Glossary

A

A9
Search experience for e-commerce applications. A subsidiary of Amazon.com.

ABMs
Automated Bid Managers

About.com
Formerly known as The Mining Company , About is a guide based information portal. Online: http://www.about.com

Above the Fold
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.

Absolute Link
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.

Accessibility
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 Ffash) accessible websites tend to have better search engine rankings than inaccessible websites.

ACH
Automated Clearing House Network

ACSS
Aural Cascading Style Sheets

Ad Blocking
The blocking of Web advertisements, typically the image in graphical Web advertisements.

Ad Clicks
Number of times users click on an ad banner.

Ad Space
The space on a Web page available for advertisements.

Ad Views (Impressions)
Number of times an ad banner is downloaded and presumably seen by visitors. If the same ad appears on multiple pages simultaneously, this statistic may understate the number of ad impressions, due to browser caching. Corresponds to net impressions in traditional media. There is currently no way of knowing if an ad was actually loaded. Most servers record an ad as served even if it was not.

AdCenter
Microsoft's cost per click ad network.

Add URL
(see Search Engine Submission)

Address
A unique identifier for a computer or site online, usually a URL for a web site or marked with an @ for an email address. Literally, it is how your computer finds a location on the information highway.

AdSense
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

Advertising Network
A network representing many Web sites in selling advertising, allowing advertising buyers to reach broad audiences relatively easily through run-of-category and run-of-network buys.

AdWords
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. You can apply for AdWords Select at http://adwords.google.com

Aeiwi
Indexes sites according groupings of keywords.

AERT
Techniques for Accessibility and Evaluation and Repair Tools

Affiliate
The publisher/salesperson in an affiliate marketing relationship.

Affiliate Directory
A categorized listing of affiliate programs.

Affiliate Forum
An online community where visitors may read and post topics related to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Fraud
Bogus activity generated by an affiliate in an attempt to generate illegitimate, unearned revenue.

Affiliate 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.

Affiliate Merchant
The advertiser in an affiliate marketing relationship.

Affiliate Network
A value-added intermediary providing services, including aggregation, for affiliate merchants and affiliates.

Affiliate Software
Software that, at a minimum, provides tracking and reporting of commission-triggering actions (sales, registrations, or clicks) from affiliate links.

Age
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.

Agent Name
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'.

AJ
Ask Jeeves (a search engine)

AJAX
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.

Alexa
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.

Algorithm
Operational programming rules that determine how a search engine indexes content and displays the results to its users.

Alive Web Directory
Human edited web directory of quality, family-friendly, and spam-free sites organized via a comprehensive category structure.

AllTheWeb
"Powered by Yahoo, you may find AllTheWeb a lighter, more customizable and pleasant "pure search" experience than you get at Yahoo itself. The focus is on web search, but news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP search are also offered."

Alt Tag
"The 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. "

Alt Text
Short form for Alternative Text, it is an <img> property that is used as a placeholder when the image is loading [and for usability purposes]. In the case of image links, it seems to have weight akin to anchor text.

Alta Vista
A popular search engine. One of the first search engines origanally owned by Digital now owned by Yahoo. Online: http://www.altavista.com, http://www.av.com

Anchor
"A word, phrase or graphic image, in hypertext, it is the object that is highlighted, underlined or "clickable" which links to another site."

Anchor Text
"This is the actual text part of a link (usually underlined). Used by search engines as an important ranking factor. Google pays particular attention to the text used in a hyperlink and associates the keywords contained in the anchor text to the page being linked to. Also see "Google bombing.""

Animated GIF
A graphic in the GIF89a file format that creates the effect of animation by rotating through a series of static images.

Announce site to search engines
"Announce a website to the engines by adding a link to it from another site; that is, one that's already indexed (by the search engines). Beware! Search engine submission services which promise higher visibility in the SERPS are total a rip-off."

Announcing
"See "submitting" "

Anonymous FTP
An option in FTP that allows users to download files without having to establish and account.

AOL
America Online (a search engine)

AOL Search
Use AOL web search to find content on the web including pictures, audio, video, local resources, and news headlines.

Apache
An open source web server software.

API
"Abbreviation for Application Program Interface. An API is a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications; it determines how a service is invoked through the application. "

Applet
An application program written in Java which allows viewing of simple animation on web pages.

Application Service Provider
Provider of applications/services that are distributed through a network to many customers in exchange for a stream of smaller payments as opposed to one fixed, upfront price.

Argus Clearinghouse
If you're interested in what the Net has to offer, the Clearinghouse can help.

ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency)
The U.S. Department of Defense agency that, in conjunction with leading universities, created ARPAnet, the precursor of the internet.

ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange

Ask Jeeves
A meta search engine that allows natural english quires. You can ask a question as your search. Online: http://www.ask.com

ASP
An acronym for Active Server Pages, a Microsoft-invented, proprietary programming language for building dynamic web sites. Also an acronym for Application Service Provider, a hosted service available via the Internet.

ASPX
Microsoft Active Server Page Framework

ATF
Above the Fold

ATW
AlltheWeb (a search engine)

AUD
Australia Dollars (3 Letter Currency Code)

Auditor
Third-party company that tracks, counts and verifies ad-banner requests or verifies a Web site's ad reporting system.

Automated Submitting
Using automated software such as WebPosition Gold or an Application Service Provider (ASP) such as Microsoft b-central's Submit-It service to submit your web pages to the search engines. This tactic is frowned upon by the search engines. Indeed, some search engines such as AltaVista have completely automated submissions by requiring the user to re-key in a one-time use submission code that is displayed on the submission page as a graphic.

Autoresponder
A program that sends an automatic form response to incoming emails.

AV
AltaVista (a search engine)

Avatar
A digital representation of a user in a virtual reality site.

Ayna
Arabic search engine and Internet directory .