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| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Arbitrage | Exploiting market inefficiencies by buying and reselling a commodity for a profit. As it relates to the search market, many thin content sites laced with an Overture feed or AdSense ads buy traffic from the major search engines and hope to send some percent of that traffic clicking out on a higher priced ad. Shopping search engines generally draw most of their traffic through arbitrage. |
| ASP | Active Server Pages - A dynamic Microsoft programming language. Allows web developers and web programmers to make their websites dynamic using database driven content. The code is primarily written in Visual Basic Script, and it is produced on the server of the site instead of the browser. The server reads the ASP code and then translates it into HTML. |
| Astroturfing | Attempting to advance a commercial or political agenda while pretending to be an impartial grassroots participant in a social group. Participating in a user forum with the secret purpose of branding, customer recruitment, or public relations(the opposite of full disclosure). |
| Audio Streaming | The process of providing audio content on a website. Some hosts do not allow audio or video streaming because it can take up a significant amount of space. |
| Authorities | Topical authorities are sites which are well trusted and well cited by experts within their topical community. A topical authority is a page which is referenced from many topical experts and hub sites. A topical hub is page which references many authorities. |
| Authority | The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search engines. Five large factors associated with site and page authority are link equity, site age, traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content. Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authorities and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on eCommerce and eBusiness, but not a broad general authority. |
| Auto Responder | Automated program that acknowledges receipt of an email message to a particular address, and then replies back with a pre-written reply email to the sender. Commonly used to communicate when you are away, when they can expect an answer or confirmation that an email has been received. |
| Automated Bid Management Software | Pay per click search engines are growing increasingly complex in their offerings. To help large advertisers cope with the increasing sophistication and complexity of these offerings some search engines and third party software developers have created software which makes it easier to control your ad spend. Some of the more advanced tools can integrate with your analytics programs and help you focus on conversion, ROI, and earnings elasticity instead of just looking at cost per click. |
| Average Inventory Cost | Product price minus coupons or discounts, plus freight and applicable taxes. The average can be found by adding the beginning cost inventory for each month plus the ending cost inventory for the last month in a period. If attempting to calculate for a season, divide by 7. If you are calculating for the year, divide by 13 instead. Typically used when calculating Gross Margin Return on Investment (GMROI). |
| B2B | Business to Business. |
| B2C | Business to Consumer. |
| Backbone | A high-speed line or series of connections that forms a major pathway within a network. In general, the better the backbone of the hosting company, the better the availability of the websites that run on their computers. |
| Bait and Switch | Marketing technique where you make something look overtly pure or as though it has another purpose to get people to believe in it or vote for it (by linking at it or sharing it with friends), then switch the intent or purpose of the website after you gain authority. It is generally easier to get links to informational websites than commercial sites. Some new sites might gain authority much quicker if they tried looking noncommercial and gaining influence before trying to monetize their market position. |
| Bandwidth | How much information you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits per second (bps). A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 57,000 bits in one second. Full-motion, full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits per second, depending on compression. |
| Banner | An online advertisement in the form of a graphic image on a Web page that links to a location of the advertiser's choice. These familiar banners are usually in GIF, JPEG or SWF format. Banners can include graphic advertisements of any size, so don’t let this term even hold any importance to you. Instead, visit www.iab.net/standards/adunits.asp and make yourself familiar with the different types of ‘interactive marketing units’ available under IAB standards. Take into account things like your logo and message to determine which sizes are best for your advertising efforts. |
| Behavioral Targeting | Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or implied intent. For example, if I recently searched for mortgages then am later reading a book review the page may still show me mortgage ads. |
| Big Box Stores | Large stand-alone store with varying market niches. |
| Bit (Binary Digit) | A single-digit number, either a 1 or a 0. A bit is the smallest unit of computerized data. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits per second. |
| Black Friday | Black Friday is used to describe a number of historical Fridays in which an event led to public chaos or disaster. |
| Black Hat SEO | Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next. Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work. People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs. When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with. |
| Block Level Analysis | A method used to break a page down into multiple points on the web graph by breaking its pages down into smaller blocks. Block level link analysis can be used to help determine if content is page specific or part of a navigational system. It also can help determine if a link is a natural editorial link, what other links that link should be associated with, and/or if it is an advertisement. Search engines generally do not want to count advertisements as votes. |
| Blog | A periodically updated journal, typically formatted in reverse chronological order. Many blogs not only archive and categorize information, but also provide a feed and allow simple user interaction like leaving comments on the posts. Most blogs tend to be personal in nature. Blogs are generally quite authoritative with heavy link equity because they give people a reason to frequently come back to their site, read their content, and link to whatever they think is interesting. The most popular blogging platforms are Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type, and Typepad. |
| Blog Comment Spam | Either manually or automatically (via a software program) adding low value or no value comments to other sites. As time passes both manual and automated blog comment spam systems are evolving to look more like legitimate comments. I have seen some automated blog comment spam systems that have multiple fake personas that converse with one another. |
| Blogger | Blogger is a free blog platform owned by Google. It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Blogspot.com, or to FTP content to your own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website's link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else's website. Blogger is probably the easiest blogging software tool to use, but it lacks many some features present in other blog platforms. |
| Booking Program | The opportunity to view new products or samples now and to place an order for that merchandise to be delivered at a later date. |