Blog – A blog, once more commonly known as a weblog, is a site or part of a site where the owner posts regular information. Kind of like a diary, dated entries are written in chronological order but displayed in the reverse order. Individuals may have personal blogs, but more and more businesses are using them to provide up-to-date news or commentary to current or potential customers.
Business Networking Sites – Following the idea of Social Networking Sites, Business Networking Sites bring business people together to form an online network. Some business networking sites focus strictly on bringing people of similar occupations together. The intent is to provide one big resource and knowledge exchange. Other business networking sites offer the opportunity to sell your products or services to other businesses within your network. Related online term: Social Networking Sites
Click Through Rate (CTR) – When you use a banner advertisement on another site, the click through rate is a way of measuring the ad’s success. Divide the number of users who clicked on the ad by the number of times the ad was delivered, also called impressions, to get your CTR. Related online terms: Impression, Web Banner
Conversion Rate – What do you want a visitor to do when he visits your website or clicks on your ad? To measure the success of your online marketing, you should have a set goal. Do you want the visitor to make a purchase, submit a form for more information, provide his email for future marketing or sign up to receive an e-newsletter? Your conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors who complete the desired action. Related online term: Unique Visitor
Ezine – An ezine or webzine is a magazine delivered in an electronic form. Ezines typically focus on a specific niche or interest. Web users subscribe to receive an ezine.
Home page – the main page of a website.
HTML – HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It is special coding used to build websites. For example, if you wanted website text to be bold or a certain color, you would need to put certain codes around that text to make it appear as you wanted on the screen. If you don’t know HTML, look into website building programs that will create the HTML coding for you.
Hyperlink – A hyperlink, also referred to as a link, makes moving around the web (also called navigating) and finding information easier. A hyperlink enables you to click on it and go to another location on the same page, a different page or even to a different website. Hyperlinks are usually in a different color of text or will indicate they are “clickable” when you put your mouse cursor over them. Related online terms: Anchor, HTML
Impression – In web advertising, an impression is each time your ad is presented on a page. When you advertise on a website, your ad may not appear each time someone views the site. It may rotate with other ads. Each time it does appear equals one impression. Related online term: Click Through Rate
Indexing – When a search enginespiders your site and gathers information, that information is used to index your website and its pages. This enables the search engine to retrieve information from your site more quickly in the future. Related online term: Spider
Keywords – Keywords are specific words or groups of words within the content or HTML coding of a website. The keywords enable a search engine to determine what a website page is about and index it accordingly. Web users also search by typing keywords into the search engines. Related online terms: Indexing, Search Engine, Web Content
Local Search – Local search is an important term for local businesses. Think of it as “Yellow Pages” on the web. When a person looks for a particular service in your phone directory, he most likely lives in your area. Local search follows the same concept. The search engine delivers results based on the searcher’s geographic location. If the searcher types in the keyword “banks and credit unions,” a local search would give him only banks and credit unions near the area where he lives. Related online term: Search Engine
PageRank – PageRank describes the importance of pages within your website as determined by the Google search engine. Google assigns each website page a ranking from 0 to 10, with 0 being low, based on how many external websites link to that page. The ranking is also based on the PageRank (i.e. importance) of the external pages linked to your site. In other words, when a high ranking page from another site links to one of yours, it’s viewed as a “vote of importance” for your page. PageRank is one of the factors used to determine a page’s placement in search results. Related online term: Hyperlink or Link
Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC) – A model in which an advertiser pays only when a user clicks on his online ad to visit his website.
Podcast – A podcast is a digital file (audio and video) distributed over the Internet using web syndication. People can subscribe to the podcast. When a new episode is available, it is automatically downloaded to the user’s computer for viewing. Related online term: Web Syndication
Reciprocal Link – Also called a link exchange, this is an agreement between two website owners to link to one another’s sites. The purpose is to drive traffic and improve PageRank. Related online term: Hyperlink or Link
Search Engine – When talking about search engines, most of us are familiar with Google, Yahoo or others. You type in specific words or phrases, the engine searches for relevant information and returns a list of possible websites. A search engine can also be placed on your website to help visitors find information only within your site.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO means improving your placement in search engine results thus driving more people to your site. When you search for something using Google, Yahoo, MSN or a number of other search engines, the results can include thousands or even millions of website pages. If you’re at the bottom of that list, people will never find you via the search engine. SEO involves building your site, and writing content, in a way that will help your site to move to the top of the search results.
Shopping Cart – Software used in e-commerce that enables a user to purchase items from a business online. The shopper places items in the online shopping cart. Upon checkout, the software calculates the total order amount, including shipping, handling and taxes.
Social Networking Sites – Social networking sites (such as MySpace) enable people to create a profile, upload a photo and interact via the site. Groups of people with similar interests can form networks and invite others to join. Related online term: Business Networking Sites
Spider – A web spider or web crawler is a program search engines use to regularly browse the World Wide Web. The web spider creates copies of visited pages and indexes them for faster processing with the search engine. Related online term: Indexing
Unique Visitor – When looking at web analytics to determine traffic to your website, the “unique visitor” number shows you how many individual people have visited your site. In other words, the same person may visit your site three times in a month, but the unique visitor number only counts that person once. If you divide the total visits number, by the unique visitor number, you will get the average number of visits, or sessions, for each unique visitor. Related online terms: Web Analytics, Conversion Rate
URL – URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is basically a website “address.” When you type in http://www.marketing-small-business.net, you've typed in this website’s URL.
Viral Marketing – Viral marketing is based on the old “word-of-mouth” advertising concept. It uses the social networking aspect of the Internet to spread information about a company or product. Viral marketing encourages web users to voluntarily pass along a marketing message to others. This may be done, for example, with a funny video clip pertaining to the product. Related online term: Social Networking Sites
Web Analytics – Web analytics is the study of the behavior of visitors to your website. Web analytics include web traffic reports, which show the sources of your traffic. Do many of your visitors come from a site where you advertise? Do they go to certain pages more than others? Do they leave your site from a certain page? Do visitors purchase a product from one website page more than others? You can make changes to your site based on analytics. If your website host does not provide a web analytics program, you should add one from another source – such as
Google Analytics.
Related online terms: Unique Visitor, Conversion Rate
Web Banner – A web banner is an ad an advertiser places on a website. A banner my simply be on your own site, or you can pay to place it on another site. When the viewer clicks on your banner at another site, he is directed to your company website. This is called a “click thru.” Web banners come in different sizes. In general, you will have buttons (smaller ads), banners (horizontal ads), leaderboards (large horizontal ads) and skyscrapers (vertical ads). Related online term: Click Through Rate
Web Browsers – There are different types of web browsers, but for our purposes we’re talking about the type you’re using right now. A web browser is the software that lets you display all of the elements on a web page. Common web browsers are Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
Web Content – Web Content includes the text, images, videos or other elements found on a website.
Web Feed – A web feed provides users frequently updated content from a website. For example, you place a feed link on your business website. Visitors can register this link with a “feed reader” they have running on their own machine. When you update information on your site, their reader automatically grabs your updated information and presents it to them. This is an excellent way to communicate with customers who may shy away from giving you their email address. Related online term: Web Syndication
Web Forums – Web forums, also called messages boards, are sites or the part of a site where users hold online discussions. Web forums typically focus on a particular subject and can be divided into sub forums to further divide topics.
Web Syndication – Web syndication refers to providing web feeds from a site to alert people to recently updated content. You may hear the terms RSS and Atom in relation to web syndication. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom (Atom Syndication Format) are the languages or formats used for web feeds. Related online term: Web Feed
Wiki – A wiki is a website built through the collaborative efforts of its users. Anyone with access to the wiki can add or edit content. An example of a wiki for small business owners is
SmallBusiness.com.
I’ve tried to choose some of the more basic or common online terms to help with your online marketing. There are many additional online terms out there! If I've missed a major one, email me through my
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If you're ready to move beyond definitions and put your knowledge into action, take a look at the Site Built It! program recommended on my
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