Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Alexa

Alexa – The web information company

Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users.  The business is now owned by Amazon.com.

Alexa has developed an installed base of millions of toolbars, one of the largest Web crawls and an infrastructure to process and serve massive amounts of data. For users of Alexa’s Toolbar and web site this has resulted in products that have revolutionised Web navigation and intelligence.

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Definitions…

Affiliate marketing is the use by a Web site that sells products of other Web sites, called affiliates, to help market the products. Amazon.com, the book seller, created the first large-scale affiliate program and hundreds of other companies have followed since.

Alternatively…

A system of advertising in which site A agrees to feature buttons from site B, and site A gets a percentage of any sales generated for site B.

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 marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimisation, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising.

Search Term Analysis – Explanation Please!

Search Term Analysis (STA) is a term often used by search marketing professionals and webmasters. STA is integral to any successful search marketing campaign and allows you to select key terms for each website page. Betwixt clients will often enquire as to the meaning of the term and what exactly are the benefits are of conducting a thorough STA.

Before building your website and creating content for web pages you need to know which Search Term(s) (keywords and phrases) people are entering into Search Engines? Also it is imperative to know how many people are searching for a particular Keyword or Phrase?

Once you know what it is they are typing in to the search engines you can write the correct copy on your site to match what it is they are looking for on their terms. This strategy creates a constant flow of highly targeted visitors.

Depending on the objective of the campaign, search terms can be selected according to their target market (eg UK or US) and popularity in terms of searches performed and size of market.

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Ad Views (Impressions)

Ad Views (Impressions)

An instance where a server serves a web page containing an ad is referred to as an ad view. An ad view is distinct from an ad click, where a visitor clicks a hyperlinked advert to activate a link to a different page or website.

Ad views are also referred to as impressions. An ad view is an advertising metric (standard of measure) that refers to the number of times an advertisement such as a web banner or text ad has been downloaded and presumably viewed.

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – AdCenter

AdCenter: Microsoft’s cost per click ad network.

Microsoft adCenter is a collection of tools and information that you can use to place advertisements for your business on the Web. Ads that you create with adCenter can appear on Live Search results pages, or on MSN-affiliated websites with related content.

The placement and ranking of your ads online are determined by several factors, including search keywords entered by the user and the type of content displayed on participating websites. Create your adCenter account, define your target market, and set an ad budget.

Microsoft search advertising makes your search advertising campaign easy to manage, with simple-to-use in-depth campaign analysis; intelligent targeting based on location, gender, or day; and access to up-to-the-minute research.

While it has a number of excellent features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still growing compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft’s limited market share and program immaturity many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great online advertising opportunity.

See: AdCenter – sign up for an account
Microsoft AdLabs – view many of the free search marketing tools Microsoft offers.

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Absolute Link

Definition
Hyperlinks that include the complete URL, which is the domain name, pathnames (if used), and file name. 

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.

Example absolute link

<a href=”http://www.betwixtmarketing.co.uk/services.htm“>Services</a>

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Above the Fold

Each week we will provide useful information on a particular search marketing term. It’s probably going to be easier to work through alphabetically, thus for week one we begin with the term – Above the Fold.

Above the fold is a graphic design concept that refers to the location of an important news story or a visually appealing photograph on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper.

In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling -”Above the scroll“, a concept in web design referring to location of an item near the top of a web page, which can thus be viewed in a browser without scrolling.

Some web marketers have called this “above the crease” referring to the way in which newspapers of yesteryear were folded and creased.