internet marketing terms

71 Internet Marketing Terms you need to be very familiar with


Disclaimer: Many of the terms here, although were re-written and explained by me, the original definitions were gotten mostly from Webopedia and Investopedia

In Internet Marketing, there are lots of terms that would be used often and as a beginner, it may sound strange and confusing. The first time I also wanted to know about Internet marketing too, I was confused about stuffs like Backlinks, SEO, SERPs, Keywords, inbound links, White hat SEO, PR, Sales funnel, B2B,  and so on. Knowing these terms made it very easy for me to read and comprehend several articles I later read about Internet Marketing.

As the Class Commences, some or many of terms would be used and the best thing to do is to familiarize yourself with those terms. I have compiled here, lists of commonly used Internet marketing terms and their corresponding meanings.

1 Ad: It’s advertisement done on the internet for promotional purposes. It could be in form of image, form, banner, links, videos or texts. Most times, ads are placed on search engines, social media sites and websites.

2 Affiliate: An affiliate is an individual or company that helps another individual or company sell their products or direct potential customers to them and in return get paid.

3 Affiliate Marketing:  Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing works so efficiently for businesses because they get more sales as affiliates work hard to get more sales for them.  It is also effective for affiliates because the can earn money without having or producing any product themselves. All they need to do is link clients and businesses together and they get paid.

4 Alexa rank: A measure of your site based on traffic and compares it with other websites. The lower your Alexa rank, the better your website. E.g A website with Alexa Rank of 100 is better than a website with Alexa rank of 1000. https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/

5 Algorithm: In internet Marketing, Algorithms are complex mathematical equations or formulas created by search engine(E.g Google) webmasters to rank websites  and determine the significance of a web page.

6 ALT Tag: An acronym for alternative tag. Word(s) attached to an image’s code to make it understandable by search engines. Another use is of the alt tag is to substitute the image when it does not load on a browser.  E.g. In the image code below, the alt tag used is “internet marketing”.

<imgsrc=”https://jedun.com.ng/images/classone.jpg” alt=“internetmarketing” />

7 Analytics: this is the use of mathematics, statistics, predictive modeling, and machine learning to find patterns in data. In simpler terms, analytics software programs help you track and interpret the activities going on your website or anywhere else.

8 Anchor Text. It is the clickable text in a hyperlink. The blue, underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard, although it is possible to change the color and underlining through HTML code. The keywords in anchor text are one of the many signals search engines use to determine the topic of a web page.

9 Article marketing: Article marketing is a type of advertising in which companies write and distribute short articles to a range of outlets such as article banks, forums, and newsletter publishers. This is basically writing quality articles and submitting it to huge article sites like Ezinearticles.com, Helium.com ,ArticleBase.com, ArticleDashboard.com, GoArticles.com. This is basically to get more traffic through backlinks.

10 Back-Link: This is a hyperlink placed on a website that leads to your website or web page when clicked.

11 Banner Ad. It’s a rectangular graphic display that stretches across the top or bottom of a website or down the right or left sidebar. It is often displayed on a website by pasting the HTML code of the banner in the desired section of the page.

12 Blog: According to shout me loud, A blog is basically a weblog that a blogger makes use for a chronological listing of blog posts. A blog has the most recent content shown first followed by the previously updated content. A blog can be easily started with services like WordPress, Blogger, etc. and do not need you to start something from scratch, providing you with the entire system including design templates. A blog thrives on new content and more updated it is, the more attention it will get.

13 Blogging: This is simply the art of writing and maintaining a blog

14 Black-hat SEO: It’s the opposite of white hat as it’s an intentional or non-intentional way to rank higher in search engines using techniques that violate search engine rules and policies. Such websites when caught are often penalized and could be banned from search engines.

15 Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who come to websites and leave without viewing another website.

16 Broken Link: This is a link that doesn’t work any longer. When such a link is clicked, it shows an error, or page not found. It occurs due to a variety of reasons i.e the page may be deleted, typo error in the URL, the previous Url may be changed, the destination website removed the linked webpage. Broken links can be problematic for website visitors, making them unable to access the desired resource or information.

17 B2B: This is an acronym for Business-to-Business. It refers to sales you make to other businesses rather than to individual consumers

18 B2C: This is an acronym for Business-to-consumer. It is a business or transaction conducted directly between a company and consumers who are the end-users of its products or services.

19 Call To Action: This is a link or button in a page that prompts the reader to take an action immediately. E.g. Download now, call now, register now, click now, buy now, e.t.c

20 Click-Through Rate (CTR): It is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns. For example, You created a Facebook ad to enable people to click a link, and it gets to 2 million people. If only 100 thousand out of the 2 million people who saw it clicks on the link, the CTR is 0.05%.

21 Content: Refers to written posts, videos, podcasts or graphics uploaded on web pages for people to read or view.

22 Content Management System (CMS). It is a software application that allows users to collaborate in the creation, editing, and production of digital content: web pages, blog posts, without writing codes. Web pages are normally created using codes and programming languages for interactions. CMS allows users to create web pages from software without necessarily writing those codes. Popular CMS include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Blogger.

23 Conversion rate: This is the ratio of people who did the actions you created a system to do to the number of those who saw the system. E.g. If you created a landing page for people to buy a television and 100 people saw it but 3 people bought it, your conversion is 3%.


25 Copyright: Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution. Many articles, videos and pictures on the internet are copyrighted, meaning only the author has the right to share them and give permission to be used and distributed.

26 Cost Per Click (CPC) is a digital marketing method used to measure the cost or cost-equivalent for each click on your ads in a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. It is internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked. In a simpler and practical explanation, you create an ad and pay for each visitor that clicks on the ad. E.g. $0.10 CPC means for each person who sees your ads and clicks it, you pay $0.10.

27 Cost Per Impression (CPI). This is quite related to CPC but the advertiser pays per impression which the number of people who saw it, regardless of whether they click on the ad or not.

28 Crawler: A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing. Web search engines and some other sites use Web crawling or spidering software to update their web content or indices of others sites’ web content. When you create a website or web page, these search engine crawlers access the page to index it.

29 CSS: Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language. This language adds more form, style and structure to a web page.

30 Do-follow link: This is a normal outbound link. When you insert a hyperlink in an anchor text and it’s clicked, it automatically leads to the website.

31 End-User: The People that eventually use a product at the end.

32 Forum: This is simply an online discussion site on the internet. Internet forums are often used to show people information. Things like pictures hyperlinks and images can also be put on the board, or “posted”. In a forum, people register, create threads and discuss on the threads. E.g JeduNigeria Forum.

33 Guest Post: It is a post or article written by a blogger or website owner on another blog or website with the mention of the author and blog usually at the end of the post.

34 Hit: It’s a request to a server to download a web file E.g page, image, e.t.c. Each a web file successfully downloads or opens, it’s counted as a hit.



37 Image Attribution: This is crediting the source of an image. Whenever you are using an image that is not free for commercial usage, the source needs to be fully credited and this is done by attributing the image.

38 Impression: An impression is defined as the point in which an ad is viewed once by a visitor, or displayed once on a web page. It doesn’t matter if it’s clicked or not. As long as it is viewed, it’s an impression.

39 Inbound Marketing: It is a technique for drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization and branding. This attracts the attention of prospects, via content creation, before they are even ready to buy; it’s one of the best and most cost-effective ways to convert strangers into customers and promoters of your business.

40 Indexing. Indexed pages are all pages that have been crawled, ranged and can show up on search engines. There are many websites and pages that haven’t /can’t be crawled and therefore can never show up on search engines. Indexing therefore is getting a web page to appear on search engines.

41 Infographic: Info-graphics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly. An infographic is a popular form of content marketing that can help you simplify a complicated subject or turn an otherwise boring subject into a captivating experience.

42 Keyword(s): A word or group of words typed into search engines when looking for information about a particular subject.

43 Keyword research: This is a method used by internet marketers to find the exact words people type on search engines when looking for a particular topic or product.

44 Keyword Stuffing: This is a Black Hat SEO practice that involves consistently repeating keyword(s) in a web page just to get noticed by search engines and rank higher. This practice worked before but doesn’t any longer. Rather, it attracts serious penalties.

45 Link-building: In the field of search engine optimization, link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website. It is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. In a simpler language, it is when someone from another website puts a link that links to your own website.

46 Long tail keywordLong tail keywords are a type of keyword phrase that has at least three, and some times as many as five words in the phrase. Long tail keywords are used when the website wants to refine search terms to the web page, as well as when the searcher is looking for something rather specific Long tail keywords are better because they rank higher due to low competition and they are very specific for specific customers.

47 Meta Description: A meta description (sometimes called a meta description attribute or tag) is an HTML element that describes and summarizes the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines. While metadata isn’t as important for SEO rankings as it used to be, the meta description still plays a significant role in on-page


49 Meta Tags:  Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s code. Used in HTML and XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a Web page. They are part of a web page’s head section

50 Meta Title: The meta title is the name(title) of a HTML document(web page). The meta title is stored in the head data of the document. It can only appear once in the entire document. Optimizing meta titles for better rankings is an important part of SEO and it also affects the Click-Through-Rate.

51 Newsletter: An email sent to a blog or website subscribers to notify them of new post on the website or information.

52 Niche: A niche or niche market in internet marketing is a narrow or specialized subcategory of the internet market. There are several things to sell or talk about in the internet market, but when you choose just one part of it, it’s called a niche. E.g. you can choose to focus on health niche which is a very broad niche. You can also go narrower by focusing on health for pregnant women.

53No-Follow: It is an abnormal link. Whenever an outbound link is put on a page, Google crawlers follow the link. This surely increases the credibility of the website in the eyes of Google. A no-follow link has a rel=”nofollow” tag inside the code and what it does is to stop Google crawlers from following the link. Webmasters do it for very specific purposes.

54 NoIndex: This is a tag put in a page’s header HTML code to prevent the page from appearing in Google search. When Googlebot next crawls that page and see the no-index tag or header, Googlebot will drop that page entirely from Google Search results.

55 Organic Link: These are back-links gotten from other websites or social media without you asking them to do that. They back-links get is because you provide quality contents and people love it and couldn’t help sharing and mentioning your web page.

56 Off-page SEO: “Off-Page SEO” refers to all of the activities that you and others do away from your website to raise the ranking of a page with search engines. They are often things not done directly on your website, but related to your website and often affect the ranking of your website.

57 On-page SEO /on-site optimization: It is the practice of optimizing individual web page’s content and HTML source code to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. This is when you follow some steps and techniques on your page to rank higher in search engines.

58 Outbound Link: This is a hyperlink placed on your website that links to another web page on a different website.

59 PPC (Pay Per Click): It’s a traffic generation model most times on search engines like Google in which an ad is created and ranks automatically at top. The advertiser pays an amount each time the ad is clicked. This is a fast traffic generation technique but also costly.

60 PR (Page Rank): PageRank is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results. It is Google’s system of counting link votes and determining which pages are most important based on them. These scores are then used along with many other things to determine if a page will rank well in a search. Page rank is usually measured in the scale of 0-10. A PR of 0-1 depicts a new website that is of low quality. A PR of 2-4 depicts intermediate quality. A PR of 5 and above depicts high quality. Authority websites such as Wikipedia have PR of 6 to 10.

61 Private Label Rights (PLR): This is a content (usually written contents) which the author sells or gives out with the permission to edit and resell. When you purchase a PLR article or eBook, you can edit it as if it were you own book.

62 Reciprocal Link: It is an agreement between two webmasters to provide a hyperlink within their own website to each other’s website. Generally this is done to provide readers with quick access to related sites, or to show a partnership between two sites. When you provide a link to someone’s website, the owner of the website also provides a link back to your website.

63 RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication): A standard data feed system used to deliver updates/content from websites. RSS is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator.

64 (SEO) Search engine optimization: This is a popular term in Internet marketing that refers to methods and techniques to make a website or a page rank(appear) on search engines when a keyword is searched.

65 Search engine: Search engines are websites where people type keywords to find out websites that have written about them. Examples are Google, Yahoo, Bing, Duck Duck Go Search, e.t.c

66 Search Engine Marketing (SEM):  It one of the most effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace and it involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.

67 Search Engine Results Page (SERP): This is a page that shows up on search engines when a particular keyword is searched.

68 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): These are webmasters practices used to ensure that a web page is indexed on search engines for a particular keyword. This is aimed at getting traffic organically from search engines.


70 Traffic: This is simply the visitors hitting your website irrespective of their source. Traffic could come from Search engines, social media, backlinks or any other means.

71 White-hat SEO: refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques, and tactics that focus on a human audience opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and policies.


There you have, 71 very important terms you need to be aware of as an Internet market. Bookmark this page and when you have some terms you don’t remember, you can rush over here and read again. If you have any questions, let me know in the comment section.



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