Bing

An .htaccess, or Hypertext Access, file allows you to take control of your site or a specific directory.

The group of potential customers that you care about most and try to reach with your SEM ads.

Also called “ad blindness,” this describes a phenomenon where site users ignore banner ads or banner-like information (such as navigation menus).

This is an ever-evolving online marketing technique that attempts to pair advertisements with users based on Web-browsing behavior.

It’s a common sales tactic to focus on benefits rather than features. Features are the product’s attributes (for example, this coffee pot features a heat-resistant, gel handle), whereas benefits are what a customer gets out of using the product (the coffee pot’s soft-grip handle repels heat for easy pouring).

Like an auction, this is the amount you’re willing to be charged for a click on your ad. It is usually a “not to exceed” amount, so the cost may actually be quite less than your bid.

Bing Ads is the pay-per-click advertising option for the Bing and Yahoo! search engines.

A broken link is a hyperlink that leads to a page that doesn’t exist or has been deleted or moved, often resulting in a 404 error.

It’s important to gauge how interested a person visiting your site actually is and to cater to people at each point of the buying cycle.

A call to action could include anything from “call us for more information” to “fill out this online form.”

Within the study of computer science, canonicalization refers to the process of converting data with more than one representation into a standardized form.

The percentage of people who clicked an ad in the search results page. Measuring CTR is a common indication of how well ads or keywords are performing.

The action a potential customer takes when selecting a link in your ad, via a mouse-click or touchscreen, for example. The clicked link may take the person to your website, to an app store page, trigger a telephone call from a mobile device or show directions to your location.

Cloaking is a SEO technique that presents content to a search engine spider that’s different from the content that’s visible to the user.

TIn its basic form, CGI refers to the connection between a form on a website and the server.

A CMS is an application that allows non-technical users to edit, publish, modify, and manage a website.

A conversion form is used to generate sales leads for a website.

A desired action that a person takes as a result of clicking your ad. Conversions are most commonly defined as completing a purchase, registering for an event, making a phone call, visiting a store and subscribing to a newsletter.

Also called Cost Per Action, Cost Per Conversion, and Pay Per Action, CPA is a pricing model that only makes an advertiser pay when a specific action has occurred.

A calculation of total cost spent divided by the number of conversions the advertiser received, such as the number of new customers or purchases occurred.

The price an advertiser pays for a click on an ad from a potential customer. Advertisers watch this number closely as they evaluate the effectiveness of their ads.

Did you know that CPM actually doesn’t refer to “cost per million” but cost per thousand?

In pay-per-click advertising, this is the amount an advertiser pays for their ads that were clicked. You control costs by setting budget limits and selecting a narrow group of people to "target" for your ads.

Crawl depth is the degree to which a search engine indexes a site.

Search engine spiders crawl sites for relevant terms and information.

The act of cybersquatting includes when a person registers a domain name with the intent of selling it to its rightful owner rather than using it.

Not to be confused with “dark Web,” “deep Web” refers to the large portion of the World Wide Web that’s not indexed by search engines like Google.

Dayparting is a marketing term inherited by search marketing from broadcast and television programming.

Websites are hosted on servers, usually either on a shared hosting server, a hybrid server, or one dedicated server.

A domain is a subset of the Internet with one shared suffix, often owned by one company, organization, or individual.

Domain age refers to the amount of time since a domain name was first registered by its registrant.

Domain Authority is the overall weight of a domain as a whole.

Many different programming languages, from PHP to JavaScript to Perl to Python, can be considered dynamic languages.

Engagement metrics refer to several types of data sets that measure how potential customers engage with your content.

Exit rate refers to the percentage of users who leave a website after viewing a specific page.

Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, abbreviated XHTML, is the successor to HTML, the language traditionally used to create Web pages.

In PPC advertising, the number of times an ad appears as a result of a search on a search engine.

An internal link directs to a page on the same domain as the domain the link exists on: Basically, it’s a link that points to another page on the same website.

Keyword cannibalization refers to when a webmaster uses the same keyword or key phrase over and over again on multiple pages, which weakens the potential ranking power of all of those pages.

Keyword density is a percentage devised from a simple ratio: the number of times keywords or keyword phrases appear on the page compared to the total amount of words.

Also sometimes referred to as “over-optimizing,” keyword-stuffing is repetitively using keywords on pages so that Google and other search engines will recognize them, even though the content itself may read poorly.

Words or phrases that potential customers use in the search engine, which are the same phrases that advertisers base their ad campaigns upon. When a searcher's keyword matches the ad campaign keyword, the ad is triggered to display.

Depending on the search, sometimes Google will show a small box of factual information on the right side of search results.

The page on your website where searchers arrive after clicking on your ad.

Specific, narrowly focused, and longer keyword phrases are often called long-tail keywords.

Low-value sites with thin content and many ads are sometimes referred to as MFAs, or made-for-advertising sites.

Malicious tagging happens mostly on the social media network Facebook.

More evolved search engines, such as Google, tend to rely heavily on algorithms to evaluate pages.

If your site has been penalized by Google or another major search engine, you may be able to fix issues and then submit a reconsideration request.

A mid-tail keyword aims to balance between two extremes: the highly competitive, high-ranking short-tail keywords and the less competitive, longer, more conversion-driven long-tail keywords.

The process of enhancing an ad’s performance by adjusting aspects of the campaign. A few examples of optimizing might include modifying bids, changing keywords and adding targeting.

Organic traffic refers to traffic that comes to your site directly from organic search and not from paid search or referrals.

Page segmentation refers to when separate parts of a website are treated differently in terms of SEO.

Google looks at the amount and quality of links a site has to determine its importance.

Also known as pay-per-click advertising, this term is synonymous with SEM and paid search. It describes the billing method for this kind of advertising.

A ranking factor is anything that is taken into account by a search engine’s ranking algorithm.

When someone follows a link on a Google results page, they are redirected through a Google-generated URL before they are brought to the page they intend to visit.

A relative link is different from an absolute link, which includes all of the information needed for a server to find a site.

After a marketing campaign, some people may have come to your website and were interested in your product but did not make a purchase.

Return on investment is a measure of how the gains from an investment compare to the cost of the investment.

SERP stands for search engine results page and refers to a list of results obtained by performing a search using a search engine.

Search engines run certain types of programs, or “bots,” that systematically browse the World Wide Web, collecting information about each page they visit and saving a copy for later processing.

A directory is a list of links based on categories and subcategories.

A Web feed, also referred to as a syndication feed, is a popular format for providing users with frequently updated data and content.

An XML sitemap is not a viewable page on a website but a file that contains links to all of the pages on the site.