Digital Marketing and Web Design Glossary

301 redirect refers to a code sent by a website’s hosting server to a browser. In practice, it means you’ll get redirected to a new page when you input the old URL.

For website administrators, 301 redirects shouldn’t be used in excess, but can be a good way to deliver relevant pages to users when the original page has been removed or the content has been merged into another page.

From an SEO perspective, the old page’s ranking will transfer to the new page.

A 404 error is a website status code indicating that a webpage cannot be found on the server. This is typically because the page has been removed or moved, but the old URL hasn’t been redirected to the new location.

404 errors should be monitored for and removed when found, but it’s often tough to catch all of them on large or older websites. Designing a 404 page that apologizes to the user in an amusing way and provides them with some resources to help them find what they’re looking for can be a great way not to lose credibility on your site.

A/B Testing refers to controlled marketing experiments done to test different approaches to marketing campaigns. You’ll see it used most often in areas such as email marketing, with things like different headlines, or different offers. Or web design, where the copy and layout of a page will be tested in two different ways.

Within the experiment, you’ll split the audience who sees each, then monitor the results.

Using this method, you’re able to collect data on what approaches work best to get a desired outcome, such as email clicks, online purchases or newsletter subscriptions.

Originally, Above the Fold referred to print newspapers, and described everything on the top half of the front page.

In website design, Above the Fold refers to any elements that are visible at the top of a webpage, usually the site’s homepage, without having to scroll down.

Optimizing the design of your homepage above the fold can be important to make a good first impression and clarify the intent of your website for the user. However, on some mobile-first or app-based sites, other considerations present themselves, since scrolling for the majority of a page’s content is more expected on these platforms.

Accessibility as it refers to websites is the idea of ensuring those with disabilities can still interact with your website without significant restrictions.

There are numerous best practices to ensure accessibility, and they have evolved in recent years. Staying compliant with accessibility guidelines is both good for your potential user base and will aid your site’s rankings, since these considerations are starting to inform how algorithms view and rank sites.

AdSense is Google’s platform for website monetization. Users can make money on their site by offering ad space, and advertisers can position themselves on relevant sites by creating multimedia ads that will be displayed throughout Google’s ad network.

Affiliate marketing is a program wherein third-party individuals or websites (affiliates) generate traffic or leads to a particular product, company or service. These affiliates then get revenue from leads or sales generated by their efforts.

This is common in influencer marketing, for instance, where an image or video will link to certain products, and the influencer will receive a small portion of any sales made from the link they provide. Certain industries will have opt-in programs as well, such as photography sites that provide affiliate links to the gear they use in exchange for revenue from the companies who benefit.

Agile Development - sometimes simply called Agile - is a project management style that emphasizes quick, iterative changes to a project to maintain flexibility in the project’s parameters and deliverables.

This is often juxtaposed with Waterfall Development, wherein an entire project is completed in stages before any launch happens. Testing and iterating in Agile often happens during development, with the initial launch happening much earlier in the process to get quicker feedback.

In general, an algorithm is a set of instructions that is assigned a specific analytical task. It most often applies to mathematics and computer science.

For websites and digital marketers, algorithms refer to the many programs designed to analyze and assess either a website, individual digital elements, or user behavior on a site. Based on this data, the algorithm could then be designed to rank a website, list a web element as a search result, or suggest content to a user, such as on Youtube or Facebook.

Alt Text is used to describe images on your website. This relates mainly to accessibility issues on websites. If images on your site fail to load, the alt text can still be displayed that will provide visual context for the user.

Analytics in digital marketing can refer to any type of analysis of data collected from a digital source. Trends and insights from this data can inform business decisions.

Google Analytics is a specific analytical platform, designed to monitor and analyze web traffic. However, there are hundreds of different analytical tools available online, and thousands of types of analysis. Structuring your analysis to focus on the most important data points is key in avoiding confusion.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s used most frequently to refer to how two pieces of software or databases can “talk” to one another. Any plug-in you’ve used for a website or integration between a software application and an internal database would be an example of two interfaces interacting with one another.

Audience Segmentation is the process of breaking a large audience into smaller chunks, or segments. The purpose for this is to match products, services and messages with the audience that will be most receptive to it.

18-year-old men and 70-year-old women may not want the same services you offer, for example, but if they’re both in your customer base, you’d want to separate them so that you can send them information that will be relevant to them.

Some software tools and services will even boast individual segmentation levels, with audiences of one. This refers to content that is delivered to users based on their past web behavior, so that what one person sees is unique to them.

B2B stands for Business to Business. It refers to businesses whose services or products are intended for other businesses, rather than direct to individual customers (B2C). Some industries, such as financial services, can be both B2B and B2C depending on the type of services being offered.

B2C stands for Business to Customer, and refers to products or services sold directly to individuals who are the users of the product. Major retailers for things like clothing and hobby goods are examples of B2C businesses.

Back end development refers to work that’s done on server-side software or applications. This means it’s not visible on a live website. A lot of logical parameters, database structuring, and website architecture would be considered back-end work.

A backlink is linked text on a website that sends the user to another website. You’ll often see sources cited in articles via backlinks to another source.

Backlinks are extremely important for website authority, because you are aligning yourself with related websites and sources within your industry. It’s just as important to work toward obtaining links from other sites to yours, which signals to search engines that your website is useful and trustworthy. Many strategies exist for maximizing a site’s backlink profile.

In digital marketing, a benchmark is a specific metric that you compare results to. A benchmark can relate to impressions, clicks, open rate, sales, or many other metrics. An established threshold is then used to determine success or failure of a particular campaign or piece of content. Benchmarks for an email campaign, for example, might be 20% open rate, 2% click through rate, and 0.5% sales rate on a product that the email is highlighting. 

The success or failure of the campaign would be measured against these numbers. Ideally, you’re developing benchmarks based on past campaign results in order to create personalized benchmarks for your business that allow you to compare across marketing channels.

Black Hat Tactics refer to a range of practices that increase a website’s ranking with search engines that are explicitly against the rules established by those engines.

One common example is keyword stuffing, which refers to spamming particular keywords on a page in order to try to rank for those topics. This sacrifices the user experience, since the page is not informational or useful, and is merely attempting to trick search engines.

In general, some black hat tactics may increase a site’s ranking temporarily, but will inevitably damage the site’s reputation and effectiveness long-term.

A regularly updated website or portion of a website with informational or entertaining articles on various topics. Blogs can exist on personal websites all the way up to multinational organizations that specialize in a particular subject.

The percentage of users on your website that leave the site without taking a single action. While no website has a 0% bounce rate, a high bounce can indicate that your site - or a particular page on a site - is not delivering the information that the user expected to see when they visited it.

Specialized marketing organization that generally works with smaller teams than larger agencies. The primary benefit of working with such an organization is that they create unique marketing plans catered to your organization and industry in ways that are more personalized than traditional agencies can often provide. Boutique agencies are generally less well-known, however, and due to their size maintain more limited client portfolios.

Website design group that creates custom, more personalized websites for their clients. Many organizations choose to work with boutique agencies because it’s easier to develop an ongoing relationship with them and craft a unique website that separates a company from their competition. Conversely, some boutique agencies are small enough that they cannot provide comprehensive web and marketing services, but rather specialize in a small subset of project types.

A brand is collectively, the terms, symbols and products that differentiate one product, service or company from another. Companies will often be referred to as brands.

Branded products or content refers to output from the company that is explicitly marketed as being that brand's product or service. Coca-Cola is a famous example of using the brand to market a product.

Brand awareness is the measurement of how well-known your brand and company is within a given market. Brand awareness can be broken into sub-categories based on age, gender, geographic region and other variables.

Many marketing campaigns are designed not simply to sell products or services, but to increase the public’s awareness of the brand as a whole, which will lead to long-term word-of-mouth and sales opportunities.

Brand Identity is a collection of aspects that make up your company and how it engages with customers. Your company’s messaging, tone and values are all aspects of brand identity.

Brand Positioning refers to the specific value your product or service brings to a client or customer. Companies will attempt to create unique brand positioning to differentiate themselves from their competition.

An example might be positioning your car company as an elite, high-class brand, naturally targeted to more affluent customers, or a reliable, low-budget option, which would bring different customers and marketing considerations with it.

Breadcrumbs provide a navigation trail for users on a website. If they’re in a particular sub-section of the website, breadcrumbs allow them to see how they got there and what previous, high-level topic pages they could view as well that link to their current page.

Having a clear breadcrumb structure for a website is important, since it relates to user experience and avoids confusing visitors to your site.

A Buyer Persona, or Customer Persona, is a hypothetical customer of your brand that is representative of a specific type of customer that your product or service appeals to. In creating a fictionalized version of these ideal customers, it allows companies to create ads and other content that is specifically targeted at these persona types, and is thus more likely to perform well.

A Call to Action is any prompt on a website or app asking the user to take a specific action, often in the form of a clickable button. “Buy Now” is a common example, though calls to action don’t always have to involve a purchase. Signing up for a newsletter or downloading a free eBook can be valuable CTAs that increase user trust and also obtain contact information of interested visitors.

CAN-SPAM is an acronym for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing, referring to a legislative act from 2003. It’s a law that sets national standards for commercial emails. In order for mass emails to be legal, they must comply with CAN-SPAM guidelines.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. A long acronym, but one that simply refers to a basic test that humans can answer quite simply but computers struggle to solve. It is used as a security precaution on many sites.

Content that is specifically curated for the person receiving it. The use of tracking and analytical tools can give you information on user behavior that can allow for this level of personalized advertising and content.

The number of times an ad is clicked compared to the number of impressions it has. Stated differently, clickthrough rate is the ratio of views to clicks. Monitoring clickthrough rates on digital ad campaigns and email sends, for example, can lead to insights that will improve future campaigns.

A comprehensive overview of a company’s major competitors, specifically as it relates to their brand identity, website, advertising and other marketing efforts. Any communication channel could be considered during a competitor analysis, including paid ads, blogs and videos, print ads, website design, social media presence and more.

A fillable area on a website that obtains user information. Among many other uses, contact forms can be used to ask a question, request follow-up communication, or book a product demo with a company sales representative.

Refers to any software that helps to create and maintain content on a website. Popular content management systems include Wordpress, Hubspot and Drupal. Proprietary content management systems can also be created to a company’s personalized specifications.

Content Marketing is the holistic process of planning, creating and distributing content across media platforms. Content marketing can include, but isn’t limited to, blogs, videos, podcasts, print publications, apps and more.

Successful completion of a web-based task, as defined by whoever is tracking for the conversion. Typical conversions are things like signing up for a newsletter, the sale of a particular product, or clicking on an ad.

The ratio of conversions for an ad campaign compared to the total number of views or interactions with that ad. A conversion can be defined in several different ways, but is often related to the sale of a product or service.

In web terms, cookies are small chunks of data placed on our computer by websites when you visit them. These data chunks are generally harmless, but can be used to track user information and “remember” you when you revisit a website. They’re important for tracking user data on a website and making changes to improve the user experience.

Cost Per Acquisition first involves creating a target action (e.g. purchasing a product), then calculates how much money is being spent in advertising dollars for one of these actions to be completed. Reducing CPA in your marketing channels, and comparing types of ads to see which is more effective, can be a useful way to reduce unnecessary costs.

A calculation of how much each ad click costs in a given ad campaign. CPC can be affected by the ad itself, or by its competitive environment. If an ad is targeted at a high-volume search term, for example, more companies may be bidding for ads related to that search, thus driving up the price.

Cost per lead is a model wherein companies pay a third-party service to provide leads for their business. This may be on an ad hoc basis or in a subscription model, with varying rates for different volumes and types of leads.

An acronym that stands for Cost Per Thousand. The number most often refers to the number of impressions an ad receives. This could be on a video channel (television or streaming), social media, banner display ad, or other marketing channel.

In web terms, crawling refers to minimally invasive programs that scan webpages and entire websites to catalog their content. Websites should be crawlable and easily interpreted by these programs so that your site is properly represented on search engines like Google and Bing.

Stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is utilized in website design. CSS is used to establish visual parameters for coded elements of a website that are written in other coding languages, such as HTML or XML. Stated more plainly, CSS primarily relates to how your website looks. Many of the layout and graphical elements on sites are designed using CSS parameters.

A Customer Journey is the path a customer takes through various engagements with a company and its content and services. This is often visualized as a map or other infographic for marketers to be able to see the stages of engagement of a company’s customers. This allows marketers to create ads and content for specific stages in this journey.

Customer Relationship Management refers to software tools that help to collect, maintain and parse user databases and related information. The most elaborate CRM systems include numerous integrated marketing options that will interface with a company’s database. Popular CRM systems include Salesforce, Hubspot and ServiceTitan.

Refers to any form of communication that uses the internet or other forms of digital communication. This can include numerous marketing channels across a broad array of platforms, software tools, and personal devices.

A tag applied to a hyperlink on a website to indicate to search engines that the destination link is one of quality. Dofollow links can be a great way to build your website’s authority with search engines, since they indicate that many other websites trust yours for information related to a specific topic.

Domain Authority is an aggregate score for your website that calculates your website’s ranking and likelihood of appearing in other searches. It was first developed by the SEO company Moz, though other analytical software tools have since developed their own versions of the metric. 

Domain Authority is not a standardized metric as defined by search engines, but can be a reasonable gauge of overall website health and ranking.

A Domain Name is a web address, or URL, that points to a specific website or resource. Various providers license or sell domain names, and companies generally own the rights to their unique domain.

Duplicate Content is much like it says, text or elements on the internet that are duplicated elsewhere. Duplicate content within your own website should be monitored and adjusted as needed. If the content is duplicated elsewhere on the internet, search engines will attempt to determine which is the original source, though it’s often best to try to avoid this issue when possible.

Any consumer good or service where the transaction takes place online. Some sites, such as Amazon, are almost exclusively dedicated to e-Commerce.

An electronic book, often available on a website as a downloadable PDF or other easily readable format.

eBooks can be great ways to provide value for website visitors while also obtaining contact information of those who have frequented your site and sought information from you.

Email Bounces are emails that don’t deliver. This can be due to several potential reasons, including deleted email addresses, those that are typed incorrectly, inboxes that aren’t monitored and are full, unable to accept new messages, or those with strict filters that block certain message types.

Email Marketing is an umbrella term to refer to the many different types of emails that can be sent as part of a company or individual’s marketing outreach. The planning, creation, execution, tracking and analysis of these sends is included in the concept.

A measurement of how involved your audience is, either holistically or for an individual ad or ad campaign. Depending on the marketing channel and ad being analyzed, a variety of metrics can be considered to determine engagement rate. It is used most frequently to analyze social media marketing.

Linked text on your website that links to another domain. External links can provide informational value for those reading your site, and also signal to search engines which external sites have content that is related to yours.

The Featured Snippet is a short-form answer to a search engine query that is displayed at or near the top of the page. The search engine attempts to respond to the query and present a succinct answer within the search results themselves, before linking to the webpage that the answer came from.

Crafting web content that aims to be showcased in the featured snippet can be a valuable way of generating traffic for your website.

Refers to any website work where the end result is seen by users of the website. This is in contrast to back end development, which is the underlying site infrastructure and code that isn’t seen by users of your site.

Refers to both the front end (what the user sees on a website) and back end (processing, data storage, etc.) of a website. Full stack developers are those who work in design environments for both front- and back-end projects.

The GDPR generally refers to a law adopted by the European Union (EU) that is related to personal privacies and human rights. It’s often invoked in regard to personal data that is collected by businesses, regulating their usage of this data. The law was adopted in 2016 and went into effect in 2018.

Making sure your data privacy and sharing policies are compliant with GDPR regulations is an important step for businesses that manage personal information.

A free, browser-based software that allows users to link their website to the Google Analytics (GA) platform. The tool then gives users information about users and traffic to their website including, but not limited to, total visitors and visits, individual pages visited, what site users entered your website from, and demographic information on users such as age and geographic region.

The most recent version of Google Analytics is GA4, replacing the previous version, Universal Analytics. Having GA set up for your business is an easy and important step to gathering useful data on your website’s effectiveness.

A business listing that appears in Google searches for your business. This listing can include several types of information, such as the business’s address, customer reviews, pictures, company description, phone number or other contact information, and ads or announcements about the company.

Having your Google Business page set up and regularly updating and maintaining it is an important step in making sure your company ranks for relevant searches.

Google Search Console (GSC) is an analytical tool provided by Google that records search data related to a linked website. As opposed to Google Analytics, which largely analyzes traffic once it’s on your site, GSC provides data on search results that provide impressions and click throughs to your site.

Search Console is also a tool that allows you to monitor pages on your site that have been indexed in Google’s system, and request indexing of individual pages. This can also be done on a sitewide level by submitting a sitemap to Google through the GSC system. The tool also provides information on possible errors or warnings related to site usability.

Blogs written by a third-party organization or individual for a website on a specific topic. Guest blogs usually come with the expectation that the writer’s organization is linked and/or mentioned within the article or author biography. This provides a passive benefit for the writer to promote their efforts elsewhere, while also providing relevant information for the site’s readers.

Depending on the policies of the publishing site, the blogs may be subject to editorial review.

Graphical User Interface, or GUI, is what allows users to engage with a website intuitively, with visual representations of the underlying coded elements.

A semantic HTML tag that denotes a webpage’s main subject. This is sometimes referred to as the page’s title, but in coding terminology, is different from the Title tag, which is the title that will appear on a browser tab. An H1 subject will only appear on the page itself.

An analytical tool that monitors traffic to your website and produces a color-coded “heat” map of user behavior on a site. Areas that are scrolled and clicked more will show up as hotter than others.

This allows you to see how people interact with your site design, and make iterative improvements that generate more engagement with important site elements.

In the context of web design, the Hero area (sometimes used as “Hero Image” as well) refers to the primary spread on a webpage, usually the site’s homepage, at or near the top of the screen and generally just below the navigation menu.

Your hero area should be the most visually prominent area of the page, and also have the most immediate, actionable information for the user to your site.

Hick’s Law is a psychological principle that, in a marketing and web design context, relates to the number of options presented to a user. The more options a user is given, the longer it will take them to make a decision. Therefore, best practices in web design, for instance, include minimizing clutter and non-essential options from major pages, in order to focus user attention on those items you consider most important.

Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, is a coding language for items displayed in a web browser. HTML is the underlying coding language behind a lot of what you see on the internet.

Importantly, HTML often doesn’t operate alone to describe web elements. Complimentary languages such as CSS are often used to define the visual attributes, while HTML defines overarching site structure and metadata.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines web standards for many common coding languages and specifications. HTML5 - Hypertext Markup Language 5 - is the most recent version of the HTML coding language, which is used to structure web-based content.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, or HTTPS, indicates the use of specific encryption on web browsers. It is used by numerous websites and is considered a best practice for encrypting your site against certain types of malicious attacks.

You can see whether or not a site is using HTTPS by viewing the full URL of a webpage, which is often either http:// or https:// with the latter using the encryption.

An approach to web-based marketing that emphasizes attracting people to your site, and its products and services, through informational content that is searched and shared.

This is in juxtaposition to paid marketing, which pays money to present ads and similar placements in order to draw people to your site. In an inbound marketing model, organic search traffic is the primary driver of traffic to many key pages.

Infographics are images displayed on web browsers that contain visualizations of data or information in ways that aim to aid comprehension of the information they contain.

Infographics can be a great way to educate your audience without resorting to visually uninteresting text blurbs. This is particularly true when a graphic may help to explain a vital piece of data.

Linked text or images on a website that link to other pages on the same website.

Creating logical internal links to related content is important, because it helps search engines relate the various types of content on your site. Websites with a lot of content should have a defined internal linking strategy to help support major topics they’d like to rank for in searches.

JS, or Javascript, is a programming language used on numerous websites. Most sites you visit incorporate JS in some way to define the behavior of the site when a user takes particular actions.

jQuery is a Javascript (JS) library. It’s designed to streamline usage of JS elements on websites and how they interact with other coding languages and site functions.

Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are metrics used to measure the success or failure of a marketing campaign. Ideally, your KPIs are established before the launch of a campaign, so that you are tracking data both before and after the campaign’s launch.

The exact KPIs used in a campaign will vary depending on the goals of the campaign and the marketing channels used.

Keyword is a bit of a misnomer, because it can refer to a word or entire phrase that appears in web searches. 

However, in either case, it refers to a word or phrase representing a specific search term and idea. Websites will build strategies to rank for particular keywords that are closely related to their products or services, in order to generate more traffic and leads.

Keyword stuffing is a “black hat” SEO technique, wherein sites will “stuff” a webpage with words on a topic they’d like to rank for, but without concern for the usability, accuracy or informational value of the page.

This practice is frowned upon by search engines and can damage your search rankings if you engage in it.

Generally refers to pages on a website designed with one specific purpose in mind, usually related to capturing a lead or sale.

Best practices for landing pages include minimizing ancillary information so that there is only one, prominent option for action by a user. This helps focus their attention and can lead to increased lead generation.

In marketing, a lead is a prospective customer. Not all leads are equally promising, and not all engagement types are the same that signify a potential lead. Any engagement with your company or website, though, indicates a potential lead.

The act of producing prospective customers for a business. Lead generation tools run the digital gamut, and include elements on websites, paid ads, social media posts and word-of-mouth campaigns.

Once a prospective customer is in your database and can be contacted in some way, lead nurturing refers to the communications provided to that person in order to guide them further along the path toward your products or services.

A classic lead nurturing technique is via email marketing, wherein a series of emails will be sent that are intended to inform the person about your brand and increase their interest in trust in utilizing your products or services.

Lifetime Value (LTV) is a calculation of how much a new customer will be worth to your company over their entire lifetime.

This calculation can alter other calculations, such as the acceptable cost of acquiring a new customer. The initial value of that customer may be too low to justify a particular cost, but their LTV could justify the advertising cost to acquire them.

A phrase used in search engines that is often a long phrase and refers to a very specific search query.

Long tail keywords often don’t have high volume, but if you can create content for relevant long tail keywords that relate to your brand’s products and website, the traffic you get from these searches can be very valuable.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that are designed to aid in marketing efforts. ChatGPT is the most well-known of these in recent years, but hundreds of tools exist that, among other tasks, help to predict consumer behavior and improve ad quality for a specific audience.

Software and processes that allow marketing functions to be run without constant manual input. For larger organizations, marketing automation is necessary to handle large volumes of customers and the large volume of data that accompanies such a user base.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are those prospective customers that, through some action related to marketing efforts, are more likely than others to become a customer. 

This can be tracked a number of ways, and is often related to users who take a specific action on a website that isn’t a full purchase, but indicates a strong interest in purchasing.

Metadata is data that applies to other data. This can seem confusing to some, so for an example, you may take a picture and save it digitally on your computer. That image’s metadata could include information such as when and where the picture was taken. In this way, the file contains both the image itself and additional descriptive data. Other metadata can include creator information and licensing or legal rights related to a file’s use.

A meta description is an HTML tag for a web page that describes the page briefly, summarizing it. 

Meta descriptions are read by search engines and often displayed for users. For example, the brief description for web pages you see in Google results is often pulled directly from the page’s meta description.

Meta tags are HTML fields that exist for web pages and help to define its content for search engines. They are primarily used to help search engines structure your site’s content.

Minification refers to the reduction in file size for website elements.

The purpose of this is to reduce the load time of your website, which can increase when it has to load large files. This is better for the visitors to your site, and is also preferred by search engines, which will often base rankings on page load times.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a term most often used in product development in business. It refers to the least a particular product needs to do in order to be usable by its intended user.

The purpose of the MVP is to create a usable product and get feedback on it immediately, before additional features are added. This can reduce development time by identifying flaws in a product early in the development process.

This can also relate to web-based applications, which often have non-core features that are not needed for the product to work well for a majority of its users.

Most web traffic on the internet is now from mobile devices. Mobile First refers to a design philosophy that prioritizes a website’s mobile view first, rather than desktop or tablet views. All need to be completed for a website to be fully functional, but this prioritizes the view that a majority of users will see.

Navigation refers to how users use your website, and the paths they take to arrive at various pages. Streamlining navigation to promote easy use of your website can be important, and help users to find relevant information more quickly.

A backlink that carries the “nofollow” HTML tag. This indicates to search engines that should not count as a vote of quality for that site.

Some sites, particularly those with user-generated content, will mark all of their backlinks as nofollow, to avoid abuse of their content systems to generate backlink SEO value for third-party websites.

Open Rate is the percentage of people who open a mass email sent by a brand or individual. Open rates can be monitored and analyzed to assess for deficiencies in email quality and relevance to the audience.

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to efforts to increase site ranks for search engine queries. Organic traffic to a website is entirely from search engine queries, rather than referral sites or paid ads.

Pagerank is an algorithm developed by Google that is used to estimate how important a particular page is. The primary way this is determined is through analysis of links to that page from outside sources.

The number of web pages a user visits when they come to your website. Tracking average pages per session can be a valuable way of seeing how good your site is at retaining and engaging traffic to it.

The number of visits to a particular web page. Page views are separate from users, since the same user may visit a web page multiple times in a given period of time.

Pain points are sources of frustration with potential customers that a company should try to solve through their products or services. Figuring out what your audience’s main pain points are that your brand is in a position to improve can be a gigantic step toward crafting a company’s messaging.

This is a web design technique in which the background and foreground elements of the design scroll at different speeds as you move up or down the page. This creates the illusion of depth, and can also help to highlight elements of a page that contain key information.

Pay Per Click advertising is a shorthand for any digital ad platform where you only pay for the number of times users click on your ad. This can be an effective way to ensure that you are not paying for exposure to audiences who won’t be interested in your product or service.

An example of PPC advertising would be a Google search ad.

Pillar Pages are core pages on a website that comprehensively cover a particular topic. Often, these pages are thousands of words long, and contain a trover of information and resources related to the core topic.

This can help both the page and the site as a whole rank in search engines for a specific topic.

Tools created to help teams manage and execute complex tasks related to company campaigns. Many project management tools are online and allow cloud-based collaboration between team members who each have responsibilities within a given project or campaign.

QR codes are barcode images that can be read by most mobile devices and will direct the user to a specific webpage. They’re often used to help track users of ads and to aid people in finding a web page related to an ad.

Reputation Management refers to a variety of tasks related to upholding and maintaining a company’s public image. Reputation management tasks can include issuing surveys to assess customer happiness, encouraging company reviews of the company’s customers, and responding to reviews in order to address customer concerns and feedback.

Responsive Web Design is a model in which websites are created with different screen sizes in mind, across device types (desktop computers, mobile phones, tablets). A responsive design will adjust itself in real-time according to the screen size of the device the user is viewing the site on.

A calculation of the cost for an ad or marketing campaign, compared to the amount of trackable revenue it provided for the company. ROI is an important metric for many campaigns, because it relates directly to the profitability of an ad or project.

Sometimes revenue can’t be tracked precisely and attributed to an ad or campaign, though many digital ads are now able to provide this granular tracking to aid in business decisions.

Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is an application that allows people to easily track updates to a website. It’s commonly used to follow updates to website blogs.

The Sales Funnel is a term that refers to the journey customers take on the path toward becoming a paying customer. It is often displayed as a visual model that indicates a journey through successive steps.

Schema markup is metadata for a web page that can define certain attributes of that page. It helps categorize and define site attributes for search engines. It is sometimes referred to as structured data.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are the methods by which sites try to increase their rankings in search engines through paid advertisements. Product or business listing on various search platforms support this structure and allow businesses to pay and/or compete for prominent listings.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, refers to myriad tactics and strategies to increase and maintain both individual web page rankings in search engines as well as the site’s ranking overall for specific keywords.

Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs, are the numerous listings for search engine queries that are not strictly organic results. In a typical Google search, for example, you may see product listings for sale, a local map with business listing and their contact information, a “questions also asked” panel, and more. Getting your site and services listed in these can be a valuable way to increase both traffic and sales.

Semantic HTML refers to numerous coding tags to indicate site structure and relative importance within a page’s content. This can be as simple as bolding or italicizing certain words, all the way to how you lay out the content to make it more easily readable by both users and search engines.

An individual visit to a website. This could consist of a visit to a single page or click throughs to numerous pages on the site, and can also take seconds or hours depending on the user.

A structured file that catalogs and organizes a website, for easy, readable access by search engines.

A sitemap should be submitted to major search engines when you create a site, and also any time you have large-scale restructuring of the site. New sitemaps do not need to be generated every time a new page goes live. These will usually be crawled by search engines and added to the number of indexed pages on a site.

Refers to the speed at which the elements on a web page load. Site speed relates to ease of use, and is also a metric used by search engine algorithms in determining site health.

Any outreach, paid or organic, via social media channels with the intent to generate engagement, leads and revenue for a company.

Social media sites differ greatly in their demographics and marketing options, so it’s important to research your audience and their preferred social platforms before engaging in social media marketing campaigns.

Software tools that are an end product in themselves, but help to facilitate other services or product creation. Examples include project management software and graphic design software.

Entire companies exist to provide software tools to individuals or businesses, as well as support for those products.

A Sprint is a component of an agile marketing approach. It refers to a brief but intense period of work by a team with a defined end goal of that work. Many projects in an agile marketing model are produced through a series of sprints, between which feedback is gathered and adjustments are made to the next cycle of work.

An SSL Certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates a website with browsers and search engines, and allows the site to have an encrypted connection. A lapsed certificate license will usually result in a loss of traffic as warnings for users block entry to the site.

A comprehensive brand document that outlines the guidelines for presenting a company and its brand image in both digital and physical placements.

Elements of a style guide can include color scheme, acceptable logos and uses of those logos, the tone and character of marketing copy, and any taglines or rules that are specific to the brand that may supercede generic grammatical rules.

A term in content marketing that refers to a related series of pieces of content. Collectively, these pieces of content form a related cluster that can aid in developing trust for the site’s users and to inform search engines of a primary topic on the site.

Refers to the entirety of a company’s potential customer base. The total addressable market might be used to refer to the broadest possible marketing campaign that would still reach a relevant audience.

Often, this market is used not to create marketing campaigns, but to break into sub-groups, from which more targeted marketing efforts can be made to more specialized but still large groups of potential customers.

Two Factor Authentication, often abbreviated 2FA, is a security precaution in which users must use two separate methods of confirming their identity before gaining access to areas of a website that contain sensitive or personal information.

Two factor authentication is considered standard practice in many industries that conduct medical, financial or otherwise personal business online.

The percentage of recipients who unsubscribe from an email after it is sent. In large-scale marketing, some unsubscribes are expected, but it’s a metric that can be monitored to ensure you aren’t putting off your audience with either the frequency or messaging of your email advertising.

Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, refers to a website, individual web page or other resource online.

Broadly refers to the entire experience that a visitor to your website or app has. User experience also refers to a design approach that focuses on ease of use and testing to ensure that visitors to your site don’t become lost or confused, and can easily understand and navigate through the site’s infrastructure.

User Interface refers to the actual architecture of a site that allows a user to engage with it and navigate it. It is closely related to user experience (UX) but not identical.

Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs) are additions to a web page URL that provide specific information to marketers, such as what site the user came from and what marketing campaign the visit should be attributed to.

These are useful in tracking ads to determine metrics like return on investment (ROI).

Your value proposition is the worth that your company or brand brings to a prospective consumer, customer or client. In order to create a strong value proposition that sells your worth well, it’s important to understand the perspective of those who will use your products or services. By framing the proposition in terms of what it will do for them, you’ll show clear value to prospective customers.

A Viewport is the visible area of a webpage. The viewport for a mobile device will be smaller than a desktop screen, and there is considerable variance within device types as well.

Websites need to be responsive to account for differing viewport sizes to avoid massive visual errors and user frustration, which is why responsive web design is so important.

A program for interfacing with web-based sites and resources on the internet. Popular web browsers include Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge and others.

Web Hosting is a service that supports and maintains a live website. For your website to go live, it needs to be hosted on one of these platforms.

A Wireframe is a visual outline of a web page or web element. In a design sense, it’s intended to provide a sketch of the eventual live design. It can be easier and quicker to make design adjustments at this stage, so that you avoid costly and lengthy adjustments to more complicated web elements later in the design process.