Glossary of Internet Terms

Affiliate Marketing: Using other web sites or e-mail lists to sell your product or service is called affiliate marketing. You pay the web site or owner of the e-mail list for each sale.

AJAX: AJAX refers to a wide group of web technologies that support dynamic web sites and allow web pages to query backend databases for information that seamlessly displays on the web site.

Analytics: Analytics, also called metrics, takes raw data gathered about the traffic on a web site and analyzes it to provide information and insights that can be used to improve the site. The raw data alone is not considered analytics. Raw data may be viewed on your server's log files.

Banner Ad: A banner ad is a graphic advertisement placed on a web site that links to another web site when it is clicked on by the viewer. These can be expensive and are often not very effective.

Blog: A sort of an online conversation or a diary, the word blog derives from weB Log. Blogs tend to focus around a single topic and allow interested visitors to post their comments. It is usually words but may include images, videos and music.

Bot: Short for robot, a bot automatically indexes information on web sites and individual pages for a search engine. A bot may also be called a spider or crawler because it "crawls" around the web following hyperlinks. Google uses GoogleBot, Yahoo has Slurp, and Microsoft has MSNBot.

Bounce Rate: A visitor who leaves a web site without stopping to view other pages on the site "bounces". This is an important web statistic to track. A bounce rate of 40 percent or less is generally very good.

Brochure Website: A brochure web site is a very basic, generally static web site. The name derives from the fact that it tends to look more like an online brochure than a full-blown web site. It has few pages and perhaps a simple link for sending an e-mail. Many web sites begin as a brochure web site.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR): The percentage of viewers who react to an ad or link by clicking on it, as compared to the number of times it is seen, is called the click-through-rate.

Content Management Solution (CMS): Also known as CRM, content resource management, CMS allows the user to access and update portions of their site without knowing HTML or web site development/authoring software.

Content Resource Management (CRM): See CMS, content management system.

Conversion Rate: Whenever a visitor to a web site makes a purchase, sends an email or interacts with the site in some way, the visitor has been "converted to a desired action." The conversion rate is the number of converted visits out of the number of total visits. This is an important statistic to know and varies by the type of site and industry.

Domain Name: The unique, registered name of a web site is the domain name. For example, wininets.com is the domain name for Winterhoff Internet Solutions. A good domain name should be easy to type, remember and say. It may be purchased from a domain registration agent authorized by ICANN.

Dynamic Website: A web site that displays different information created by the choices each visitor makes while on the site is termed "dynamic". This type of site contains a database of information that is called up by the visitor and, therefore, highly interactive to use. A dynamic site also may change from visit to visit or even during a visit.

GIF: Graphic Interchange Format, known as gif for short, is a file format for images. A GIF is generally used for images such as logos that have a small number of colors. See also png and jpg or jpeg.

Hit: Each time a file is downloaded from a web site, it is measured as a hit. Hits may be a downloaded page, pdf, image or software.

Hosting Company: A company that stores and hosts websites is called a hosting company.

Inbound Links: A link from another web site that points to your site is an inbound link. Inbound, or incoming, links are highly desirable since they improve ranking by search engines. Inbound links that are relevant to the site help, however irrelevant links can hurt your page rank.

JPG: Also called a jpeg, is a file format for an image. It is most often used on photographs and other images with many colors that blend together. It stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. See also png and gif.

Keywords: The words or phrases that a person uses to find information are keywords. Search engine ranking is enhanced when a site uses the same keywords that it's customers use in their searches.

Landing Page: The web page a viewer "lands" on after clicking on a link or advertisement is known as a landing page. When it is well designed, the landing page can increase response rates.

Link Authority: Each time an outside web site provides a link to your web site, or a page within your site, it elevates how a search engine ranks the site. While search engines each have different criteria for ranking their results, more link authorities generally mean a higher ranking on results pages.

Links: Sometimes called hyperlinks, this is either text or an image that can be clicked on to take you to another location, either within the same site or to a different site.

Meta Tags: Invisible to the visitor is HTML code that provides information about the web page including keywords, a description and author are called meta tags. They are less critical for search engine optimization than they use to be.

Organic Search: Also called a natural search, the ranking of results in an organic search are derived by the search engine, not by paying for a position. A well-built web site is very cost-effective way to get listed, unlike paid placement.

Page Titles: A page title is the name of the page displayed in the top of your web browser and in a search engine listing. The title is defined in the HTML code and is very easy to improve for better search results.

PageRank (PR): PageRank is a patented method of ranking web sites used by Google. A scale of 1-10 is used to rate web sites. Much of the PageRank comes from the number and quality of links to a site. PageRank can be viewed on the Google Toolbar or on sites like What's My Page Rank.

Pageview: When one page on a site completely loads, the site is recorded as having one page view. If a visitor views multiple pages during a visit, each fully loaded page is counted as a pageview. A pageview can also be called an impression because the visitor sees the information displayed on the page, regardless of whether or not they act on it.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Paying for advertising on some else's web site only when your advertisement is clicked on by the visitor is called Pay-Per-Click. It is not based on the number of pageviews or impressions. The cost for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is usually higher than impressions but it only charges for visitors who are interested enough to click on your ad. A well-known example is Google Adwords.

PNG: Portable Network Graphics is another file format for images. It was created as an alternative to a gif file. While it compresses better, it does not support animation.

Reciprocal Linking: Linking to someone else's web site in return for them linking to you is known as reciprocal linking. This practice use to improve search engine rankings, but now too many reciprocal links can lower ranking.

Registrar: A registrar is in charge of official records. There are several types of registrars for the Internet. The most common is a domain name registrar, which is a company authorized to register domain names.

Search Engine: A search engine refers to software used to index information on web sites and individual pages so it can be easily found. Some of the most commonly used search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to a variety of methods for improving traffic to a web site. It can include search engine optimization (SEO), which improves how search engines rank a web site and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Improving your ranking on the results page of searches performed by a search engine is called optimization. Some ways to do this include code optimization (tweaking code), being CSS compliant, the structuring of content, and using meta tags.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The page produced by a search engine that displays results. The goal is always to rank as high as possible in the list of results. A results page shows the page title, a short description and contains a link to the page.

Shopping cart: A function of a website that allows a visitor to select products for purchase.

Spam: Spam is basically junk. It often refers to unsolicited e-mail but may mean repeated or unnecessary comments to a blog or discussion forum.

SSL Certificate: A Secure Sockets Layer, called SSL for short, allows the transfer of data via the Internet in a secure manner. It is critical for banking and e-commerce. An SSL certificate file is given by an issuing authority to provide an encryption key so you can create secure communication between a browser and a specific server.

Static Website: A web site that is not connected to a database is considered static because all visitors see the same information in the same way.

URL: Short for Uniform Resource Locator, a URL is a distinct string of characters that leads to a web site or another resource on the Internet. A domain name is often part of a URL, but a URL address does not have to have a domain name associated with it.

Unique Visitor: The unique visitor statistic tracks the number of different visitors to a web site during a set period of time. This means visiting a site daily for a month only counts as one unique visitor for that month. This statistic, as well as the total number of visitors, can be seen on your server's log files or through an analytics program like Google Analytics or Mint.

Visit: Each time a person comes to a site, it is counted as one visit, regardless of the number of pageviews.

Web Application: Web application is a broad term used to describe any web-based software designed to run through a web browser. Web applications includes shopping carts, dynamic web sites (not static sites), content management systems, MySpace, WebMail and much more.

Web Authoring Software: Web authoring software refers to applications that allow a non-programmer to build a static web site that is then uploaded to a server. Dreamweaver and GoLive are examples of web authoring software.

Web Browser: A web browser is software that allows a computer user to access the Internet. Internet Explorer is the top browser with about 67% of computer users. It is followed by Firefox (20%), Safari (10%) and all others. Web browsers often interpret code differently, so it is important to build and test a web site for more than one web browser.

Web Server: There are two main operating systems for web servers: Linux (Apache) or Windows (IIS). A Linux-based server is cheaper to install and run, but a Windows-based system is offers better support. Both have some limitations. The selection of an operating system should be influenced by the technology in which a web site is written.

Web Developer: A web developer creates web sites. Development may be done by a single professional or a team of professionals who deal with the overall look (design) functionality (programming), optimization, organization (architecture) and content (writing and images) of a web site. Large, complex web projects require more time, skills and knowledge to complete.

Whois: Whois is the name of an online function that searches records to obtain technical data and contact information for domain names.