Glossary - A

above the fold
With reference to the top part of a newspaper, the term is used on the Net to describe the top part of the page that the user can see without scrolling down.

acquisition
A term used in Internet marketing to describe the point at which a visitor becomes a qualified lead / customer. Generally this is the point where the visitor
· buys a product or
· provides contact details and indicates an interest in the product or
· subscribes to a newsletter.

acquisition cost
Total cost of an advertising / marketing campaign divided by the number of visitors (visitor acquisition cost) or divided by the number of customers (customer acquisition cost). Monitoring of acquisition cost is an important factor in effective PPC advertising.

adsense
Google 's contextual based ad program.

advanced search
An option at most of the major search engines that allow users to specify certain search criteria. For example, users can elect to see only documents added to the database after a certain date, documents in specific languages etc.

adwords
Google 's PPC program.

agent name delivery
Different pages can be presented at the same URL . Different pages are delivered based on the agent name requesting the page. Typically, agent names starting with " Mozilla " indicate regular browsers while search engine spiders use names like Googlebot , Scooter etc. Agent Name Delivery is not a very effective form of cloaking though. Search engines can (and do) disguise spiders as "Mozilla" agents.

algorithm
Algorithms are sets of rules according to which search engines rank web pages. Figuring out the algorithms is a major part of SEO . The thinking is that if you understand how they calculate relevance , you can make specific pages on your site super relevant for specific search terms .

allintitle
A special search command for Google . A search for allintitle:widget would only return sites that has the word "widget" in the title .

allinurl
A special search command for Google . A search for allinurl:widget would only return sites that has the word "widget" in the URL .

alt Attribute
More commonly known as the "alt tag". The alt attribute is an HTML element specified within an image tag. The syntax is:
<IMG SRC="main-logo.gif" ALT="Pandecta Logo">
The text in the alt attribute, "Pandecta Logo" in this example, will be displayed in the place of the image "main-logo.gif" while the image loads or if the user has images turned off. In most browsers the text also appears as a "tool tip" when the user hovers the mouse pointer over the image after it has loaded.
Creating an alt attribute for images is not required, but recommended since the alt text is factored into the algorithms of most search engines .

alt tag
Common name (erroneous) for the alt attribute .

alt text
Text specified in the alt attribute .

anchor text
Also called link text, referring to the text that appears in a text link. For example, if I link to the Pandecta Magazine web site like this: Click here , then " Click here " is the anchor text for the link. Some search engines - notably Google - take anchor text into account when ranking sites. It is therefore beneficial to have keywords in the anchor text of links pointing to your site.

audience reach
In the context of search engines , the term refers to the percentage of the total Internet population that use a particular search engine during a given month. Together with search hours , audience reach is an important measure when calculating the popularity of the different search engines.

automated submission
he practice of machine-based, automatic submission of URL s to search engines , usually with the use of submission software or submission services .
Also see mass submission . For more on automated submission, mass submission and submission software (and their dangers), please refer to the Search Engine Yearbook .