Definitions – Glossary

Adsense
Adsense is the name of Google’s paid advertising program for web publishers. It is the counterpart to its Adwords program for web advertisers.

Adware
Adware is advertising supported software which automatically plays, displays or downloads advertisements to a computer.

Adwords
Adwords is the name of Google’s CPC program (Cost per click)  for web advertisers. It is the counterpart to it’s Adsense program for web publishers.

Advertiser
An Advertiser on the web is conceptually similar to an advertiser in traditional media – someone who individually or as an organization promotes their product or services through a public medium. However, the mechanisms of advertisng online, as well as the organizational capabilities needed for success, are quite different. Advertisers love the web because the results from the dollars they spend online are much more measurable than in traditional media. However, advertising online requires a very different mindset as the web is a conversational medium and ads cannot interrupt that conversation, especially as social media becomes an increasingly large part of the web’s focus and content.

Advertising Network
An Advertising Network is an intermediary that sits between advertisers and publishers. The network sells inventory on the publishers’ web properties to advertisers. The advertising network can consist of a few or thousands of publishers. The terms under which an advertiser may buy space vary greatly between networks, as does the control advertisers have to chose the specific web properties on which they desire to advertise.

Affiliate
An Affiliate is a website which links back to an e-commerce site such as Amazon.com (which was the first to use the concept) with the goal of making a commission for referred sales. The term is somewhat related to the broadcasting industry (especially in North America), where a network affiliate (or affiliated station) is a local broadcaster which carries some or all of the program line-up of a television or radio network, but is owned by a company other than the owner of the network.

Affiliate Network
The creation and use of marketing programs for a network of affiliates. The parallel is channel marketing through an indirect sales channel in traditional physical world sales. An Affiliate Network is a company that acts as market maker between advertisers who need affiliates and publishers who wish to earn revenue as affiliates. There are hundreds of these networks, the largest of which are Commission Junction and Linksys.

Alt Tags
Alt Tags are hypertext tags that are attached to content (e.g. images) and hypertext links. The alt attribute is used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify text that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered. Search engines use the tags as another indicator of the purpose/content focus of a page and of the page to which it is linked.  They are important for Search Engine Optimization.

AOL
AOL is mainly known as an ISP and for its front end proprietary client software which was one of the earliest interfaces to the world wide web (and which has now been supplanted by html front ends). However AOL has a more critical role for email marketers, as it is a major backbone for web traffic and thus email traffic. AOL has very strict spam controls on its network, and their front end makes it incredibly easy to report spam abuse. As a result, AOL is the first and primary vendor with whom you can be blacklisted when sending bulk emails. Once blacklisted, it is extremely difficult to clear your IP address(es) from that list, and the size of AOLs email traffic effectively prevents you from doing any email marketing.

The AOL guidelines and standards for email publishers are all collected here. AOL also has an “Enhanced White List” to which bulk mailers may subscribe to avoid blacklisting. See AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist.

Automated Bid Management System
An Automated Bid Management System is a software tool that will continuously monitor bids and performance for Cost per click campaigns and automatically adjust bids for specific keywords based on specific goals, such as avg cost/click, avg position on page, etc.

Banner Ad
A Banner Ad is an embedded advertisement in a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser. Banner Ads are usually an image (gif, jpeg, png), JavaScript program or multimedia object constructed with Silverlight, Java, Shockwave or Flash, often employing animation, sound, or video to maximize presence. Images are usually in a high-aspect ratio shape (i.e. either wide and short, or tall and narrow) hence the reference to banners. These were the earliest, dominant form of online advertising using a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model until the economic downturn in 2001. At that point, Google introduced Adwords, based on a cost per click (CPC) model that has become the more dominant ad type and pricing model. Several types of banner advertising have also moved to the CPC model, although CPM still dominates the banner ad world.

Bid-Based Advertising
Bid-Based Advertising is a form on online advertising in which an advertiser makes a bid for an available slot on a publisher’s site or within a bid-based network. The position of the ad on the page, or whether it is displayed at all, is determined by how the bid compares to other advertisers who are bidding for the space at the same time. Google’s Adwords program is one form of bid-based advertising. Many other networks have bid-based advertising programs. Examples include vertical search engine shopping.com and the online directory superpages.com.

Blacklists
Blacklists are maintained by email providers and spam filters of email spammers that prevent them from sending email across the Internet. One common mechanism for implementing blacklists is a DNS Blacklist. A DNS Blacklist, or DNSBL, is used by an Internet site to publish lists of IP addresses that should be avoided. The technology is built upon the Internet Domain Name System, or DNS. DNSBLs are chiefly used to publish lists of addresses linked to spamming. Most mail transport agent (mail server) software can be configured to reject or flag messages which have been sent from a site listed on one or more such lists.
A web log. Usually maintained by an individual to record on-going, or near real-time activities or thoughts. Often includes images and video. Like an online diary.

Can Spam Act
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (15 U.S.C. 7701, et seq., Public Law No. 108-187, was S.877 of the 108th United States Congress) was signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 16, 2003. It establishes US standards for the sending of commercial email and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. The acronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill’s full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, and is also a double entendre around spam.

Content
From the perspective of SEO, content is any text, images, flash, and video that can potentially be spidered by a search engine web spider.
Two meanings. 1. Whether the writing, images, video, or flash on a web page meets generally accepted standards of semantics, style, and grammer. 2. From an SEO perspective, whether or not the content on a web page follows best practices for getting high search engine rankings on the desired keyword.

Cost Per Thousand
is a payment mechanism by which a publisher is paid by an advertiser for every thousand times an ad is presented on their website. This model is most similar to the more traditional print, radio, and tv advertising models and is the payment mechanism that has the most business risk. Under this model, the only performance promise made by the publisher is to show the ad in an agreed-to location on the website. If no one ever clicks on the ad, the publisher is still paid.

Digg
Digg is a popular social news site that lets people discover and share content from anywhere on the Web. Users submit links and stories and the community votes them up or down and comments on them. Users can “digg” stories they like or “bury” others they don’t.

Directory
A web directory or link directory is a web site that specializes in linking to other websites. Directory categorization is usually based on the web site overall rather than one page or a set of keywords. Sites are often limited to inclusion in only a few categories. Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness. The two most well-known directories are Yahoo! Directory (which was the first directory developed) and the directory of the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ.
A submission of a web site, its address, and description to a directory that allows submission by site owners.
DMOZ
DMOZ is an abbreviation for directory.mozilla.org, which is the directory of the Open Directory Project (ODP). It is a multi-lingual, open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape. It is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. DMOZ is very difficult to get into, but very worthwhile as it propogates its entries to numerous other directories.

Drupal
Drupal is a free, open-source platform and content management system written in php. It is often used as a “back end” system that powers community features on many different types of sites, ranging from personal blogs to large corporate and political sites. (See Wikipedia entry.)

Embedding
The act of adding code to a website so that a video or photo can be displayed while it’s being hosed at another site. Many users now watch embedded YouTube videos or see Flickr photos on blogs rather than on the original site.

Facebook
The most popular social networking site in the world, with more than 200 million members. Members’ home page streams can now be seen in a wide range of applications and devices. (See Wikipedia entry.)

Feed
A Web feed or RSS feed is a format that provides users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a Web feed, enabling users to subscribe to a site’s latest content. By using a news reader to subscribe to a feed, you can read the latest posts or watch the newest videos on your computer or portable device on your own schedule. (See Wikipedia entry.)

Flickr
Founded by two entrepreneurs and purchased by Yahoo! in 2005, Flickr is the world’s premier photo sharing and hosting site. Its members have uploaded more than 3 billion photos. (See Wikipedia entry.)

Geotagging
Geotagging is the process of adding location-based metadata to media such as photos, video or online maps. Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of businesses and services based on location. (See Wikipedia entry.)

Hosting
A blog, video or podcast needs a hosting service before it can appear online. Companies sometimes host their blogs on their own servers, but a better choice for video or audio is to use a host such as YouTube, Viddler or Magnify.net for video and a host such as Libsyn for podcasts. (See Wikipedia for different kinds of hosting.)

Lifestreaming
The practice of collecting an online user’s disjointed online presence in one central location or site. Lifestreaming services bring photos, videos, bookmarks, microblog posts and blog posts from a single user into one place using RSS. Friendfeed and Tumblr are examples of lifestreaming services.

MySpace
An online social network similar to Facebook. MySpace caters to artists and bands, who enjoy the flexibility of creating an individual “look” for their page. As with Facebook, MySpace allows users to “friend” each other and create groups. (See Wikipedia entry.) 
Earnings Per Hundred Clicks, also known as EPC, is the ultimate test to tell which of the affiliates you’re promoting is performing the best. For example, is an affiliate program that pays $100 commission better than a program that pays $5 commission? EPC is a way of better understanding the business value of the relationship. EPC is calculated by dividing the commission generated by an affiliate C(a) by the the number of clicks N(c), so that EPC = C(a)/N(c)

Embedding

Facebook
Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world, with more than 200 million members. Members’ home page streams can now be seen in a wide range of applications and devices. (See Wikipedia entry) 

Keyword
A Keyword is an index term, subject term, subject heading, or descriptor, in information retrieval. Keywords are used by search engines to determine relevance of entries in their indices to a specific query.

Landing Page
A Landing Page is a content page on a website to which traffic is directed, either through paid search or email marketing.

Link Analysis
Link Analysis is the examination of links on a website to determine their effect on the site’s rankings in the search engines. Link analysis covers both links into the site from other websites (inbound links), as well as links within a site (site cross-linking).

Link Building
Link Building is an active program that increases the number of inbound links into a web site or cross-linking within a web site in order to increase that site’s placement in the search engine rankings for specific keywords.

Lifestreaming
The practice of collecting an online user’s disjointed online presence in one central location or site. Lifestreaming services bring photos, videos, bookmarks, microblog posts and blog posts from a single user into one place using RSS. Friendfeed and Tumblr are examples of lifestreaming services.

Meta Tags
Meta Tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes

MySpace
An online social network similar to Facebook. MySpace caters to artists and bands, who enjoy the flexibility of creating an individual “look” for their page. As with Facebook, MySpace allows users to “friend” each other and create groups. (See Wikipedia entry.)

Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project is a multilingual open content  of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

Page Header
A Page Header is the section of a web page that is contained within the <head> and </head> tags. Page headers contain general information, also called meta information, about a document that helps search engines identify the main topic or purpose of a web page.

Page Rank
An algorithm developed by Sergei Brin and Larry Page that measures the relevance of a particular web page to a specific query. The PageRank algorithm is the fundamental algorithm underlying the Google search engine.

Pay per Click
Pay Per Click is a form of online  where  pay a publisher when someone clicks on an ad presented on the publisher’s website.

Publisher
A publisher is anyone who produces a website for public viewing/consumption.

Search Engine
A Search Engine is an information retrieval technology that returns a set of relevant results from a database based on a specific query on the database.

SEO
Search Engine optimization, or SEO, is the science of adapting web sites so that their pages show at the highest possible position in the  for a specific .

Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is the act of tagging a specific web page for inclusion on a social bookmarking website. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Social Media
Social media is any form of online publication or presence that allows end users to engage in multi-directional conversations in or around the content on the website.

Social Network
A Social Network is a website, or network of websites, specifically established to allow end users to communicate directly with each other on topics of mutual interest.

Spam
The terms Spam is most often used to define email sent without permission to a vast, unfiltered audience. Spam can take many forms. Although it is most often associated porn sites and offers from online pharmacies, spam can be considered any form of email sent without permission, e.g. when a company sends a new kind of newsletter to a customer who has given permission only to receive a completely different newsletter
Tagging
Within the field of information retrieval, tagging is the act of actively assigning keywords to a document, whether in a database or on the worldwide web. Tagging can be done programmatically or manually. In the case of the world wide web, tagging often means social bookmarking, which is a manual act performed by members of a social network of assigning specific keywords to a web page to make the content on the page easier to find by other members of the social network.

Unsubscribing
Unsubscribing is the act of removing oneself from an email publishers opt-in list. Also known as opting out. Unsubscribe is also the most common word shown in links to landing pages that allow opting out for a specific publication. The unsubscribe link is a required element under most anti-spam laws, such as SB 1386, and can usually be found in small text at the bottom of any email.
Web Spider
A Web Spider is software that follows links, either on a specific site or across the web, Web spiders catalog the data contained within the pages to which those links point. This data is then analyzed and used to create the search indices which are used to speed search queries.

Webinar
A webinar is a seminar that is presented through the worldwide web.

Web Analytics
Web analytics has two meanings. 1. The tasks associated with analyzing activity on a website. 2. Softare or services used to perform analysis of activity on with a website. Web analytics covers a wide range of analysis, including (among others) sources of traffic, internal flows within a site, and revenue generated with various parts of these site.

Website Traffic
Two definitions. 1. The number of unique visitors to a website. 2. The total number of visits to a website.

White list
A whitelist is the list of email addresses of individuals who have given specific permission to a publisher to receive emails for the publisher.