Search Engine Promotion Optimization and Marketing - Small Business Consultants - San Diego

CD-ROM	Compact Disk-Read Only Memory, a storage medium popular in modern computers. One CD-ROM can hold 600 MB of data.
CGI	Common Gateway Interface. An interface-creation scripting program that allows Web pages to be made on the fly based on information from buttons, checkboxes, text input, etc. a standard interface between web server software and other programs running on the same machine.
CGI Program	Strictly, any program which handles its input and output data according to the CGI standard. In practice, CGI programs are used to handle forms and database queries on web pages, and to produce non-static web page content.
Channels, Channel listings	Lists of links to selected (and usually popular) web sites. The links are maintained by search engines and directories and are sorted into categories or channels. Sites are picked by a channel editor, often because of a site's already high ranking with the search engines. Some search engines and directories allow visitors to nominate sites for inclusion in their channels.
Click	The opportunity for a visitor to be transferred to a location by clicking on an ad, as recorded by the server.
Client	A computer, program or process which makes requests for information from another computer, program or process. Web browsers are client programs. Search engine spiders are (or can be said to behave as) clients.
Click-Through Rate	Percentage of times a user responded to an advertisement by clicking on the ad button/banner. At one time the granddaddy of Web-marketing measurements, click-through is based on the idea that online promotions that do what they're intended to do will elicit a click.
Click through	The process of clicking on a link in a search engine output page to visit an indexed site. This is an important link in the process of receiving visitors to a site via search engines. Good ranking may be useless if visitors do not click on the link which leads to the indexed site. The secret here is to provide a good descriptive title and an accurate and interesting description.
Cloaking	Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning. The hiding of page content. Normally carried out to stop page thieves stealing optimized pages. See also Bait-and-Switch.
Clustering	The listing of only one page from each web site in a search engine or directory's list of search results. This avoids occupation of all the top results by a small number of web sites and makes the list of results clearer and more useful to the user.
Comment	The HTML <!-- and --> tags are used to hide text from browsers. Some search engines ignore text between these symbols but others index such text as if the comment tags were not there. Comments are often used to hide javascript code from non-compliant browsers, and sometimes (notably on Excite) to provide invisible keywords to some search engines.
Copyrighting	Copywriting for search engines is the art of creating web page copy that is tailored not only to fall in line with the current interpretation of search engine algorithms, but also to entice the reader to perform the action you desire. For example, to sign up for your newsletter, or click through to a certain area of your site.
Cookie	A file on your computer that records information such as where you have been on the World Wide Web. The browser stores this information which allows a site to remember the browser in future transactions or requests. Since the Web's protocol has no way to remember requests, cookies read and record a user’s browser type and IP address, and store this information on the user’s own computer. The cookie can be read only by a server in the domain that stored it. Visitors can accept or deny cookies, by changing a setting in their browser preferences.
CPC Campaign	Cost Per Click. A website marketing campaign based on a cost-per-click price where you only pay for the visitors that click on your listings. Hitwise Search Marketing provides guaranteed traffic at competitive cost per click prices. Due to our relationships with search engines combined with our optimisation techniques, the price of marketing your website is lowered drastically.
CSS	Cascading Style Sheet (file.css)
Coverage	The percentage of a population group covered by the Internet.
Crawler	A program used by a search engine to "crawl" links on the Internet to find and index content. Also called a robot or spider. Can be used to identify and differentiate between types of crawlers indexing your site.
Creative	The technology used to create or develop an ad unit. The most common creative technology for banners is GIF or JPEG images. Other creative technologies include Java, - HTML, or streaming audio or video. These are commonly referred to as rich media banners.
Cyberspace	Coined by author William Gibson in his 1984 novel "Neuromancer," cyberspace is now used to describe all of the information available through computer networks.
Cloaking	In terms of search engine marketing, this is the act of getting a search engine to record content for a URL that is different than what a searcher will ultimately see. It can be done in many technical ways. Several search engines have explicit rules against unapproved cloaking. Those violating these guidelines might find their pages penalized or banned from a search engine's index. As for approved cloaking, this generally only happens with search engines offering paid inclusion program. Anyone offering cloaking services should be able to demonstrate explicit approval from a search engine about what they intend to do. If not, then they should then have explained the risks inherent of unapproved cloaking.
Contextual Link Inventory	To supplement their business models, certain text-link advertising networks have expanded their network distribution to include “contextual inventory”. Most vendors of "search engine traffic" have expanded the definition of Search Engine Marketing to include this contextual inventory. Contextual or content inventory is generated when listings are displayed on pages of Web sites (usually not search engines), where the written content on the page indicates to the ad-server that the page is a good match to specific keywords and phrases. Often this matching method is validated by measuring the number of times a viewer clicks on the displayed ad.
Conversion Rate	The relationship between visitors to a web site and actions consider to be a "conversion," such as a sale or request to receive more information. Often expressed as a percentage. If a web site has 50 visitors and 10 of them convert, then the site has a 20 percent conversion rate. Source: Webmaster World Forums
Cost Per Click	System where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for each click someone makes on a link leading to their web site. Also known as CPC. Source: Webmaster World Forums
CPM	System where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for the number of times their ad is seen by a consumer, regardless of the consumer's subsequent action. Heavily used in print, broadcasting and direct marketing, as well as with online banner ad sales. CPM stands for "cost per thousand," since ad views are often sold in blocks of 1,000. The M in CPM is Latin for thousand. Source: Webmaster World Forums and Did-It.com
Crawler	Component of search engine that gather listings by automatically "crawling" the web. A search engine's crawler (also called a spider or robot), follows links to web pages. It makes copies of the web pages found and stores these in the search engine's index.
CTR	Clickthrough Rate.