All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better. See also: Google AdSense heat map - shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
- Browse Related Terms: Above the Fold, Beyond The Banner, Call To Action, Content Integration, Demographics, Geo-Targeting, Landing Page, Negative Keyword, Pay-per-post (PPP), Share of Voice, Target Audience, trademark
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
It specifies a
- transfer protocol
- domain name
- and often a file name
A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links. Example absolute link <a href="http://seobook.com/folder/filename.html">Cool Stuff</a> Example relative link <a href="../folder/filename.html">Cool Stuff</a>
- Browse Related Terms: .htaccess, 301, 302, Absolute Link, Canonical URL, CSS, Hijacking, Meta Refresh, Redirect, Relative Link, Scraper sites, SSI
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Accessibility is the practice of making websites usable by disabled people - especially blind people. Because search engines are essentially blind (ie they can't see pictures or use Flash) accessible websites tend to have better search engine rankings than inaccessible websites.
Also listed in:
- All > Technology > GIS
- All > Technology > Telecommunications
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Microsoft's cost per click ad network. While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft's limited marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity. See also: AdCenter - sign up for an account Microsoft AdLabs - view many of the free search marketing tools Microsoft offers.
- Browse Related Terms: AdCenter, Analytics, API, Automated Bid Management Software, GAP (Google Advertising Professional), Google, Google Analytics, Google Keyword Tool, Google Pack, Google Trends, Googleware, Keyword Research Tools, Machine-generated, Overture Keyword Selector Tool, Portal Site, Supplemental Pages, Traffic Estimator, Wordtracker
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
A property of the relationship between words in a search engine (or directory) query. Search engines often allow users to specify that words should be next to one another or somewhere near one another in the web pages searched.
- Browse Related Terms: Adjacency, False Drop, keyword, Keyword Funnel, Keyword Phrase, Meta Search, Meta Search Engine, Positioning, Positioning Technique, Query Refinement, registration, Relevancy Algorithm, Reputation Management, Search Term, SERP, Usage Data
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages. It's also a way for website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.
Google's contextual advertising network. Publishers large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google. AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue stream which will help some publishers establish a baseline for the value of their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is the trade off for automating ad sales. AdSense ad auction formats include cost per click - advertisers are only charged when ads are clicked on CPM - advertisers are charged a certain amount per ad impression. Advertisers can target sites based on keyword, category, or demographic information. AdSense ad formats include text graphic animated graphics videos In some cases I have seen ads which got a 2 or 3% click through rate (CTR), while sites that are optimized for maximum CTR (through aggressive ad integration) can obtain as high as a 50 or 60% CTR depending on how niche their site is how commercially oriented their site is the relevancy and depth of advertisers in their vertical It is also worth pointing out that if you are too aggressive in monetizing your site before it has built up adequate authority your site may never gain enough authority to become highly profitable. Depending on your vertical your most efficient monetization model may be any of the following AdSense affiliate marketing direct ad sales selling your own products and services a mixture of the above See also: Google AdSense program - sign up as an ad publisher Google AdSense heat map - shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning. Google AdWords - buy ads on Google search and / or contextually relevant web pages.
- Browse Related Terms: AdSense, AdWords, Bidding, Contextual Advertising, Cost Per Lead (CPL), CPA, CPC, Earnings Per Click, Google Traffic Estimator, Pay-for-performance, Pay-per-click (PPC), PPC
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Google's advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google's ads are keyword targeted and sold on a cost per click basis in an auction which factors in ad clickthrough rate as well as max bid. Google is looking into expanding their ad network to include video ads, demographic targeting, affiliate ads, radio ads, and traditional print ads. AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords. Rather than doing that here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources. See also: Google AdWords - sign up for an advertiser account Google Advertising Professional Program - program for qualifying as an AdWords expert Google AdWords Learning Center - text and multimedia educational modules. Contains quizzes related to each section. AdWords Keyword Tool - shows related keywords, advertiser competition, and relative search volume estimates. Google Traffic Estimator - estimates bid prices and search volumes for keywords. Free PPC tips [PDF] - my ebook offering free pay per click advice. Andrew Goodman's Google AdWords Handbook - costs roughly $75, but is well worth it
Google's CPC (Cost Per Click) based text advertising. AdWords takes clickthrough rate into consideration in addition to advertiser?s bid to determine the ad?s relative position within the paid search results. Google applies such a weighting factor in order to feature those paid search results that more popular and thus presumably more relevant and useful. Google has also started taking into account the quality of the landing page and applying a quality score to the landing pages.
- Browse Related Terms: AdSense, AdWords, Bidding, Contextual Advertising, Cost Per Lead (CPL), CPA, CPC, Earnings Per Click, Google Traffic Estimator, Pay-for-performance, Pay-per-click (PPC), PPC
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying independent agents on a cost per action (CPA) basis. Affiliates only get paid if visitors complete an action. Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for wasting money on instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage via other's affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value. Some power affiliates make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year because they are heavily focused on automation and/or tap large traffic streams. Typically niche affiliate sites make more per unit effort than overtly broad ones because they are easier to focus (and thus have a higher conversion rate). Selling a conversion is typically harder than selling a click (like AdSense does, for instance). Search engines are increasingly looking to remove the noise low quality thin affiliate sites ad to the search results through the use of algorithms which detect thin affiliate sites and duplicate content; manual review; and, implementation of landing page quality scores on their paid ads. See also: Commission Junction - probably the largest affiliate network Linkshare - another large affiliate network Performics - another large affiliate network Azoogle Ads - ad offer network focused on high margin / high profit verticals CPA Empire - similar to AzoogleAds Amazon Associates - Amazon's affiliate program Clickbank - an affiliate network for selling electronic products and information
- Browse Related Terms: Affiliate Marketing, Alexa, AllTheWeb, Bid management tool, Copyright, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Landing Page Quality Scores, Overture, Relevancy, ROI, SEM, The Tragedy of the Commons, Yahoo! Search Marketing
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents. Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home pages. Some search engines may also try to classify sites to understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites or reference sites that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages and try to classify them based on how frequently they change. See also: Google Patent 20050071741: Information retrieval based on historical data - mentions that document age, link age, link bursts, and link churn may be used to help score the relevancy of a document.
- Browse Related Terms: Age, Authorities, Authority, Co-citation, Compacted Information, Expert Document, Gateway Page, Hilltop, Hubs, Kleinberg, Jon, On-theme, Taxonomy, Teoma, Topic-Sensitive PageRank
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
This is the name of the Crawler/spider that is currently visiting a page. Spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalogue websites on the internet. When a spider indexes a particular website, this is known as 'being spidered'.
- Browse Related Terms: Agent Name, applet, Bot, Client, Crawler, GoogleBot, Hallway page, Politeness Window, Pop-up, Robot, Spider, Standards compliant, user agent, Web Crawler
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
The process of sending search engine spiders to a tailored page, yet directing your visitors to what you want them to see. This is done using server side includes (or other dynamic content techniques). SSI, for example, can be used to deliver different content to the client depending on the value of HTTP_USER_AGENT. Most normal browser software packages have a user agent string which starts with "Mozilla" (coined from Mosaic and Godzilla).
By switching on the value of HTTP_USER_AGENT (a process known as agent detection), different pages can be presented at the same URL, so that normal visitors will never see the page submitted to search engines (and vice versa).
In practise this is somewhat simplistic. Some search engines pretend to be "plain mozilla" browsers to prevent use of agent name delivery. Effective use of agent name delivery can be very difficult, and may not even work.
How do you spot agent name delivery at work? This is quite difficult, as the owners of web pages using agent name delivery can control what you see! You may be able to guess that a page is using this technique if it appears to be indexed incorrectly or the title or description don't match the page you see, but this could also have been achieved by switching pages after the relevant search engine has indexed it. If you really want to see the search engines' tailored version of a page, write a program (e.g. a Perl script) to retrieve the URL with HTTP_USER_AGENT set to each of the strings used by the search engine spiders. If agent name delivery is in use, one or more of the retrieved pages will be different to the others!
See also hidden text and IP delivery.
- Browse Related Terms: Agent Name Delivery, Cgi-bin, Cloaking, Hijacking of Websites, IP Delivery, Navigation bar (nav bar), Pull-down list, Robots.txt, Spider trap, Spidering, Stealth Script, Stop character
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load.
Asynchronous JavaScript And XML Allows you to create a more user-friendly web application by working behind the scenes (inside a web browser) by making web pages feel more responsive. In short, it allows JavaScript scripts to send data requests and receive responses without having to reload the entire page.
- Browse Related Terms: 200, 404, AJAX, Click-down Ad or Click-within Ad, Custom error page, Error page, Fair Use, Flash Page, HTTP 301 Status Code Definition, HTTP 302 Status Code Definition, HTTP 400 Status Code Definition, HTTP 401 Status Code Definition, HTTP 403 Status Code Definition, HTTP 404 Status Code Definition, HTTP 410 Status Code Definition, HTTP 500 Status Code Definition, HTTP 501 Status Code Definition, Interstitial Ad, Open Source, Token
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic. Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free. See also Alexa.com
- Browse Related Terms: Affiliate Marketing, Alexa, AllTheWeb, Bid management tool, Copyright, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Landing Page Quality Scores, Overture, Relevancy, ROI, SEM, The Tragedy of the Commons, Yahoo! Search Marketing
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
An algorithm is an operational programming rule that determine how a search engine indexes content and displays the results to its users.
- Browse Related Terms: Algorithm, Mod_rewrite, Resubmission, Rewrite, URL Rewrite
Also listed in:
- All > Law > E-Discovery
- All > Science > Weather
- All > Technology > Parallel Computing > Grid Computing
- All > Technology > Programming > Perl
- All > Technology > Security > Biometrics
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features. See also: AllTheWeb
- Browse Related Terms: Affiliate Marketing, Alexa, AllTheWeb, Bid management tool, Copyright, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Landing Page Quality Scores, Overture, Relevancy, ROI, SEM, The Tragedy of the Commons, Yahoo! Search Marketing
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
The ALT attribute is designed to be an alternative text description (provide a text equivalent) for images. Benefits
Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object.
Example usage
<img src="http://www.seobook.com/images/whammy.gif" height="140" width="120" alt="Press Your Luck Whammy." />
See also
- Browse Related Terms: Alt Attribute, Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, heading, Heading tag, Hidden keywords, Hidden Text, Information Architecture, Keyword prominence, Noframes tag, Optimization, Render, Title, Title tag
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Alt tags alternate text associated with a web page graphic that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the graphic. Alt tags should convey what the graphic is for or about and contain good relevant keywords. Alt tags also make web pages more accessible to the disabled. For example, a vision-impaired user may have a web browser that reads aloud the text and alt tags on a page. (For those familiar with HTML, "alt" isn't actually a tag by itself but an attribute to the "img" tag.). Note that the value of Alt tags for SEO have been discounted over time by the search engines to the point that now it is of minimal value.
- Browse Related Terms: Alt Attribute, Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, heading, Heading tag, Hidden keywords, Hidden Text, Information Architecture, Keyword prominence, Noframes tag, Optimization, Render, Title, Title tag
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare. See also: AltaVista
- Browse Related Terms: AltaVista, Everflux, Flux, Google Dance, link, Miserable Failure, Placement, Ranking, Update
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
The largest internet retailing website. Amazon.com is rich in consumer generated media. Amazon also owns a number of other popular websites, including IMDB and Alexa. See also: Amazon.com - official site
- Browse Related Terms: Amazon.com, AOL, Channels, Channel listings, DMOZ, Dreamweaver, Inlinks, Portal, Yahoo!, Zeal - Volunteer Built Web Directory
All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing
Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site.
Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not.
See also:
- Google Analytics - Google's free analytics program
- Conversion Ruler - a simple and cheap web based analytic tool
- ClickTracks - downloadable and web based analytics software
- Browse Related Terms: AdCenter, Analytics, API, Automated Bid Management Software, GAP (Google Advertising Professional), Google, Google Analytics, Google Keyword Tool, Google Pack, Google Trends, Googleware, Keyword Research Tools, Machine-generated, Overture Keyword Selector Tool, Portal Site, Supplemental Pages, Traffic Estimator, Wordtracker