Suggest a new term / correction to an existing term. In exchange we will place your name and a link to your site below your suggestion / correction.
A
About
www.about.com
Formerly known as The Mining Company, About is a large Internet directory.
 
above the fold
With reference to the top part of a newspaper, the term is used on the Net to describe the top part of the page that the user can see without scrolling down.
acquisition
A term used in Internet marketing to describe the point at which a visitor becomes a qualified lead / customer. Generally this is the point where the visitor
· buys a product or
· provides contact details and indicates an interest in the product or
· subscribes to a newsletter.
acquisition cost
Total cost of an advertising / marketing campaign divided by the number of visitors (visitor acquisition cost) or divided by the number of customers (customer acquisition cost). Monitoring of acquisition cost is an important factor in effective PPC advertising.
adjacency
Referring to the relationship between words, particularly words used in a search engine query. Search engines typically assign higher value to pages where the search terms appear next to one another (as in the query) than to pages where the search terms are separated by other words.
adjacent searching
see proximity
ad broker
An Internet advertising specialist. Ad brokers act as middlemen between web site owners with advertising space to sell and advertisers.
ad inventory
The number of potential page views a site has available for advertising.
AdSense
Google's contextual based ad program.
Added - January 2, 2004
by Aaron Wall of www.search-marketing.info
advanced search
An option at most of the major search engines that allow users to specify certain search criteria. For example, users can elect to see only documents added to the database after a certain date, documents in specific languages etc.
AdWords
Google's PPC program.
affiliate program / affiliate link
Affiliate programs allow other people to sell your products on a commission basis. All your affiliates really do is place link to your site. When a visitor arrives at your site, your affiliate program "makes a note" of the site that referred him. If a visitor buys something and the referring site belongs to one of your affiliates, you pay that affiliate either a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount - according to your agreement.
agent name delivery
Different pages can be presented at the same URL. Different pages are delivered based on the agent name requesting the page. Typically, agent names starting with "Mozilla" indicate regular browsers while search engine spiders use names like Googlebot, Scooter etc. Agent Name Delivery is not a very effective form of cloaking though. Search engines can (and do) disguise spiders as "Mozilla" agents.
Also see cloaking, IP delivery.
algorithm
Algorithms are sets of rules according to which search engines rank web pages. Figuring out the algorithms is a major part of SEO. The thinking is that if you understand how they calculate relevance, you can make specific pages on your site super relevant for specific search terms. For more on algorithms and SEO in general, please refer to the Search Engine Yearbook.
algorithm-based software
Data mining software typically used for statistical analysis.
algorithmic search
A term often used in the financial community to distinguish between algorithm-based search engines like Google and payment-driven search engines like Overture. The term is slightly confusing. All search engines - including Overture - has some form of algorithm working behind the scenes.
AliWeb
www.aliweb.com
An Internet directory.
allintitle
A special search command for Google. A search for allintitle:widget would only return sites that has the word "widget" in the title.
allinurl
A special search command for Google. A search for allinurl:widget would only return sites that has the word "widget" in the URL.
AllTheWeb
www.alltheweb.com
A very large search engine, gaining in stature and popularity. At this stage (2002) it seems to be the top contender for Google's throne. In a study by Pandecta Magazine, conducted in the 4th quarter of 2002, AllTheWeb was estimated to have the second largest database (after Google). It also did well in relevancy test: 3rd after Google and Wisenut. It lost out in the speed test though. It came in last. For more details on that study, AllTheWeb and the other search engines worth knowing about, please refer to the Search Engine Yearbook.
AltaVista
 www.altavista.com
Pioneering search engine purchased by Overture in February of 2003.
Last edited - Feb 21, 2003
by Mike Valentine of http://www.searchengineoptimism.com
For a detailed look at AltaVista and the other major search engines, please refer to the Search Engine Yearbook.
alt attribute
More commonly known as the "alt tag". The alt attribute is an HTML element specified within an image tag. The syntax is:
<IMG SRC="main-logo.gif" ALT="Pandecta Logo">
The text in the alt attribute, "Pandecta Logo" in this example, will be displayed in the place of the image "main-logo.gif" while the image loads or if the user has images turned off. In most browsers the text also appears as a "tool tip" when the user hovers the mouse pointer over the image after it has loaded.
Creating an alt attribute for images is not required, but recommended since the alt text is factored into the algorithms of most search engines.
alt tag
Common name (erroneous) for the alt attribute.
alt text
Text specified in the alt attribute.
anchor text
Also called link text, referring to the text that appears in a text link. For example, if I link to the Pandecta Magazine web site like this: Click here, then "Click here" is the anchor text for the link. Some search engines - notably Google - take anchor text into account when ranking sites. It is therefore beneficial to have keywords in the anchor text of links pointing to your site.
applet
A small application, usually in Java, usually for use on the Web.
ArchitextSpider
The name of the Excite search engine's spider.
Ask Jeeves
 www.ask.com
Previously knows as "Ask Jeeves".
www.askjeeves.com
A fairly popular search engine. Initially its claim to fame was letting you to enter plain text questions as opposed to only keywords. Ask Jeeves receives search results from Teoma, Overture and ODP.
ASP
Active Server Pages. A server-side scripting language used to deliver dynamic content.
attribute
A term used in the HTML language to refer to display settings. For example, the "bgcolor" attribute inside the <body> tag specifies the background color of a page.
audience reach
In the context of search engines, the term refers to the percentage of the total Internet population that use a particular search engine during a given month. Together with search hours, audience reach is an important measure when calculating the popularity of the different search engines.
authority
Jon Kleinberg first used the term authority to describe documents that are often cited in other documents from the same topic area. In the context of web searching, an authority is a site that has many inbound links - preferably from sites on the same topic.
Also see hub.
automated submission
The practice of machine-based, automatic submission of URLs to search engines, usually with the use of submission software or submission services.
Also see mass submission. For more on automated submission, mass submission and submission software (and their dangers), please refer to the Search Engine Yearbook.
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