C - Search Engine Optimization Glossary...

C - Search Engine Optimization Glossary for SEO terms that begin with the letter ' C ' including definitions.

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C

CGM: Consumer Generated Media refers to posts that have been made by consumers either in support or opposition of products, companies or web sites, which are very influential and powerful regarding perceived company image. If CGM reaches a large audience, overnight a business could be changed in the public eye.

CMS: Content Management Systems in computing is a document centric collaborative application for managing documents and other content, often a web application and used as a method for the management of web sites and content. The market for content management systems remains fragmented, with many open source and proprietary solutions available. Source: Wikipedia.org

COA: Cost of Acquisition, the price for acquiring conversions (desired actions or outcomes), such as sales.

CPA: A measure used to calculate total monetary cost per sale, action or lead from beginning to end. Cost Per Acquisition (or Cost Per Action/Cost Per Order) works out an ad campaign’s total cost and divides it by its number of conversions. A campaign costing $100, for example, results in 5 conversions, so the CPA arrives at $20 ($100 / 5). The generation of one conversion cost $20.
 
CPC: Cost Per Click is the charge made by search engines to advertisers for the clicks made to their web site.

CPM: C = Cost, P = Per, M = Thousand (from the Latin prefix, milli) Cost Per Thousand Impressions, (viewers or ad serves). The unit of measure used as standard for costs involved in displaying an ad. An ad appearing on a web page, visited 1,000 times costing $5, has a CPM of $5. Every 1,000 times the ad appears it incurs a $5 charge for the advertiser. Compare to CPC pricing (defined above). CPM is the standard monetization (converting into money) model for offline display ad space, and some context-based networks that serve online search ads.

CPO: Cost Per Order, the capital used in advertising or marketing expenses to acquire an order (acquisition). Calculation formulated by division of marketing expenses by number of orders/conversions. See Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) ref.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets contain information on font sizes, colors and paragraph layout in addition to the HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) with multiple uses in web site design and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

CTR: Click-Through-Rate, calculation for when the amount of clicks an ad receives is shared by the total of times the ad is served or displayed: total clicks over total impressions for specific ad = CTR. 100 impressions with 6 clicks, makes an ad’s CTR is 6%. If more visitors are received at a site, so the CTR becomes higher. CTR will also factor into the Quality Score of your advertiser search engine and, thereto, your minimum keyword bids on Tier I engines.

Campaign Integration: Specific and defined series of activities, planned and executed as part of paid search campaigns concurrent with other diverse marketing initiatives, online, offline, or both. The integration element addresses consistency of messaging and image, increasing response rates, supporting brand awareness, driving offline conversions and contributing to ROI business goals prior to the campaign launch.

Canonicalization: Canonification, C14N (abbreviation for the longer word beginning with C and the fourteen letters between it and the N) a process for ensuring data conforms to some specification in an approved format. The process of picking the best URL when there are several choices; this usually refers to home pages. Source: Matt Cutts Blog: SEO Advice. In addition, “Canonicalization is the process of converting data that has more than one possible representation into a "standard" canonical representation. This can be done to compare different representations for equivalence, to count the number of distinct data structures (e.g., in combinatorics), to improve the efficiency of various algorithms by eliminating repeated calculations, or to make it possible to impose a meaningful sorting order.” Source: Wikipedia

Click Bot: A ‘clicking robot’, software programmed to make artificial clicks on paid listings within the engines thereby artificially inflating click amount figures.

Click Fraud: Use of a ‘click bot’ or clicks made on PPC advertisements motivated by something more than searching for advertised products or services that may be the actions of malicious intent by negative competitor/affiliates motivated to increase costs incurred by a rival advertiser so their click-through costs affect the collaborating affiliate. Search engine results are affected by the dilution of click quality.

Click Through: Transfer to another destination by clicking on a hypertext link.
 
Client-side Tracking: This type of tracking tags every page requiring tracking on web sites, using blocks of JavaScript code. It is cookie based (available as first or third party cookies) and readily available to companies using servers other than their own.

Cloaking: A process whereby web sites can display alternative versions of web pages under different circumstances. A deceit primarily used for showing optimized or content-rich pages to search engines and different pages to the human eye. Most major search engine representatives have publicly stated that they do not approve of this practice.

Comment: Text contained inside  “comment” tag on web pages. “Comments” are used variously for communication between web developers and Cascading Style Sheets.

Competitive Analysis: A tool of SEO, CA assesses and analyses strengths and weaknesses in competing web sites identifying traffic patterns or major traffic sources, keyphrase and keyword selections.

Content Network: Contextual Networks or content networks include Google and Yahoo! Contextual Search networks serving paid search ads that have been triggered by related keywords of the content page viewed by a user.

Content Targeting: An ad serving process in Google and Yahoo! for displaying keyword triggered ads that are related to the subject (context) or content of a web site viewed by users. Contrast with search network serves, where ads are displayed in response to a keyword typed by a user into a search engine’s search box or one of the partner sites.

Contextual Advertising: The advertising automatically served or positioned on web pages based on its page content, keywords and keyphrases. [Contrast to a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ad display.] A contextual ad for digital cameras, for example, would appear on pages with photography articles (close relationship with cameras) not due to the user actually typing into the search box “digital cameras”.

Contextual Distribution: A marketing decision by advertisers regarding display search ads on specific publisher sites across the web in addition to, or instead of, placing their PPC ads on search networks generally.

Contextual Network: Content Ads or Content Network; contextual network ads serve on web site pages next to content containing the keywords being bid upon. In some ways contextual ads are similar in to traditional display ads in print media where, just as traditional ad buys, often are purchased using the same CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model for purchased keywords, as opposed to a CPC basis for payment.

Contextual Search: A search mechanism that analyzes the viewed page and returns a list of those related search results to the user. Offered by Google and Yahoo!

Contextual Search Campaigns: A paid placement search campaign that takes a search ad listing beyond search engine results pages and to ‘matched content’ web partners’ sites.

Conversion Action: The response or action you desire from a visitor to your site. Purchases, requests for follow-ups or further information (lead generation), subscriptions to company newsletters, downloads of company free offers (research results, videos or tools), subscriptions to company updates or news may be among the conversions desired.

Conversion Rate: Measurements determining how many prospects performed the desired or prescribed actions or steps. Signing up to a newsletter, for example, with 100 visitors to the site resulting in 1 newsletter signup, would give a conversion rate of 1%. Micro-conversions like reading different pages on your site ultimately lead to the main conversion step of actually making a purchase, perhaps or signing up to a service. Calculated as:  Number of converting visitors/total number click-throughs for the ad. EG: 6/150 = 0.04 (Multiply by 100 to reach percent) x 100 = 4%

Copyright: Common law protection for ownership of works or expressions fixed in a tangible form that currently include music, art, sound, words and images. Copyright asserts the exclusive right to copy, display, license, or expand the work to the owner. However, ownership of an original expression may be difficult to prove legally without some sort of verification like having been used publicly or displayed at some point in time, giving it provenance.

Crawler: A ‘behind the scenes’ automated program in search engines for gathering web site listings utilising automatic web crawling. The search engine's crawler, ‘spider’ or ‘robot’ can “read” web page coding and page text contents, and can follow links to other hyperlinked pages on the web pages over which it crawls. It duplicates and stores any web pages found for the search engine's database or index.

Creatives: The term used for the designs, unique words and displays of paid-space advertisements. Also known as banners. Creative refers to an ad’s title (headline), its display URL (a clickable link to the advertiser’s web site landing page) and the description (text offer). Unique creative display employs word emphasis conventions – bold, “in speech marks”, ‘quotes’, italicised or font differences along with added logos, graphic images, video clips or animation on some sites.

Custom Feed: Bespoke tailoring of feeds to each of the shopping engines allowing submission of XML feeds. There are different feed requirements and product categories for each engine.

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