On more than one occasion I have been in a conversation with someone and I’ll mention a term that is standard for the internet industry and I’ll get a blank stare in return. So in order to help our clients better understand the “lingo” we use, we at Oxley have decided to define some of the most used terminology in our industry. As the list is quite extensive, we are going to break it up into 3 posts starting with the first 20 terms.
- Above the Fold: The part of a website or page you can see without scrolling down or to the side. How much of a website is “above the fold” varies at it is determined by a user’s screen size. Advertisers will often pay a premium for ads placed above the fold because these ads are usually more effective.
- Algorithm: A very complex set of variables used by search engines to help determine the rank or position of a natural listing. These algorithms are kept private from the public.
- Analytics: Sometimes referred to as “Web Metrics,” Analytics refers to the data collected about a website, the website’s users and their behavior. This data is used by website administrators to help improve the overall experience of their visitors, which in turn often results in a higher ROI for profit-based websites.
- Backlinks: A link from another website pointing to a page on your website. Search Engines use backlinks to determine a websites credibility or “authority.” If a website links to you, it is essentially vouching for the credibility of your website on a certain subject. That is why the act of Link Building is such an essential part of Search Engine Optimization.
- Cloaking: The process of showing a search engine bot or spider one version of a web page that is different from the page shown to the end user. Most search engines have rules against cloaking and penalize those who violate their policies on cloaking.
- Conversion Rate: The conversion rate is a statistic that tells you what percentage of your websites visitors are being converted on a goal. These goals will vary depending on the site’s purpose and might be a sale, or just an email signup.
- Cookie: Cookies are small, temporary files that a website attaches to your browser. They allow website’s to track your behavior on the site, but also assist in things like remembering what information to save like usernames and passwords.
- CMS – Content Management System: A Content Management System such as Drupal or WordPress allows users to manage the text and pictures on their websites without having to know how to code and have specialized software on their sites. We build our clients websites on a CMS because it allows them to control their own content and make changes to their website.
- CPC – Cost per Click: A set amount of money you pay when a user clicks on your ad. A user must click on your ad for you to be charged. This is one of the most common ways to pay for ads on search engines and other internet advertising platforms.
- CPM – Cost per Impression: The amount of money you pay for a set number of impressions (views) of your ad. For instance, you might pay $1 for 10,000 impressions.
- Crawler: A Crawler is a used by search engines to gather information about by “crawling” the web. Commonly referred to as a “bot” or “spider”, a crawler follows links to different webpages and in the process, pulls information about and makes copies of these pages.
- CSS – Cascading Style Sheet: The CSS or Cascading Style Sheet is a way to remove most of the style elements from the actual HTML on the website and put the style code in a separate file. This allows the HTML code to load quicker which benefits your visitors.
- CTR – Click through Rate: The Click though Rate is the ratio measuring your ads impressions vs. the number of times it was clicked.
- EdgeRank: The algorithm used by Facebook to determine which posts will appear in a user’s newsfeed. The higher the EdgeRank, the more likely it is that the post will appear in a user’s newsfeed. Like Google, Facebook does not release the factors that influence the EdgeRank to the public.
- Forum: A place on the internet where people with similar interests can discuss and share information about a certain topic with each other.
- Geo-Targeting: Targeting a user’s physical location. Commonly used by search engines to deliver personalized results when searching for local events.
- HTML: HyperText Markup Language is the programming language used on websites. Developers use other programming languages that output as HTML code to expand what they are able to do on the web.
- Hyperlink: Hyperlinks allow you to navigate to another part of the web. They are often colored blue and are called “links” for short.
- Impressions: The number of times someone visits a page running your ad. It is worth noting that this does not mean that they have actually seen your ad, which is another reason it is sometimes better to pay the premium to get your ad “above the fold.”
- Index: An index is the collection of information a search engine has that it uses to relate search queries against. Since most search engines use automatic crawlers to gather their information, most of these indexes are massive.
Check out our next 2 posts for more terms!
