When speaking about websites the language can be a bit confusing, You’ve probably heard about HTML, H1 tags, Meta tags, keywords, landing pages, email marketing and 100 others,

I’ll use this article to explain some of the most common.

Ready? Here goes…

HTML

HTML which stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language” which is the language commonly used to build websites.

Tags or Headline tags

This tag tells the search engines (I’ll refer to search engines as SE’s from now on) how important the word or phrase is, if you want the SE’s to put greater emphasis on a word or phrase you assign it an H1 tag, you can tag all the way to H6, but honestly I’ve never gone that far with them.

H1 tags are written in HTML which stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language” which is the language commonly used to build websites. The tag in HTML looks like this, <h1>this is an HTML tag</h1>, when viewed on a website you would only see the words “this is an HTML tag”

Keywords

Keywords are critical to your website and if you don’t choose them the SE’s will. Keywords are simply a word or phrase that someone uses to find information on the internet.

For instance if I were going to look for a good restaurant I would type into Google or another search engine “restaurants chattanooga” so, restaurants chattanooga is the keyword.

There are tools that will tell you how many people actually search for a specific keyword as well as suggest others for you too. The one I use most is free and is provided by Google, who better to tell you how many people are searching for a specific term?

Click here to go to the Google keyword tool. Oh yeah, it is free but you will need a Google account to use it.

Another one is Wordtracker, click to see it.

Meta Tags

Are tags used within the HTML of a webpage and are used to specify the page description and keywords.

Back-Links

An example of a back-link is if I put your domain name on my website and make it so people can click the link to go to your website. That is considered a back-link for you and is very powerful in helping your website get ranked well in the SE’s.

The same holds true if you put a link to my website, that is a back-link for me, however if we trade links and each of us put the others link on our website, the SE’s ranking power is diminished.

People used to “trade links” and still do somewhat to get high SE’s rankings and it worked until the SE’s saw what they were doing and it no longer works very well if you just trade. The back-link I described first is a one way back-link and those are really what you need for ranking purposes.

Banner Ad

A banner ad is similar to a billboard on the side of the highway except that it is used on a website and can vary in size.

Click Through Rate – CTR

This is the percentage of people that see your ad and actually click on it to visit your website.

Pay Per Click – PPC

PPC is exactly what it sounds like, you place an ad on someone else”s website or with the search engines (you’ve probably heard of Google adwords) and every time someone clicks on your ad you pay a small amount for that click. Click Through Rate becomes extremely important when using PPC.

Impression

How many times your ad was viewed online. This is used typically to determine your click through rates.

Opt-in

Mostly used with email marketing, any time someone gives you there email address it is referred to as an opt-in.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol

The method used to upload most websites to the host server.

Website Host

This is the server that stores your webpages on the internet.

Server

This is the equipment a website host uses to store your website pages on the internet.

If you have any questions and I’m sure you will, please send me your question here and I’ll be happy to explain anything I can.

Tagged as: Website Lingo, Website Optimization