Digital Glossary

We tent to romanticize the past and view the future negatively, believing that societies/institutions are by and large in decline.

In contrast to the Surface Web (indexed sites), this part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines, but does not deal in illegal activities, like the Dark Web. This consists of a variety of databases, documents, reports and other information that is not available to the public. It can also include things like web mail, online banking or subscription based content like videos, magazines, newspapers or other publications.

As a witness who secretly fears being vulnerable to a serious mishap, we will blame the victim less if we relate to the victim.

The buyer aspect of media buying that allows advertisers broad access and management of digital inventory through multiple ad exchanges, with the options to serve and track ads, perform real-time bidding on ads, utilize wide targeting, and optimize.

The destination of your ad is where people will land if they click on it. “also known as” Landing Page.

Advertising (paid placements) on any digital platform. This can include social platforms like Instagram, Pinterest & Facebook as well as on search engines like Google or Bing and individual websites.

An inspection or examination of a business’s current digital advertising performance and tactics.

Sometimes known as a virtual assistant or intelligent personal assistant, this software or application can perform tasks or services via verbal commands from a user. These assistants are generally used to answer questions, set events and to-do lists, and can be set up to control utilities like lights and other automated devices in homes or businesses. Most smart devices also have built in digital assistants like Siri or Alexa.

Sometimes you can hire a real person (virtual assistant) that do some of those tasks.

A tool that provides a time-based structure for campaign planning, assigning, creating, and delivering campaigns to the marketer’s target audience. Marketing calendars help align marketing partners with the overall goals of a client or brand.

A direct message on social media is a private message sent directly to a user’s inbox. DMs exist in contrast to public forms of interaction on social media like commenting on an image or posting on a user’s timeline.

Direct search traffic is made up of visits from people entering your website URL directly into their browser.

A website that categorically lists websites with similar themes. Some directories like chambers of commerce (a list of businesses in one geographic area) can be helpful for SEO, however widespread abuse of spam directories led Google to discount links from directories whose sole purpose was selling links.

Just like directories for people and phone numbers, there are directories for websites. Submitting your site to a directory gives you more than just an inbound link; it helps people find you.

Disappearing content, sometimes called ephemeral content, refers to posts on social media that delete themselves automatically after a set amount of time has passed. Instagram and Snapchat Stories are notable examples, as these sets of photos and videos disappear after 24 hours. In social media marketing, disappearing content is used to be spontaneous and timely while motivating users to engage through FOMO.

Display ads are one of the oldest forms of online advertising and come in the form of banners in different sizes that are served to online audiences via display ad networks.They are Ads on a display network which include many different formats such as: images, flash, video, and audio. Also commonly known as banner ads, these are the advertisements that are seen around the web on news sites, blogs, and social media or on a web page that a consumer is using.

a network of websites and apps that show display ads on their web pages. Google’s display network spans over 2 million websites that reach over 90% of people on the internet. Businesses can target consumers on the display network based on keywords/topics, placement on specific webpages, and through remarketing.

Shows the website address (domain from the final URL) within the Search ad and does not display additional tracking parameters within the URL. This gives the user an idea of where they will go after they click on the ad.

Stands for Domain Name System, it is a protocol that translates website URLs (which use alphabetic characters) into IP addresses (that use numeric characters). DNS exists because it is more useful for internet users to remember letters and words in website URLs, but the world wide web communicates in numbers with IP addresses. Without DNS, every website would just be a string of numbers rather than a traditional URL.

In other words, it's the system that translates Internet domain names into IP numbers.
If a domain name is like a street address, DNS is the city infrastructure: roads, power lines, water lines… all that.
You also might hear: domain name system, DNS settings, caching, records (e.g. A, CNAME)

A phrase that denotes a hyperlink absent of a “nofollow” tag. By default, a hyperlink is a dofollow link until a “nofollow” piece of code is added to it. Dofollow links pass SEO equity to the destination URL, while “nofollow” links do not.

The main web address of your site (i.e. www.yoursite.com). It’s good to renew ownership of your domain for several years. Search engine rankings favor websites with longer registrations because it shows commitment.

a search engine ranking factor used to measure the power of a domain name based on Age, Popularity, Size and other Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) factors. This measurement (scored between 1 – 100) represents how much authority a domain has, to help decide where it should appear in search results and indicating how good your entire domain is. It is calculated by the quantity of links to your site, the quality of those links, and the quantity and quality of those links.

The portion of a URL which indicates the host or web server or the unique name that identifies an Internet site. Example: intigress.com is a domain name.

Is a lead nurturing method that uses automated tailored content & triggers that are ‘dripped’ at a specific time with the goal of driving a desired action (e.g: a sale). Drip campaigns or drip emails are usually used here.

The less you know, the more confident you are. The more you know, the less confident you are.

Refers to instances where portions of text are found in at least two different places on the web. When the same content is found on multiple websites, it can cause ranking issues for one or all of the websites, as Google does not want to show multiple websites in search results that have the exact same information.

Generally, the site that indexed the content first is considered to be the original content and would not be penalized.

Duplicate content can result from plagiarism, automated content scrapers, or lazy web design. Duplicate content can also be a problem within one website — if multiple versions of a page exists, Google may not understand which version to show in search results, and the pages are competing against each other, this is also known as keyword cannibalization.

Issues like this can occur when new versions of pages are added, without deleting or forwarding the old version, or through poor URL structures.

The amount of time between when a user clicks on a result on the search engine results page and when the user returns to the search engine results page.