SEO

Statistics / Analytics

A collection of measurement or tracking data (most often in report format) that provides insights related to marketing and audience activities

Integrated Marketing

A consistent collaboration of many marketing channels / efforts working together (holistically) to enforce / strengthen the message and excitement around your product or service.

Google Algorithm

A full automated series of checks and balances that allow a search engine to determine the strengths and weaknesses (aka: quality) of your website. Updates to this can shake up the entire web, causing websites to lose or gain valuable positions in the SERP's. Most recent updates include Caffeine/Freshness, Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird.

Call to Action

A request presented to the audience to take some sort of action. Could be a request to like, follow, comment, share, tweet, retweet, scan a code, enter a contest, register, sign up for something, buy something etc. Should always be the most prominent element on your marketing collateral UNLESS you are aiming to "soft sell" it.

Gamification

A rising trend for businesses intended to further involve / engage the audience in activities that are now based on game theory (such as taking actions and collecting or losing points, competing in multi player environments, getting on a leaderboard, earning rewards etc).

Apps

A rising trend that uses a mobile device application to interact with the audience. May provide event maps, agenda's, push notifications for speakers or performances, contest information, gamification information, social media integrations etc.

Sociographics

A segment within psychographics which explains the social network or influence of a target audience / persona. Will include details about how "connected" this person is (in terms of their social circle), the type of crowd they hang with, whether they are an influencer or a receiver among their group and what indicates this. Etc. See this article for more info. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-social-graph-sociographics-how-to-use-friends-to-influence-people/63055/

Social Shares

A shared Facebook Post or Retweet; signifying valuable information for others to see. *This is one step closer to going viral.

Persona

A summary of a target audience segment that includes demographics, psychographics, sociographics and other related identifiers. Often portrayed like a biography of the person / group (or type of person). Frequently that person / group (or type) is given a name like Sally or The Super Mom and is described in an exciting way making them "feel" more relatable.

Live Tweeting

A trend in events that allows event organizers and/or attendee's to tweet rich snippets (ie: top tips or quotes) during the event. Some organizers may display these on a projection screen at the event, while others may keep it on twitter only.

Email Autoresponder Series

A trending method of using an automated email marketing platform to "follow up" with someone (through a series of pre-written messages) after they have taken an action (such as signing up for a newsletter, rsvp'ing for an event, registering for an event, upgrading tickets, entering a contest etc)

Bounces (Website Visits)

A visitor that leaves/exits within 30 seconds of arriving on a page or post. *This is very bad for business.

Likes

A vote of approval from Facebook friends, followers and fans

Follows

A vote of approval from Twitter friends and fans

Organic Listing

A website (page, post or content piece) that has been added to the Google or other search engine index (for free) and is presented to users that input a related search.

Online Registration

Allowing for free OR paid registrations to take place via an online form. Excellent way to reduce staff involvement, to seamlessly collect funds and to measure the success of an event / event marketing.

Adoption Curve

Also known as the Diffusion of Innovation, segments target market into stages of adoption (related to our products or services). Starts with innovators and early adopters, moves to early majority and late majority and includes laggards or non-adopters as the least likely to adopt (last on the curve).

Click Through Audience

An audience that is trained / predisposed to click through from one link / page or post to another. Great for bloggers to keep the audience on site longer.

Hard Sell

An obvious and sometimes aggressive approach to selling something.

Soft Sell

An unobtrusive (non-threatening) way to promote / sell something. Very subtle. (Like a call to action at the end of a blog post).

SWOT Analysis

Analyzing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as they may relate to our companies, competition, products or services.

Social Booths

Another rising trend in events that encourages attendee's to take photo's, caption them, post them to social sites (like instragram, twitter, facebook etc). live during an event. *Increases the exposure and excitement around an event as well as your work.

Wearable Technology

Another rising trend that allows people to bypass mobile phones and tablets and simply use wearable devices (like google glass, samsung gear, tshirts and so on to access and transmit computer based intelligence).

Content

Any collateral piece that you post to your website or social media channels that users may view, share or download. Could be blog posts, downloadable checklists, images, video, soundclips, songs, etc.

BOB

Big Orange Button <- Best color for call to action buttons

CHARTing

Connecting, Hearing, Appreciating, Rewarding and Earning Trust. These 5 elements make Social Media and other forms of relationship building a success. Together they build loyalty. Solo they are simply activities.

Engagements

Conversations revolving around OR between your company and its audience through social networks, blogs, youtube etc. often a performance metric deemed difficult but worthy of measurement.

Marketing Plan

Detailed overview of how you market your product or service. Includes tactical outline, timeline and budget - as well as any supporting research that further emphasizes decisions.

Bounced (Emails)

Emails that do not make it to the subscriber. Could be because the email address is full, dead or temporarily disabled.

Backlinks

External links that point to your website.

Demographics

Factual data about a target audience, can include age, gender, marital status, income, nationality etc.

H1 & H2

Heading tags. H1 is used for the main title or headline (and only used once on a page). H2 is used for the sub-headline OR section headers on a page. Can be used more than once on a page or post.

Marketing Strategy

High level overview of how you will position your product or service for success. May include timeline and budget summaries, but will not include specific tactical plans.

Traffic Objectives

How (W5&H) you intend to drive traffic to your site. I.E.: Will you target your local region (city or state) (using geo-local keywords), a national audience (ie: canada), specific continents OR a global audience? And if so, how? (By which traffic methods (SEO, PPC, Blogging, Email Marketing, Social Media etc) and which keywords).

Load Times

How long it takes to load a page. Must be under 3 seconds OR you will not earn top positions for your page. A slow loading page (page speed) is a bad user experience. *To solve this problem you may need to host your media on a cloud server like Rackspace or AmazonS3

Positioning

How the marketing mix comes together as one distinct / cohesive message. Also known as the 5th P.

USP

How you establish a unique position within your industry (in contrast to the competition). (aka: Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Position).

Measurement

How you track the results (positive or negative) of your efforts.

Segmentation

Identifying / categorizing or separating unique targets within a target audience. Can be done conceptually OR actually (via advanced email marketing systems). Great for creating unique marketing messages for unique user groups.

Index / Indexed

In order for your site content to show up in Google or other Search Engines you need to be "indexed" by them. This happens when a search engine crawls your site to determine what content you have to offer that is of value to users.

Anchored links

Internal or external links that are anchored with keywords or phrases explaining what your page or post is about. *This is the best way to put a link on a page, but you should not have the same anchors for every link coming in to your pages. That looks spammy.

Alternative Text

Keyword friendly descriptions of your images and other media on page. Great for SEO.

Spam

Low quality content on your page. Can be generated by the owner OR users.

Landing Page

Many are targeted to specific audiences and/or calls to action - but according to Google Analytics any page that a new visitor enters your site by - IS a landing page. Therefore you should treat each of them as equally capable in producing a result.

Market Research

May include: Keyword research / validation, surveys, focus groups, competition research, testing and analysis thereof. May be quantitative OR qualitative.

Affiliate Referrals

Partner companies that refer new business to you in exchange for free services or commissions on successfully referred clients.

PPC

Pay Per Click / Sponsored Listings / Search Engine or Display Advertising.

Psychographics

Presumed data about a target audience's preferences, such as hobbies, interests, motivators, habits etc.

Qualitative Research

Research that provides emotional / behaviorial insights. (ie: likes, dislikes, needs, wants, interests, hobbies, decision making processes etc).

Quantitative Research

Research that provides statistics that is both firm and factual in nature (ie: rating points, frequency of something, financial data etc).

ROI

Return on investment (ie: how much money you make compared to how much you spend)

Rich Snippets

Rich markups (extra HTML coding) that allow you to customize what your author bio, posts or listings look like in Social Networks. Can be associated with anything from blog posts to recipes and so much more.

Polls

Short, simple surveys, great for measuring response rates to certain content or topics of conversation. Also great for gathering market intelligence.

SCUIB

Stands for size, color, underline, italics and bold. A simple acronym to summarize "emphasized text". Anything you emphasize will be considered important to your page. Try to emphasize keyword relevant terms or phrases if possible.

RSS

Stands for: Real Simple Syndication. An RSS feed makes it possible to syndicate your blog feed across the net; integrates nicely with social media (allowing your new posts to automatically release on Social Networks). Also makes it possible for readers to view your most recent content in their own RSS reader.

Branding Online

Still maintains the same look and feel / positioning as offline branding but also uses branded terms and keywords as well as related terms to apply context to it.

Context

The "intention" or meaning behind the search OR the content that is published on site for the public to peruse.

Landing Page Optimization

The effort of optimizing a Landing Page for the clearest path to action. Ie: Making it extremely relevant to the users intention, keeping it clean (free of clutter and easy to navigate), professional, effective and clearly drawing the audience to ONE ACTION. Best if there are little to no distractions or links on the page -- accept the call to action.

Title Tag

The first line of meta data that describes what this page is about. It is the first thing that shows up when your site is listed in the SERP's, should be under 65 characters and should inform the users what they will see if they click on the page. It is referred to as the SEO Title in Yoast.

Social Networking

The interconnectedness of Social Networks and the acts of Social Media Marketing.

Social Network

The online site / platform upon which Social Media efforts are employed.

Users

The people that come to your site and stay on the site, browsing through your content and getting to know you.

Target Market(s)

The persons or groups of persons that you intend to reach with your marketing efforts.

Website Model

The type of website that you need to design in order to reach your target market and accomplish your traffic and conversion objectives. May include portfolio sites, squeeze pages, direct response pages, portals, etc.

Social Media

The use of Social Networks to promote / announce new products, services, events or every day messages. *A term that is starting to encompass the what, where and HOW of the medium. Also referred to as one of many online marketing "channels".

Automation

The use of computer technology to do something that was once manual (such as signing people up for newsletters, collecting contest entries, sending emails. taking registrations, online sales etc)

Digital Marketing

The use of digital technology to assist marketing efforts. Could include all things internet related, but may also include emerging tech like virtual reality, augmented reality, wearable technology etc. if it can be used to market a business (think of the Pepsi Max bus stop commercial or the Westjet Christmas Miracle campaign).

Traffic

The visitors you get to your website.

Description tag.

This is the second line of meta data that describes what a page is about. It shows up under your title tag in search engines, contains 160 characters of text or less. Should be attention grabbing and have a call to action (that gets people to visit your page). It is referred to as the SEO Description in Yoast.

Google Webmaster Tools

Tracks the strengths and weaknesses of your site, specifically as it relates to crawl issues (HTML errors), load times, link quality and other domain level activities.

Google Analytics

Tracks website visits (referred to as sessions), where they came from, what search queries (or keywords) they used, how long they stayed, how many pages they viewed and what sort of activity they engaged in while on site.

URL

Uniform resource locator AKA: The www. address of a domain, page or post.

Blogging

Used to be for short, simple updates of valuable information (tips, news, trends etc.) now a great way to deliver content and make connection with the marketing (replaces traditional articles). Often positioned to educate, engage or entertain the audience.

Differentiation

Using segmentation and/or testing to create unique marketing messages that appeal to specific persona's / needs and wants.

Conversion Objectives

What do you want your visitors / users to do on site? ie: Sign up for your mailing list, share stuff, enter contests, register for an event, fill out a survey, complete your contact form, buy a product etc.

Hashtags

Words or phrases that are preceded by a # symbol, used in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and sometimes Pinterest to make such keyword or keyphrase easy to search. Also good for categorizing event conversations.

page rank

a mathematical algorithm named after Google co-founder Larry Page to indicate how important a page is on the web; used as a metric when evaluating websites.

directory

aid in finding Internet websites; list of sites are usually arranged by category, and the directory has a search function.

broad match

all search volumes for a keyword idea, including synonyms and related words.

display URL

displays in ad but has link to another page.

search engine algorithm

displays the search engine's "best guess" at which pages are most relevant to the user's search and in which order they should be shown.

negative match

key term that users do not want to be considered in their search

keyword density

percentage of times a particular word is used on a website page in comparison to the number of words on that page.

SEO (search engine optimization)

process of designing a site and its content whereby search engines find the site without being paid to do so; also known as organic search, natural search, or algorithmic search.

SEM (search engine marketing)

process of getting listed on search engines

spiders

programs that "crawl" the web and follow every link or piece of data that they see and bring this information back to be stored; also known as robots.

keyword

search terms, words, or phrases that are selected by the user when making a search in a search engine; also refers to terms that are bid on in a PPC system, or a section, in the HTML code for a website where site developers put terms that they hope search engines will classify the site when users search for those terms on the web.

exact match

search volume for a particular keyword

phrase match

search volume that includes an entire phrase

meta tag

section in the HTML header section of a website that can be used to describe the site in more detail, including content and keywords; also known as meta name, or meta element.

index server

stores the information index, which has categorized websites as a best fit to certain keywords.

CPM (cost-per-thousand)

the amount paid in purchasing advertising; in this case, means the cost per thousand impressions, or the cost divided by the total number of impressions.

CPC (cost-per-click)

the cost of a paid ad campaign divided by the number of clicks.

domain name authority

the extent to which a domain name is considered to be a reputable website in a particular category.

universal search

the inclusion of search results from multiple content sources such as videos; images, news, maps, books, and websites into one set of research results.

paid search

the paid aspect of SEM based on an advertising model where firms seeking to rank high in specific search categories will bid on certain terms or "keywords" in the hopes of a lucrative ad ranking; also known as PPC (pay-per-click)

title tag

the title the user sees in the blue bar at the top of the web page; also known as the HTML title tag.

local search

using a local search term in a search query.

search engine

website that works to help users find the things they want to find on the Internet.

user intent

what the user is actually searching for.