Glossary of Marketing Terms

Instead of explaining all the terms in my posts after I use them, here is a list of common terms for your reference.

Areas (of a Web Page)

Most search engines assign varying degrees of importance to the location of your keywords on the page. Factors such as frequency, total words, weight, and prominence by “Area” are vital to your search positioning efforts.

Some areas can only be seen when you view the HTML source code for a page. The area will have a begin tag such as < TITLE >, and an ending tag such as < /TITLE >. The ending or closing tag will always have the added slash character in it.

To view the HTML coding for the page you’re analyzing, use your favorite HTML editor. With some editors, like Microsoft FrontPage, you’ll need to click on the HTML tab to view the actual tags behind the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) screen.

Example of a complete page which includes the BODY area and tags within it:

< HTML >

< HEAD >

(meta tags go here)

< /HEAD >

< BODY >

(main “visible” text and graphics go here)

< /BODY >

< /HTML >

Body

The BODY area is where the bulk of the text on a page generally exists. The ALT, COMMENT, and LINK tags all can appear within the body area. When they do, they are counted as part of their own particular area, rather than the BODY area. The only words counted in the body are those that do not fall in some other more specific area.

Description Meta Tag

The text found in the META Description tag will be displayed to the user in the search results for many engines. Therefore, it pays to create a good description so that you not only rank well, but so people will want to click on your link once they see it.

Example of a META Description tag:

< META name=”description” content=”paragraph text goes here.” >

The above tag would appear within the < HEAD > area.

eCommerce (Electronic Commerce)

eCommerce is the buying and selling of goods or services on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web. In practice, this term and a newer term, e-business, are often used interchangeably. For online retail selling, the term e-tailing is sometimes used.

As a place for direct retail shopping, with its 24-hour availability, a global reach, the ability to interact and provide custom information and ordering, and multimedia prospects, the Web is rapidly becoming a multibillion dollar source of revenue for the world’s businesses. A number of businesses already report considerable success. As early as the middle of 1997, Dell Computers reported orders of a million dollars a day. By early 1999, projected eCommerce revenues for business were in the billions of dollars and the stocks of companies deemed most adept at eCommerce were skyrocketing.

The Security of Business Transactions includes authenticating business transactors, controlling access to resources such as Web pages for registered or selected users, encrypting communications, and in general, ensuring the privacy and effectiveness of transactions. Among the most widely-used security technologies is the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is built into both of the leading Web browsers.

Keywords

These are the words people use to find your web site in a search engine. These are also the words a web author must use to get his/her site favorably ranked in the search engines, so that qualified prospects will easily find them.

It’s a good idea to ask friends or co-workers what they might use to find your site, or even have them go to a search engine and tell them to try and find information on the topic your site happens to cover. Watch what words and phrases they use.

If you choose the right keywords, you’ll see your site traffic skyrocket. Therefore, you should think long and hard on what keywords people are likely to use to find you. Make lists of keywords and then combine them into two or three word phrases.

If you’re IBM or Microsoft, perhaps you can afford to fight over a keyword like “software”. But, for the rest of us, we know we can’t always beat the big guys. So instead, what smart marketers do is to identify a “niche” that few others are targeting and go after it.

Keyword Frequency

Frequency is how often a keyword appears on the page or in an area on the page. In general, the more times a keyword appears on the page, the more relevant it will be to that search.

You don’t want to go overboard with frequency since many search engines will penalize you for keyword “spamming” if they feel you were excessive. In general though, use your keyword in the document in as many different areas as you can, and as many times as is recommended for that engine.

Keyword Prominence

Prominence is how close to the start of the area that the keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the top of the page or area will be more relevant. However, sometimes it helps to have a keyword in the middle of an area, or even toward the end of the area.

Keyword Weight

Keyword weight is the percentage or concentration of keywords on your page in relation to all other words on the page. A “keyword” can be either a single word, or a short phrase.

Keyword weight refers to the number of keywords appearing in an area divided by the total number of words appearing in that area. The weight is a little different depending on whether the keyword is a single word or a multi-word phrase.

For example, if the keyword phrase has two words, as in, “cheap domains,” then each occurrence of the word “cheap” would count as 1/2 of a keyword phrase, and each word “domains” used would also count as 1/2 a keyword phrase.

Link Popularity

The number of links from other pages to your page. This could be someone else linking to your site, or it may simply be a search engine’s listing of your site in its index. Link popularity has become one of the major factors used by top search engines in ranking sites.

Link Text

A page’s relevance to a given search can be improved by taking advantage of another scoring technique highly favored by some search engines. The text within a LINK is sometimes weighed more heavily than words found in the regular body text.

Example of a link tag:

< A HREF=”keyword.html” >Keyword< /A >

Meta Tags

Part of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that describes some aspect of the contents of a Web page. The only meta tags that is visible to a browser is the Title tag, which is where that title at the very top of your browser window comes from. All other meta tags are invisible to browsers.

Use of the keywords meta tag is generally not advisable since search engines have become “smarter”. This tag will not help your overall search engine rankings.

Optimization

Optimization means ensuring that your web pages are accessible to search engines and focused in ways that help improve the chances they will be found. Search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users find web sites. That’s why a web site with a good search engine listing may see a dramatic increase in traffic.

Everyone wants that good listing. Unfortunately, many web sites appear poorly in search engine rankings, or may not be listed at all, because they fail to consider how search engines work. Knowledge of “search engine optimization” can help many of these sites.

Page Rank

A name used by Google to describe its own version of “link popularity”. Uses a scale of 1 to 10 to reflect the page’s importance to Google listings.

Positioning (Search Engine Positioning)

The art/science of adjusting a website in such a way as to create top rankings in various search engines on the Internet.

Rank (or Ranking)

Rank refers to the relative position that a website comes up on a search engine, when someone does a search for a given key word or phrase.

Search Engine

A search engine is a company that provides a free service to the public, to search the Web for whatever someone wants to find. People register their web sites with a search engine company, thus becoming part of that “search index”, also known as a database. The engine (computer program) searches throughout its database of listings, looking for user requested “keywords. In a few seconds, it can scan through millions of pages in its index, and display for you the results.

The most popular search engines are: Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN). In August 2010, Bing and Yahoo merged and now use Bing to power searches on Yahoo.

Spamdexing

The search engine’s version of “spam” or unwanted actions. Spamdexing, a word taken from “spamming the index”, means someone is trying to fool the engine to gain a better ranking. Some search engines penalize for this, others ban a site completely! Be careful.

Title

The < TITLE > tag of your Web page is considered by experts to be the most important HTML tag or element. All the search engines consider the keywords in this tag and generally give those keywords a lot of importance in their ranking system. If you created one page with a keyword in the title tag, and another page with the same keyword in the body, the one with the keyword in the title will rank higher in most engines.

Many search engines use the HTML < TITLE > tag as the title of your page in the search results that appear to the user. What this means to you is that this HTML tag must not only work to your advantage for keyword scoring, but also must be attractive to the reader.