33 Internet Marketing Terms You Should Know

SEO. PPC. Social Media. Pagerank. Link authority.
What the hell?
If you’re not an internet marketer, here’s a list of terms so that you can translate what someone like me spouts at you in a caffeine-induced rush.
This isn’t a comprehensive internet marketing glossary. Just the terms we’d probably use without thinking about it. Print this list and hang it next to your phone:
A-list bloggers. aka A-listers or Those Miserable Buggers (when I’m feeling jealous). All those writers who dominate the Technorati rankings (see Technorati, below). Getting a nod from one of these folks can mean exponential growth in site traffic.
Affiliate marketing. Selling your product through other web sites or e-mail lists by paying the site or list owner for each sale. Great for expanding your sales network. May cause severe migraines.
Analytics. Taking traffic data and other information about your web site, analyzing it, and then providing insight. Note that a raw report is not analytics.
AJAX. Not the cleaning stuff. Generic term for forms that let you modify data on a page without reloading the entire page. You care because it looks neat, is speedy, but may kill you in the search engines.
Blog. Short for ‘web log’. A fancy word for a web site where you publish short entries on a regular basis and let visitors post comments about those entries.
CMS. Content Management System. A web application (see below) that allows users to add and edit web pages on a web site without learning HTML. May cause mass celebration or mutiny among web teams.
Conversion rate. The number of sales, leads or other desired actions that occur on your web site, compared to the total number of visitors.
Domain name. The address of your web site, such as ‘www.conversationmarketing.com’.
Dynamic web site. A web site generated using a web application and a database. These sites will often change from one visit to the next, or one moment to the next.
Flash. An animation and interactive platform that lets you create very complex movement on a page. One of the best ways to distribute video. YouTube uses Flash to distribute all video on the site. Also a great way to make your customers hate you.
Hit. Any one file downloaded from your site one time. A single page of a web site, viewed once, may generate 30 or more hits. Great if you need to impress your boss. Lousy as a measure of web site traffic.
Link authority. The ‘vote’ provided to a page on your web site when another web site (or page within your web site) links to it. Search engines include these ‘votes’ in their ranking algorithms.
Movable Type. A popular blogging platform.
Pageview. Any one page of your site completely loading any one time. If I visit your web site and look at 3 pages, that will count as 3 page views.
PEBCAK error. Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. An expression I may use if forced to spend 2 hours troubleshooting a web site failure, only to learn your computer was unplugged from the network.
Ping. Originally a networking term, in internet marketing parlance ‘ping’ means notifying the world that you’ve updated your web site. Pings are usually sent automatically to sites such as Technorati.
PPC. Pay Per Click marketing. Bidding for position in the sponsored search engine rankings. Higher bids have a better chance of a higher ranking, although there are other factors. Great way to generate business fast, or spend a small fortune and get no return at all. Use with caution.
Ranking algorithm. The mysterious black box that determines how you rank for a specific keyword. Google has one algorithm. Yahoo! has theirs. Microsoft does their best to copy Google’s.
Reciprocal linking. Linking to someone else’s web site in return for them linking to you. This used to help with search engine rankings. Now helps you disappear from the search rankings.
Registrar. The service you use to reserve a domain name.
RSS. A type of text file that delivers a list of headlines and content directly to feed readers and other software. Stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’.
SEO. Search Engine Optimization. Working to insure your web site will get as high a ranking as possible in the unpaid search results in the major search engines.
Social media. A term coined by someone who wanted to publish more books. Usually refers to the many blogs, bookmarking sites and other sites that allow visitors to interact with each other and the web site owner. May also refer to a drunk journalist at a party.
Spam. Used to refer only to unsolicited e-mail. May also refer to unproductive comments or repeated submissions to blogs or discussion forums. Or a Monty Python skit.
Static web site. A web site that isn’t connected to a database. ‘Static’ refers to the fact that the page does not change.
URL. Uniform Resource Locator. The unique address of one file on the internet. ‘www.portent.com/blog’ is the URL of one page on my site.
Unique visitor. Any one visitor coming to your site any number of times in the time period. If I come to your web site 30 times in a month, I still only count as one unique visitor.
Visit. Any user visiting your site any one time.
Web 2.0. See ‘social media’, above. Refers generically to any site that looks cooler than sites before 1999. Seriously. I have no idea what this phrase means.
Web 3.0. Synonym for ‘Ian, please punch me in the liver’.
Web Application. Usually refers to a database-driven web site, such as a shopping cart.
WordPress. A popular blogging platform.
XHTML. Successor to HTML. XHTML is used to build web pages.
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