GlossaryA

Glossary terms
A

Above the Fold
A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the
area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the
very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are
well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.
See also:

Google AdSense heat map - shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
Absolute Link
A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of
having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is
typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.
Example absolute link

<a href="http://seobook.com/folder/filename.html">Cool Stuff</a>

Example relative link

<a href="../folder/filename.html">Cool Stuff</a>

AdCenter
Microsoft's cost per click ad network.
While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent
in nature compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft's limited marketshare and program newness many
terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity.

See also:

AdCenter -
sign up for an account
Microsoft AdLabs - view many of the free search marketing tools Microsoft offers.

AdSense
Google's contextual advertising network. Publishers large and small may automatically publish relevant
advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google.
AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue stream which will help some publishers establish a
baseline for the value of their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is the trade
off for automating ad sales.

AdSense ad auction formats include

cost per click - advertisers are only charged when ads are clicked on
CPM - advertisers are charged a certain amount per ad impression. Advertisers can target sites based on
keyword, category, or demographic information.
AdSense ad formats include

text
graphic
animated graphics
videos
In some cases I have seen ads which got a 2 or 3% click through rate (CTR), while sites that are optimized for
maximum CTR (through aggressive ad integration) can obtain as high as a 50 or 60% CTR depending on

how niche their site is
how commercially oriented their site is
the relevancy and depth of advertisers in their vertical
It is also worth pointing out that if you are too aggressive in monetizing your site before it has built up
adequate authority your site may never gain enough authority to become highly profitable.

Depending on your vertical your most efficient monetization model may be any of the following

AdSense
affiliate marketing
direct ad sales
selling your own products and services
a mixture of the above
See also:

Google AdSense program - sign up as an ad publisher
Google AdSense heat map - shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
Google AdWords - buy ads on Google search and / or contextually relevant web pages.
AdWords
Google's advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google's ads are keyword targeted and sold on a
cost per click basis in an auction which factors in ad clickthrough rate as well as max bid. Google is looking
into expanding their ad network to include video ads, demographic targeting, affiliate ads, radio ads, and
traditional print ads.
AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords.
Rather than doing that here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources.

See also:

Google AdWords - sign up for an advertiser account
Google Advertising Professional Program - program for qualifying as an AdWords expert
Google AdWords Learning Center - text and multimedia educational modules. Contains quizzes related to
each section.
AdWords Keyword Tool - shows related keywords, advertiser competition, and relative search volume
estimates.
Google Traffic Estimator - estimates bid prices and search volumes for keywords.
Free PPC tips [PDF] - my ebook offering free pay per click advice.
Andrew Goodman's Google AdWords Handbook - costs roughly $75, but is well worth it
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying
independent agents on a cost per action (CPA) basis. Affiliates only get paid if visitors complete an action.
Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for
wasting money on instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage via other's
affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value.

Some power affiliates make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year because they are heavily
focused on automation and/or tap large traffic streams. Typically niche affiliate sites make more per unit effort
than overtly broad ones because they are easier to focus (and thus have a higher conversion rate).

Selling a conversion is typically harder than selling a click (like AdSense does, for instance). Search engines
are increasingly looking to remove the noise low quality thin affiliate sites ad to the search results through the
use of

algorithms which detect thin affiliate sites and duplicate content;
manual review; and,
implementation of landing page quality scores on their paid ads.
See also:

Commission Junction - probably the largest affiliate network
Linkshare - another large affiliate network
Performics - another large affiliate network
Azoogle Ads - ad offer network focused on high margin / high profit verticals
CPA Empire - similar to AzoogleAds
Amazon Associates - Amazon's affiliate program
Clickbank - an affiliate network for selling electronic products and information

Age
Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related
historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some
specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents.
Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than
you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or
a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into
their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home
pages.

Some search engines may also try to classify sites to understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites
or reference sites that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages and try to
classify them based on how frequently they change.

See also:

Google Patent 20050071741: Information retrieval based on historical data - mentions that document age,
link age, link bursts, and link churn may be used to help score the relevancy of a document.

AJAX
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which allows a web page to request additional data from a
server without requiring a new page to load.

Alexa
Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic.
Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being
highly accurate it is free.

See also

Alexa.com

AllTheWeb
Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo may
use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features.
See also:

AllTheWeb.com

Alt Attribute
Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an
image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an
image by providing a text equivalent for the object.
Example usage

<img src="http://www.seobook.com/images/whammy.gif" height="140" width="120" alt="Press Your Luck
Whammy." />

See also

W3C QA: Alt Attribute

AltaVista
Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early
powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to
dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy
and a loss of mindshare and marketshare.
See also:

AltaVista

Amazon.com
The largest internet retailing website. Amazon.com is rich in consumer generated media. Amazon also owns a
number of other popular websites, including IMDB and Alexa.
See also:

Amazon.com - official site

Analytics
Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon
interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site.
Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over
those who do not.

See also:

Google Analytics - Google's free analytics program
Conversion Ruler - a simple and cheap web based analytic tool
ClickTracks - downloadable and web based analytics software

Anchor Text
The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image the image alt attribute may
act in the place of anchor text.
Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at
your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much
similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure
when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

Example of anchor text:

<a href="http://www.seobusinesssolutions.com/">Search Engine Optimization Blog</a>

Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to
20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of
other top ranked competing sites.

See also:

Backlink Analyzer - free tool to analyze your link anchor text

AOL

Popular web portal which merged with Time Warner.
API
Application Program Interface - a series of conventions or routines used to access software functions. Most
major search products have an API program.
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.
See also:

Wolf-Howl: AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets
[audio] Jeremy Shoemaker interviews Kris Jones and part 2
Wikipedia: arbitrage

ASP
Active Server Pages - a dynamic Microsoft programming language.

See also:

ASP.net

Ask.com

Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they dumped
Jeeves in early 2006. Their search engine is powered by the Teoma search technology, which is largely
reliant upon Kleinberg's concept of hubs and authorities.
See also:

Ask
Ask Sponsored Listings - Ask syndicates AdWords ads, but also sells internal pay per click ads as well
Ask Webmaster Help
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
authority 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 SEO, but not a broad general authority.

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.
Example potential topical authorities:

the largest brands in your field
the top blogger talking about your subject
the Wikipedia or DMOZ page about your topic
See also:

Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF]
Jon Klienberg's Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment [PDF]
Jon Klienberg's home page
Hypersearching the Web

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.
See also:

If you want to program internal bid management software you can get a developer token to use the Google
AdWords API.

A few popular bid management tools are

Atlas OnePoint (formerly known as GoToast)
BidRank
KeywordMax

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