Wednesday 14 January 2009

The meaning of web words, acronyms and terms

A glossary of internet marketing buzzwords, acronyms and terms invented purely to make you go :-s (that means confused).

You'll also notice that there's lots of links to other posts of mine. This is an environmentally friendly post as it recycles content i've already written, much like they started to do in later series of Friends. This list was last updated on 14th January 2009.
  • ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) - an initiative by content providers to add rights information on all copyrighted material.
  • Backlink - An incoming link to a website. How to check your backlinks.
  • Batphone - A high priority phone line. Full definition.
  • CMS - Content Management System
  • Cybersquatter - People registering domains similar to a well known domain to try and get traffic from people typing in incorrect URLs, often sending you to porn.
  • Favicon - The little icons in your browser's address bar. They're easy to make too!
  • Hard 404 - An error page that returns a 404 error. This is the correct response, a soft 404 is the wrong response for SEO.
  • Link juice - Ah the magic Google love. As Google's algorithm is partly based on the number and quality of links to your site, each link will provide a little boost to your ranking (some more than others), this is their link juice.
  • Meta tags - An all encompassing phrase that covers data placed in the code of a web page. Useful for SEO is the 'meta description' attribute. A title tag is not a meta tag.
  • Pagerank - Named after Google founder Larry Page, this is another name for Google's algorithm which provides the ranking that Google gives each page to prioritise where they appear in search results. More on the 'pagerank' given in Google toolbar.
  • Phishing - People trying to get confidential information from you such as credit card details, usernames, passwords. 7 top tips to avoid being phished.
  • Rickroll - I'm not going to tell you the answer to this, you must ask my identical twin.
  • SEM - Search Engine Marketing
  • SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
  • SERPs - Search Engine Results Page
  • Social bookmarks - the 6 little icons at the end of this post that let you bookmark or favourite a web page for others to discuss and read or just for your own benefit so you can find it again.
  • Soft 404 - An error page that returns a 200 OK error, this is not good for SEO.
  • Spamdexing - Spamming a search engine to manipulate their results. Wikipedia article.
  • Tag cloud - see the left of my blog. It's a way of displaying information or links based on their various importances by using font size or colour. Quintura is a good example.
  • Title tag - A HTML element essential for SEO. Defines your web page's title that appears at the top of the browser and in search results. It's also not a meta tag.
  • Top level domain (TLD) - The last bit of a URL following the final dot. Like .com, .co.uk and .org.
  • Universal search - Google's term for a search engine that returns more than just standard text results, like video, images, news, flash, shopping and more.
  • URL - Unique Resource Locator. In web terms this means the EXACT web address (including http:// at the beginning)
  • W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium. Holder of the web's protocol, standards and guidelines. www.w3.org
  • Web 2.0 - Who knows? Wikipedia calls it the "changing trend in the use of World Wide Web technology... blah blah blah".
  • WYSIWYG - What you see is what get. As opposed to inputting HTML in directly, a WYSIWYG editor will just show you the finished product as you type and you can make changes such as bolding, underlining and adding images without touching the code.

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