Search Marketing Definitions

By Howard C. Gray

As experienced search marketers, we sometimes forget our clients may be new to Internet merchandising. We can be guilty of waxing-on using terms that could make anyone's head spin. Sometimes when we describe what we do to acquaintances on the street they tend to look at us like we're Aliens speaking in tongues. Here at e-businesscoach.com, we want to provide you with the best opportunity to learn all you can to create and operate a profitable online store. As is typical with many industries today, there is a flowering of bizarre and unusual acronyms and so forth. To provide you with the best service, we have created this handy guide to translating our lingo.

Algorithm    A mathematical formula applied to a software to search for pages in a Search Engine's database index.

Anxiety    The feeling of fear, insecurity, revulsion or confusion a visitor feels when they arrive at your site or landing page. Your goal is to reduce their anxiety.

Benchmarking    Measurement of comparison for one site with the industry.

Analytics   Website optimizing program designed to gather data and measure how people are using the site.

AOV    Average Order Value, the average value (revenue) of all orders on a website.

Bolding    Using bolding HTML to make a selected word or phrase pop off the page for users who scan web pages (most searchers do this first).

Bounce Pages / Bounce Rates    Bounce pages are pages on your website that visitors come to and then quickly leave. In other words, they don't "do anything" when they arrive. They don't navigate the page, they don't click on any links, they don't add to cart, etc. They leave. Pages with high bounce rates indicate a problem with the page. Visitors are either not seeing what they want right away, are confused they have opened the wrong page, or feel a high amount of anxiety, either from a prominent image, a lack of security logos, etc, so, they "bounce away."

Bot    A search engine software "robot" with mathematical programming formulas (see Spider)

Breadcrumbs    The linking navigation visible under the header as the visitor drills down showing where they are located in the site.

Cache    The index of a page as the search engine sees the page. Useful for quick examination of when a page was last crawled (Google) or to find programming or HTML errors on a web page. The Search Engine will show the errors you can't see with out the cache. Look for the Cashed link at the end of the  Search Engine results links.

Call-to-Action    Content or graphics that invites the searcher to do something: click on a link, click on a graphic, click on an image, etc.

Content    The copy you write for your web pages. Content should be written with keywords people use to search for your products or services. Content should be written with call to action benefits to the user incorporated. Content should be written to supply the visitor with all the information they seek. Content should be original and written with the basic rules of spelling and grammar in mind.

Conversions    The ability of a path...when a visitor from a landing page goes to add to cart for example, to accomplish a goal, whether that is to buy a product, sign up for an e-mail. etc.

Crawl    When a search engine spider passes through your website navigation and links.

Filters / Triggers    Mathematical formulas designed to find "spamming/spammy" pages and remove them from the search results. A page with the word kids repeated too many times would trigger a filter. Perhaps if the page reaches a certain density, this filter would then come into play.

Funnel   The path a visitor takes to get to a goal. Such as add to cart, proceed to checkout, fill out shipping address, billing address, purchase product. An abandoned funnel is one where the visitor has bailed out and not completed the goal.

Goals  Places to go or things to do on a website, such as add to cart or sign up for an email, often associated with a funnel.

Google Web Optimizer    A tool offered by Google to test different landing pages. Useful in refining the design of a web page and improving conversions.

Keyword Density    A mathematical formula designed to measure the number of times a keyword is repeated on a page in relation to the rest of the page's content. Useful for determining if a page is "over-optimized" for a particular keyword, which could cause a page to be ranked lower.

Landing page    A webpage designed for visitors to find, open and navigate. Frequently refers to where a paid Ad is directed. Often a category page that ranks naturally in the Search Engines.

Linking Architecture   How your site category and products are sorted and structured. Ideally you would want to place your most important products (the ones that sell the best and rank the best) at the top of your sorting list. By doing so, the search engines will determine that you have made this your most important category or product. This also allows the search engine spider to crawl your site in a drill down manner.

LSI    Latent Semantic Index(ing) - The special mathematic formula developed by document searchers to find information in a document or webpage that is related to the search query keyword. For example search query keyword is "car" but the word does not appear on the page. Instead "auto" appears on the page and the search result is returned regardless of exact keyword match. The system long thought to be used by Google to weed out search marketers attempting to rank in the  Search Engine's by using a keyword with certain frequency.

Meta-description    Or meta-tag description, meta-description="content" - the place in the Admin section of your website web pages that tells the search engine what the page or site is about. See Search Engine Guidelines for more information. This can be used to create free call to action advertising in 155 characters or less. DO NOT stuff with keywords, duplicate the same meta-description for all your pages or avoid leaving blank. Used properly, this can greatly affect your rankings, the # of visitors you get and improve your conversions.

Navigation    The linking "architecture" of your website. The path searchers take to find products on your website. Navigation should be simple and straightforward and always available. Popular websites like Amazon use a tabbed navigation in the header because tabbed navigation looks like a real file system. In other words, it's real obvious the purpose with a quick glance.

Nelson Norms    The enormous word association (or norms) database project developed at the University of S. Florida from 1973-1998 by Douglas Nelson and Cathy McEvoy from an original small norms project created in 1963. Our theory is that this database is thought to be used by Google to develop their LSI based Search Algorithm. The sheer size and that it's tied in with how humans perceive words. The mathematical matrixes are LSI based and are already in place. Despite the overwhelming monstrosity of the database, there are easy ways to use it to develop powerful call to action copy inherently designed to rank well in the Search Engine's and is very effective at creating higher conversion rates.

Organic or natural rankings    Positioning in the  Search Engine's index without the use of paid advertising.

Pageviews    The number of pages a visitor looked at while visiting the site.

Rankings    The position your website or webpage as in regards to a search query with a selected  keyword(s). The higher the ranking, the more visitors to your site. Rankings change with time and fresh content.

Referrals Sites or origins (such as emails) that send traffic to a website. Can be from links from other websites, directories, blogs, etc.

Scan     How most internet users "read" content.

SE    Search Engine

SEO    Search Engine Optimization. The process by which a website is analyzed, reviewed, researched and studied. Thereby a plan is created using searched-for lists of keywords to "optimize" a website to rank highly in the search engines. SEO can be a long and tedious task and requires a great deal of effort on both the part of e-businesscoach and our clients. The results however of such expense and time are well worth the effort.

SERPs    Search Engine Results Pages. The results a searcher sees when they type keywords they've chosen into a search engine. The SERPs pages are your best opportunity to create inviting results that speak to the searcher. Highly important.

Snippet   The subtitle that appears under the title in the SERPs. Search Engine guidelines recommend using your meta-description to describe the page. As with paid Ads, you can use it as an advertisement to draw searchers to your site.

Spamming / spammy    A technique used by search marketers to get a page to rank well by stuffing various aspects and facets of a page with keywords they want the page to rank well with. For example, cramming as many variations of the words "Britany Spears" into the title, meta-description, hidden content on the page, links and so forth simply to get a top ranking. Using an automatically generated script to insert keywords into facets of your web pages. Frowned on by Google.

Spider    A search engine software "robot" with mathematical programming formulas similar to advanced calculus and algebra designed to "crawl" or pass through a website, determine what the website is about, and index the pages of the website in the SE's database.

Traffic    Visitors  who come to a website.