A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O| P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

A

Alert

A notification of an event related to your website performance. In the Alerts application, you can create custom Alerts of two types: Lead and Keyword. Lead Alerts notify you of visits by significant leads or other changes to your website traffic; Keyword Alerts let you know when your keyword rankings have changed in specified ways.

Anchor text

The clickable text part of a hyperlink.  The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

B

Bounce

The act of visiting a page on a website and then leaving without visiting any other pages on that site within a given time frame. The time frame varies from one analytics program to another.

Bounce rate

The percentage of visitors who visit only one page of a site and then leave without visiting any other pages.

C

Cost per click

In paid search, the amount an advertiser must bid to have an ad placed in a paid placement for a given keyword. 

Also called the pay-per-click (PPC).  A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad.  The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

CRM

Customer relationship management, a comprehensive system or strategy for administering a company's approach to contacts, leads, and customers. CRM may also refer to methodologies and software used to organize, track and oversee these relationships.

D

E

Estimated click value

In the Keywords application, Estimated click value gives you a sense of the value of your search optimization efforts during a given time frame. It shows the total number of visits for each target keyword multiplied by the minimum cost-per-click (Min CPC) for that keyword.

F

G

Googlebot

Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine.  Googlebot describes all Google spiders.  All Google bots begin with “Googlebot”; for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

H

High Impact Opportunity

An Optimization opportunity in an element of a web page that is especially important to search engines and may seriously affect a page's search rankings. For example, a missing H1 tag.

Head terms

Keywords that get over 1,000 monthly searches.

I

Inbound link

Also called a backlink. A link to your page from another website. Search engines consider a link from another web page to be a "vote" for the content of the page, and can consequently rate the page that is linked to more highly, particularly if the linking page is considered authoritative.

Invisible web

A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that isn’t indexed by search engines.  Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth.

J

K

Keyword

Words or phrases that users enter in search engines to narrow the results of a search. Search engines rank results partly according to the relevance of a page's content to the keywords entered.

Keyword ranking

Also known as search engine ranking — the relative position of a page in the search results for a given keyword.

Keyword trend

In the Keywords application, the change in a page's keyword ranking over time.

L

Lead

A visitor that has filled in a form on your website, providing more detailed information such as name and contact phone number. In order to use Optify to convert visitors into lead, you must first set up your web forms to send data to Optify. See Visitor

Leads from keywords

In the Keywords application, Leads from keywords reports the total number of leads that originated from organic (unpaid) searches on any of the keywords in your active keyword list within the time frame selected.

Long-tail

Keywords that get less than 100 monthly searches.

Link bait

Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a web page and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links from other sites.  Or, as Matt Cutts of Google says, “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

Link building

The process of getting quality websites to link to your websites in order to improve search engine rankings.  Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

M

Meta tags

Information placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing information that is not visible to browsers, but can be used in varying degrees by search engines to index a page.  Common meta tags used in search engine marketing are title, description, and keyword tags.

Mid-terms

Keywords that get between 100 and 1,000 monthly searches.

N

O

Optify score

In the Pages application, an indicator of how well the page is optimized for search, on a scale of 1 to 100. In calculating the score, Optify takes into account several factors, including industry best practices, known search engine procedures, and any page elements that need work as shown in the status column of the Page detail view for the page. Roughly, a score of 75 or higher indicates a page that is well-optimized.

Optimization opportunity

In the Pages application, an issue that was found on a website that may contribute to a degradation of the website's performance in search rankings, and which can help improve search rankings if addressed. To learn how to address an issue, hover over the item in the Issues tab. See High Impact Opportunity.

Organic search

Organic search results are listings that appear in a search engine according to their relevance to a user's search terms, in contrast to paid search. In general, the goal of search engine optimization efforts is to increase the effectiveness of a website's performance in organic searches.

P

Paid search

The practice of giving money to a search engine service such as Google or Yahoo in exchange for displaying ads or links to a site based on the user's search terms. Depending on the search engine, the ads may or may not be easily distinguished from other search results.

PPC

Pay-per-click. A type of search marketing wherein advertisers pay a search engine for placement of ads. Typically advertisers bid on search terms (keywords), indicating the maximum amount they are willing to pay. When a user searches for that term, the search engine selects one or more related ads to display based on the high bid as well as other factors (such as geographical location or date and time of the search).

Q

R

Ranking

See keyword ranking.

S

Score set

A Score set is a collection of rules that enables you to prioritize visitors and leads displayed in Lead intelligence. Use the Lead Scoring application to view rules for existing score sets and to create new score sets based on criteria you choose. Use the Lead Exclusion tab to create rules for hiding visitors and leads from lists and reports.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Using paid search to reach an audience or market.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers.  SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users.  Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

SERP (search engine results page)

The web page of related links that is displayed after entering one or more search terms.

Social media

A category of sites based on user participation and user-generated content.  They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.

Spider

A search engine spider is a program that crawls the web, visiting web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine’s index.  The major search engines on the web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.”

T

Title tag

An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific web page.  The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages.  The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

U

Universal search

Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page.  Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories.

V

Visits from keywords

In the Keywords application, Visits from keywords reports the total number of visits to your website that originated from organic (unpaid) searches on any of the keywords in your active keyword list within the time frame selected.

Visitor

Someone who has visited a website that is being tracked by Optify.

W

Web 2.0

A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services.  These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

X

Y

Z