of blacklists on the Internet. In short they are all attempts to block certain types of users and activity from your computer, e-mail address or website by providing a list of suspected problem IP addresses. Various official and unofficial bodies maintain these lists and the quality of their data collection and the exact nature of their content varies considerably. During the days of the file sharing boom many users downloaded blacklists containing IP addresses of suspected anti-piracy groups to block them from connecting to their PC to check their file shares. As an Internet marketer your biggest concern will be delivering a high number of your e-mail messages to clients. Having your e-mail server blacklisted as one delivering SPAM (unsolicited e-mail) would hugely impact your delivery rates as most big e-mail providers check various e-mail blacklists before delivering mail to their customers. As a result it is important that professional Internet marketers follow a diligent opt-in e-mail strategy and send their subscribers useful relevant information and advertisements to avoid excessive SPAM reports and any danger of blacklisting.

Blog evolved from the original term 'Weblog'. They are commonly a form of web journal allowing the writer to cover a range of topics that are relevant to the key business or message of the site. There are a number of different software platforms and tools available but to the end users the presentation will always appear familiar as the home page will often be a series of posts with the opportunity for discussion available. Whilst it is not a prerequisite of the format that they be more informal, most businesses that host a blog will tend to use it as an opportunity to engage with their customers in a more relaxed manner. This differentiates blog use amongst enterprises from more formal communications such as press releases even though similar topics may be covered in the entries. The ease with which a blog can be set up and the range of different tools and hosting options (many free) has lead to a huge number of private individuals choosing to blog. Everything from 'mommies blogs' to tech blogs can get huge amounts of traffic and therefore be monetised profitably with advertising, sales etc.

A brand is the identity of a business no matter what form it takes whether it's a slogan, logo, colour scheme or music. For huge multinationals such as Coca-Cola the brand can be extremely valuable. The identify of a business is defined through it's brand by achieving consistent styles and colours and even tone of communication which is consistent with the brand the business is trying to establish. Many consumers will associate a logo as being the most important part of a brand as it is often the most used and the most visible - it often appears on all communications and paperwork relating to that business. Other more subtle elements like colour, tone and slogan can be just as important as they give more opportunity for the business to establish its ethos and key messages in consumers' minds.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. They’ve been around since about 2000 when Yahoo! started to experiment with using tools to prevent automated message spam on their services. The situation most webmasters encounter the need for a CAPTCHA is when their site has a user contact form or other form of comment opportunity. Thousands of automated ‘bots’ or computer processes designed to find opportunities to post links or other unhelpful messages are constantly operating on the Internet. Once these find a site it is often subjected to an endless barrage of these messages. Adding a CAPTCHA to the end of the form forces the bot to be able to read the content of a box which humans should find extremely easy to read but that computers will find extremely difficult to decipher using current technology. This significantly reduces the number of unhelpful automated messages that site owners need to filter through to leave the real genuine human discussion live on their site. Unfortunately for Internet marketers the decision over CAPTCHA isn’t as straightforward as it first seems. As the sophistication of attempts to read CAPTCHA’s by computers has improved so has their complexity to resist this trend. This does lead to many humans struggling to read them and despite fancy additions such as an ‘audio option’ and the ability to refresh and try a different puzzle many of those humans will still simply ignore the opportunity to post on your site which can mean a valuable customer lost.

Google Adsense and other similar advertising programmes earn their money from advertisers who are willing to pay for each user who clicks on one of their displayed advertisements and visits their site accordingly. Site owners hosting these ‘pay per click’ advertisements get paid a share of this revenue. Some dishonest sites are not earning enough traffic to make the money they would like from legitimate clicks on the ads they are running. Instead of looking to legitimately build their business and grow their traffic they look for ways to fake legitimate clicks and earn money they are not entitled to. Unsophisticated (and easily caught) fraudsters might simply click on ads showing on their site themselves. Others may encourage friends, family or even paid agents overseas to do this for them. Click fraud is a serious problem for the online advertising industry especially for webmasters who rely on paid advertising in this form to fund their legitimate businesses, not to mention advertisers who would like to expand their online presence using tools such as Adsense. As a result providers such as Google invest millions in sophisticated anti-fraud techniques to detect unusual patters and shut down offenders. Related Reading: Adsense

Whenever the target objective of a banner, link or page is to achieve the result that the end user clicks on a link, button or banner to proceed through to another page then achieving that result is a ‘click through’. Imagine running a small text ad such as the one below: Find Out More About The Internet Click Here Now! Clearly the purpose of this ad is for people to want to find out more about the Internet and click on the underlined link. Anyone who has done so has clicked through. The click through rate for an advertisement is an important metric. Internet marketers will compare click through rates for various advertisements, squeeze pages and banners to optimise their campaigns. If the page displayed 200 times and 20 people clicked the link then the click through rate would be 10%. If an alternative version could achieve 12% over a reasonable sample then the ad could be changed to this ‘more optimal’ version.

There are two main types of cloaking usually referred to online. Site/Page Cloaking The presentation of a different page or site to search engine spiders than would be displayed to human users. A number of techniques can be used to achieve this including IP ranges. Originally it had some good practical uses such as ensuring search engines were able to find content embedded in objects they were at the time unable to crawl. As better crawlers and other solutions have overtaken cloaking as a solution to these problems the remaining uses fall into more gray areas. Sites which have been over adjusted to rank well in the search engines may be an uncomfortable reading experience for human users. Cloaking could be used to present a more acceptable version to human readers without compromising the ranking achieved by the over optimised version. This is seen as a poor step by search engines and could result in the site being penalised or removed from the search results if caught, however. Link Cloaking Affiliate links often look unattractive to end users. On top of that many are suspicious or at least slightly cautious about where they click - many users having had at least one bad experience of malware. Using redirects it is possible to change a link that looks something like this:- www.remasterguru19192.redirectmaster.zulu38488429292923939.com/3883838hfkjdas83 To something more like:- www.yoursitexyz.com/your-link If this has the combined benefit of looking more attractive and improving the click through rate to your advertised product (and as a result sales) then it is something well worth doing - and indeed many top affiliate marketers will cloak their affiliate links.

At the bottom of a blog post, article or page on a website the author or webmaster may wish to facilitate discussion between readers about the content. This is most often done using comments at the bottom of the post which usually take the form of a series of unstructured text replies which can be entered into a box provided, usually as well as name, and other optional information about the poster. These comments will mostly be directed at the article and users post anything from just a word of thanks to a long form view on the content provided. Encouraging readers to comment and sparking a debate in the comments section at the end of posts is a powerful tool used by bloggers (and Internet marketers) to keep posts alive and encourage, sharing and debate across a wider audience than just the core readers of the site.

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A system for the storage, retrieval, editing and eventual display of content on a website. In the earlier days of web design and the Internet end users were often unable to edit their own websites. Entire sites would be built from lots of individual HTML pages which were relatively difficult to edit. Powerful design tools and editors started to enter the market but were still often either expensive or difficult to use (or in the case of simple solutions such as Word Processors not very good!). As a result it was still beyond the capability of many business owners to update the latest information about their business without calling on the assistance of their original web designer. Content management systems revolutionised this process. They allowed designers to focus primarily on the visual and structural elements of the site. Most systems (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are three extremely popular CMS) provide an easy to use what you see is what you get (WYSIWIG) editor for users. It is then possible to edit pages and entries without even seeing the HTML and CSS code which makes up the actual design of the site and has brought self-editing within the reach of most businesses.

There are several slightly different uses of the term contextual search in use, however, the most common meaning is simply to attempt to return search results that are about the same type of information (in the same context) as the article or term being read or searched for. A blog post might have an automated version of a contextual search in the form of a ‘related posts’ widget that analyses the keywords and content and provides a list of posts which have a high degree of similarity to the current post. The most common use of contextual search is in advertising, however. Google Adsense blocks seen on sites don’t just show random advertisements to users. The system analyses the content on the page, and ascertains the keywords and nature of the content (much like a related posts widget should). Once it’s done that it shows advertisements that are relevant to the user based on the type of content they are currently consuming. One important factor Internet marketers looking to advertise on platforms that deliver advertising on content partners sites is that consumers are often in a different frame of mind than when searching actively for terms. Sure your consumer might be reading some news about boats but they are less likely to buy a boat than if, well, they just searched for boats to buy. It’s important to adjust your expectations accordingly when planning campaigns.

Internet marketers are looking to achieve certain actions or results from visitors to a web page or site. The conversion rate is the fraction of those total visitors who go ahead and complete the desired action. For example a shoe sales site runs a blog about healthy living and running in the hope that their quality content about fitness and the best running shoes will lead to readers visiting their shoe sales partner site and buying shoes. If a thousand visitors a month come to the site and ten go on to buy some trainers then the conversion rate of the blog is 1%. As with all metrics it will be extremely important for successful marketers to test various different strategies and designs to optimise the conversion rate. A link to the specific types of trainers being discussed with a discount coupon showing might lead to a higher conversion rate for the blog than simply a link to the homepage of the shoe store section of the site with dozens of shoes highlighted. Whilst this might be intuitive and not require testing, other less obvious improvements would only be found through experience and testing.

CPA (Cost Per Action) is most commonly a type of advertising where the advertiser will only pay when a stated action has been completed. This action can vary from completing an e-mail sign up form and verifying the address to actually purchasing an item. The A can also stand for Acquisition and a high proportion of Cost Per Action offers will result in the advertiser acquiring something whether that’s a new e-mail subscriber or a new member for their Poker Site with a verified account. An example of a CPA offer where acquisition is the goal would be an advertiser offering: “$200 for each new sign up to Pretend Stakes Poker who deposits at least $50 and plays through 1,000 Pretend Stakes Poker Points within 6 months.” One can calculate the CPA for a conventional ad - perhaps to assist with pricing of future CPA offers. If a banner costs $2,000 to display on a site for 1 week and it will receive 10,000 views. Of those 1% will click through to your site and of those 5% will sign up (the desired Action in this case). Your CPA = $2,000 / (10,000 * 0.01 * 0.05) = $400. Each sign up has cost you $400 (you only received 5 sign ups) so those users had better offer you greater returns than this in the long run to be profitable!

Also known as pay per click, CPC (cost per click) advertising is a form of Internet advertising where the advertiser only pays the publisher when a user actually clicks on the banner or link contained in the advertisement. Google AdWords is currently the biggest CPC programme on the Internet covering clicks on both their search results pages as well as through their content network of publishers. Often this method is favoured for testing as it allows a high number of extremely focused visitors to be directed to a target page almost immediately. This high level of focus and quality of visitors has driven up the cost of CPC advertising and not all niches will remain profitable however great opportunity still exists and as a testing mechanism it will always be invaluable.

Internet advertising where the pricing is based on a cost per thousand impressions is called CPM. (Where CP = cost per and M is the Roman Numeral for 1,000). You will see it referred to occasionally as CPI (cost per impression) but in popular usage CPM has mostly taken over. Different sites will have different CPM values to different online advertisers. Programmes such as Google AdSense try to put a value on their publishing members for CPM that is optimal for the programme and acceptable to the customer. Other advertisers will simply make an offer to display their banner on your site for $20 per 1,000 impressions. An impression is simply each time the banner (or other advertisement) is displayed on your site to one of your readers.

A Web crawler is a computer that works it’s way through websites on the Internet following links and discovering new content. This new content is then organised and indexed with any links added to the ‘crawl frontier’ which represents future pages to be visited. As you can imagine a huge amount of new data is added to the Internet constantly and existing indexed pages often change. It is important, therefore, for modern crawlers to be very selective and intelligent about which pages they visit and index in order to provide the best experience to search engine users. Other uses for crawlers include webmasters checking their own sites for broken links and any errors in the HTML code that makes up the site and those who might look to send out SPAM will often crawl websites looking for e-mail addresses.

A link on a Webpage that points to another page that no longer exists on the World Wide Web. This could be for any reason ranging from the other site changing and not doing 301 redirects to the other site closing down entirely. The link may have even been incorrect since inception and never pointed to a valid page due to an error typing it onto the site. Linking to resources that no longer exist can cause significant frustration for users and good authority sites take what measures they can to minimise the impact of this including some automated checks for broken links and manual checking of some important links in key articles. Link rot (the problem caused by dead links) is a significant issue facing published work and some studies have shown as many as 3% of published links can vanish within a year in some fields.

The practice of linking to pages deep within a Website rather than to just the homepage or main section pages. There is some increased risk of link rot (dead links forming) as a result of linking deep within sites as there is a higher chance of the older pages being changed, removed or archived. It is an important tool for Internet marketers seeking to improve their sites ranking for some long-tail phrases where a specific page is significantly more relevant to that result than the homepage. A viral marketing campaign might be used to build deep links to that specific page and ensure search traffic finds it’s way there. Other site owners may be less keen on deep linking. A number of issues have arisen between newspapers over ownership of articles and Ticketmaster famously fell out with Microsoft over deep linking. Sometimes a site owner is significantly disadvantaged if users are directed straight to content instead of through the advertising and sign up process presented on their home page. Search engines can be encouraged to not index deep links using the robots.txt rules although this is a convention and not enforced in any way.

The description tag (or description attribute) is one of the few meta attributes still considered by all the search engines. Of a recommended length of up to 155 characters it provides a fallback piece of text to be used to describe a site. Sometimes it will appear in the search results themselves for a page and so it is important that it is relevant as that will naturally have a big impact on click through rates. One common flaw seen in search results is where a content management system has the option to set a global description tag (something like “Joomla! A great CMS”) and rookie users either forget or incorrectly set the tag on future pages so the search results show something like this: Bill’s Marketing Page Joomla! A Great CMS A better result can be achieved using the description tag correctly. <meta name="description" content="Something About Bill’s Site Page Here" >

The original Yellow Pages style directories on paper were simply a way to look up businesses contact details and information. A Web Directory is similar in that it allows users to look up links to Websites. Often these directories will be organised in a similar way to offline directories, splitting sites and businesses up into similar categories. Sites about plumbing will be grouped together just like the plumbers in the Yellow Pages. Some directories are open and allow free submission of any site by the webmaster. Others are paid or specific to certain niches and sites must either pay or fit the rules of the directory in order to be included. Other directories will be more elitist and seek to only include sites of a certain quality or importance. Achieving a link from one of these directories can be extremely valuable as many of your competitors will be unable to do so.

DMOZ (short for directory.mozilla.org - it’s original domain name) is the open directory project - a human edited, hierarchical directory of links to sites on the World Wide Web. There is a huge human editing team splitting focus between finding and adding new sites to categories and ensuring the existing sections remain up to date and there are no dead links. A listing in the Open Directory is extremely valuable for SEO purposes as they are not easy to come by and as a result give a significant advantage over competitors. The human editors will consider such factors as whether a site submitted for addition actually adds any further value to the section, carries too much advertising/commercial intent etc. As a result it can be extremely difficult to get a non-brand business listed on the site. Whilst there have been a number of criticisms of the project (ranging from slowness and apparently inconsistent editing where some ‘friends’ of editors get their sites listed), Internet marketers would be wise to put those aside and consider it for the opportunities it presents. Overall it’s a good project offering real value to its users and to the Internet as a whole, albeit as Google’s domination of search has grown it’s usage is now significantly diminished.

A domain is simply a web site address. The domain name system is just a way for the Internet to allow users to take advantage of easy to remember domain names such as www.this.com and have the system convert that to the actual numeric IP address. Users can therefore find websites, and give out e-mail and web addresses to your site without having to know it’s actual IP address or even how it is derived from the name they do know. Domains are usually controlled and registered by central bodies. Buying a domain usually just means registering your ownership with that body for a limited period of time subject to renewal and following their rules in the mean time.

Dynamic content is a page designed to display either different information in a different format to different users or to be able to adapt or change presentation based on interaction with the end user. An example might be a news page that allows users to customise which types of stories interest them or that uses usage information to display the most relevant news to those users first. Another good example would be an interactive map that allows users to zoom and change the information presented - such as Google Maps. Internet marketers presenting dynamic content need to bear in mind the implications this has for search engines. Often they cannot access the complex data structures that underpin the page (either for complexity or security reasons) and as a result some parts of the site may end up incomplete on their indexes. For certain types of marketing activity static pages with limited dynamic content might be the only practical solution to these limitations.

A web feed (or syndicated feed) is a way for publishers to provide their users with access to their regularly updated information. End users will utilise applications such as a news reader to subscribe to these feeds enabling them to keep up to date with the content of the sites. Some news readers themselves are online applications (such as Google Reader). A number of different technologies are used by site owners to distribute these feeds - such as RSS and atom. Popular, modern news readers will be able to cope with most types of feed. One of big advantages to Internet marketers is that it will often encourage syndication of your content and the use of links to your articles on other sites as these feeds can be read easily by computers and plug ins to other websites. If you see a site with ‘Latest News From The BBC’ and some links to BBC news stories there is a good chance they have obtained this by reading a BBC news feed automatically.

Google is a huge Internet business. They are most famous for their Google search engine which is by far the most popular in the world (with over 70% of searches in most jurisdictions). Users have become attached to the clean, functional home page which simply contains the word Google (sometimes holidays are celebrated with a funky, artistic version of this logo) and a search box. Logged in users are sometimes presented with additional tools at the top but it’s a far cry from the huge amount of news, photos and other advertising ‘web portals’ such as Yahoo! present to their users along with the search bar. As their search dominance has settled and further growth would prove challenging, Google has moved to become dominant in other areas of Internet commerce and is already the dominant player in online advertising (AdWords) and a huge player in e-mail, social networking, maps and local business search. Their documents platform threatens the incumbent Office and cloud operators making Google one of the most powerful e-commerce firms in the World. Challenges to marketers caused by this dominance are many. The biggest is the ever increasing amount of search real estate that is taken up by Google’s paid advertising blocks and their own web applications. Check out any local search these days and the organic results are buried below the local map widget that Google has coded. Yahoo! Finance is critically acclaimed as one of the best finance portal’s online but searches for share prices will often result in Google’s own widget, graph and link showing in preference. As time goes on, marketers can expect further encroaches onto territory they would have previously controlled with their websites.

Part of the algorithm designed by Google to give fresh content and new sites a chance to get noticed and build attention on the Internet can lead to some new webmasters ranking pretty well for brand new sites. These sites will often then jump about in the rankings before settling at a new level. This period of uncertainty is often called ‘dancing’ about in the rankings or the Google Dance. Sometimes after a campaign of SEO or some new viral campaign driving lots of traffic to a site a similar move in the rankings before settling to a new ‘long term’ level can occur. This is also often referred to as a Google Dance. It can be confusing for webmasters as they can be unsure when or where it will end and if anything they are doing is having a positive or negative effect during this period.

Guest blogging is the art of writing compelling and eye catching content and offering it to topical sites in the same niche as your business. Often written using a pen name and containing a link back to your site. This has the dual effect of being good for SEO – a context relevant link back to your site from a genuine blog or site about your niche – and also generating immediate direct traffic as some readers of this relevant blog click your link. Some blogs invite guest posts, others the approach needs to be more diplomatic – offering real value to the readers of the blog. If you become an expert in your niche you may even receive invitations to make a guest blog post on other popular sites. This can have a huge impact on your visibility, traffic and profits. As always in the current Internet marketing climate – great content is the key to success.

Heading tags are used to display your titles and headings in the correct rank and format - much like a book will have a large title for the book name then smaller titles for each chapter and even smaller titles for subsections within a chapter. The main heading tag is heading 1 and is used as shown: <h1>This Is The Main Heading</h1>

This Is The Main Heading

Correct usage is extremely important as search engines will look at the content of your headings when they index your site. It’s important they know what the main heading is and how the subheadings and sections of your page flow. This will allow them to show most suitable excerpts from your site to searchers and deliver the correct visitors to your page.

Hidden text is that which is displayed in such a way as to be readable by a computer visitor but invisible to human readers. A common technique might be to add text in white over a white background. This text will only be visible to human readers who know it’s location and highlight it in some way. Old SPAM techniques included a lot of use of invisible text. This is because it allowed the inclusion of lots of phrases and keywords that would be readable to the search engines but not to your human readers so the readability and appearance of your sales page would not be compromised - or could even be on a different topic. Search engines have become much more able to determine whether a page is actually human readable and often will exclude content which is not - this has significantly reduced the prevalence of these techniques. There are some legitimate uses of hidden text. For example a poker forum displaying some analysis of a hand might want to hide the result of the hand so that users can discuss the hand without being impacted by the results before simply highlighting the hidden area to read the missing text. However, given the search engine’s attitude to it I would suggest a better solution such as a sliding area to reveal the hand would both be more stylish and less likely to get the page de-listed.

Hits was historically a very popular way to measure how busy a website or page was. Unfortunately it is significantly misleading as it is simply a count of requests for information from the web server. A page with dozens of pictures and other elements that must be downloaded would garner significantly more hits from the same number of visitors than a page that was simply one picture and some text. It is therefore possible to measure your own site’s popularity growing over time using hits (provided the mean complexity of your pages remains the same), however as it is so driven by complexity of the site it would not be possible to compare your traffic to another peer site using hits alone. A more accurate measure by far would be the number of unique visitors to the site as measured by more sophisticated analytics software.

The home page of a website is simply the main page that loads automatically when you visit the domain with no other page specified in the URL you type. It is analogous with the front page of a newspaper or magazine. For example if you visit www.google.com you will visit Google’s search page which is the Google home page. The content presented on a home page can vary significantly depending on the site - for example blogs will usually display a selection of their latest posts and a newspaper will usually show their latest news headlines and advertisements.

A hyperlink is a link that can be followed by the reader of the page/text. They can exist in documents outside of the Internet as well as on webpages. It will usually take the form simply of some blue underlined text which when clicked will take the user to the destination - whether that's another web page entirely or simply another point on the same document. Most often users will simply refer to a hyperlink as a link and use phrases such as "I have linked to your blog from my Twitter account."

An impression is one single display of an advertisement on an individual web page. Some online advertising will be billed as a cost per impression (CPI) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). Webmasters with a stable, high level of relevant traffic can often earn good money from CPM advertising.

An inbound link is a hyperlink from another website. The Internet is designed to allow authors to link (provide a way for users to click through and be taken automatically by their browser to the destination page or information) to other resources. If an author, user or automated feed reader places a link on a site which points to a resource or page on your site then it would be said you have earned an inbound link. These have always been one of the most important factors for Google and other search engines when ranking pages as they are an indication of other users finding the information useful and of a high enough quality to point other users to. This does lead to some abuse of the system and search engines now have to be mindful of marketers paying for or using some spam-like techniques to obtain a higher number of links. The rank of the site linking is becoming increasingly important so an inbound link from a very important site such as the New York Times would be a lot more valuable than from Bill’s Plumbing Blog!.

Indexes (alphabetical lists of content) have a similar level of importance online as offline although many work behind the scenes online instead of being manually searched by users. A website might index keywords and content in articles to allow faster and more accurate searching of articles on the site. More sophisticated search engines (like Google) will build huge web indexes as well as cached content to enable quick searching and the technology has moved on considerably from users scrolling through lists of letters at the back of books. The principles are the same, however and some larger or academic sites will still provide their users with a more old fashioned index.

Internet Protocol (IP) address is simply a number allocated to every device (whether it’s a home PC or a web server hosting hundreds of websites) which uses the Internet to communicate. The term address is appropriate as it tells other devices where to find the specified device in order to communicate it (which may or may not be possible of course depending on such things as whether it is switched on/accepts communication etc). As demand for connections to the Internet has increased the development of a new system called IPv6 which is simply a 128 bit system (instead of the current 32 bit system). This allows for a huge number of extra IP addresses to be allocated and the growth of the Internet can then continue unbounded.

A keyword is a word that is extremely relevant to the content it is associated with. Imagine a video on a popular video streaming site. It is about motor cars. Two keywords associated with the video might be ‘motor’ and ‘cars’ but also the name of the driver say ‘Hill’. In an article the keywords might not always be so obvious but usually they will be written regularly throughout the article. A discussion of Hill’s big win in the motor race might mention the race, Hill and motor cars regularly and the keywords (most important words) would be things like ‘Hill’, ‘cars’, ‘motor’ and ‘race’. Keywords are useful to users as they can assist in ways such as suggesting other articles that are similar automatically using a sidebar that displays other articles with the same keyword. Users are often given the opportunity to click the keywords at the end of an article to search using that keyword and find other related content. Keywords are also important for search engines as they help understand the core messages of content. Note that search engines often use their own algorithmic methods to determine keywords rather than relying on those suggested by webmasters.

Keyword density is a measure of the frequency with which a keyword appears in a particular block of text - usually some kind of article, landing page or sales page. It is important that articles should have an appropriate level of keyword density to appear relevant to that term both to search engines and to users. One would expect an article about Hill’s Race win to have the words ‘Hill’ and ‘Race’ fairly frequently if you’ve found the most relevant article. On the other hand you wouldn’t expect those words to be inserted into the article so often as to make it difficult (unpleasant) to read. Calculating keyword density as a percentage is a useful tool. Simply calculate the percentage of times that word appears. For example the keyword density of ‘Hill’ in a 700 word article if it appears 7 times is 1%. There is no exact science for determining the ‘perfect’ keyword density as it varies hugely depending on the type of content and the intended target audience and even the topic itself. A good guide for Internet marketers to follow is that important keywords should appear often during the article but never so much that it would look unnatural to human readers. It’s a good idea to have the keywords appear in prominent positions - headings, during the introduction and conclusion of your article also. Some of these other factors can be just as important, if not more important than the keyword density itself.

Keyword stuffing refers to the overuse of keywords either during the actual body text of an article or within meta tags provided by the webmaster or content management system intended to usually provide useful information to search engines. This technique is sometimes combined with others such as invisible text and cloaking in an attempt to appear relevant to a particular phrase or set of words. Because search engines are largely able to detect these methods and end users find the pages they form extremely unhelpful and irrelevant in many cases, keyword stuffing has fallen into disuse.

The landing or destination page is simply the page that an Internet marketer or business owner wishes visitors to arrive at first for a particular campaign. Whilst selling a product - imagine basketball trainers - it might be grossly inefficient to have those advertisements point links to the homepage of an online shoe store. Instead a direct link to the page with basketball trainers and the same offer as the advertisement being highlighted would make more sense. Traffic to the landing page could originate from a number of sources but they will usually be driven by some form of advertising primarily. This will range from print ads with a web address or search phrase suggested (assuming the advertiser ranks top for that phrase) to e-mails, and viral marketing campaigns. The objective of a landing or destination page will be to obtain a set action from the end user. In the case of the shoe store it would be for them to buy the shoes. For many other businesses obtaining sign-ups to mailing lists could be just as important for the landing page as any sales actually made immediately.

Lead generation is simply the use of your website or other marketing tools (e-mail lists etc) to generate enquiries for another business. For example the owner of a finance newsletter and online forum might host a form along with a mortgage calculator. This form would ask for sufficient information to sell to actual mortgage advice firms. The finance forum would be said to be generating leads for mortgage advisers. A number of approaches are taken to monetising these leads. Most often the destination firm will simply buy the leads from the marketing firm for a fixed price. In some cases there will be other performance elements, bonuses or profit share agreements as part of the lead generation. Sometimes refunds will be impossible, in other cases the two firms will have a set refund policy where low quality leads can be returned for a replacement or refund. Lead generation is most commonly seen in industries dominated by a vast number of very small firms that are unable to easily rank for their highly competitive search terms alone (mortgage advice, debt advice, insurance etc). Large lead generation sites supported by the revenue gained from supplying leads to hundreds of these firms together are big enough to rank in these highly competitive terms - Internet marketers will also design sites much more likely to rank well than small local advice firms. This often results in a situation where due to efficiencies shown by the marketing firm, the cheapest and best way for the destination firm to acquire enquiries from the Internet is buy purchasing leads rather than by improving the ranking of their own website.

Link bait is producing content or a feature which attracts sufficient interest that it encourages users to share it and link to it. This is most often a legitimate and 'white hat' strategy for building inbound links to a website which delivers both high quality, sustainable links. There are a wide variety of strategies marketers and webmasters use to develop link bait. The key element is that the content is likely to encourage discussion, sharing or linking out of vanity--for example a list of fifty best video makers on the web might result in quite a few links from the people in the list out of vanity. They may also choose to share the link with their networks. Other interactive link bait includes videos, pictures and other tools (weight loss calculator widgets etc) that users are likely to want to share with their friends, or on their blogs or websites. The main positive marketers gain from these types of link bait is that they have the potential to go viral and deliver huge returns in legitimate high quality links.

Link building refers to any organised campaign or attempt to obtain inbound links to a site. Due to the importance search engines place on inbound links as a ranking factor this is often one of the main challenges faced by Internet marketers or search engine marketers. Inbound links can be obtained in a number of ways and a good campaign will result in a good mix of links from a range of high quality sources and a natural mix of anchor text that reflects the solid approach that has been taken. A poor campaign will result in a large number of low quality links from poor parts of the Internet with transparently ‘spammy’ anchor text. As search engines become more sophisticated marketers need to consider their link building strategies much more carefully. Posting a thousand ‘thank you’ posts on forums and blog posts might one day have been the key to 10,000 inbound links and a good ranking but these days one quality link from a well respected site can be worth hundreds of thousands of these junky links. Many low quality links won’t even find themselves in the search engines indexes in any case.

A link exchange is an attempt to gain more inbound links by offering to link to another site (usually in some related niche) in exchange for a link back from that site. Some link exchanges are natural and work for the end user - two webmasters realising their content complements each others sites well might link to each other to help their users. In many cases though it is simply a transparent way to obtain inbound links and improve search rankings. It has been speculated that as a result of this the value of straight swaps like this is limited. In an attempt to improve the results many webmasters swap links from ‘related sites’ in a 3 way link exchange. This means the sites do not link directly back to each other but another site in the webmasters’ portfolio. This avoids a transparent swap and the hope would be that search engines would view this as a more legitimate new inbound link. The problem is that many times sites will be hosted together on the same server which limits the value of this kind of swap for many webmasters.

A link farm is a site or page which exists with the primary purpose of linking to other sites or pages. These sites are often part of a group or the same ownership structure and the existence of the link farm is purely for the purpose of trying to game the search engines by obtaining the appearance of a higher number of inbound links than could otherwise be achieved. Whilst these sites are often of little use to end users and the links are often compiled using some automated methods, it appears search engines have not fully negated their effects. Having said that, as search engines get better at determining whether links are relevant and come from sites that are connected and have relevant content the benefits of using link farms will continue to diminish.

The link popularity of a site or page is calculated by counting the number of inbound links that site or page has. Google and other search engines rely fairly heavily on link popularity when deciding which pages are relevant to rank for certain search terms. Unfortunately for marketers the search engines have moved beyond simply counting the links when determining a site's link popularity. Instead a great deal of importance is placed on the quality of the site on which the link is placed. Whilst it cannot be known for certain the value a link will provide in terms of link popularity it can be reasonably assumed that a link from a high ranking authority site is worth considerably more than a link in the one thousandth comment at the bottom of a low quality blog.

A log file is a standard type of computer file - often readable with a simple text editor but sometimes in a proprietary format. It contains a simple diary style list (log) of all the events of a certain type or types that have occurred during a specified period. A webmaster may set the server to keep an error log file for example. This file will record any error messages the operating system for the server generates. In the event of an unusual activity - for example an effort to hack into or break the server - the webmaster can review this file for evidence of the techniques used or the problems that occurred with a view to fixing them. User logs are also a useful way for webmasters to monitor the way their end users are using their content. Understanding who clicks where and how they came to find the stie are also useful information that might be found in a user log. More advanced analytics applications may store and monitor significantly more information (such as Google analytics) but the principle is the same - they log information about users in a file for a specified period for future reading and analysis.

A specific keyword about a narrow topic and often made up of several actual words is a long-tailed keyword. Initially businesses will write content and advertise based on a number of their core activities for example 'widgets'. As the months go on they might discover a large amount of traffic is visiting because of a phrase near the end of their article about 'widget lubrication systems for donkey carts' which was originally not intended to be particularly important. The owner of this site might decide to write an entire article on this niche topic on the back of this interest to take advantage of the long tail of search with the objective of picking up more similar traffic. Search is referred to as having a long tail because if one draws a graph of traffic vs keywords the most popular will have much more traffic than the more obscure. However the graph tails off for a long time forming a long thin tail-like area formed of the traffic from the more obscure, longer and more specific keywords. This phenomenon is extremely important to marketers. It will become even more so as search engines continue to improve and deliver better matches for more obscure searches users will continue to be more specific in their search queries. This tail then forms a very large amount of total traffic - sometimes even more than the most popular keywords for a site. Marketers who successfully write for these long-tail targets will also often find that the competition is much less so the traffic can be obtained for significantly less effort than traffic obtained whilst competing for the more popular core terms.

A meta tag (meta element) is a design element which provides information about a web page without being visible to the end user in their browser. Originally much of their content was crucial for search engines in their attempts to correctly categorize and rank pages. For example the meta keywords tag was particularly used by search engines and as a consequence abused by some SEO specialists. This use has largely subsided as search engines have become better at classifying pages based entirely on the content that the end users are able to see. Other residual uses include things like identifying a site for linking purposes - for example requesting that search engines do not use data on the Open Directory Project to identify a site in their results. <meta name="robots" content="noodp" >

Search advertising is sold on the basis that advertising displayed next to search results for a specific keyword or next to content about that specific keyword will be effective in targeting users interested in products related to that term. Due to differences in context and the simplicity of this environment some totally different terms would attract the same advertisements if negative keywords were not possible. A double glazing company would not want their advertisements for replacement windows to run alongside advertisements for the popular operating system. Negative keywords such as 'software' could be used to ensure for example that these advertisements wouldn't show next to results for the term 'windows software.'

A nofollow link is one which will not be pursued by an Internet search engine's web crawler. There are certain types of link that Google generally prescribes should be nofollow such as paid advertising links. A link to a site or page is usually seen as a citation backing up the validity of the information on the destination and its potential usefulness given by the provider of the link. If a webmaster wishes to provide the link for users but not provide it as a citation passing 'link juice' or credibility in the eyes of the search engines then a nofollow link may be used. Another common use of nofollow links is where the provision of 'dofollow' links would lead to abuse or spam. Many blogs had links that were followed by the search engines placed in comments at the bottom of articles. These proved to be an extremely popular target for spammers who could simply combine their link with an unhelpful message such as 'great post' and benefit from the resulting link. By switching to a nofollow comments approach bloggers discourage that kind of activity. Unfortunately with much content spam being automated this attempt to discourage spam is largely a failure. There is some debate as to the approach taken by search engines to nofollow links and whether the link ‘juice’ is simply lost or passed to the page - or whether indeed search engines do pass some value through nofollow links. It would be interesting to note though that having 100% ‘do follow’ links in your link popularity profile would make it obvious to search engines that a large amount of your links were probably generated for the purposes of ranking. A natural link profile would include users discussing or posting about your site on some nofollow blogs and forums whereas an an artificial campaign that deliberately avoided nofollow links would stand out for precisely that reason. As a result many campaigns will involve building more natural link patterns which include these links.

The organic search results are the results of a search on an Internet search engine (such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing) which are there as a result of their relevance to the keyword searched as opposed to due to advertising or other controlled purpose. Some historic surveys indicated that users had difficulty determining which results they were viewing were advertisements and which were the real listings. All the major search engines reserve the top positions on their results pages for paid search listings as a consequence as this is an extremely lucrative purpose. Those who do not wish to pay the search providers for a position in their listings can only hope for the top of the organic results no matter how high the quality of their site. Unfortunately for those sites the amount of space taken up on popular search engines such as Google by paid search or other Google instigated widgets has increased considerably and this has had an impact on the value of organic listings - albeit that  value is still extremely high.

The organic search results are those appearing due to their relevance to a keyword not because of other factors such as paid advertising. The ranking of these sites is the order in which they appear with the number one spot on search engines extremely valuable. In fact many studies indicate that the vast majority of traffic is captured by the first five slots in the organic search rankings. As a result any site looking to garner a significant amount of traffic in certain keyword areas will need to build a site of sufficient quality and authority to appear in the rankings accordingly.

An outbound link is formed when you place a link on your site that points to another site or resource. These can prove a useful tool, providing readers with some additional information or further reading after they have considered the material in an article, without having to fully research or write further content covering those topics. The target of an outbound link receives credit in the eyes of search engines for that link - sometimes called ‘link juice’. Whilst in the past many marketers would avoid linking to any resources as a result of passing on this ‘link juice’ it has become accepted that some extremely high quality sites (authority sites) just by virtue of always looking to provide excellent information for their users will often link to useful resources. These sites do not rank poorly in the organic search results as a consequence - in fact many indications show they rank better because of their role as an authority site. Care does need to be taken not to be seen to be linking to unfavourable parts of the Internet. Links to banned sites, link farms or sites operating in less reputable niches (such as pornography) should generally be avoided or treated with caution. An excessive habit of having links on your sites to poor quality parts of the World Wide Web will likely lead to some loss of the perceived value of your site from a search engineer’s perspective.

Overture Services Inc were one of the first paid advertising providers in the early days of the commercialisation of the Internet before the were acquired by Yahoo! in 2003. Overture had some valuable patents relating to search advertising which led to Google paying Yahoo! in stock for a perpetual license to use the technology. Since the takeover the Overture brand has been discontinued in most jurisdictions with ‘Yahoo! Search Marketing’ becoming the promoted brand.

A request by a browser to load a traditional HTML page (or equivalent in other technologies - such as Flash) is known as a page view. This is distinct from a hit which refers to requests to load any resource from a server. As a consequence a single page view will usually correlate to several hits as an HTML page will often load a number of images and other resources. This information is regularly recorded in a number of web analytics packages as it is important to webmasters who can determine the popularity of different pages with their readership. On top of that any advertisers will be very interested in the number of page views the page they wish to advertise on would usually get as this will be a good indicator of the number of impressions to expect from their advertisement.

Larry Page developed a mathematical algorithm for determining the importance of a site based on the links it has received. This research was done at Stanford and licensed to Google who now have the term PageRank trademarked. At the time of introduction in 1998, PageRank was a relatively revolutionary technology which put Google's search results way out in front of competitors' in quality. As this system is not immune to 'gaming' by professional SEO firms, the techniques used by Google and other search engines has had to develop to take into account some other measures such as content quality measures brought in with the Panda update. Whilst knowing the PageRank for your sites is still a useful tool it is of diminishing importance to focus on PageRank as other ranking factors move to prominence. Google has even removed the public PageRank from the Webmaster Tools application and updates to the public PageRank information have become so infrequent as to be unhelpful in measuring an SEO campaign or other web project.

This refers to the addition of search results to the rankings as a result of payment rather than through the natural discovery process that search engines follow. There is some blurring of the distinction between these listings and pay per click advertising. The most obvious difference is that these are sold without specified guaranteed wording and unlike PPC ads appear within the organic search results instead of in a separate, clearly marked advertising block. It's definitely worth noting that Google, the most dominant search engine, does not allow users to buy their way into the organic listings. The only way to be listed through payment is in the clear advertising blocks through their search advertising programmes. This avoids the situation other search engines face where they can be accused of returning results that are of financial benefit to the search provider but add less value to the end user. Nonetheless it is popular where available and delivers many benefits such as more regular crawling and immediate listing which gives new businesses a faster road to exposure in the organic results. It also allows for quicker feedback to be received on any changes made to content which in itself is a useful SEO tool.

If a site is caught attempting to manipulate the search results through cloaking, spam link building and other strategies that violate the Google webmaster guidelines then a punishment (penalty) may follow. This can take many forms from a reduction in search ranking position to an outright ban and removal from the Google Search Index. If a marketer finds they have suddenly lost search traffic it's a good idea to start by investigating whether the site has been removed from Google. This can be done by simply searching: site:yoursite.com.  In the event of a ban you should fix any issues - your spam -  then submit a request for re-inclusion on Webmaster tools. If your site hasn’t been banned but is still suffering from reduced traffic it may simply be that some of your links have been disallowed or ignored by Google. There may be no need to take further action. However, if you find that some of your key terms and article headers that were often near the top of Google are now not even in the top ten or twenty results you may need to take similar steps as if you were banned - admit your mistakes to Google on webmaster tools and fix them up as best you can.

With the popularity of portable media devices (driven by the Apple led iPod boom) it’s natural that businesses and marketers would seek to connect to these users. A podcast is a recorded audio show, presentation or other entertaining or interesting recorded media which is then subsequently made available for download. Users can then take the podcast with them on their portable media device for consumption at their leisure. Audio is a powerful tool and podcasts have the potential to go viral as users share links and discuss the content on social media sites. As video formats have become more advanced and devices more capable of storing and playing video, video podcasts have become more popular.

Pay Per Click advertising is one of the most popular on the Internet as advertisers only pay for actual clicks on their advertisements and users subsequently delivered to their landing pages. Google, for example, has a pay per click advertising programme as part of their AdWords system allowing webmasters to advertise at the top of the search engine results in exchange for paying for each click received. This advertising also extends to content sites such as news sites and blogs through partner programmes such as AdSense. In exchange for displaying a block of advertisements on their sites, webmasters receive a share of revenue generated by AdSense which is often driven by a PPC model with advertisers paying for each click. The cost of PPC advertising can be high and as a result it’s important to carefully test and plan campaigns. Many big campaigns will be for $1000s of dollars per day. Initial testing for those campaigns could be for as little as $20 per day as the campaign is tuned up testing different landing pages, keywords and advertisement text.

A PPC Management firm is one which specialises in the design, costing and monitoring of a Pay Per Click advertising campaign. Many businesses do not have the skills or experience in-house to run such a campaign but wish to benefit from the ‘top of Google’ benefits that can be bought through buying clicks and ensuring your listing shows in a premium spot above the organic results.

Ranking for a search term means appearing in the organic search results for a major search engine. It is most commonly used with the assumption that one means 'ranking well' for that term. With the majority of traffic visiting the first five links in the organic search results and few people looking beyond the second page of results it's extremely important for any business to rank well for the keywords relating to their business.

A reciprocal link between two websites is simply a situation where the sites both link to each other. For example a property site in Philadelphia, PA might link to their sister office in Southampton, PA and vice versa. Some linking arrangements, such as the above are natural and can give a boost to search engine rankings as links from other related/relevant or authority sites (as well as to a lesser extent links generally) are still the major ranking factor used by search engines. Other examples of natural results might be two Accountants in different cities who are specialists in the same unusual part of tax law who meet at a conference and link to each other as local experts in their field. Some less natural approaches to building reciprocal links have been popular since the advent of links being used to determine rankings in the search engines. Some automated schemes exist where sites can join and request links from other sites. In some industries members were encouraged to improve their rankings through mass reciprocal link schemes – for example in the real estate industry. Major search engines are keen to determine the links which are more natural and those which are attempts to mass manipulate their results so it's important not to overdo any reciprocal linking and to try to consider sites and partners which offer genuine value to your end users.

URL redirection and domain redirection on the World Wide Web are simply a way to point browsers to another URL or domain instead of the one they entered into their browser (or clicked on a page). There are a lot of reasons why this would be done. One common example for domains is to avoid marketers buying misspelled domains for your brand. For example www.cokke.com if your site was www.coke.com. The real owner of www.coke.com might buy www.cokke.com and redirect users to the correct site www.coke.com if they made that typo by mistake. For URLs it's most commonly a 301 redirection that will be used because of some moved content or a page that simply doesn't exist any more redirecting to some more up to date content or page. A 301 redirection is called a 'permanent redirect' for this reason – the page that is missing will never return. There are, of course, many other uses of redirects such as manipulating visitors, making short aliases for longer URLs, cloaking affiliate links to encourage more clicks etc. Some are even 'error handling' – many of you will have visited a broken page on a website and been redirected to their error handling (404) page.

When an end user clicks a link on a website they are viewing using their browser it will usually send a request to the server where the destination page is hosted. This request will include an HTTP header field usually referred to as the referrer field which tells the new server the last page the user was on. This page will naturally be the page on which the link was located. This information is extremely useful to marketers as it will allow them to better understand the sources of their traffic and the profiles of websites that link to them. This will allow landing pages to be better optimised and future link building strategies to be adapted based on this information. It will also give some indication if the previous page was a search engine as to the search phrases used in the discovery of the site. The advent of secure searching on Google will reduce the availability of this referrer information over time. It is not completely reliable information however, as it is possible to fake the referrer field or to block the provision of this information. Some users are keen to block this information as well as their true IP from web servers to avoid their browsing habits and user profile being logged (sometimes indefinitely) by hundreds of websites across the World Wide Web.

Responsive design is building a website that adjusts to the size of the browser display on the client device. This has huge benefits to marketers as they can ensure their content is displayed exactly as they would hope no matter what type of device is being used to visit their site.

A robot or Internet bot is an application designed to automate certain processes or tasks over the Internet. Usually these are highly repetitive, data related tasks that would be extremely inefficient for humans to undertake given the huge amount of data on the Internet. An example is the Google bot which spiders the Internet looking for and analysing new content on web servers. Not all uses of bots are whiter than white, however. Hacking groups often use large networks of compromised machines to launch attacks on businesses. These networks are often called a 'botnet.' Other less reputable uses for bots include spamming websites. Many forums are subjected to endless automated registration attempts followed by unhelpful posts about Viagra in a thread about PHP coding for example. However, while these techniques remain so effective at gathering links for the marketers and traffic from actual users there will continue to be a big market for well written marketing software of this form.

Robots.txt is a file webmasters can host on their server if they wish to instruct web robots (usually spidering robots such as Google bot) to take certain actions/avoid certain pages. This is to avoid spidering of duplicate content/private content or administrative areas of the site – all of which can have negative impacts.

RSS aggregators, commonly also known as news readers, are either a locally run piece of software or a Web application (such as Google News Reader) which combines several sources of syndicated web content (feeds) such as news, blog posts, latest videos and other such content into one easy to read location. End users find this useful as they can quickly see any new posts on all their favourite sites, blogs and news sources. This is particularly important to workers in one specialist field – an Internet Marketer could get the latest feeds from all their favourite SEO blogs together so as to avoid ever missing content. The beauty of this method to end users is that there no need to sign up to e-mail lists exposing themselves to unwanted marketing. They can simply subscribe/unsubscribe to whatever feeds they want easily and within the system. Other sites may use forms of news reader to aggregate topical headlines from across their industry for their visitors. For example a poker site may choose to aggregate poker blogs from across the web that share the same ethos as the site into a 'blogs feed' section for easy consumption by their readers. Becoming syndicated in this way is a great way for sites to pick up additional inbound links of course.

A web search engine is a set of software tools which combine to search for information on the Internet. Searching is actually the final activity undertaken by the system as first they must crawl the web for information and index that information. Most modern search engines return a series of pages (called the Search Engine Results Pages – SERPS). As the abilities of the crawling software used to gather this information have improved so has the variety of information returned. Google, for example, now includes image search results, social search results and maps as part of their standard SERPS. Effective search engines were a big step forward from the human maintained web directories of the past. They allowed fresh and up to date content to be indexed and served to users much more quickly than it could have been checked and added to a directory. This does rely on a significant use of automated ranking and assessment of content which can be manipulated by specialist SEOs leading to a constant battle by the search engines to improve their systems and defeat these manipulations.

Search Engine Marketing is a general term which refers to all activities relating to marketing a product on the search results pages of search engines. It is distinct from 'Web Marketing' or 'Digital Marketing' in that it refers entirely to obtaining traffic and sales as a result of targeting search terms whereas the other two terms refer broadly to any type of marketing (e-mail, banners, social marketing etc) on the Internet. It's worth noting that as search engines have started to include social results in the SERPS social media marketing will start to fall under the banner of SEM. Within SEM there are various subsets of expertise. One is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which is the attempt to optimise a site's on and off site content, profiles and links to improve position in the organic listings. Most often associated with SEM is the use of pay per click advertising and paid inclusion to achieve certain traffic objectives through the paid links sections of search engines results pages – for example through the Google AdWords system.

Improving on page content as well as considering off page ranking factors (such as quality inbound links from authority sites) in order to appear in a higher position in the search engine results is known as SEO. As search engines have become more advanced the most important question good SEOs ask is whether the target page deserves to rank for that term. If not then significant work must be undertaken to improve the content and on-page ranking factors (having suitable titles, content, images, links to resources etc). Once this is achieved a business must work to achieve optimal off page ranking factors. This requires exposing excellent content to those who would provide links – bloggers in the same niche may wish to review an exciting new product in exchange for their free sample (this is common in the technology field). Various other techniques such as link bait (writing content or designing tools that are so good they catch people's attention and they share/link them almost in a viral manner) and social marketing are also used to increase the exposure of the target pages. Some other techniques often considered 'black hat' include attempts to 'game' the search engine system by building links in less natural ways. Posting thousands of comments in forums and on blogs as well as articles in thousands of article directories often re-spun and in poor English is often seen as a strategy for gaining links. Whilst this and other methods do garner some success it is debatable whether they are a solid long term strategy for any business.

When a search term is entered into one of the major search engines the most common way to display the resources found (web pages, images, videos etc) is through a series of ordered pages (by rank of the material) which are called the Search Engine Results Pages. It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of the traffic goes to the first five items on the results and very few people will ever look beyond page two. This only goes to highlight the importance of Search Engine Optimisation and ranking well.

A sitemap is a list of currently available pages on a website. This information is useful both to users who are trying to find a specific piece of information and to web crawlers which are trying to add pages from the site to the search index. The term instead of site index simply to differentiate it from an A-Z listing that end users would consider an index – a sitemap is more often ordered in some ranking or hierarchy rather than simply A-Z. The four major search engines support the same format of sitemap. Extensible Markup Language is used to present these to the search engines (XML) and tools such as Google's Webmaster Tools allow the submission of these sitemaps directly to Google for indexing. Submitting in this way does not guarantee crawling or indexing of all the pages in the sitemap, however for many dynamically generated or content management system hosted sites it is a powerful way to ensure that the search engines have access to information about the entire site.

Social search is a tool for finding content shared on social media sites. Social media most commonly refers to the range of sites and tools online which help users to communicate with each other more effectively, share links, content (often photos/video and other non-text media) and make connections with new people. At present most of these tools allow for searching within their tool alone but as their prominence grows various social search engines and tools are developing which allow users to either search for publicly shared trends or aggregate their personal connections across various social media sites and search those. The trend towards social search continues into the main search engines where they are looking to both include social media results within their main search results (for example Google include their Google+ results in their results pages) but also to include 'social triggers' in deciding what other search results to show. The idea that we are likely to be more interested or trust more results that were recommended by our friends is the key factor which is driving the popularity of social search experimentation at present.

The indiscriminate distribution of electronic messages. Spam is most commonly associated with the huge number of unsolicited e-mails users receive – especially if they have made their e-mail address public at some point either on a website or forum. Spammers also collect e-mail addresses by purchasing them from other spammers. Response rates are tiny as most users have spam controls in place automatically removing spam and those that don't often find it irritating and delete messages without reading. However, despite this, and huge potential fines for spamming in some jurisdictions, it remains a popular and profitable business model for dark economy business as it has extremely low costs the low response rate doesn't matter – spammers can hugely increase the number of messages they send without significant increases in cost. As the types of electronic communication broaden, the opportunity for spammers has increased. We now see spam comments in the footers of almost every blog and automated software even exists for the registering to and spamming of forums with messages advertising everything from Viagra to socks. Often the sole purpose of this spam is to gain links back to the main site – ie for SEO purposes. As a result of this particular type of spam you will often hear the phrase 'link spam'. This is sometimes extended beyond leaving messages to the creation of nonsensical, often automated content on the Internet that has no purpose other than to create a link back to a home site. The submission of thousands of spun (rewritten using an automated program) articles which make little sense to article directories just to get a link in the footer would be an example of this behaviour.

Search engines often run Pay Per Click advertising programmes. These involve advertisers bidding in order to have their search results show in certain premium positions – usually including a block above the main search engine results. These search listings are called the 'sponsored listings' and are often identified as such (although other terms may also be used identifying them as advertisements). The advertisers will then only pay when actual users click the links and visit their landing pages. Sponsored listings can also extend to content sites on the Internet which will often sign up to programmes where blocks of sponsored links will be shown in exchange for a share of the revenue. The biggest such programme is Google AdSense. Most types of advertising are catered for ranging from text and banner ads and pay per click to cost per thousand impressions.

In Internet marketing a squeeze page is a website page designed with the purpose of achieving a specific action. Usually this action is to sign up for further information or to buy a cheap product with the purpose of finding potential buyers of more expensive products and marketing those to the ‘list’ the squeeze page has generated. Designing squeeze pages is a different art to designing regular user pages as the content is all built with one objective - the sign up. The heading has the purpose of making users want to read the page, the first line of the text gets them interested in reading more... and so on. Everything is designed to lead the user step by step until they fill in the form at the end of the page - a bit like a mail in order form seen in offline advertising.

The art of selecting a keyword which one wishes to rank for is known as targeting that keyword. Sometimes it is used to refer to an entire niche – for example a financial news site is might be targeting a range of niches such as mortgage lead generation and insurance. It's important to understand the niche you are targeting and build content accordingly -from the broad strategy to individual search terms you wish to target. Once you have devised this strategy it will lead to a targeted range of article titles for your site content, landing pages and subsequently anchor text that will be used on inbound links. This focused strategy is essential to obtain good search engine rankings and traffic.

The title tag is required for HTML documents and is extremely important for SEO. It simply defines the main heading/title of the page and the nature of the content for use in the browser title bar and on search engines. Typically less than seventy characters are used as this is the most that Google (the largest search engine) will display in their results pages. It’s important to use relevant, keyword rich descriptions in your title tag. Including brands can also improve click through rates if it is a prominent brand that operates the site. Sites with good brands or relevant terms in their title tag tend to rank better. On top of this, many social media tools will use the title tag to name pages that people choose to share or link to. You will almost never get a better opportunity to make sure incoming shares and links have the correct anchor text than in this situation. <head> <title>Awesome Internet Marketing Glossary</title> </head>

Trackbacks are a method of linking conversations and articles between blogs that is both automatic and extremely powerful. When an author writes an article that discusses the entries on an alternative blog, his software automatically sends a ‘ping’ to the other blog. If this blog is also Trackback enabled it will be able (at the author’s discretion) to display a link back to the linking site and a summary of content. Starting with Moveable type and developing as part of other blogging and content management systems such as WordPress these pingbacks and trackbacks have become an important way for bloggers to notify each other of links and share content. They have also become a tool for spammers who would look to manipulate trackbacks with fake pings and such techniques.

In order to be able to determine where certain links are coming from, a code is often inserted into the URL (uniform resource locator). For example:-www.somethingsomethingsomething.com/blahblah.php?SOMELONGCODE These codes are used primarily in paid search campaigns or in affiliate marketing. In affiliate marketing the code usually contains two parts. One will identify the affiliate the second will usually identify his campaign (for internal tracking - for example an affiliate that uses a different code in e-mail and web traffic campaigns). These will allow the affiliate to get paid but also to track which link source is working out the most profitable for the business. For paid search campaigns a lot more information is provided including the keywords that were searched. The end result is the same, the user can examine statistics about which keywords were most profitable, which way of wording an advertisement delivered the most clicks etc.

Traffic on the Internet is the term for visitors to a website. Some service providers such as Alexa attempt to accurately show Internet traffic and not only that analyse the traffic behaviour for the most popular sites on the web. There is some controversy over the accuracy of most traffic measurement techniques (except those used by the webmaster on his or her own site of course) as they often rely on statistically biased samples - such as Alexa Toolbar users - to determine a big portion of their data. The term is often combined with other marketing or Internet terms to mean visitors from that source - for example ‘Banner Traffic’.

A range of tools exist to break down and understand the traffic (visitors to) websites. This traffic analysis is crucial to Internet marketers as it allows them to not only understand the sources of their visitors but a great deal of detail about their user behaviour. Some public sites such as Alexa attempt to provide rankings and information about user behaviour and site traffic globally. This is a task fraught with difficulties and potential statistical bias (such as over-reliance on certain toolbar users). It does, however, illustrate well the importance of understanding not only how many users visit a site but the behaviour of that traffic also. Webmasters have significantly more powerful tools available to them when analysing the traffic on their own site - including tools such as Google Analytics. They can see in detail how traffic arrived at pages on the site as well as how that traffic then flowed through the site, what pages were visited and for how long before the traffic eventually moved on. This gives designers and marketers a clear idea of what pages are working and important to users to further optimise their  campaigns.

The IP address of a user visiting a website combined with another piece of data (usually a cookie) are used to determine that a user is a unique user. This data is important as a site with one hundred regular visitors who come fifty times a day to chat might be less valuable to an advertiser than a site with five thousand unique users per day as the second site has considerably greater ‘marketing reach.’ Unfortunately there are a huge number of factors which cloud judgement of this figure. If you visited this site today this morning at home, then at work then on your Android tablet on the way home from work you would be identified by three unique IP addresses and three unique browsers. As a result the site would appear to have three unique visitors. When you combine this with the users who regularly clear cookies it starts to further distort the number even when measured over such short periods as one month. When you are planning your advertising campaigns it’s worth bearing in mind that a site with two thousand unique visitors per day may have half that figure or less in reality.

Originally known as the URI - Universal Resource Identifier the term URL has become synonymous with URI and become the most commonly used. It is a string used to describe and identify an Internet resource and how to access it. Whilst the most common URLs are links to web pages that users will be familiar with and starting with http:// this part of the URL is in fact the part that identifies the protocol being used. A file server might use the File Transfer Protocol and therefore start ftp:// for example. The next part of a URL describes the actual location of the Internet resource through it’s IP address (or equivalent domain name). For example http://www.yahoo.com would describe the protocol (HTTP) and location required to access the popular search engine and web portal Yahoo!. Additional information can be specified for example a directory on the server can be specified using the / in this manner: http://www.whateverdomain.com/thedirectory/file.html would identify the protocol, Internet location and directory required to access the file.html resource. Variables can be passed to the server using the ? for example:- http://www.whateverdomain.com/thedirectory/file.php?type_of_cheese=cheddar would pass the word cheddar to the server as the type_of_cheese variable. As not all communication will take place on the default port for connection under the protocol (HTTP would usually be port 80 for example) the URL allows this to be specified using a ‘:’ as shown:- http://www.connecttomeon7676.com:7676 would connect to this domain on port 7676 assuming it allows connections on that port.

Viral marketing takes advantage of the fact that when something really commonly shared and that catches the end users attention is created on the Internet it is often shared at such a fast rate that it spreads exponentially across domains, to e-mail inboxes and through social media sites. This type of spread is ‘spreading virally’ and viral marketing is a technique for taking advantage of this spread to communicate a key message, brand or simply to accumulate links and traffic to a specific page. This is one of the most important modern methods of Internet marketing as it generates huge numbers of natural, high quality and context relevant links, shares and discussion about your product, service or page. This huge impact would be almost impossible to replicate using any automated link building software or mass submission of content due to the high quality and extremely fast generation of links. The natural search cues as well play a huge role as there will be a massive variety of sharing methods utilised - which again is difficult to replicate in any artificial way and extremely slow to replicate using non-viral engagement with customers and sites.

See: Unique Visitor A visitor to a website or Internet resource is at a high level simply an individual who has chosen to direct their browser (or other tool) at that website or Internet resource. They are more often identified as an IP that has visited the site. This is to be differentiated from a unique visitor which would aim (albeing not perfectly) to avoid double counting of visits in a better attempt to identify how many actual individuals have visited the site during a specified period.

Web copywriting is the very specific skill of creating written content designed for consumption online whether on blogs, news sites or other resources. It has to be written in an engaging and interesting style, getting the message across using a reasonably short number of words - online attention spans are notoriously short with longer articles rarely being finished by users. Not only does the skill include the ability to engage with users and pass on messages in a short space but it will often also include the demonstration of sound sales and marketing strategies seen offline. Tips and tricks that enable a good writer to drive a visitor from the headline to the opt-in marketing box or buy button at the end of a sales page are hugely important tools in the web copyrwriters arsenal. As creating high quality content for websites has become more important from an SEO perspective as major search engines become better at identifying poor content, web copywriting skills are now in growing demand.

A web spider is an automated program which explores the web with the main purpose of discovering new content, and caching a copy of it so as to allow for later indexing and searching of that data on a search engine. Although search engines are the main users of web spiders (sometimes also called Web Crawlers) they are often used for other purposes. One might spider a site in order to find broken links and other site errors for example.

Pronounced as two words ‘who is’ a WHOIS database stores contact information for administrators or owners of domains, IP addresses, blocks and Internet Service providers. It is a protocol with set rules allowing the effective querying of this data.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia which is written by users. As a result it relies on the honest and open attempts of its users to improve the quality of the information provided although the system of editors does moderate some lower quality content or at least tag it so end users can be aware of the issues. Articles may start with warnings such as those shown below: This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2010) This asks users for support in improving the article as well as highlighting to users unable to help that there are some issues with this article. Many academics question the accuracy of vast numbers of articles - especially due to the constant editing of articles by those with less than honest intentions. For example companies are often found to have employees working on Wikipedia edits. However, despite this, Wikipedia has become a prime authority site on the World Wide Web and is relied on by millions of users to answer their simple questions and explain common terms. As more and more topics are covered Wikipedia continues to be an important resource provided it is treated with caution.

XML or eXtensible Markup Language is an encoding format that produces documents that are readable both by people and by computers. This has proved useful for things like news feeds (atom feeds for example) which are interesting both to news reader software and to humans visiting the site.

Many sites wish to provide a list of latest article titles and excerpts (or full content) in a format that can be read by newsreaders such as Google’s online reader application. RSS feeds are the most common type seen currently on blogs and major news sites alike. RSS is simply aformat which is based on XML with a particular end - the distribution of readable news from a site - in mind. The beauty of RSS is that a user can visit an RSS feed address and view the articles/content/links but can also simply copy the link into a reader which will continue to obtain the data from the feed for later consumption without the user needing to revisit the site. The ability of aggregators, and other automated systems to read these feeds is really important from a marketing perspective as it will result in your content being syndicated (repeated, linked to etc) on other sites.