An image that represents an account on social networks and forums.

The @ symbol is used in email, but it is now also being used to tag users in messages on social networking websites. Both Twitter and Facebook use the @ tag.

Short for application, an app performs a function on your mobile phone or computer.

Application Programming Interface, a document interface that allows software applications to interact with other applications. For an example the Twitter API.

A website and toolbar that tracks the number of hits (visitors) to a particular website and ranks them based on this amount.

The technology that powers Google’s PPC advertising. It facilitates targeting adverts to specific searches, and the adverts appear above and to the right of the organic searches. To find out more about Adwords see our Pay Per Click information page.

A bookmarking service that gives a code people can use on their websites so when people visit they can share.

This is testing a new technique (A) of online marketing (whether it be PPC or SEO) against a control (B) to see if the new technique is more effective.

A traditional method for bloggers to list all the other blogs they have read. The popular blogging service WordPress have retired the blogroll in recent updates.

A term given to the sum of all blogs on the internet.

A person who writes a blog.

Short for weB LOG, a blog is a website that is maintained by one user, or a group of users, where the users post updates. Some are used as online diaries, but others may be corporate. A company that maintains a blog gives it a personable front for the potential clients, and it also maintains an interesting online presence that can be used for SEO.

A relatively new search engine that aims to better Google. It claims to be spam-free, and it also contains functionality that makes SEO easier.

White hat activities are any technique to increase a websites rank that follows search engines rules. More generally, this means ethically promoting a website without resorting to spam and other such ‘black hat’ activities.

A free URL shortening application. They also provide analytics on your links.

An online design portfolio-based community recently acquired by Adobe, developers of industry-standard design software such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

What SEO attempts to encourage, a link to a specific website from another. It increases the websites standing when evaluated by a webcrawler such as PageRank, in essence telling it that the website must be popular.

Corporate Social Responsibility, the ethical behaviour of a company while serving to improve the welfare of their employees as well as the local community.

Conversion Rate Optimisation. The conversion rate is how many people go from just browsing to making a purchase, or becoming a customer. We don’t need to tell you a high conversion rate is desirable!

Text, pictures, video’s and any other online material.

A term used on LinkedIn to describe the people you are associated with.

An online response given by users as either an answer or reaction to a post or message.

What a user sees on a webpage and a WebCrawler sees are actually very different. A computer does not see pictures or text in the way we do, and users do not see the code that produces these pictures or arrangements of text.

Groups of friends on Google + network. Circles can be categorised into colleagues, family etc. You can share certain information with certain groups if you wish.

If there are multiple versions of similar pages, the canonical rel tag tells the WebCrawler that the page linked is the definitive version. Each non-canonical page must link to the canonical version with this link.

A campaign is made up of marketing messages with a specific aim. A campaign may aim to raise awareness, raise funds or increase the sales of a product.

A community for designers to upload snapshots of their work.

A website that collects links to websites much like a search engine, but instead is done by humans rather than WebCrawlers. They are not going to be fooled by spam, but they cannot index nearly as many links as a search engine and generally stick to one topic.

An online news website which has a unique algorithm. The site lets its readers submit articles and also allows people to vote whether or not they liked the article. The articles with the highest number of votes appear at the top of the page while the less popular stories move down the page.

Links tend to decrease in their power over time. A backlink may do better for your website today than it will in a year if it remains unchanged, to stop results pages being clogged up with outdated material. Therefore it is necessary to always get new, fresh, links.

A social network for users to share their location with friends that are within a close proximity.

An online discussion board. People post about whatever topic they wish to generate an online discussion.

The act of choosing to see the tweets of someone on Twitter. Following – Twitter users that choose certain accounts to follow are choosing to view their tweets in the timeline (aka news feed). Your following are all those people that have chosen to view your tweets.

A social network based on picture sharing. Users can store and share photos here.

A large group of people organise to get together at a specific time and place to surprise the public. They will put on a performance that is random and pointless for a brief time and then they will disperse as if nothing has happened.

Nowadays Google and other search engines attempt to pre-empt what you want when you are searching. Geo-Targeting is one example of this, but the search engine will also try to guess what you want, and tailor your results, by your past search history.

Brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg and portrayed in the film The Social Network, if you haven’t at least heard of this website I’m surprised you managed to navigate to this page. It is the definitive social networking site.

Google plus is the latest competitor to the social networking market, and offers the benefit of merging all other Google services under one social networking site.

A tool that shows search density by keyword. It can show the keyword popularity in comparison to others, as well as popularity over a given amount of time.

Google offers up to $10,000 in free PPC advertising for eligible charities. Please check out our section explaining Google Grants at Passion Digital.

A free, browser based tool that allows users to track many different statistics concerning an owned website. This tool is vital for SEO. For instance, a webmaster will be able to track from which search engines so users arrive on the site, and what search terms they used.

Google’s very own social network encourages you to share with the circles (see description above) you make.

The practice of search engines displaying results dependant on where you are. If you want a new pair of shoes it is useless to you if shops 5000 miles away are top of the results page and they don’t deliver!

Text that is highlighted and takes you to a certain destination. They are used to reference other content or to navigate you through a website.

Hyper-Text Mark-up Language is the code that the World Wide Web is written with. If you right-click on this page a select “view code” you can see this code. Interestingly, this code is all a WebCrawler sees.

Saying a website got X many hits is saying how many people visited that website.

Like the concept of tags, a user can draw attention to certain aspects of a twitter post. By placing a #symbol before a word (phrases must be joined without spaces) it is highlighted as a tag.

A video service provided by Google + which allows up to 10 people to talk at one time.

A photo sharing social network with differs from others as it runs as a mobile application. The application allows users to take photographs which they can then apply filters to. Your photos are automatically shared on Instagram and then you have the option to share them on other social networks.

Someone who is an expert in a certain field and, or have a large following. Influencers therefore hold a lot of power in communicating their opinions to their following, perhaps affecting their opinions and behaviour.

An impression is simply someone seeing an advert. They may not click on it or buy anything.

Instant Messaging , texts that are delivered in real-time. This can occur one-to-one or in group messages. IM also allows users to us live record and video calling.

A measure of social influence, Klout connects your social accounts and provides each user with a Klout score. The higher your score is the more influencer you have in the social world. The Klout score is out of 100.

A webpage has a section that is hidden from users, but contains all the words relevant to the page. Keyword stuffing is a black hat technique whereby this section is abused and filled my a high amount of irrelevant keywords, in the hope that it will be associated with these words and found when these words are searched for.

A term or phrase that a user will search for with a search engine. It is important to have your business’ website associated with these keywords so that it will appear when these words are searched for.

Many terms are searched for through search engines, and many people search for the same things. As these terms are so popular, it is very difficult for a starter company to compete against the established websites.

A corporate social network used to connect professionals.

The process by which you increase the amount of links to your website. It may involve generating more interesting or newsworthy content, creating a blog, asking clients to link, plus many other techniques. It is the goal of SEO to build many good links to a website.

A webpage with great, interesting content that people will share with others. They may share it through email, or over Facebook or Twitter, or even social news and bookmarking sites like Reddit or Digg.

You probably see these on plenty of websites, and it is a little graphic button encouraging linking between a website and a social media profile. The “Like” is Facebook’s own version, Google has a “+1” button.

An action made by a Facebook user that represents approval.

The specific webpage on a website that a user is taken to when clicking on a search engine result or a PPC advert. While this could simply be the homepage, often it is more helpful to the customer (and therefore your profits) if they are taken to a page that is specific to their search terms.

An idea, joke or concept that people share. Meme’s can be images or videos or text. Typically a meme comes in the form of an image with supportive text.

Since 2005, Google has been using a new term that can be implemented into the ‘rel’ code of a link. Whereby a normal link to another website counts as a ‘vote’ in that websites favour, a ‘nofollow’ command stops Google and most other search engines from counting a vote. It does not stop their WebCrawlers from following the link, however.

The hub of everyone’s posts. For Facebook, the news feed is made up of friend’s posts. On Twitter, it is known as Timeline as is made up of tweets of those you follow. The news feed is constantly refreshed with the latest posts.

Search engines evaluate the trustworthiness of a website based on how many links point to that website. But links from trustworthy sites are better than links from untrustworthy, and potentially spammy, websites.

The opposite of a keyword: if a user searches using a negative keyword, your results will not show. This is useful if a link is easily confused with something else.

These are the results of a web search that have not been paid for. The positions of the results should be organic in that they reflect the popularity/trustworthiness of the website without being influenced by paid advertising.

On each social network you are given a profile to develop with your personal information and content which you can then choose to share and interact with.

Stands for Page Rank, and is usually seen accompanied by a number i.e. ‘PR6’. It is a score of how trustworthy a particular site is as ranked by Google’s PageRank algorithm. A score of 10 is the highest, and unattainable by all but the most popular websites on the web.

Pay Per Click. While Search Engine Optimisation improves a websites standing in the unpaid section of a search engine, paid results are also found on search engines. On Google, they are above, and to the right, of the main (unpaid) results.

Typically an audio file, a podcast is available to download for playback.

Framework that runs software and presents content.

A social network for people to create image boards.

Images that are chosen from websites or within the Pinterest community. These images are then placed onto image boards.

Google Penguin is the latest version of its PageRank WebCrawler which improves its spam detection. It is better at detecting cloaking, keyword stuffing and duplicate pages. It is in place to better organic searches.

The anchor text is the text that the user clicks on for a link. It is also what a WebCrawler uses to decide what the linked page is about. Therefore, a link to your website with the anchor text that has the exact keywords you wish for your website is the ideal.

The algorithm or WebCrawler that powers Google’s search. It is named after Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and not webpages.

Taking all the information from subscribed news sites and blogs, the reader puts all this information in one easy-to-digest place. It is displayed in a format that is constantly refreshed to get up-to-date information.

Users subscribe to news feeds to get all the latest information in one place (RSS Reader).

Really Simple Syndication, Delivers content enabling readers to stay up-to-date with any blogs or sites they read without them having to visit each individual site.

Return on Investment. What every business person likes to see! If one puts £200 into an ad campaign, a return on investment is any business generated above that initial investment.

A file that says to a search engine WebCrawler “do not search me!” Placing a file named robots.txt in the main directory of a website allows the webmaster to block all WebCrawlers from accessing the page, or specifically block certain WebCrawlers, and therefore stop appearing in results of search engines.

An action on tweets for users to share that tweet with their following. The action resends the message with the original users name tag.

The action a Pinterest user takes when pinning an image from someone’s board onto one of their own.

Part of the code for a link may include a ‘rel’ signifier, which is short for relation. It tells a WebCrawler something about the link, and is used to fine tune certain aspects of SEO. There are two terms frequently used by us:

A social news site that is made up of users who share and leave comments on stories.

The action of choosing to get updates and information from a certain site. It is much like signing up for the monthly postage of a magazine.

As the amount of links pointing to a website tell the search engine how popular it is and therefore how high up the website will be on the results page, some people attempt to create vast amounts of links to a website to try to increase its apparent popularity.

A written document that outlines how employees should talk about work on social media as well as advising them on how to best use social media sites. This is written for the protection of the company and clarifies what employees can and cannot say.

The act of driving traffic through social media channels to reach a certain goal.

The act of pro-actively monitoring and tracking applicable social media activity.

Made up of users who partake in social interactions using social websites, networks and applications.

A video chat programme that is free to use. You can also use it for texting and leaving video and voice messages to other users.

One feature of social networking sites is that users can share links. If your website has an awesome page, a user may want to share it with all their friends. Most social networking sites have features that make this process very easy.

An action made by internet users to pass on any form of information (whether a photo, video, article etc) to their friends, followers and connections.

Search Engine Results Pages. You probably see this every day; it is the page that is displayed when you search with a search engine. It will have a list of results relevant to your search, as well as PPC adverts. The goal of SEO is to move a website to the top of the results page of relevant searched terms.

Search Engine Optimisation. By tailoring the specifics of a website and how it is marketed, a website can move further up the results page on a search engine when a user searches. Doing so vastly improves the odds that the user will click on the link and visit your website! See our SEO strategies page to see what we do.

A social media website where users can post short messages, known as tweets (up to 140 characters) for anyone who is following them to see. It is sometimes known as microblogging as it is similar to blogging but with a strict limit to what can be posted.

A microblogging platform and social network that allows users to post images, text, video’s, links and quotes.

Someone who has the intention to get an emotional response from others online. They generally post controversial, provocative & irrelevant messages for their own amusement. Their views do not necessarily reflect the ones they post about.
troll face

An event or topic that is popular and is widely discussed online.

A stream of conversations. For example, a list of comments on a blog post.

Since computers cannot understand text in the way humans can, tags can draw attention to certain aspects of a webpage or other online content for a WebCrawler to use, or for the websites own search system. For instance a user may tag a video with its relevant actors.

A term given to all user-created data such as blogs, comments, reviews, podcasts and more.

Much like a blog, but documented using video instead of written content.

Certain bits of information are said to ‘go viral’. This means they spread from person to person very quickly, much like a virus. Memes can often spread like this.

There is a lot of jargon used on the web, especially in the world of digital marketing. This guide explains both some one the more commonplace as well as some of the more technical terms you may see.

An open source CMS which is used for blog publication. There are currently over 70 million WordPress sites in the world.

(Sometimes called a bot, robot or spider) Search engines work by indexing all available webpages and scoring them based on a number of factors to gauge their trustworthiness or popularity.

Several years ago the web was ‘one way’, meaning that users were only able to consume information; they did not contribute to the web themselves. Web 2.0 is the idea that users are now able to influence websites and send information to them.

A global video community where users upload and share videos.