Glossary of web-related terms

A

AdSense – Google advertising programme through which website publishers can earn revenue by hosting serve ads that are based on their site’s content and target its audience.

AdWords – Google advertising programme through which advertisers pay Google per click on ads which are served on SERPs (search engine results pages) and within content.

Affiliate link – a ink that’s tracked and may generate a payment for its publisher. Payments may be paid per click, per user, per application, per accepted application or any combination. I only ever use affiliate links that give you the same deal as going directly to the destination site, and I only ever use affiliate links for products, services or retailers that I personally use and recommend.

Affiliate marketing – a commercial arrangement by which an online retailer (eg Amazon) pays commission to an external website (eg this one) for traffic, sales or leads generated. It’s how MoneySavingExpert.com is financed.

AIDCA – helpful when creating or critiquing a piece of advertising, marketing or content. Copy, design and branding should make the product or service appear Attractive/appealing, Interesting, Desirable, and should be Convincing and Actionable.

Analytics – tools measuring / data relating to traffic to a website or webpage in terms of quantity, location, devices and browsers used, time spent on pages, etc.

Anchor text – the words which are linked to another webpage in a hyperlink (see below).

Article marketing – outdated form of content marketing through which articles were often placed on directories including EzineArticles.com and eHow.com. Article marketing evolved when social media began to dominate and following Google’s Panda algorithm update, which demoted low-value content, ‘content farms’ and sites with high ad-to-content ratios.

 

B

Backend – the behind-the-scenes admin area of a website through which you can make changes and add content and users.

Backlinking – also known as inbound links, a search engine optimisation (SEO) term used to define links from other websites pointing towards/linking to your site. Google uses the quality and quantity of such links as a key indicator on where it should rank a particular webpage.

Banner ads – click here.

Beta – term given to a product that’s been released on a limited basis or is not ready for a full commercial release and finishing touches are being added.

Blog – amalgamation of the term ‘web log’. Frequently updated section on a website.

 

C

CMS / content management system – software that facilitates creating, editing, organising, and publishing content, such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

CTA / call to action – wording in an ad, blog post or direct marketing that encourages the reader to take action (eg click here, buy now, sign up, etc).

 

D

Domain – the name of a website: facebook.com, google.co.uk and paulparry.com. There are many companies online with whom you can buy/register domain names. I always use Namcheap.com* because they provide a great service at a decent price.

 

E

Email marketing – marketing by email which works when the sender respects their subscriber (ie doesn’t send spam or sell their email address to a third party), sends them a series of emails that contain valuable, helpful content free of charge, then offers the subscriber a product or service. The idea is that the marketer has built up enough trust before they make their offer so that subscriber feels more open to receiving it and is more likely to buy.

 

F

Funnel – when a company gets you to click on an ad or sign up for a free ebook, you’re in their funnel. They want to change you from someone who wasn’t previously interested in their product or service to an email subscriber, then convert you to a customer over a period of time, then a repeat customer, then a fan. With some email marketing software, when you opt out (unsubscribe) of a marketer’s emails, you’re placed in another category and sent a different series of marketing emails.

 

G

H

Hosting – the server space where a website’s files live/are hosted.

HTML – hyper text mark-up language, the basic programming language of the internet.

Hyperlink – if you write something and link it to another webpage, like this, you’ve created a hyperlink.

 

I

J

K

Keywords/keyphrases – words or phrases that people use to search in Google for information on a particular subject, service or product. Identifying keyphrases that a target audience or market uses to find information – and then optimising a website’s pages around those words or phrases – is a crucial element of SEO.

 

L

Landing page – “A landing page, sometimes known as a “lead capture page”, “static page” or a “lander”, or a “destination page”, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimised search result or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link. Landing pages are used for lead generation. The actions that a visitor takes on a landing page is what determines an advertiser’s conversion rate.” (source: Wikipedia)

Lizardry – umbrella term used to describe the various ways we react to certain situations instinctively, rather than with the more rational part of our brain which responds with thought and reason.  

Location independent – the ability to work anywhere, as long as there’s an internet connection.

Long tail – the concept that endless choice creates unlimited demand.

“Our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.” (source)

 

M

Malware – malicious software that can harm a computer.

 

 

N

Niche – a section or sub-section of a market.

O

P

Pivoting – new word meaning pragmatism: changing your mind or the direction of your business/career/life based on what works, what you prefer or discovering what you no longer want.

Q

R

Responsive – web design that works well on your phone as well as bigger screens.

Reverse engineering – working out how something was (or might have been) made or achieved by looking at the result first and then trying to identify how the creator reached that point by looking at the process in reverse order to the product’s origination. This might be done to try to duplicate the process and aim for similar success.

 

S

SEO / search engine optimisation – the practice of trying to improve a webpage’s or website’s organic ranking (ie, not paid for) in search engine results pages (SERPs), and increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to that webpage or website.

SERPs – search engine results pages.

Squeeze page – a webpage designed, built and optimised to collect email addresses, or ‘squeeze’ them from people visiting the page.

 

T

Themes – templates that are used to make WordPress websites look the way they do. WordPress comes with at least one default theme and there are millions of others to download that are either free or paid-for. Some are better than others. This website uses the Divi theme, available here*.

Traffic – collective term for (the number of) visitors to a webpage or website.

 

U

URL – stands for uniform resource locator and refers to the address of a webpage, eg https://www.paulparry.com/glossary

UI – user interface.

UX / user experience – how easy it is for someone to use, interact with or get information from a particular website.

 

V

W

WordPress – the world’s favourite CMS. Note: there is a wordpress.com and a wordpress.org.

 

X

Y

Z

*affiliate link