Digital Marketing Terms – The Basics
I recently gave a presentation on Internet Marketing and Social Media to a group of local professionals. Now, that in itself isnt something unusual, but something that happened during the presentation was. Towards the end of the presentation, somebody raised their hand and asked what a blog was. I had to take a step back, because many times people will not speak up when they dont understand something. It was a great reminder that technology, the Internet and Social Media may not be new to some people, but others are just getting their feet wet.
So to members of our blog audience who may be unfamiliar with some of the items that have been written about here, I decided it was a good time to pull together a quick list of items that we have referenced a number of times but have never truly defined.
Alt Text, or alternative text This is a reference to text that is assigned to a particular image on your website. This is done on the backend. You would want images on your website to have alt text for a few reasons. One, it gives search engines an idea of what the image is about (they are getting better at recognizing images, but they are not all the way there yet). Two, some people turn images off within their browsers to make their Internet experience go faster. By having alt text on an image, these visitors will see the text you choose to describe the image. It could be as basic as a friendly face, or as important as a promotion that you use an image to explain. And three, for the visually impaired who have the content of your website read to them, the reading program will read the image alt text to help describe what the web page is all about.
Backlink The term backlink refers to links on other websites that point back to yours. They can come from directories, industry websites, local business websites, chambers or any other site out there. Search engines recognize links from high quality, related websites as a factor in determining how well your website should rank on SERPs.
Blog You could go to Wikipedia and read there extremely long explanation of what a blog is, or you could read a few, like ours, and see for yourself. Basically businesses use blogs to communicate with their customers on the Internet on a regular basis. Information on the company, a product, the brand and the industry can all be shared, with text, videos, images or links to other web pages.
Content Management System, or CMS When we speak of a CMS, we are referring to a web CMS. These are applications that allow website managers to create and manage the content, and sometimes the design, or their website. Many are easier for non techies to use, allowing them to create and upload content by themselves.
Cookie Tiny pieces of data sent from a website to a visitors browser. This enables the website to remember that the visitor has been to the site before, along with other bits of information, depending on the cookie. It can remember a user name for a site, keep products in an online shopping cart or even remembering user preferences.
Keyword Rankings Keywords or keyword phrases are terms used to describe the words that a person may type into a search engine to find something. For any particular business, there are keywords that their target audience would type in when looking for their product or service. When someone types in these phrases, a business would want to show up near the top of a SERP because that is where the most clicks through to websites happen. Where a particular website ranks for a keyword is called the Keyword Ranking (i.e., If I am a shoe website, and someone types in Air Jordans, I would want my website to come up in the first placement, with a keyword ranking of #1. But maybe I am a new site, and I am on the bottom of page 2. In that case, my keyword ranking may be #20.).
Long Tail Keywords, or just long tail When people reference long tail keywords they are typically referring to phrases that have at least 3 words in them. They tend to be narrowly focused, and more in line with what the searcher is truly looking for. Many times they may not be as popular as the most commonly typed in phrases, but are typically easier to gain good keyword rankings for.
Mobile website Most websites are initially built for a big screen, either a desktop or a laptop. However, as more and more people are browsing the Internet with their SmartPhones, websites that look good on a monitor arent always looking their best on a smaller phone. When this happens, web developers build a Mobile Website, which is a version of a website that looks good and performs well on a SmartPhone.
Read more here:
Digital Marketing Terms – The Basics