Are you a new-entry to the digital marketing industry? Do you feel complex in understand terms and jargons in digital marketing? This digital marketing glossary can be your personal dictionary that uncovers from A to Z related to digital marketing.
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Digital Marketing Glossary: Terms & Definitions to Know
This list of online marketing glossary is not for beginners. But also, it will be more helpful for seasonal webmasters. It includes digital marketing terms, acronyms, numeric codes, and so on. We will also keep updating this with any new terms that dominate SEO, blogging and digital marketing areas. Don’t miss to bookmark this list of digital marketing glossary that you may need it anytime.
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404 – The HTTP Error to notify that the specific page is not found on a website. You will get this error either the page is removed or moved and the URL was not changed accordingly or URL typed incorrectly.
301 – HTTP error that denotes that the requested page has been moved permanently. It is a permanent redirect to take you to the redirected pages. 301 redirects are best to use on websites to implement redirects.
302 – Temporary redirection code to notify that the requested page has been moved temporarily to another URL.
Adwords – the online advertising platform of Google that allows webmasters to display advertisements across Google products and services to online users.
A
Adsense – A stream of Google that approves online publishers to display relevant advertisements on their web pages. Against the audience action like views, or clicks, the website owner will earn a commission from Google.
Ahrefs – The premium SEO tool to explore content strategies, keywords, perform competitor analysis, backlinks analysis, etc. to further optimize your web pages for better rankings.
Alexa rank – One of the ranking algorithms based on the traffic to any particular website. Lower the rank denotes higher the traffic will be.
Algorithm – The set of rules or criteria based on which search engines rank any website. Usually, we refer to the Google search algorithm which keeps on changing.
Alt text – The ALT tag or ALT text is the HTML code provided to the image to describe it. You will find it while placing your mouse cursor on the image.
Affiliate marketing – Promoting or advertising any products or services (that you don’t own) for a commission against its sales or leads generated by you. There are plenty of affiliate programs available in the market.
Analytics – The data collection and analysis process to understand the performance results and the returns of the inputs. Basically, it includes traffic to the website, ranking keywords, traffic sources, etc.
Anchor text – The clickable text or word of any link. It must be relevant to tell about the content of the link to both the users and search engines.
Article spinning – The process of creating multiple unique articles from a single seed content, using alternative words or sentence structure. Article spinning is not highly recommended for better SEO.
Automation – Automation is nothing but automatic the manual tasks using some tools. In SEO or digital marketing, bots are used to automate signup forms filling, content submission, etc.
B
Backlinks – Links refers to other websites linking to your domain.
Blog – The online platform where people can share, tweet, discuss any topics candidly.
Blogger outreach – The process of contact other bloggers, building relationships and promoting brand, products or services among others.
Breadcrumbs – The navigational aid used to notify the hierarchy or structure of the particular page. You can find it appearing in the permalink of the results in Google search engine results page.
Broken links – The links that are pointing to a page that is removed or no longer exists and returns 404 errors.
Bounce rate – The percentage of the visitors landing on your page and leaving not visiting any other pages on your website further.
C
Caches – Stores static versions of dynamic pages to serve for similar requests in the future faster. It reduces server loading time, bandwidth and hence, increases your website loading time.
Call-To-Action (CTA) – Buttons with triggering words that trigger users to take specific actions, by clicking on it.
Canonical – The HTML element to denote the primary pages if there are multiple pages with the same content.
Citation – Mention of your business information like name or address on other web pages or domains.
Click through rates – The percentage of the users seeing the ad to how many clicks happened. For an instant, if 100 times the ads were shown but only 30 clicks happened, then the click-through rate is 30%.
Competitor analysis – Refers to gathering and analysis your competitor’s data like ranking keywords, backlinks, content strategy, citations, etc. using SEO tools.
Cookies – The text file that web browsers or websites use to store the data like login credentials or sessions to track your activity on the site.
Content Management System, (CMS) – The user-friendly system to create, edit, or update any forms of content like text, image, and video, online.
Conversion rates – It is the ratio between the number of visitors and how many of those does your desired goal of action like buying your products or services. If 100 users visiting your page, and only 20 buys your product, then the conversion rate is 20%.
Cost Per Click (CPC) – The internet advertising model to drive traffic. And the advertiser pays the publisher when the adverts are clicked.
Cost Per View (CPV) – Similar to CPC, where the advertisers pay per view for their advertisements, to the publishers. Mostly, we use it in YouTube marketing.
D
Directory submissions – Nothing but mentioning our domain or business information in the directory pages to gain popularity on the web. It is one of the links building strategies.
Disavow – Disavowing bad backlinks refers to identifying spam backlinks and submitting on Google disavow tool to intimate Google not to consider those links while indexing.
Display ads – Displaying advertisements on web pages about general things or announcing brand messages to the site visitors either in the form of text, videos, images, flash, etc.
Dofollow – The link attribute of the backlinks that can be followed by search engines bots and spiders.
Domain Authority – Refers to the search engine ranking score by Moz to denote how well the site is to rank on search engine results page. It is based on the number of backlinks, the quality of the root domain, and so on.
Domain Name – The unique comprises of letters, numerical values, and special characters to identify a website or a domain.
E
Email Marketing – An effective marketing method by delivering potential and relevant emails to the target audience email inboxes. It can either be promotional offers, informative, alert notifications about expiry of something, etc.
Email Templates – The specific format of email content to pitch that appeals email receiver to go through and take your desired goal of action.
Event Blogs – Blogs that talk about specific festivals or events and will be active for that specified time duration. Like Christmas or New Year related blogs promoting relevant products and services.
External Links – Links placing in your pages that are pointing to any other domain or pages.
F
Facebook marketing – Running advertisements on Facebook platform attracting a specific set of audience or followers based on various factors.
Favicon – It is the small icon of a website that appears when the particular site is opened in the browser tabs.
Focus keyword – Focus keyword is the primary keyword around which the page or site content talks about.
G
Google Bot – The search crawlers that are developed by Google to spider or crawls and indexes the web pages.
Google Dance – The state of which a website ranking on Google is fluctuating rather being stable in a single position. It usually happens for new websites, or after link building campaigns.
Google Ranking – The position that any website holds in the Google search engine results page for specific queries or keyword search.
Guest Post – The phenomena of contributing content to other published on other sites or blogs with necessary approval from the owner.
H
Hashtags – Tags especially used to tag content topics on social media platforms. Using which, users can easily surf through the desired content on particular topics that are tagged in.
Header – Top portion of a page that can be stored as the default format for all your pages in the website, optionally.
Heading tags – The tags to create headings with different hierarchy levels from H1 to H6. H1 is the top important tag and others follow consequently in a top-down hierarchy.
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) – The programming language to create websites and online pages.
I
Image optimization – To make your website loading faster, compressing or reducing the size of the images without compromising its quality is image optimization.
Impressions – When your web page or advertisement appears for the user’s view in search engine results page against specific search query or on social media platforms for tag searches.
Inbound marketing – The marketing model to drive in the potential visitors or customers rather pushing a brand outward onto prospects to generate leads or customers.
Indexation – If Google visits your specific page and indexing to add it to Google index’s of the web.
Internal links – Links that you are placing internally among your different pages on your website.
K
Keywords – The word or a phrase or a search term for which you will be optimizing your web pages to rank for. And, this is the term your target audience will be using on search engines to search for.
Keyword Density – It is the percentage of presence of keyword to the overall content word count. For an instant, if a content has 100 words with 3 keywords in it, then keyword density is 3%.
Keyword Stuffing – This is the case of excessively dumping your keywords in the content just to increase the keyword density.
L
Landing page – The specific landing page wherein you wanted your readers or customers to land on first. Landing pages can be your impressive commercial or sales page having to trigger call-to-action buttons or redirection to other commercial pages.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – Indexing the content based on the words relevancy to understand the text better. For an instant, Search engines know that the word Dock, Launch Pad, iTunes, are related to Apple product Mac not the apple fruit.
Leads – The curated potential audience in the sales funnel who can be converted easily as a client.
Link Building – The process of connecting with other website pages through links, providing more information on the topic and by which, attracting more audience.
Linking Domains – The links you have from domains that are pointing to your website.
M
Meta title – The title of the webpage that appears in the search engine results page and taskbar.
Meta description – The description of the page content that usually available in the search engine results page for the users to understand what the page is about and click-through.
Moz – The popular tool that made SEO, inbound marketing, linking building, content marketing, and competitor analysis, easier.
Mobile Responsiveness – The quality of a website or webpage on how responsive it is on mobile devices or different device screens like tablets, etc. Basically, themes have a major impact on deciding the mobile responsiveness of your website.
N
Nofollow – The link attribute or tags that are included to any links intimating search engines not to follow this link while indexing.
Noindex – The tag used in robots.txt to tell search engines not index the page or particular sections of the page.
Ninja outreach – The exclusive tool for blogger outreach and influencer marketing to streamline your marketing approaches and automate lead generation.
Niche – The specific topic or market that you promote, write about, or target. For an instant, travel, food, fashion, etc. are various niches.
Negative SEO – The practice of using black hat techniques SEO for quicker results or intentionally harming competitor’s websites. It includes malicious activities like website hacking, building bulk spammy backlinks, etc.
O
On-page SEO – The search engine optimization techniques that are carried out by making changes to your websites.
Off-page SEO – The search engine optimization techniques that are applied outside the websites like link building, promoting on social networks to boost the website performance.
Organic traffic – The real traffic from the search engine results page when users search with some specific search queries that are relevant to your web pages, not through paid resources.
Outbound links – The link on a page that points to any other domain or web page. A single page can have multiple outbound links.
P
Prospects – The potential lead that shows interest or provided verbal confirmation on your products or services, almost nearing to close the deal.
Pay Per Click (PPC) – The paid advertising campaign to derive targeted traffic to your website, where advertisers pay per user’s click to the publishers.
Penalty – Issued by the search engines for breaking the algorithmic flow or guidelines. It is the negative impact on your website’s ranking based on the search engine updates or manual review.
Plug-ins – The readily available file or a bit of code to add more functionality to your website or CMS
Pop up – the ads or forms usually a small window that appears suddenly on your screens against your mouse navigation, scrolling, etc.
Page Authority – The metric developed by MOZ to understand the capability of a specific page to rank in search engines.
Plagiarism – The bad practice of taking someone’s content and duplicating it on your web pages.
Profile creation – A link building technique by creating your business profile on other websites like forums, communities, etc.
Private Blog Networks (PBN) – The network of authoritative websites built solely to generate links to the commercial pages to improve the ranking of such money making posts.
PHP – Hypertext Pre-processor, the widely used open-source programming language for web development.
Q
Quora – The popular platform to ask questions and provide answers. The best place to connect with people who share or gains knowledge on your relevant topic.
Quality backlinks – The backlinks that link to your webpage with the proper anchor text, pointing from any authority domain having a similar topic discussion.
R
Reciprocal links – If any website is pointing to your website, then favoring that website with a link back, refers to link exchange or reciprocal link.
Redirect – Diverting or redirecting a user from one page to another for specific reasons.
Referral traffic – The traffic driven from different sources like social networks, communities, a referral from other websites, etc. are the referral traffic.
Remarketing – By means of emails, display ads, targeting potential customers repeatedly compelling them to make a purchase or take action of their interest. It is nothing but following up users or reminding, again and again, the users to come back to you.
Robots.txt – The text file that is added to the root of your website with instructions to tell search engines which page to index and not to.
Rank Tracking – the practice of tracking the ranking positions of your web pages in the search engines for specific target keywords.
Rich Snippet – The HTML tags to mark up specific business information like reviews, address, contact number, working hours, recipes, displaying directly in the search engine results.
S
Search engine Optimization (SEO) – The process of optimizing your website or out of it to improve its ranking in search engines results page and hence, driving free, organic traffic.
SEM – Marketing your products or services to the target audience using search engines or paid advertisements.
SMM – Practicing various marketing activities on social media platforms.
SERP – The page of results that appears after performing a search in the search engines with specific keywords or phrase or queries.
Sessions – The duration or time period a user spent on your web pages during the visit. If a stay is for 30 minutes, then it is calculated as 1 session.
Sitelinks – The list of links of the related inner page that appears under specific results in SERP.
Site speed – How faster your website loads define the site loading speed.
Social Signals – The metric that determines the popularity of any content on the social platforms based on the shares, likes, comments, discussions.
Social Bookmarking – A type of link building by bookmarking your website on any social bookmarking sites. Hence, search engines consider this bookmarking as a quality backlink.
Silo Structure – A technique to organize your website pages and posts in a structured manner for easy navigation and indexation with relevancy.
Spider – The robot or algorithmic software that crawls the internet pages and index data.
Subscribers – The users subscribing to your site for emails, RSS feeds, or following social profiles.
Split testing – testing different versions of web pages to examine which performs better.
T
Target Audience – The specific set of people showing curiosity in your brand, products or services or content.
Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) – It’s weight used to calculate how important a term or word to a document in a corpus of related documents.
Tracking code – A piece of code used (that is added to your website) by Google to track your website users and their behaviors.
Traffic – The number of visitors to your website.
Traffic Driving – performing marketing activities to increase the volume of traffic flow to your website.
U
Unique visitors – The first time visitors on your website from the search engine’s organic search results.
Uniform Resource Locator (URL) – The specific address of any web page on the Internet
User Interface (UI) – The space or interface of your site or app that user interacts
User Experience (UX) – The overall experience that a user has while browsing or navigating through your website.
User-Generated Content – Users creating content on your website either via comments, creating a forum topic, etc.
V
Voice Search – Online users using voice command to perform internet search in the search engines.
Video marketing – Promoting your brand, products or services through video streams to attract more potential readers.
W
White-hat SEO – The SEO practice that stays in line with the search engine algorithms, improving your search engine rankings
Web hosting – The service that hosts your website on its server space allowing your users to access it anytime.
Webmaster tools – Google or Bing webmaster tools to know more information, statistics and performance details of your website.
WordPress – The leading content management system to build amazing websites with more responsive themes and plugins for added functionalities.
Web 2.0 – The 2nd generation of the web where any user can create, tweak, edit, share content and interacts more.
X
(XML) Extensible Markup Language – A markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding files and documents. It is designed to be both machine-readable and human-readable.
XML sitemap – List of pages created in an XML format telling search engines to find and index easier.
Y
Yoast – The WordPress SEO plug-in that evaluates your page based on every on-page factor rate it and provides suggestions to fix the issues to optimize your page for better ranking.
Yelp – Yelp is the locality-based business directory. For any businesses that targets particular location must register its business information in Yelp.
Final Words – Digital Marketing Glossary
Hope this compilation would be more helpful while you are seeking for definitions of any digital marketing. That’s particularly being an online webmaster or digital marketer. For newbies who are dying to start their career in digital marketing can have it handy. All the terms I have mentioned here are often used. If you wish to include any other terms that I have missed, let me know in the comments section. We will consider and add it to the list during our next update.
Which plugin you used to create this type of glossary……
Alizay,
Thanks for checking out this digital marketing glossary. By the way, we didn’t use any specific plug-in to present this glossary. Posted like every other regular post on this blog, with necessary formatting.