Internet Marketing Jargon Buster: 85+ Terms and What they mean

As with any industry, internet marketers tend to use a lot of jargon and acronyms. This can be overwhelming if you’re new to the field, so I’ve put together this little glossary of hotel internet marketing terms & definitions.

Hotel internet marketing jargon

  • Buying cycle: the research process your potential guests go through
  • Guest personas: profiles of the buying habits of an imaginary, but typical, guest
  • Content marketing: publishing useful information with the purpose of attracting new guests
  • Permission marketing: coined by Seth Godin, this refers to getting a customer’s consent to receive marketing messages
  • Relationship marketing: similar to permission marketing, this approach seeks to build long-term relationships with people
  • Viral marketing: a campaign that is so useful, interesting, or funny that people share it
  • Crowdsourcing: outsourcing a task to an external group of people

Website jargon

  • Domain name: yoursite.com (hotelmarketingstrategies.com is my domain name)
  • Web hosting: publishing a website so it is viewable by others on the internet
  • Usability: website ease of use for visitors
  • HTML: a programming code used to display content on the web
  • CMS: Content Management System, or a tool that lets non-technical folks create & update web pages without knowing HTML
  • META tags: HTML code that gives information about a web page; most often seen in the title area of your web browser & in search engine results
  • Link: a connection from one web page to another one
  • Flash: an animation technology that can create attractive, but generally less useful, websites
  • Splash page: a web page that precedes the home page of a website
  • Above the fold: the portion of a web page viewable without scrolling
  • Landing page: the first page on your website a visitor sees after clicking an ad
  • Cloaking: giving search engines different content that what humans see on a web page (something frowned upon by search engines and could get you banned)

Search engine marketing jargon

  • SEM: search engine marketing, the broad practice of using search engines to bring visitors to your website
  • Local search: a web search to find a business in a specific city or geographic area
  • SEO: search engine optimization, or the process of making your website easier to find in search engines like Google
  • Black Hat SEO: optimization techniques that (intentionally) go against guidelines from Google and other search engines
  • SERP: Search Engine Results Pages, or a list of websites returned by a search engine in response to a query
  • SEP: Search Engine Position – your website’s position among search engine results
  • PR: Page Rank, Google’s measure of a web pages’ importance on a scale of 1-10
  • Keywords: the words and phrases people use in search engines to find things
  • Long tail keywords: obscure or very targeted keywords (coined by Chris Anderson)
  • Keyword research: the process of finding which keywords are most popular & relevant to your hotel
  • On-page or On-site Optimization: things you do on your hotel’s website to make it rank higher in search engines
  • Off-page or Off-site Optimization: tactics performed on other websites to increase your site’s ranking
  • Inbound/Outbound Links: links from other websites to your websites, and vice versa
  • Link building campaign: an organized effort to get more inbound links (to increase search position)
  • Reciprocal linking: the practice of exchanging links with another website to get referrals and increase search rank
  • Algorithms: the way a search engines sorts & positions websites

Pay-Per-Click advertising jargon

  • PPC or Pay Per Click: an method of advertising – usually on search engines – where you only pay for people who actually visit your site
  • AdWords: Google’s popular PPC advertising program
  • Keyword match types: different settings with various levels of focus (broad=all queries containing keyword; phrase=only those keywords in that order; exact=only that exact keyword phrase, and nothing else)
  • Negative keywords: terms added to a PPC campaign to prevent ads from showing for queries including these words
  • Keyword bid: the maximum amount of money you are willing to pay for each click for a particular keyword
  • CPC: Cost per Click, or how much you actually pay for each click
  • Impressions: the number of times the ad has been displayed
  • CTR: Clickthrough Rate, or percentage of people clicking your ads
  • Average position: ranking among other PPC ads (usually in the right-hand column of search results pages)
  • Relevancy: the similarity between your ad and a search query
  • Quality score: in AdWords, this is determined by relevancy, and plays a role in your ads’ price and position
  • DKI: Dynamic Keyword Insertion, or the ability to automatically update your ad to include a searcher’s keywords in the title
  • Geo-targeting: displaying your ads only in selected geographic areas
  • Click fraud: malicious clicks made to banners with no intent of purchasing

Blog jargon

  • Blog: a journal-style website
  • Post: an entry published to a blog
  • Blogger: the author of a blog
  • Blogosphere: all the blogs on the web
  • WordPress: a popular free blogging software tool
  • Theme: code that changes the visual appearance of a blog
  • RSS or News feeds: a method of publishing regularly-changing web content (commonly blog posts)
  • FeedBurner: a popular service from Google that makes it easy for blog publishers to share their RSS news feeds
  • Feed reader: tool that combines all your RSS subscriptions in one place for easy reading
  • Microblogging: a style of blogging that uses very short posts
  • Podcast: audio content that can be subscribed to & downloaded automatically to listen to offline
  • Videocast or Vlogging: same as a podcast, but with video content
  • Trackbacks: a notification that another blogger wrote about a blog post
  • Comment spam: comments left on blogs with the sole purpose of getting links to another website
  • Blogroll: a list of links in the sidebar of a blog (usually other blogs the author reads regularly)

no more jargonSocial Media jargon

  • Social media: tools that people use to publish and share web content
  • Web 2.0:  a term that describes blogs and social networking sites that emphasize collaboration and sharing
  • SMO: Social Media Optimization, or making yourself more visible in social media networks
  • UGC: User Generated Content – text, photos, video, and other media that consumers produce
  • Conversation: probably more a buzzword than anything else, this refers to a two-way dialog between companies and their current or potential customers
  • Listening: the practice of tracking what people are saying about you online
  • Reputation management: a combination of listening (above), and proactively responding to feedback
  • Transparency: buzzword alert! this simply means being honest and less ‘corporate’
  • Influencer: someone highly recognized in social networks, with the ability to persuade many others
  • Social bookmarking: saving web content to a web-based service (instead of your browser) where you can share it
  • Creative Commons: a license that allows other people to republish your content with attribution (increasing your influence)
  • Tags: keywords attached to content that help other people find it easily
  • Mashups: two tools or pieces of content combined to make something new (such as a map and guest-written hotel reviews)
  • Wiki: a web page (or set of pages) that anyone can edit & improve
  • Flickr: a popular photo sharing site
  • Twitter: a popular microblogging network
  • Tweets: updates to Twitter
  • Tweetup: a Twitter meetup, of course!

Metrics & measurement jargon

  • Hit: a file request from a web server, which is not nearly as accurate as a….
  • Page view: a request to load a single web page, which is not nearly as important as…
  • Unique visits: the number of different people who visited your website, which is much less important than…
  • Conversion rate: the percentage of people visiting your website that perform a specific action (for hotels, it’s usually making a reservation)
  • Referral sources: the websites people visited immediately before visiting yours
  • Stickiness: attractiveness of web content that makes a guest return again and again
  • Bounce rate: the number of people who visit your website and leave without going to any other page

Okay, that’s about as far as 4 shots of espresso will take me…did I leave out anything important? Are my definitions completely wacky? Let me know in the comments!

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Article by Josiah Mackenzie // June 09, 2009 Josiah spends pretty much all day, every day looking for ways you can use new media and the social web to improve your business. To bring him on your team, you should look at our Insider's Circle program here.

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