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)

Social 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!