Graphic that shows icons representing digital marketing trends in 2018

To call the world of digital marketing fast-paced is an understatement. The digital landscape is always evolving with state-of-the-art technology, updated algorithms, and cutting-edge strategy. Keeping up with all of it could be a full-time job. So, we at Two Rivers Marketing have made it a little easier for you with a glossary that every digital marketer should know.

You also may find it helpful to download our handy PDF of the digital marketing glossary.

  • Alt text – Used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page.
  • Analytics (or Google Analytics) – A Google platform that allows webmasters to collect statistics and data about website visitors. Google Analytics allows webmasters to see where web traffic comes from and how visitors behave once on the site.
  • Anchor text – Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.
  • Backlink – An incoming hyperlink from an external website to another website. From an SEO perspective, backlinks are a method to gain trust with search engines and thus rankings, as the bots and spiders will crawl a website and, in turn, crawl any external links found. When additional traffic is directed from an external source, this helps search engines to see the site as a valued and trusted resource.
  • Customer relationship management (CRM) – The practices, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving customer relations, retention and sales growth.
  • CRM system – A platform that connects your different departments, from marketing to sales to customer service, and organizes their notes, activities, and metrics into one cohesive system. Examples of popular CRM platforms include Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.
  • Dashboard – A webpage that contains and displays aggregate data about the performance of a website or digital marketing campaign. A dashboard pulls information from various data sources and displays the info in an easy-to-read format.
  • Domain authority – A search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs).
  • Email marketing – The use of email with the goal of acquiring sales, customers, or any other type of conversion.
  • External link – A link that points at an external domain.
  • Followed links – Links that are crawled and indexed by the search engines.
  • HTML – HyperText Markup Language, a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on webpages.
  • Internal link – A link that goes from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain.
  • Inbound marketing – Refers to the activities and strategies used for attracting potential users or customers to a website. Inbound marketing is crucial to having a good web presence, as it’s used as a way to attract prospective customers by educating and building trust about your services, product, and/or brand.
  • Keyword – Ideas and topics that define what your content is about. SEO keywords are the keywords and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines. They’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called “search queries.”
  • Keyword difficulty – An analysis of how well a keyword would perform against already-ranked results.
  • Keyword priority – An overall score that combines keyword metrics to create a single, sortable number you can use to effectively prioritize keywords.
  • Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords – Keywords that are semantically related to your primary keyword. They are not limited to synonyms or words with similar meanings.
  • Link equity – Authority-passing links, including followed links and 301 (permanent) redirects.
  • Long-tail keywords – Three and four keyword phrases which are very specific. Whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy.
  • Marketing automation – The process of utilizing existing technology to automate marketing communications to a database of existing and prospective customers. Read about the six components you need to be successful at marketing automation here.
  • Metadata – A set of data that describes and gives information about other data. Throughout the web, metadata is used to describe individual pages on a website, allowing search engines to understand what the page portrays.
  • Meta description – HTML attributes that provide concise summaries of webpages. They commonly appear underneath the blue clickable links in a SERP.
  • Meta tags – HTML tag used to define metadata on websites. For SEO, these are generally going to be used for description, keywords, and titles.
  • No link equity – Links that do not pass link authority.
  • Open graph – Open Graph is a type of markup used by Facebook to parse out information, like what image and description to display.
  • Page authority (PA) – A score developed by Moz that indicates how likely a page is to rank based on how authoritative search engines consider it to be because of which sites link to it.
  • Primary keywords – The most important keywords on a webpage.
  • Ranking – Refers to a website’s position on the SERP on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
  • Readability – Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand the written text.
  • Rich snippets – The term used to describe structured data markup that site operators can add to their existing HTML, which in turn allow search engines to better understand what information is contained on each webpage.
  • Secondary keywords – Used after primary keywords. When a secondary keyword is used, the chances of attracting additional visitors to your site are increased.
  • Search engine – A web search engine is a software system designed to search for information on the web. Popular search engines include Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO) – Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing websites and content to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Learn the difference between SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) in this blog post.
  • Search engine algorithm – The computer process applied to webpages in the search engine index to determine what are the more relevant pages and to assign ranks in the SERP.
  • Search engine results page (SERP) – The page featuring a list of search results that is returned to the searcher after they submit a search query.
  • Search volume – The amount or quantity of searches that occur for a particular keyword or term, often expressed as average searches per month.
  • Schema markup – Code that is added to the HTML of a website to give search engines more relevant information about a business, person, place, product, or thing. Also known as rich snippets or structured data.
  • Structured data – A system of pairing a name with a value that helps search engines categorize and index your content.
  • Virtual assistant – Application that is able to perform tasks based on user’s command.
  • Voice search – Search queries that are performed by a user speaking into a mobile device, digital assistant, or computer. Get four tips to improve your voice search efforts in this post.

You also may find it helpful to download our glossary of digital advertising terms here.

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