Industry Glossary

Definition: An affiliate program is an Internet marketing practice that connects businesses selling products online with websites related to those products. The websites are run by third parties who sell products and services for the Internet company and in return receive a small commission.

Also Known As: associate programs

A backlink is a link coming from another website to your own. The number and quality of backlinks that your site has can affect your search engine optimization efforts, as some search engines provide significant weight to the backlinks of a site.

If you are working on an SEO campaign, you should include efforts to get links to your site on related sites with high ranking in search engines for the terms you are targeting. This "link love" will help improve your search engine ranking as well. Try to avoid being linked on link farms as that can hurt your search engine results.

Also Known As: inbound links, incoming links, inward links

Google says:

"Avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links"

A bad neighborhood on the Web is any website that uses any dirty tricks to try and increase their site's rankings or do harm to customers reading the site.

These include:

• cloaking
• spamming
• installing viruses or malware
• link farms
• breaking other laws

All of these things will get a site penalized or banned from Google and other search engines, and if you link to these sites, your site will be penalized.

How to Check if a Site is a Bad Neighborhood
Search Google for links to that site. If there are none, chances are the site has been banned. In the Google search engine, type: site: URL

If no results are found, it's not a good idea to link to that site, as it is probably considered a bad neighborhood.

Also Known As: link farms, spam sites

Computer program to view and interact with Internet Web pages.

Example: Internet Explorer 6, 7, & 8; Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape, etc.

A dedicated server is a Web server that is leased or owned outright. Dedicated servers provide you exclusive use of the Web server resources for your business.

In most cases, you'll have full control of the server, including root access and server administration. Some dedicated server plans provide administration consoles to manage the server, while others require you use helpdesk employees to manage your Web server. Make sure that you know what access your plan provides.

Also Known As: dedicated hosting, managed colocation, managed hosting service

A favicon or Favorites Icon is a small graphic that is associated with a page or Web site. The favicon allows the Web developer to customize the site in the Web browser, both in the tab bar that is displayed in many browsers as well as in the bookmarks when a site is saved.

It was named the favicon because it was first developed in Internet Explorer, which calls bookmarked sites "favorites" and this icon was displayed in the favorites menu.

Most site favicons are designed as a small rendition of their logo or other branding mechanism.

Also known as: Favorites Icon

Hypertext Markup Language. The language used to write Web pages. Based on SGML and recently rewritten to follow XML guidelines.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The set of rules used to exchange information on the Web. When seen as part of a URL, it tells the user-agent what protocol to use to gather the data for display/use.

HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol over SSL (Secure Socket Layer). It is a TCP/IP protocol used by Web servers to transfer and display Web content securely. The data transferred is encrypted so that it cannot be read by anyone except the recipient.

HTTPS is used by any Web site that is collecting sensitive customer data such as banking information or purchasing information. If you are making a transaction online, you should make sure that it is done over HTTPS so that the data remains secure.

You can tell when a page is using HTTPS in two ways:

• There will be a lock icon in the browser window pane (usually at the bottom).
• The URL will say "https://"

An image or portion of text that is highlighted in some way (usually underlined on the Web) and connects the current document to another. Hyperlinks are what make plain text into "hypertext".

In SEO, the keywords or keyword phrase is the phrase that the author is trying to target for search engines. Most of the time, you should focus on one keyword or keyword phrase per page.

Keywords should represent the main point of a page. They are the words that someone would type into a search engine and find your page.

Meta data is data about data. In other words, it is information about the Web page that it is currently on. Meta data is usually information that is more useful to programs and scripts than to the customers reading the page. So, meta data is stored in meta tags that are hidden in the of the HTML document.

Meta data is most often used for search engine optimization (SEO). The two most critical meta tags used in SEO are: description and keywords. These are sometimes used by search engines to place the pages in the search directory, and they are used to provide a short description of the Web page in the search results.

Most search engines offer two types of search results to their customers: paid results (typically at the top or on the side) and organic or natural results. While paid results can get your Web site to rank higher for a specific keyword phrase (because you've paid to be high in the results), most customers consider these results to be little better than advertising, and will often skip over them in favor of the natural or organic search results.

An organic search is a search that generates results that were not paid advertisements. Many customers feel that these results are a more accurate reflection of what they might want when searching for a specific phrase, because they are generated by popularity and common usage.

When you do SEO or search engine optimization you are attempting to adjust the content of your Web pages to rank well in the organic search results.

Also known as: organic search

RSS is an abbreviation that stands for either:

Really Simple Syndication -or-
Rich Site Summary

The most common definition is Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is a type of XML that allows Web content producers to provide content from their website for publication on other websites. It allows readers of the website to stay informed easily about changes on that website because the information is collected in a standard format and is readable by many different types of RSS tools and RSS readers.

Also Known As: Atom - not exactly a synonym, but rather another XML syndication language

WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get - an editor where you primarily work with the layout and design of the page.