Digital Marketing – A to Z Guide

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Digital Marketing is a very vast domain which is developing very fastly each passing day in terms of contents and technology used. A successful Digital Marketer should have a very clear understanding of the fundamentals of digital marketing and key areas of digital marketing along with the important key words. We have compiled a Digital Marketing – A to Z Guide for your easy understanding of this topic.

In simple words Digital Marketing is the process of marketing goods and services using digital media or more commonly known as online marketing. Digital Marketing can take various forms such as internet videos, display advertisements, and social media posts etc.

The most commonly and widely used Digital Marketing tool is Internet. Digital Marketing not only consists of email, social media, and web-based advertising, but it also covers text and multimedia communications as a marketing channel.

We believe by now you might have a clear understanding of the topic – “What is Digital Marketing?”

If not, we highly encourage you to read our article here – What Is Digital Marketing?

Hey… here in this Digital Marketing – A to Z Guide blog post we have tried to keep everything simple and to the point, so that even a beginner can grasp the buzzwords of Digital marketing.

Ready to dive in? okay let’s explore the jargons and acronyms commonly used in the Digital Marketing world. Here you go … Digital Marketing – A to Z Guide…

Alt-Text:  is also known as Alternative text, Alt-Text is added to a website’s code to correctly describe the appearance and purpose of pictures on that page. Generally, Alt text assists search engine crawlers by appropriately providing picture context and descriptions, indexing, and image. This also helps visually challenged people understand the website content by reading the alt text.

Ad Copy: This refers to the text which is displayed to the user who sees an advert which could be a social ad or paid search.

Ad Extensions: This is usually some additional information which could be added to paid search ads in order to make the ads more useful and informative and may include any kind of review, location, and sitelinks etc.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages): AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source publishing code standard. AMP helps publishers to load their sites rapidly on mobile, as mobile responsive may be clumsy and sluggish due to the extensive utilization of desktop resources.

Alt Tag: The alt attribute of the IMG element is an HTML attribute. Whenever the picture cannot be loaded, the text is shown.

Anchor Text: This is the visible text contained in a link.

Bot: refers to a software program normally found on the internet and is deployed to do the repetitive tasks. They are more commonly known as ‘crawler’ or ‘spider’ and they crawl the entire content in order for the website to be ranked and included in search results.

Blackhat SEO: All SEO methods which are known to be manipulative or unethical and might harm your website or even have it blacklisted from search engines in the long term are termed as blackhat SEO.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of site visitors who depart without clicking or interacting with any part of the page. Bounce rates typically range from 40 to 60%, but ideally the lesser, the better.

Backlink: self-explanatory… refers to a link from one web site to another. Backlink’s are considered as votes for a specific page by Google and in turn improves the authority of your web site.

Cost: The total money which is spent on any advertising campaigns.

Cost Per Click: Refers to the average amount of click received on your site resulting from a paid ad. Normally calculated as cost per click=Amount Spent/Clicks.

CPA (Cost per Acquisition): CPA, or Cost Per Acquisition, is a paid advertising statistic. It calculates the cost of acquiring a new lead, client, or conversion.

Conversion Rate: Your website might have some goals, generally When users completes the desired action on your site then you may achieve the conversion rate.

Conversion Value: refers to the monetary value of the conversions.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): is the percentage of users who has taken the action of clicking to the site, after they have encountered an ad. It’s calculation is as follows:

Click-Through Rate = Clicks / Impressions x 100

Domain Name: this is the unique identifier or address on the internet. For e.g., www.avtalkz.com

Domain Authority (DA):  site authority and website authority are the two synonyms for Domain Authority. DA is a metric very widely used by SEOs to arrive at the conclusion as to how “rankable” a website is as a whole.

Normally, the score of the search engine ranking ranges from 1-100, developed by a SEO software company Moz that states how well a website will rank on search engine result pages. DA is calculated by evaluating factors such as linking root domains and the number of total links – it shows how authoritative your site is deemed by a search engine. 

Directory:  Websites that gives you a list of companies in a particular region or with similar topics are known as directories. Guides can assist you in creating backlinks to your site for SEO purposes.

Duplicate Content: Content that occurs in multiple places is normally referred as duplicate content (i.e., at multiple web addresses). Search engines have a tough time deciding which version of the same or “similar content” information is more relevant to the search query when there are many pieces of the same or ” similar content” in different places on the internet. Pages with minimal substance (thin content) are also flagged as duplicates by Google.

External Link: An external link refers to links wherein a link on your webpage leads to another website. This is an external link to your site if another website links to you.

Follow/No Follow Links: ‘Dofollow’ another common name for Followed links, this enables search engines like Google to follow them and finally arrive at the site being linked to, which enhances link equity.

Featured Snippets: You might have seen a special kind of organic search result displayed at the top of the results page on certain occasions when you search for your interested topics. Google displays the featured snippet block as a summary of the answer and is extracted from a webpage in an emphasized layout.

Google Analytics: This is a very popular tool used to collect and analyze data about traffic coming to a website. Google Analytics captures metrics such as the number of visitors, pages visited, transactions carried out etc. 

Google Ads/AdWords: There would be seldom any person who might not have heard about Google Ads. It is an online paid advertising platform developed by Google. Interested advertisers can pay to display ads to their preferred customer segment for their products or services. PPC campaigns are used to create, manage and optimize Google Ads.

Header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) are normally very useful in organizing text headings on a web page. Header tags are a web page’s titles and subcategories that assist users and search engines in understanding what the page is about.

HTML: HTML is expanded as “Hypertext Markup Language”. It is a set of instructions about how to display a webpage in a web browser.

Image Alt Tags: otherwise known as “alt attribute” and “alt description,” is an HTML attribute associated with image tags to provide a text alternative for search engines.

Internal Link: denotes a link on a webpage that directs to another page on the same website. For e.g., a link from a blog page on your site to another blog topic would be an internal link.

Inbound Link:  refers to a backlink which points to your website.

Impressions:  generally, refers to how many times an ad was shown to users. This term is widely used in PPC advertising.

Indexing: Under this process Google bots crawls your site and indexes your pages and adds web pages into Google search.

Keyword Density:  refers to the total number of times your keyword appears in an article of text. We can do the calculation by dividing the number of times the keyword appears in a piece of text by the total number of words this article of text has, and then multiplying the result by hundred.

Keyword Ranking: is the position of your website in search results for a given keyword.

Keyword Stuffing: when a particular word or phrase is repeated multiple times in an article is known as keyword stuffing. This practice of keyword stuffing may lower your page ranking.

Linking Domains:  refers to the total count of different websites or domains which link back to you. It may link to your site from different pages from their parent site which helps to increase the inbound links count higher than the count of linking domains.

Link Building: ‘external links’ or ‘inbound links’ are the other known names for Link building. These are generally backlinks to your website from other websites.

Metadata:  simply put Metadata is data about data. Majority of the search engines like Google do not read your original content, instead they index the entire content by indexing certain metadata fields, such as a search engine title, description, keywords, copyright and event dates.

Meta Descriptions: are short excerpt of text, which is displayed on search results pages, underneath the result link. It helps the users with a brief and short description of what the original page is about before they decide to click and navigate to that page.

NoIndex: these are the tags which signals the search engine to avoid indexing a particular page. This can be achieved by mentioning the tags in the robots.txt file for even some larger sections of the website as well.

NoFollow: another tag which lets the user the power to enable search engine not to follow them and exclude weightage in ranking procedures.

Organic: refers to the amount of traffic which comes to a website through any non-paid search engine result. A SEO Campaign’s main measurement is the organic traffic.

Off-page SEO: as the term itself suggests, the search engine optimization strategies that take place outside of your website and are utilized to boost a website’s ranking in search engine results pages. Enabling this tactic makes your site more accessible from multiple locations, resulting in more additional traffic, which gives the signal to search engines that your website is helpful to users and in turn boosts up the rankings as well.

On-page SEO: is a phrase used to define and group SEO operations performed on a website to enhance search engine rankings. This involves the act of optimizing on-page text to ensure it targets keywords, producing metadata, increasing your website’s performance, and ultimately it leads to a robust internal linking strategy.

Page Views: The total number of views by all the visitors to your website.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC): under this model generally the concerned advertisers usually pays out a agreed amount for each and every click by visitors on their posted advert.

Pagination:  under this the web contents are separated into different pages.

Pages per Visit: The average number of pages users view during a visit to your site.

Robots.txt:  This is one of the important files which is generally located in the root of the website, and it normally contains instructions to search engine bots regarding the methods to crawl pages on a particular website. Also, this file contains specific info about areas or pages not to be crawled.

Redirects:  enables the web browser to navigate users from one page location to another location even without the need of the user to click or any other input options.

Broadly, used redirects include: –

301 – which is used mainly to redirect a visitor permanently from one web page to another one.

302 – another type of redirect which enables temporary situations redirect to another web page.

SERP:  The long list of results when you perform a Google search using certain keyword is known as SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Site Speed: This doesn’t need explanation! Self-explanatory … refers to the website loading speed on a electronic device.

Sitemap: This is a very important file in which the website owner provides all the information’s about the main pages, videos, and other important files on the site, and the relationships between them. All search engines read this file and then decides which pages to crawl and which one not to crawl.

SEO: stands for Search Engine Optimization. Simply put the process of improving the rankings or visibility of the webpage in the search engine results to get more traffic to the concerned website.

Traffic: refers to the total visitors who pays a visit to your website.

Time on Page: is the average amount of time spent by any user on your website. There are many software’s to track this and the results would help you to understand the performance of each and every page of your website and to take corrective actions in case of non-performance of any particular pages.

URL: expanded as “Uniform Resource Locator” refers to the address of a specific web page.

By now you must be familiar with quite a few Digital Marketing terminologies mentioned in the above post.  

Once you feel comfortable with the important key words of Digital Marketing, then you may explore the different channels to achieve your targets using the most cost-effective Digital Marketing tools within your budget.