AdSense
AdSense is an advertising program run by Google. Web site owners can enroll in this program to enable text and image advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on a per-click basis. Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user's geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google's targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords.

AdWords
AdWords is Google's branded P4P service. It provides relevant text-based ads on Google's site, and on external sites willing to host Google ads. On the Google site, they are pure text, and thus difficult to block. However, on external sites, they are hosted within an IFRAME tag, making them easy to remove with advertisement blockers like the Mozilla extension AdBlock. Companies wishing to promote their products can enroll in this program to their adds on Google or on websites which use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model.

Affiliate
An affiliate is an entity with a relationship with a peer or a larger entity.

Affiliate Network
An affiliate network is composed of a group of merchants and a group of affiliates. Merchants join the network and affiliates join the network in order to advertise the merchant products in exchange of a commision from the merchant. Affiliate networks present some great advantages for the merchant and the affiliate. The merchant gets potential access to a wide networks of affiliates. The affiliate dos not necessarly need to make a certain sale amount for one particular merchant but rather for the entire range of merchants before getting paid.

Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink. Anchor text gets a lot of weight in search engine algorithms because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps as the tendency is, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page.

ASP
Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's server-side technology for dynamically-generated web pages that is marketed as an adjunct to Internet Information Server (IIS).

Authoring Tool
An authoring tool is a software application used to create multimedia content typically for delivery on the World Wide Web.
 

B

B2B
Business-to-business electronic commerce (B2B) typically takes the form of automated processes between trading partners and is performed in much higher volumes than business-to-consumer (B2C) applications.

B2C
Business-to-consumer electronic commerce (B2C) is typified by the publicly addressed forms of eCommerce such as webshops and TeleShopping.

Backlink
Backlinks are incoming links to a website. For example, a site with a lot of backlinks implies that many other sites link to that site.

Bandwidth
The word bandwidth is also used to mean the amount of data that can be transferred through a digital connection in a given time period (i.e., the connection's bit rate). In such cases, bandwidth is usually measured in bits or bytes per second.

Blog
A weblog, Web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a website would typically be accessible to any Internet user. The term "blog" came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server log.

Bridge Page
Bridge Page are web pages that are created to rank high in search engines for particular phrases with purpose to seduce or hoax you to watch another page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.
 

C

CGI
Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is an important World Wide Web technology that enables a client web browser to request data from a program executed on the Web server. CGI specifies a standard for passing data between the client and the program.

Client
In computing, a client is a system that accesses a (remote) service on another computer by some kind of network. The term was first applied to devices that were not capable of running their own stand-alone programs, but could interact with remote computers via a network. These dumb terminals were clients of the time-sharing mainframe computer.

ColdFusion
In computing, ColdFusion is a tag-based, middleware programming language used chiefly for writing web-based applications. The language was created by JJ Allaire and his brother Jeremy Allaire, but the product is currently owned by Macromedia.

Counter
Counters are (usually) numerical counters displayed on some Internet web pages. Once set up, these counters will be incremented one every time the web page is retrieved (viewed on a web browser).

CPA
Cost Per Action (CPA) for banner ads; the fee charged every time a user completes a desired action, such as filling out a form, downloading software, or viewing a series of pages.

CPC
Cost Per Click (CPC) for banner ads; the fee charged every time a user clicks on a banner ad or HTML link.

CPL
Cost Per Lead (CPL). A lead can be anything from an e-mail address for a newsletter to a complete survey that needs to be completely filled out and verified in order to get credit.

CPM
Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM), of buying advertising space in a given media vehicle. For example, $100 CPM means each impression cost 10 cents. "1" CPM mens "1000" Impressions.

CPS
Cost Per Sale (CPS); the fee charged every time a user completes a purchase.

Crawler
A web crawler (also known as web spider) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. A web crawler is one type of bot. Web crawlers not only keep a copy of all the visited pages for later processing - for example by a search engine but also index these pages to make the search narrower.

CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a computer language used to describe the presentation of a structured document written in HTML, XHTML or XML. The CSS specification is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

CTR
Click Through Ratio (CTR); the ratio of click-throughs to impressions for a given ad run. For example, if a banner has a CTR of 40:1, it means that 1 out of 40 people have clicked on it.
 

D

Dead Link
A dead link is a link on the world wide web that points to a webpage or server that is permanently unavailable. Dead links are commonplace on the Internet, but they are considered to be unprofessional.

DHTML
Dynamic HTML or DHTML designates a technique of creating interactive web sites by using a combination of the static markup language HTML, a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript) and the style definition language Cascading Style Sheets.

Directory
In computing, a directory, catalog, or folder, is an entity in a file system which contains a group of files and other directories. A typical file system contains thousands of files, and directories help organize them by keeping related files together. A directory contained inside another directory is called a subdirectory of that directory. Together, the directories form a hierarchy, or tree structure.

DNS
The Domain Name Server (System) or DNS is a system that stores information about host names and domain names in a kind of distributed database on networks, such as the Internet. Most importantly, it provides an IP address for each host name, and lists the mail exchange servers accepting e-mail for each domain.

Domain Name
A domain name is the unique name of a computer on the Internet that distinguishes it from the other systems on the network.

Doorway Page
Doorway pages are web pages that are created to rank high in search engines for particular phrases with purpose to seduce or hoax you to watch another page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.

Download
The process of retrieving information from any computer to your computer is called downloading.

Dynamic Page
Information on web pages which changes or is changed automatically. Sometimes it's possible to spot this technique by looking at a page's file extension.
Search engines will currently index dynamic content in a similar fashion to static content.
 

E

EPC
EPC means; Earnings Per Click.

EPV
EPV means; Earnings Per Visitor.

Error 400
Error 400: Bad Request means; the request is incorrect.

Error 401
Error 401: Unauthorized means; the client does not have the required privileges to access the site.

Error 403
Error 403: Forbidden means; the request is forbidden. You don't have an access to enter the site.

Error 404
Error 404: Not Found means; the requested resource no longer exists or has been moved, or the address may be misspelled.

Error 500
Error 500: Internal Server Error means; the server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling the request by the client for access to the requested URL.

Error 501
Error 501: Not Implemented means; the server does not support the service type or the called protocol.

Error 503
Error 503: Service Unavailable means; the server took too long to answer and the connection timed out.
 

F

Favicon
A favicon (short for "Favorites icon"), also known as a page icon, is an icon associated with a particular website. A web designer can create such an icon, and many graphical web browsers—such as recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, and Konqueror—can then make use of them. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the browser's address bar, next to the site's name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page's title in a Tabbed Document Interface.

FFA
A Free For All link page (FFA) is a web page set up to ostensibly improving the search engine placement of a particular web site.

Frames
Frames is the HTML extension that Netscape developed to divide a page up into several sub-pages.

FTP
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a software standard for transferring computer files between machines with widely different operating systems. It belongs to the application layer of the Internet protocol suite.
 

G

Gateway Page
Gateway Page are web pages that are created to rank high in search engines for particular phrases with purpose to seduce or hoax you to watch another page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.
 

H

Hit
Hit is a request for a file on a webserver. Each HTML document and graphic file counts as a separate hit, so they aren't an accurate representation of the number of different visitors to your site.

HTML
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser.

HTTP
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the primary method used to convey information on the World Wide Web. The original purpose was to provide a way to publish and receive HTML pages.

HTTPS
HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the communication protocol of the World Wide Web. It was invented by Netscape Communications Corporation to provide authentication and encrypted communication and is used in electronic commerce.

Hyperlink
A hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference in a hypertext document to another document or other resource. As such it would be similar to a citation in literature. However, combined with a data network and suitable access protocol, it can be used to fetch the resource referenced. This can then be saved, viewed, or displayed as part of the referencing document.

Hypertext
Hypertext is a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which contain automated cross-references to other documents called hyperlinks. Selecting a hyperlink causes the computer to display the linked document within a very short period of time.
 

I

Image Map
In HTML, a list of co-ordinates relating to a specific image, created in order to hyperlink areas of the image to various destinations. For example, a map of the world may have each country hyperlinked to further information about that country. The intention of an image map is to provide an easy way of linking various parts of an image without resorting to dividing the image into separate parts.

IP Address
An IP address is a unique number, akin to a telephone number, used by machines (usually computers) to refer to each other when sending information through the Internet using the Internet Protocol. This allows machines passing the information onwards on behalf of the sender to know where to send it next, and for the machine receiving the information to know that it is the intended destination.

ISP
An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a business or organization that offers users access to the Internet and related services. Most telecommunications operators are ISPs. They provide services like internet transit, domain name registration and hosting, dial-up access, leased line access and colocation.
 

J

Java
Java is an object-oriented programming language developed primarily by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems. The language, initially called Oak (named after the oak trees outside Gosling's office), was intended to replace C++, although the feature set better resembles that of Objective C.

JavaScript
JavaScript, often mistyped as "Javascript", is an object-oriented scripting language based on the concept of prototypes. The language is most well known for its use in websites. It was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape Communications under the name Mocha and then LiveScript but then renamed to "JavaScript". JavaScript has a syntax close to that of Sun Microsystems’ Java language. But beside name and syntax the language has more in common with Self than with Java. JavaScript was first standardized in 1997–1999 by ECMA under the name ECMAScript. The standard (as of December 1999) is ECMA-262 Edition 3, and corresponds to JavaScript 1.5. This is also now an ISO 16262 standard.
 

K

Keyword
A word searched for in a search command. Keywords are searched in any order. Use spaces to separate keywords in simple keyword searching.

Keyword Density
A property of the text in a web page which indicates how close together the keywords appear. Some search engines use this property for Positioning. Analysers are available which allow comparisons between pages. Pages can then be produced with the similar keyword densities to those found in high ranking pages.

Keyword Phrase
More than one Keyword, searched exactly as keyed (all terms required to be in documents, in the order keyed). Enclosing keywords in quotations " " forms a phrase in Search Engines. Some times a phrase is called a "character string."
 

L

Link Farm
Link farm is a large group of web pages created that contain hyperlinks to one another or a specific other page. Link farms are normally created by programs, rather than by human beings.

Link Popularity
Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In theory, off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings.
 

M

Meta Tag
Meta tags are used to provide structured data about data.

Mirror Site
Mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site (often a web site). Mirror sites are most commonly used to provide multiple sources of the same information, and are of particular value as a way of providing reliable access to large downloads.
 

O

Open Source
Open source or open-source software (OSS) is any computer software distributed under a license which allows users to change and/or share the software freely. Many programs use a specific license agreement satisfying the Open Source Definition.
 

P

PageRank
PageRank is a family of algorithms for assigning numerical weightings to hyperlinked documents (or web pages) indexed by a search engine. Its properties are much discussed by search engine optimization (SEO) experts. The PageRank system is used by the popular search engine Google to help determine a page's relevance or importance. It was developed by Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while at Stanford University in 1998. As Google puts it:

Perl
Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language, is a programming language released by Larry Wall on December 18, 1987 that borrows features from C, sed, awk, shell scripting and from many other programming languages.

PHP
PHP is a widely-used open-source programming language primarily for server-side applications and developing dynamic web content.

POP3
Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) is an application layer Internet standard protocol used to retrieve email from a remote server to a local client over a TCP/IP connection. Nearly all individual Internet service provider email accounts are accessed via POP3.

Popunder
Pop-under ads are a form of online advertising that, spawns a new browser window in the background.

Popup
Pop-up ads are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to increase web traffic. It works when certain web sites open a new web browser window to display advertisements. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by JavaScript, but can be generated by other means as well. A less intrusive variation on the pop-up window is the pop-under advertisement. This opens a new browser window, but in the background, so as not to interrupt the user's page-view.

Portal
A portal is a web site that provides a starting point, a gateway, or portal, to other resources on the Internet or an intranet. Intranet portals are also known as "enterprise information portals" (EIP).

PPC
Pay per click, or PPC, is an advertising technique used on websites, especially search engines. Pay per click advertisements are usually text ads placed near search results; when a site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a small amount. Variants include pay for placement and pay for ranking. Pay per click is also sometimes known as Cost per click or CPC.

PPL
Pay per lead, or PPL, is an ad pricing structure by which the advertiser pays the publisher according to how many leads are generated by an ad, often determined by information submitted directly into the banner ad.

PSA
A public service announcement or PSA is a non-commercial "advertisement" for web sites.
 

R

Reciprocal Link
A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites in order to ensure mutual traffic.

Referrer
When visiting a webpage, the referer (sic) or referring page is the URL of the previous webpage from which a link was followed. More generally, it is the URL of a previous item which led to this request - the referer for an image, for example, is generally the HTML page on which it is to be displayed. The referer is part of the HTTP request sent by the browser program to the web server.

Robots.txt
The robots exclusion standard or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent well-behaved web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. The information specifying the parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called robots.txt in the top-level directory of the website.

Search Engine
A search engine is a program designed to help find files stored on a computer, for example a public server on the World Wide Web, or one's own computer. The search engine allows one to ask for media content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieving a list of files that match those criteria. A search engine often uses a previously made, and regularly updated index to look for files after the user has entered search criteria.
 

S

SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of client sites.

SERP
SERP was chosen as the keyword for the initial competition, primarily due to the fact it is an acronym for Search Engine Results Page. Not a well known word, except by SEOs, this meant it was not a particularly competitive target, allowing for the tracking of competing sites to be reasonably easy.

Server
Server is a computer software application that carries out some task on behalf of users. This is usually divided into file serving, allowing users to store and access files on a common computer; and application serving, where the software runs a computer program to carry out some task for the users. This is the original meaning of the term. Web, mail, and database servers are what most people access when using the internet.

Session ID
Session ID (Session Identifier) is a value generated by a server that identifies a particular session.

SHTML
A file name extension that identifies web pages containing SSI commands.

SMTP
SMTP is a relatively simple, text-based protocol, where one or more recipients of a message are specified (and in most cases verified to exist) and then the message text is transferred. It is quite easy to test a SMTP server using the telnet program. SMTP uses TCP port 25. To determine the SMTP server for a given domain name, the MX (Mail eXchange) DNS record is used.

Spam
Spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages in bulk. In the popular eye, the most common form of spam is that delivered in e-mail as a form of commercial advertising. However, over the short history of electronic media, people have done things comparable to spamming for many purposes other than the commercial, and in many media other than e-mail. In this article and those related, the term spamming is used broadly to refer to all of these behaviors, regardless of medium and commercial intent.

Spider
A spider is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. A web crawler is one type of bot. Web crawlers not only keep a copy of all the visited pages for later processing - for example by a search engine but also index these pages to make the search narrower.

SQL
Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most popular computer language used to create, modify and query databases.

SSI
Server Side Includes or SSI is a simple server-side scripting language used almost exclusively for the web. As its name implies, its primary use is including the contents of one file in another.

SSL
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), its successor, are cryptographic protocols which provide secure communications on the Internet.

Static Page
Static Page is a standard web page using only HTML. Static pages do not employ dynamic technologies (like PHP, ASP, Perl...), and have standard URL's.

Subdomain
In the DNS hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain name. A DNS hierarchy consists of the root-level domain at the top, underneath which are the top-level domains, followed by second-level domains and finally subdomains.
 

T

TLD
A top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of which Internet domain names consist of. For example, in the domain name MyWebmasterIndex.com the top-level domain is com (or COM, as domain names are not case-sensitive).

Toolbar
In a graphical interface on a computer monitor a toolbar is a row, column, or block of onscreen buttons or icons that, when clicked, activate certain functions of the program.

Traffic
Traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor this traffic and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth – not all web traffic is welcome.
 

U

Unique Visitors
Unique visitor is a real visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site. If for example, someone visits twenty pages within a web site, the server will count only one unique visitor (because the page accesses are all associated with the same IP address) but twenty page accesses.

Upload
When one computer sends information to another, it is called uploading.

URL
A Uniform Resource Locator, URL, or Web address, is a standardized address for some resource (such as a document or image) on the Internet (or elsewhere). First created by Tim Berners-Lee for use on the World Wide Web, the currently used forms are detailed by IETF standard.

User Agent
A user agent is the client application used with a particular network protocol; the phrase is most commonly used in reference to those which access the World Wide Web. Web user agents range from web browsers to search engine crawlers ("spiders"), as well as screen readers and braille browsers used by people with disabilities.
 

V

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing and viral advertising refers to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through processes similar to the spread of an epidemic.

Virtual Domain
Also seen as "redirecting URLs," a virtual domain is one that exists in type, but not on an actual server. Popular redirecting services (cjb.net, for example) will allow you to sign up for a virtual domain name of your choice. This is useful if your actual URL is long and not easily remembered. By typing in the redirecting URL of your choice, you are automatically redirected by the service to your actual, longer URL.

Virtual Hosting
Virtual hosting is a method that web servers use to host more than one domain name on the same computer and IP address.
 

W

Web Hosting
Web hosting is a service that provides Internet users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients.

Web Server
A Web Server is a computer on the World Wide Web (connected to the Internet Backbone) that stores HTML documents that can be retrieved via a Web browser.

Whois
Whois is a protocol for submitting a query to a database for determining the owner of a domain name, an IP network, or an autonomous system number.

WML
Wireless Markup Language is the primary content format for devices that implement the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) specification based on XML, such as mobile phones.

WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and is used in computing to refer to the technology that makes sure the image seen on the screen corresponds to what is printed out on paper. Today this is expected for word processors but in other situations, like web (HTML) authoring, this is not always the case.
 

X

XHTML
XHTML (short for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a markup language that has the same expressive possibilities as HTML, but a stricter syntax. Whereas HTML was an application of SGML, a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. XHTML 1.0 became a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation on January 26, 2000.

XLL
Extensible Linking Language (XLL), second part of the W3C's XML specification concerning hyperlinks. An XML extension used to insert links that can point directly to a specific object (image, title, word, etc.) into a page.

XML
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C recommendation for creating special-purpose markup languages. It is a simplified subset of SGML, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured text and information across the Internet. Languages based on XML (for example, RDF, RSS, MathML, XSIL and SVG) are themselves described in a formal way, allowing programs to modify and validate documents in these languages without prior knowledge of their form.

XSL
The eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a set of language technologies for defining XML document transformation and presentation