Quirk's eMarketing Glossary

The top portion of an email that can be viewed through the preview pane. It's important that what you most want communicated to readers appears above the fold.

The general term used to describe the degree to which a system is usable by as many people as possible without modification. In one context it refers specifically to people with disabilities and their use of assistive devices such as screen-reading web browsers.

An approach to web design where different browsers and settings are taken into account. Accessibility is a must. An interesting post on accessibility.

ASP - It’s the same abbreviation of Application Service Provider but definitely not the same thing.  Active Server Pages are Microsoft's server-side technology for dynamically-generated webpages. ASP of this variety is marketed as an add-on to IIS.

The allotted space on webpages available for online advertising.

Text and image advertisements by Google that appear on websites.

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. A lot faster than ISDN, ADSL is a high speed method of accessing the Internet.

Affiliates distribute the affiliate merchant’s product. They will earn revenue for each lead they send to the merchant site.

An online community of affiliate enthusiasts where members can read or post topics on any topics linked to affiliate marketing.

An agreement between two sites in which one site - the affiliate, agrees to feature content or an advertisement designed to drive traffic to another site. In return the affiliate site receives a percentage of sales generated by traffic it sends towards this site.

The merchant fills the role of the advertiser in an affiliate marketing relationship. The merchant will implement a tracking system, provide affiliates with the campaign graphics they need, as well as pay them.

Abbreviation of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, AJAX is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. AJAX increases usability and speed by ensuring the webpage doesn’t have to reload each time a change is made by the user.

A number indicating how popular your site is compared to other sites, based on information returned by the Alexa Toolbar and SearchStatus. The number is the index of a given site in long ordered list of popularity, the most popular site at index 1, the second most at index 2 etc.

An algorithm is a mathematical, computational or statistical method that is pre-determined to take a number of variables into account and output a single, quantifiable number that is a function of all of the variables. A good example of a commonly used algorithm is the one used by Google to determine which pages should rank more highly on the SERP's. Another example is the algorithm used by BrandsEye to take into accounted tagged and weighted criteria, to calculate a single Reputation Score. 

This refers to the "alt" attribute for the IMG HTML tag. It is used in HTML to attribute a text field to an image on a webpage, normally with a descriptive function, telling a user what an image is about and displaying the text in instance where the image is unable to load.

The visible, clickable text in a link.

A GIF which supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame.

An open source web server, Apache HTTP Server is the most popular web server in use today.

This search engine formally known as Ask Jeeves was founded by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen. Ask Jeeves allowed users to ask questions in everyday language and became an extremely popular engine. As the bigwigs (Google, MSN and Yahoo!) began indexing pages faster, Ask Jeeves suffered. Though its user base is still significantly smaller than those of the big wigs, Ask.com is still a popular engine.

Abbreviation of Application Service Provider, essentially a business that provides computer-based services to customers over a network.

A nifty program designed to send an automated response to incoming emails.