Glossary: A

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.

A large directory. Formerly known as The Mining Company.

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.

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.

A database system developed by Microsoft. Part of Microsoft Office Professional. Mostly used on low traffic web sites running on the Windows platform.

Accessibility is a prerequisite to usability. If a person can not access a web page he certainly can not use it. Accessibility refers to web page information/content being obtainable and functional to largest possible audience. It is about providing access to information for those who would otherwise lose their opportunity to use the web. In contrast,inaccessible means unobtainable, nonfunctional.

Acrobat is part of a set of applications developed by Adobe to create and view PDF (Post-Script Document Format) files. It was developed because documents containing images and text often did not look the same when viewed on different computer systems. PDF documents look exactly the same regardless of what system they are viewed on.

A web technology for streaming movies from a web server to a web client. Developed by Microsoft.

A programming interface (API) that allows web browsers to download and execute Windows programs. (See also Plug-In)

Historically, an organization charged with the representation of advertising space for a group of websites for the purpose of maximizing revenue and minimizing administrative costs through aggregation. The role of the modern Internet advertising network is to transact, serve, track and report the distribution of creative from advertisers to publishers using an efficient, interactive marketplace.

Different ads and different ad sources are often rotated in the same space on a webpage. Ad rotation can be static (one ad per page view) or dynamic (more than one ad per page view cycled based on elapsed display time). This is usually done automatically by software on the website. This function is related to, but different from ad serving provided by a network, such as Fastclick.com. Ad rotation software can be used in conjunction with the Fastclick.com service.

Name for the organization, hardware, and software that deliver advertising creative to the user’s browser. The ad server typically is responsible for selecting the appropriate ad to serve by frequency control and targeting. The ad server also performs a variety of other administrative tasks including the counting of impressions and clicks, and report generation.

The space on a webpage reserved to display advertising.

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.

This value, available in the "miscellanous chart", reports an estimated indicator that can be used to have an idea of the number of times a visitor has added your web site into its favourite bookmarks.

A Microsoft technology that provides data access to any kind of data store.

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.

A special type of DSL line where the upload speed is different from the download speed.

Digital creative that is typically interactive. Banners, buttons, interstitials and key words are all examples of online advertisements. The digital creative can be text, static graphic, animated graphic, video, audio or other.

Any individual or entity purchasing online advertising space including agency media buyers, OEM media buyers, and sole proprietors.

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.

Techniques for Accessibility and Evaluation and Repair Tools

Typical term for a website that drives traffic to another website in exchange for a percent of sales from users driven to the site.

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
// Implementation of landing page quality scores on their paid ads

Affinity diagramming is a categorization method where users sort various concepts into several categories. This method is used by a team to organize a large amount of data according to the natural relationships between the items. Basically, you write each concept on a Post-It note and tack them onto a wall. Team members move the notes to groups based on how they feel the concept belongs with other concepts.

Marketing efforts aimed at consumers on the basis of established buying patterns.

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.

An organization beholden with the responsibility to design, produce and manage the advertising for its customers. Agencies that handle digital creative and online campaigns are typical called interactive agencies. Many agencies handle both interactive and traditional media.

Ask Jeeves (a search engine)

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.

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.

Method used by search engines and directories to rank the content in their database. Each search engine and directory uses a different algorithm and frequently changes this formula to refresh their results data.

A URL that points to another website. Many websites use aliases to differentiate traffic. Fastclick allows approved aliases to be used with the same ad code as the main website.

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.

The ALT Text or 'alternative text' is an attribute of the IMG tag. The ALT Text provides an alternate message to your viewers who cannot see your graphics. Without ALT Text, images on a web site are meaningless to these users. Search Engines also use ALT Text to index web pages.

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.

Text associated with a specific webpage image that gets displayed when the Internet user hovers the mouse over the image. Alt tags should convey what the image/website is about and contain relevant keywords because they are spidered by search engines.

An open source web browser editor from W3C, used to push leading-edge ideas in browser design.

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.

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.

In Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), an anchor is the establishing of a term, phrase, image, or other information object as being either.

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.

The clickable – text – part of a webpage. Anchor text is usually underlined.

A special graphics image file encoded with a series of images that are displayed in sequence like an electronic flip-book.

A set of pictures simulating movement when played in series.

An organization that creates standards for the computer industry. Responsible for the ANSI C standard.

An international standard for the C programming language.

A computer program made to discover and destroy all types of computer viruses.

Popular web portal which merged with Time Warner.

America On Line's internet search engine.

An open source web server. Mostly for Unix, Linux and Solaris platforms.

A foundation that oversees the development of the Apache HTTP web server, the most popular HTTP server on the internet. Other notable Apache projects include the Xerces XML parsers and the Ant Java build tool.

An interface for letting a program communicate with another program. In web terms: An interface for letting web browsers or web servers communicate with other programs. (See also Active-X and Plug-In)

A small application served along with or instead of an image file for the purpose of executing a specific animation, visual or audio sequence. Some rich media creatives are served using a Java applet. Applets are typically intended to provide an enhanced web user experience, comparable to a plug-in.

Entities that manage and distribute services and solutions to customers across a wide area network from a central data center. Internet advertising networks are sometimes referred to as ASPs.

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.

A computer program to locate files on public FTP servers.

The experimental network tested in the 1970's which started the development of the Internet.

An array is a data structure consisting of a collection of items. In some languages, such as Java, arrays have a fixed size and must be declared to hold items of a certain type. In other languages, such as PHP, an array's size can be changed throughout the course of the program and can hold different data types in each position.

In a traditional array, each position in the array is identified by a number, known as the index or subscript. Often the range of numbers starts at zero, so that the first the position is identified by 0, the second by 1, and so on, though this is not the case for all languages.

A set of 128 alphanumeric and special control characters used for computer storing and printing of text. Used by HTML when transmitting data over the web.

A multimedia streaming format. Developed by Microsoft for Windows Media.

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.

A meta based search engine located at www.askjeeves.com. The special feature of this search engine is you can ask it English type questions such as, "What is the capital of New Jersey?"

Microsoft Active Server Pages (file.asp)
Application Service Provider (e.g. a provider of web based applications)

An XML format for storing information about ASF files. Developed by Microsoft for Windows Media.

Abbreviation for AllTheWeb, a search engine powered by FAST.

The folks that would be interested in your particular market.

In web terms: the method used to verify the identity of a user, program or computer on the web.

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.

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.

File format for video files. Video compression technology developed by Microsoft.