Glossary

Clickthrough-rate
The rate at which people click on a link such as a search engine listing or a banner ad. Studies show that clickthrough rates are six times higher for search engine listings than banner ads.

Cloaking
Serving different content to search engine spiders than to human visitors. Cloaking is basically a "bait and switch" tactic, where the web server feeds visiting spiders content that is keyword-rich, thus fooling the search engine into placing that page higher in the search results. Yet when the visitor clicks on the link they are given different content, which may be totally unrelated. Search engines frown upon this practice and some will penalize or ban sites that they catch doing it.

Cost-per-action (CPA)
The cost incurred or price paid for a specific action, such as signing up for an email newsletter, entering a contest, registering on the site, completing a survey, downloading trial software, printing a coupon, etc.

Cost-per-click
The cost incurred or price paid for a clickthrough to your landing page.

Conversion
The act of converting a web site visitor into a customer or at least taking that visitor a step closer to customer acquisition (such as place an order).

Conversion rate
The rate at which visitors get converted to customers or are moved a step closer to customer acquisition.

Doorway page
A doorway page is a web page full of keyword-rich copy that doesn't deliver any useful information on it other than a link into the site, and whose sole purpose is to be fed to the search engines. Search engines do not like doorway pages as they do not provide values to the visitor.

Pay-inclusion
Paying a search engine to have your web pages included in that search engine's index

Pay placement
paying a search engine to have your listing show up prominently. These listings are usually denoted as "sponsored listings".

Pay-per-click / PPC
A pay-for-performance pricing model where advertising (such as banners or paid search engine listings) is priced based on number of clickthroughs rather than impressions or other criteria.

PageRank
Google uses a weighted form of link popularity called PageRank™. Not all links are created equal. PageRank scoring ranges from 0 to 10, 10 being the best. PageRank scores get exponentially harder to achieve the closer to 10 they are.

SEM
Acronym for Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimization / SEO
Search engine optimization is the use of strategies and tactics to achieve a higher rankings of web pages in the search results pages of the search engines.

SERP
An acronym for Search Engine Results Page.

Static Page
A "static web page" means that the web page was not created dynamically from a database at the time that a visitor is viewing the page, instead it was created and saved as a HTML file.