Web Development Glossary for Small Businesses

JPG or JPEG: A popular compressed graphic image file format that permits more colors than the 256 allowed in the GIF format created by the Joint Photographic Expert Group. JPG files compress images to smaller files size than GIF formatted files, which makes them a web designers choice for a faster loading and more colorful image.

JSP: A Java-based Linux, Unix and Solaris server technology that allows designers to embed server executable scripts into web pages.

JavaScript: The most popular scripting language used on the Internet developed by Netscape that permits dynamic behavior to be specified and carried out within an HTML web page, such as drop-down menus.

Job Shop: A business that creates products to fill unique or custom sales orders. Job shops usually do not carry product inventory. Job shops provide services to the business-to-business market, such as business web design and development companies.

KISS: An acronym for Keep It Simple Stupid. Possibly a driving force behind the creation of Cascading Style Sheets and a definite consideration when copywriting web content. Regularly ignored by Congress with obvious results.

Keyword: A descriptive word or series of words (even though "keyword" is single) used by web visitors to find information and by search engine to index and categorize websites. Also known as "key phrase" since many searches enter a string of keywords in order to create a more specific search. In PPC ads, key phrases and keywords are used to place the ads on appropriate search results pages.

Keyword Density: The quantity of specific keywords used on a web page divided by the number of words on the page.

Keyword/Key Phrase Research: When choosing keywords, research is done to determine a keyword's usage and popularity. Keyword research is done to determine heavily used keywords and find longtail keywords. Longtail keywords have the potential to draw less traffic, but generate a higher quality of sales leads due to their specificity.

Late-Mover Advantage: An advantage that a business may acquire by not being one of the first to compete in particular market or adopt an emerging technology. Late-mover advantages include learning from competitors' mistakes, refining successful marketing strategies, and avoiding technology dead-ends. Businesses just entering the online market avoided going through the frame website, table website, CSS website design evolution and can begin with the latest, most search engine optimizable web design.

Links: Short for hyper-links, text or images that have HTML code associated with them causing the word(s) or image, when clicked on, to open another web page, either internal or external to the link's website.

Link Strategy: An online marketing and SEO strategy of building a large number of inbound links to a business website. this strategy focuses on finding websites with high search engine ranking that are complementary to the business' products or services.

Link Popularity: A measure of the number of Internet sites linking to your website. Search engines measure both the quantity and quality of the links. Link popularity is the SEO measure that spam directories attempt to trick with only short-term beneficial results and long-term severely debilitating results to an online marketing presence.