Dictionary of Search Engine Marketing Terms

AdSense: Google’s advertising programme that allows small web sites to host Google Adwords sponsored ads on their site in return for a percentage of the revenues

AdWords: The name of Google’s Pay per click advertising programme

Backlinks: The number of hyperlinks that point to a particular web page. Search engines measure the number of backlinks to a page to gauge its popularity.

Click Fraud: An activity where an advert is clicked on solely for the purpose of either generating revenue for the site on which it appears or increasing the cost per click payments made by the advertiser.

Click Through Rates (CTR): the number of times a link is clicked on divided by the number of times it appears

Cloaking: A technique whereby a web site attempts to fool a search engine by displaying different content to the crawler than that on the actual page. As a result, the information shown on search results may be totally different to that seen by a human being.

Conversion Rate: The percentage of the number of visitors who perform a desired action such as making a purchase.

Copywriting: The art of writing content that conveys the meaning of the page whilst including relevant keywords that can be matched against search queries

Cost Per Click: The amount paid by an advertiser for each click on a link pointing to their web site.

CPM: Cost per thousand (the ‘M’ is the Latin for thousand). A pricing structure used in traditional banner advertising where the customer pays a fixed price for each thousand times the advertisement is shown on a web page

Crawler: Also known as a spider. This is a piece of code that reads the source code of each page that it comes across. Typically a crawler will also follow any links to another page.

Directory: A method of categorising the world wide web using humans to describe and organise web sites into defined categories. A directory was the original idea behind Yahoo although the sheer size of the web makes it impossible to keep up. The most popular directory today is DMOZ that is run by volunteers

Doorway Page: A page which has been specifically designed to rank highly in search engine listings but which may not make much sense to a human reader. Also known as a ‘Gateway Page`. See also ‘Cloaking’

Golden Triangle: The area on a search results page where a searcher is most likely to look. Search results and adverts within this area are likely to receive a much higher click through rate than those outside

Key Phrase: A series of Key Words

Key Word: a word on a web page that matches that typed into a search engine

Landing Page: A page that is the ultimate destination when someone clicks on link on a search listing.

Link Popularity: The rating of how popular a page is determined by the number of external links to it. The raw material of PageRank

Link Text: The text embedded in a hyperlink instruction

Listings: The information that appears on a search engine results page.

Meta Search: A method of searching a number of search directories from a single query. The most popular Meta search engine is Dogpile

Meta Tags: The meta tags are held in the `Title` area of an HTML page. They are not intended to be seen by visitors by are intended to be read by computers and sometimes human indexers to give them an idea of the content of the page.

Meta Description Tag: A short description of the web page by the author that is meant to be read and understood by humans. Used by some, but not all, search engines for the text under the link in the search listings

Meta Keywords Tag: A list of keywords and phrases that is intended to help the site to be found. However, The value of the meta tag has declined as many webmasters abused the feature to stuff keywords for search engines.

Meta Robots Tag: Tells a spider not to index that particular page

Organic Listings: The list of web sites that appear on a standard set of search results without having been paid for.

PageRank: The method by which Google judges the relevance of a page. Originally dependent on the popularity of a page through the number of back links, PageRank is now much more complex

Paid Inclusion: A web page which an advertisers pays to be added to a search engine’s listings although typically, it will not affect its ranking.

Paid Listings: The list of websites that have been included via Paid Inclusion or Paid Placement programmes

Pay Per Click (PPC): An advertising programme where the advertiser only pays for the number of times their advertisement is clicked on by a visitor.

Paid Placement: A marketing programme whereby advertisers pay to have their links included on a page in response to particular keywords. Usually purchased via an auction-based system, the higher bidders get higher placement on the page.

Rank: The position in which a web page appears in search engine results in response to any given query

Results Page: A web page containing a list of sites that match the keywords entered in a query

Robots.txt: A file that informs a search engine which pages should and should not be placed in its index.

ROI: Return On Investment. The difference between what a customer spends on optimising and marketing their websites and what they make back in terms of sales.

Search Engine: A searchable database of web pages

Search Engine Marketing: The discipline of marketing a web site through a search engine. This can include optimisation of pages for the organic listings or through paid placement programmes.

Search Engine Optimisation: The process of creating a web page and its content in order to achieve the best possible ranking on a search engine listing.

Search Terms: The word or group of words typed into a query box on a search engine

SEM: See Search Engine Marketing

SEO: See Search Engine Optimisation

SERPS: short for Search Engine Results Page, the list of web sites seen for any given query.

Spam: The practice of adding multiple or misleading keywords or phrases in order to gain a higher ranking in search engine results

Spider: A software program that crawls through the web’s address space and collects the information on each page it finds and follows links to other pages. The gathered information is then passed to the search engine’s index. Also known as a ‘crawler’, ‘robot’ or ‘bot’.

Submission: The act of informing a directory or search engine of the existence of a web site. Often a description of the page is required as well as a URL.