Webmaster Glossary

Glossary:

Adsense

Contextual advertising offered by Google. Website publishers are paid based on the click-through and advertisement impressions of Google sponsored advertisements. Google Adsense show relevant advertisement based on website content and other factors.

Adwords

Pay per click advertising program by Google. Advertisers can publish their advertisements on Google search results pages and other external websites that have content relevant to their advertisment. Advertisers are charged whenever the advertisements are clicked.

Actionscript

programming language based on ECMAScript, used to define behaviours of Adobe Flash applications.

Affiliate Programs

Marketing method used to allow affiliates to receive rewards and/or payments for driving traffic and/or sales from an affiliate’s efforts.

Alt Attribute

Alternative text to be rendered when a graphic element cannot be displayed. Alt attributes of images are indexed by search engines. Alternately referred to as the Alt tag.

Anchor Text

The text you use when you create a link. If an image is used as a link, the alt attribute acts like the anchor text. Anchor texts gets a lot of weight in Search engine results from the major search engines (Yahoo, Google and MSN). Search engines assume the relevancy of the text used as anchor text to the site being linked to. That’s the reason it is recommended to use relevant anchor texts when linking to another page or website.

Apache

Most widely available web server on the Internet.

Backlink

External link that point to your web page or website. The quantity and quality of backlinks are the primary factors determining Google’s Page Rank.

Bandwidth

Amount of data that may be downloaded and uploaded from a website or web server measured in bytes per month.

Browser

Software used to navigate and display web pages in HTML or XHTML format.

Blogosphere

The collective totality of blogs and their connection with each other. Blogs are believed to be connected to each other through the internet as a community.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets. Defines how HTML or XHTML should be displayed on the browser. CSS can be on each html, xhtml. However, its recommended that you create a separate stylesheet.

Dead Link

A link that points to a webpage that is unavailable.

DHTML

Dynamic HTML. It refers to webpages that reacts to inputs by the user, geographic location or time. DHTML is produced by using a number of technologies like client-side scripting languages(Javascript), server-side languages (ASP ,PHP), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and ActiveX.

Domain Name

Series of alpha-numeric characters used to identify a website on the internet instead of using and IP address. Domain names are registered through a domain name registrar.

Doorway Page

See Gateway Page

Forum

Internet applications often called bulletin boards that allows discussion on a distinct topic.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol. Protocol used to transfer files over a TCP/IP network. FTP is a means for webmasters to upload files to the web server.

Gateway Page

Gateway pages are web pages built to rank high in search engine results for certain keywords for sole intention of driving traffic to another website or webpage.

Google Dance

The fluctuation of search engine results (SERPs). Websites experience surprising change of website rankings. At this time it is said that Google is in the process of updating the search engine rankings.

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language. It is the markup language used for creating web pages.

Javascript

It is a HTML-embedded client-side scripting language created by Netscape.

Keyword Research

Process of analyzing the best and most effective keywords which brings higher and better search engine traffic and ranking to a web page or website.

Keyword Research Tools

Link Building

Creation of inbound links from an external website to a particular website.

Meta Tags

HTML tag located in the header section that is used to provide additional information about a web page.

MySQL

The most popular database servers used in web development with PHP.

Page Rank

Google’s way of measuring the quantity and quality of external links to a particular website

Pay Per Click

Advertising model where a publisher website is rewarded and/or paid for each click-through visitor.

PDF

Portable Document Format. Document readable by the Adobe Acrobat Reader. It allows very good formatting and control on how it is going to be displayed on the monitor. It has the .pdf extension.

PHP

Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is the most popular HTML-embedded server-side scripting languages.

Pixel

is a short term for picture element, the smallest sample of a picture/image.

Problogger

Professional Blogger. Blogger who gets makes a living by getting paid by companies or individuals to blog about their website, business or product.

Reciprocal Links

An exchange of links between websites. Exchange is often agreed upon by the webmasters.

RSS

Really Simple Syndication. XML feeds usually fetched by a reader like Bloglines and Google Reader for conversion to readable format.

Search Engine

A program that uses robots or spiders to crawl or get information on different websites on the internet. Search engines stores or indexes the information to provide users information of different topics and subjects.

Search Engine Algorithm

Search engines’ process of determining the relevancy of web pages through various factors that will ultimately affect it’s rank in search engine results

Search Engine Optimization

Strategy involving Strategy involving designing and modification of web pages in order to improve search result rankings.

SERPs

Search Engine Results Pages. It is the page with website listings returned by a search engine from querying a keyword or phrase.

Sitemap

A page on your website where you can find links to all internal pages or at least to the pages with high importance or value. Sitemaps were built for search engine spiders for easier indexing of the website’s pages. The use of XML sitemaps were also introduced to signal search engines how important a web page is and how often a web page is updated.

Tags

Keywords that represent what a website, blog post or website link is all about.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator. A string of characters used to locate a specified resource on the internet.

Vexel

Vexel came from the two words “vector” and “pixel” often similar to vector-art appearance but is formed entirely by pixels which in turn imitates the looks of vector.

Webmaster

commonly used to describe the person responsible for updating, maintaining and implementing graphic design, web development and sometimes business strategies for a website.

WYSIWYG

What You See Is What You Get. Commonly used to describe programs that lets the developer see the progress and look of a website or program while it is being created.