A-Z Glossary

This page is devoted to providing information on the various terms that we use here at Indulge.

Web Design

Bitmap Graphics

Defines a display space and the color for each pixel or a "bit" in the display space. A Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and the Joint Photographic Experts Group format (JPEG) are examples of graphic image file types that contain bit maps.

Design Fidelity

Design fidelity refers to the level of detail in a design prototype. There are three levels of fidelity: low, mid and high. Low fidelity prototypes consist of sketches and post-its, which is great for high-level brainstorming and collaboration. Mid fidelity prototyping is often refered to as wireframing and is usually created using grey blocks and sample content, without colour. High fidelity design represents as close to the finished website design as possible, all components have been designed at this stage and we will be using real content.

Golden Ratio

This “golden” number, 1.61803399, represented by the Greek letter Phi, is sometimes reffered to as the divine proportion, golden mean or golden section. Historically, the number can be seen in the architecture of many ancient creations, like the Egyptian Pyramids and the Greek Parthenon.

Grid

Grids help designers to align and arrange elements in a quick and uniform way. A grid is a framework made up of evenly divided, intersecting columns and rows. We have grids for desktop, tablet and mobile devices here at Indulge and the grid specification will vary depending on the type of project.

Hex Colour

A hex colour triplet is a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number used in HTML, CSS, SVG, and other computing applications, to represent colors. The bytes represent the red (R), green (G) and blue (B) components of each color. One byte represents a number in the range 00 to FF (in hexadecimal notation), or 0 to 255 in decimal notation e.g. black would be #000000, white would be #FFFFF, a shade of blue would be #0000CC.

Monochromatic

A color scheme that uses shades of only one color, including lighter and darker tones of that color.

Opacity

The degree of transparency a graphical object has. The lower the opacity, the more transparent an element is.

RGB

RGB or ‘Red, Green, Blue’ is a color model for on-screen purposes e.g. websites. RGB is a additive color, meaning that when mixing the three colors together, we start with black and end up with white as more color is added. See Hex Colours to understand how we define RGB in website code.

Retina Display Screens

A marketing term developed by Apple to describe high density pixel screens that have roughly 300 or more pixels per inch.

Resolution

Generally speaking, the higher your resolution, the better your images will display, and the more detail the image will have. Whereas lower resolution images or graphics appear blurry or pixelated.

Saturation

The degree of intensity and vividness of a color. For example, a low-saturation color may appear paler, and faded, whereas a more heavily saturated color may appear more vibrant and colorful.

Stock Photo

A professionally shot photograph available online for licensing through websites such as Big Stock Photo or iStockphoto. Stock photos are usually used instead of hiring a professional photographer, or if a designer cannot access or create the images they need from their own inventory of photographs.

Thumbnail

Thumbnails are small, reduced-size versions of pictures or videos. A small image linking through to news article or website services page would be referred to as a thumbnail.

Vector Graphics

Graphical paths that make up vector graphics exisit independant to the pixels on the screen, meaning that they can be scaled easily with distorting. Vector graphics use geometrical formulas to represent images, creating crisp outlines to shapes.

White Space

Also called ‘negative space’, white space refers to the areas of a design that are blank and not filled with content. White space allows design to ‘breathe’, helps avoid overly complicated designs, and keeps designs uncluttered.

Digital Marketing

404

A 404 status error will occur when a page becomes unavailable. This could be due to being removed or unpublished, and will result in the users request returning a 404 page not found.

Algorithm Update

Types of Google algorithms include - Penguin, Pigeon, Panda, and Hummingbird.

Google Penguin is an update which has been generated to help combat unnatural and spammy links (following the debacle of link farm black hat techniques in the later 1990’s).

Google Panda algorithm is geared around content, helping to ensure that websites continue to use high-quality content that is predominantly useful for users, keyword ratio, hidden text, cloaking, and thin text.

Google Pigeon is an update that impacts local organic search results, helping to improve results based on proximity to a location.

Algorithm updates are rolled out on an ongoing basis. It is possible to recover from a penalty following an algorithm update but it can take time.

Alt Text

Alt text or alt tags are the copy used to describe what is within an image. Crawlers and bots are unable to understand the visual representation of an image, so they will use the alt text to understand its relevance to the page. Alt text is also useful for screen readers and image-based results in search engines.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text (hyperlink) found within website copy. When clicking on the anchor text, it will take you to the URL that has been specified.

Backlink

A backlink is obtained when a website links to your website. All of these links form your backlink profile. A backlink profile should ideally contain high quality and highly relevant links only and should be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure they remain so.

Black Hat

Black hat techniques are techniques that go against search engine guidelines. Usually, unethical quick fire techniques that aim to rank higher in results but will often result in a manual penalty from Google. Examples of this include keyword stuffing, link farms, and cloaking.

Bot / Crawler

A crawler, sometimes called a spider or bot is an Internet bot that systematically browses the internet, typically for the purpose of indexing websites. Frequency of crawling websites can vary dependent on the frequency content is published and length of time that a website has been live.

Bounce Rate

A bounce rate is where a user lands on the site but leaves immediately without taking any action, this is usually due to misleading information or error.

Canonical Tag

A canonical tag or rel=canonical is a tag that is used to communicate to search engines and crawlers which URL represents the master copy. This helps to lower the risk of duplicate content. An example of this would be a news section of a website where there could be multiple pages with the same header, page title, and description.

CTR

Click-through-rate. Equals the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown.

Conversion Rate

Number of conversions divided by the number of visits.

Dashboard

A dashboard is an area where you can collate a number of useful charts to make it easier to view data when reporting. You can have up to 12 charts per dashboard.

(direct) / (none)

Direct traffic is any traffic that visits the website directly, this may be carried out by either using a bookmark or by entering the URL directly into the search bar.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is content that appears in more than one place across the internet, this could be on the same site or across different sites. Duplicate content is classed as content that is identical or has considerably similar blocks of content.

Entrances

The number of visits to a specific landing page, this is the page that the user landed on first before potentially browsing through any other pages of the website.

Events

Events enable you to track additional types of engagement on the website, including video clicks, email clicks and click to call. Setting up these types of metrics requires a bit of custom coding.

Exit Page

The number of conversions divided by the number of visits from a specific source. A goal equals a conversion (transaction).

Featured Snippet

Featured snippets are search results carefully selected by Google to appear in a favourable position (known as position 0), above all Google Organic search results. A featured snippet often appears in the form of answering a users search enquiry, often leading to increased exposure for a business or brand.

Goals

A goal is any action that you want your visitors to take: register, download, donate, complete a Newsletter form or stay a certain amount of time on the site. It is within this section that you can measure conversions to find out how well your site is performing. Goals can either be:

URL Destination – the most popular goal often used to measure how many people see a confirmation page
Time on Site – if an aim of your site is to have users play a 10 minute game then you may wish to track all visits over 10 minutes as a goal completed
Pages/Visit – if you want to track the how many pages users view per visit you can set your target as a goal

Goal Conversion Rate

Number of conversions divided by the number of visits from a specific source. A goal equals a conversion (transaction).

Header tags (h1, h2)

Header tags are used to indicate visual hierarchy to crawlers and users. Using h1, h2, h3 and so on indicates the weight or importance of the content and the relevance that the content following has to the page. Headers also allow for breaks in content making it easier for users to understand or skim.

Keyword

This is the search term that a user typed into a search engine which eventually led to a click onto your site. Keywords are terms and phrases relevant to your site which should be featured prominently in your content (to optimize your search rankings).

Landing Page

A landing page is the first page that a user visits on a website, whether this be direct, via a search engine or a referral source.

Meta Description

A meta description can be found within a search result, below the page title and URL, and its purpose is to describe what the user can expect to find on that page. Carefully constructing a meta description can help to improve click-through rate.

NAP

Name, address and phone number. These details can be included within the footer and contact page of a website and can assist with local SEO by aligning the business and website content with a specific location.

Organic Search

Organic search is a type of channel grouping within the Acquisition section of Google Analytics, and includes any traffic that uses a search engine to find your website, this includes Google and Bing.

Pageviews

A pageview is the number of times users view a page. This covers all page views; so if a user refreshes the page, or navigates away from the page and returns, these are all counted as additional page views.

Page Title

When using a search engine, you can find the page title (or title tag) as the headline for the website search result. It appears as a clickable link above the featured URL. Page titles should ideally be within the 60 character limit. When visiting a website, you can also find page titles in the tab at the top of your web browser.

Penalty

A penalty is a manual penalty that is issued by Google, that will subsequently have a negative impact on a website’s search ranking. A manual penalty may be issued if a website doesn’t follow best practice guidelines, or is regarded as using deceptive or manipulative techniques to boost website performance (“black hat” SEO).

PPC

PPC stands for “pay-per-click”. This is a form of advertising in which you set a budget for your ads on a given platform, such as Google Ads or Facebook, and then only pay for the clicks you receive.

Ranking

Ranking is the process that a search engine (like Bing or Google) uses to establish where your website appears in search results.

Redirect

It is possible to direct traffic to a different page using a redirect. A redirect is an HTTP status code that indicates to bots and crawlers that a page has become unavailable or has been moved.

Referrals

Referral traffic is any traffic that is directed to the website via a referral source, this may be via social media, third party websites or other sources that may have published a link to your website.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a type of advertising that can be used via PPC or social media, where you can target and promote your product or service to users who have previously visited your website, this may help to increase the chances of conversion.

SEO

SEO is an abbreviation of search engine optimisation, an acknowledged process whereby an SEO professional review, recommend and implement changes that will enhance a websites design, usability or content in order to appear in a more favourable position in search engine rankings.

SERP

SERP’s are Search Engine Result Pages, essentially the list of results that a search engine will retrieve based on the query that the user enters.

Sessions

Sessions are the individual periods of time (also known as “visits”) that users spend on your site. A session is ended either after 30 minutes of inactivity or if the user leaves your site for more than 30 minutes (if a user leaves your site and returns within 30 minutes, this is counted as part of the original session).

Sitemap.xml

Sitemap.xml is a page saved to a website’s server that lists all available pages that can be indexed by bots and crawlers. This file can be uploaded to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to provide a clearer indication of the pages accessible, assisting future indexing.

Tracking Code

Tracking code can be added to a website to help collect data on traffic visiting the website, activity and behaviour. The most popular form of tracking code is for Google Analytics, Google Ads and other advertising platforms.

Unique Pageviews

The unique pageview number counts each time the page was viewed in an individual session as a single event; so whether a visitor viewed the page once in their visit or five times, the number of unique pageviews will be recorded as just one.