The Unite Glossary of SEM definitions

Do you need to know what something means, have you been bamboozled by someone spouting Search Engine Marketing terms at you that simply mean nothing? Then this Glossary of definitions should help. We try our hardest never to use jargon and always to explain what we mean in plain English

A

Affiliate

A site with related (hopefully) linked to your own site. Sometimes a financial reward is given for the link or for traffic received or revenue generated. There are commercial organisations that have Affiliate Networks that they use to generate income for site owners and for themselves.

Affiliate Network

A network of related sites willing to provide a single site multiple links in return for financial reward.

Algorithm

The brains of the search engine, the algorithm ranks the contents or listings held within the index to ensure that most relevant content is displayed for any given query or search. The algorithms are closely guarded secrets that drive the quality of the search engine response; they are the single largest technical factor in making a search engine unique.

Anchor Text

See: Link Text

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B

Back-links

These are links to your site and an important part of the SEO performance. USM manages link-building programmes as part of its SEO solution.

Balance

This is a founding principal of Equi=Media and all EM Group agencies. We aim to deliver a balanced approach to Search Engine Marketing ensuring that maximum ROI is delivered, as well as meeting your other business objectives.

Bid Capping

Setting a maximum bid price used by Unite Search Marketing when managing client pay per click activity - this is one of the business rules used within the Unite (TM Pending) platform.

Bid Engine

The systems used by search engines to manage the bids for specific terms and keywords, e.g. Google Adwords

Blind Traffic

raffic that is often driven to a site by the result of bad or misleading advertising - essentially traffic that has no interest in your site, products or services. This is one of the headaches that USM can address and thus improve the ROI of your campaign.

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C

Click Through Rate

This is the number of times a link is clicked divided by the number of people that see the link expressed as a percentage. Whilst an important measure, traffic quality should be balanced against volume.

Cloaking

This is the practice of having two sets of content for any given URL. One for the search engine and one for the site visitor or searcher that visits that page. Some search engines have rules against cloaking and might, if found on your site get you banned from their Index. There are exceptions to this rule but you need explicit permission!

Contextual Link

Or Contextual Inventory is where a publisher has content that can be matched to appropriate listings, which are served by the search engine. These text link adverts are sometimes displayed in a panel alongside the matched content or sometimes as direct links within the content. It can be an extension of the text link advertising programmes common to all the leading search engines, or can be a specific programme run by the content publisher.

Conversion Rate

This can be interpreted in many ways - it's unique to you and is essentially the number of visitors to a certain page, divided by the number of people that convert or do what it is you want them to do, such as completing a form, etc. expressed as a percentage.

Cost Per Click

Also known as CPC this is the cost paid for each time a person clicks on a link you have commissioned from their site to yours. Banners or text based advertising can be sold on a CPC basis.

CPM

This is the format of paying for advertising of any sort where you pay based on the number of people that see your advert. It stands for cost per thousand (it an M not a T because the Latin for thousand is a M).

Crawler

This is the tool that search engines use to harvest the content or listings by automatically crawling the web. The crawler (sometimes called a spider or robot) follows links from one page to another and whilst at a page makes a copy of that page and sends it for storage in the search engine index. For example, the one used by Google is called GoogleBot.

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D

Delisting

Pages that have been removed from the index have been 'delisted'. This could happen because of a technical fault or because the site or page has been banned.

Directories

Much like Yellow Pages, a directory is an index, which is compiled by humans and not crawlers, where sites are put in categories. A directory can be searched by clicking on categories or by using a keyword search. DMOZ is a well-known Directory, Yahoo1 started life as a directory.

Doorway Pages

These are pages built solely with the purpose of trying to get ranked well for a specific term in the organic or natural listings of a search engine. The searcher often sees very little content and is quickly pushed to the pages for which the 'doorway' was built. Sometimes Cloaking is used to achieve this. Some search engines have rules against doorway pages when used for cheating, but they can sometimes be used in paid campaigns. Doorway pages are sometimes also called Gateway, Jump and Bridge pages.

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E

EM2-Digital

Our sister agency and part of the Equi=Media. They are specialist in online marketing offering email marketing and online channel development. USM drives high quality traffic to a site; EM2-Digital can ensure that the maximum numbers convert.

Equi=Media

Equi from equilibrium, or balance, the USM and EM2-Digital parent agency. These are the media guys that plan and buy everything from door drops to banners, radio to skyscraper ads be it for branding or direct response purposes.

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F

Feed Management

Some search engines have 'paid inclusion' systems. This allows content to be compiled into a structured file format and directly fed into the index, which is a Trusted Feed. Managing this process is called Feed Management. In SEO terms it also includes optimisation of the content to gain higher rankings for the content. XML is often used as the protocol for such file submissions. This is a USM service.

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I

Index

This is the filing cabinet of the search engine, the place where copies of all the pages that have been crawled are stored. When a query is made, the algorithm will search the index for relevant content and display them to the searcher in listings. In the case of directories this is where all the descriptions or summaries of the web sites are stored.

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K

Keywords

The words that a searcher uses in a query to find specific content. For example, the keywords used for this page could well be 'SEO' and 'Glossary'. Keyword is also used by search marketeers for the words or terms that they hope a page will be found under. They are an essential part of any Search Engine Marketing.

Keyword Stuffing

A practice undertaken by dodgy SEOs… It means loading a page with large number of the same keywords in order to trick the search engine. It's Spam - don't do it, it could result in your site being penalised! See: Spam.

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L

Landing Page

The pages that the searcher arrives at having clicked on a search engine listing.

Link Popularity

The measure of how popular a page is by counting the number of pages link to it (Back-links). It is not a measure of the quality or context of a link, which is a more important factor in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Link Text

This is a description of the words used in any given link. To state the obvious it has to be a text based link. Sometimes also referred to as anchor text.

Listings

The content displayed on a search engine results page in response to a query or search.

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M

Meta Search Engine

A type of search engine that get listings from a number of other search engines, it's works as a search aggregator.

Meta Tags

This is a type of content placed in a web page intended for use by the search engine crawler, the browser or other application and not for the user. If you view the page source you may see meta information towards the top of the page. (Using Microsoft Explorer, View > Page Source).

Meta Description Tag

This tag contains the information that the author wants the search engine to use to describe the page when listed, however, not all search engine use meta descriptions when displaying results.

Meta Keyword Tag

This is a series of words of terms that the author thinks will help the search engine rank the page, not all search engines use this tag.

Meta Robots Tag

This tag is used to give a search engine crawler or robot instructions, such as asking it to or not to index that page. Some search engines ignore these instructions. Some search engines recognise robots.txt files, which can be used as an alternative way of given the crawler instructions.

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O

Optimisation

All SEM activity should be regularly optimised to improve campaign performance. USM has dedicated ‘Optimisers' that work on specific client accounts and manage and optimise campaign performance. Using manual and automated methods and systems such as Unite (TM Pending) the USM proprietary SEM technology platform.

Organic Listings

These are listings that have not been paid for and that the search engine displays because the search engine algorithm deems that they best fit the query that has been made. Search Engine Optimisation is the term used for improving or getting content listed within the organic results of the search engine. Search Engine Marketing includes paid-for search as well as organic or natural search.

Outbound Links

Links on any given page that takes the user to another page. It does not matter if those pages are within the same site or on another site, they are all outbound links.

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P

PageRank

This is the name of the patented calculation method used by Google to give a numerical score or weighting to a page, which is a measurement of its importance. Larry Page first developed PageRank whilst at Stamford University. Larry was a Google founder - good work Larry!

Paid Inclusion

Instead of waiting for a crawler to index your pages, you can simply pay to put your content in the search engine Index. This is called paid inclusion. It does not guarantee that they will be ranked well (See Feed Management for more on Paid Inclusion).

PPC

See: Pay-per-Click.

Paid Listing

This is the term used to describe listings that search engines sell to advertisers, instead of organic or natural listings. This can be done via paid Inclusion or through pay-per-click advertising.

Pay-per-Click

This is the generic term used to describe listings that are paid for each time a person click on the link. A good example would be Google Adwords where advertisers bid for the position that their text based advert is displayed. Each time an ad is clicked, the bid price is paid. Similar systems are used in most search engines; Yahoo! and MSN, etc. It is also sometimes called Paid Inclusion.

Position

See: Rank (well not having a good position would be...)

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Q

Query

A query describes the words that a searcher enters into the Search Engine search box in order to find something.

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R

Rank

This is the relative position a page is displayed on the results pages for a given query. It may come 1st, 2nd or 45th, etc. Do not confuse this with Google PageRank.

Reciprocal Link

This describes a link given to another site in return for one back.

Results Page

Once a query or search terms has been entered into a search engine, the 'Results Page' displays the listings that the search engine has matched to the query. Sometimes called SERPS.

Robots

See: Crawler

Robots.txt

Files used within a web site to either stop a crawler searching the whole site, or certain pages of the site.

ROI

What your SEM or SEO activity should be delivering! USM can help your organisation achieve more Return on Investment.

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S

Search Engine Marketing

Any marketing activity focused on promoting a web site via search engines. It may be organic or natural search (SEO) activity to achieve rank improvement, or paid activity such as pay-per-click.

Search Engine Optimisation

This is the practice of optimising a web site or a web page to achieve improvements in organic or natural rank position. It excludes any form of paid advertising activity.

Search Terms

Same as query, but sometimes also used in SEO to describe the words or phrases by which a given page is intended to be found. Sometimes called Keywords.

SEM

See: Search Engine Marketing

SEO

See: Search Engine Optimisation

SERPs

Search Engine Result Pages or sometimes Panel, See: Search Results.

Spam

A horrid canned meat based product developed during WW2 and forced into the mouths of young children to their utter disgust! In SEO terms, it is also a bad thing. Spam is any Search Engine Optimisation method that a search engine thinks is against its efforts to deliver appropriate content for any given query. Some search engines have specific guidelines for what is and what is not good practice, and failure to observe these rules could results in pages being removed, whole sites being banned or the page rank being penalised. Heavy repetition of keywords or the use of doorway pages are all forms of spamming a search engine.

Spider

See: Crawler

Stop Word

The words that don't matter - e.g. 'it', 'the', 'a'. Search engines ignore them as they add no value to the content from an algorithm point of view. Of course they help the humans...

Submissions

Search engines and directories allow a web site URL to be 'submitted' to the engine or directory for indexing. There is no guarantee that a site will be indexed and included within the listings, or what rank it will be given. Some engines and directories do have Paid Inclusion systems, where in return for a fee, they guarantee to index your site or pages. However, no guarantee is given for rank position.

Swindon

A town in Wiltshire, Home of USM. Originally famous for being picked by Isambard Kingdom Brunel as the home for the engineering works of the Great Western Railway.

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U

Unite

(TM Pending) This is the name of the technology platform that Unite Search Marketing has developed over the last six years to manage all aspect of Search Engine Marketing campaign management, ensuring that our service is both efficient and measurable.

USM

Unite Search Marketing, of course.

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X

XML Feeds

See: Feed Management

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