Impression
One view of an Internet ad. Generally, ad reports will display how many impressions or views a particular ad received. This data reveals how many times a search engine served the ad when users entered in specific search keywords. It will also record how many times a user has viewed the content on a webpage containing those specific keywords.
Inbound Link
A link coming into a site from another site. The opposite of an inbound link is an outbound link.
Indexability
How well a search engine can crawl or index a website. Search engines must be able to index a site in order to included it in search results. If a site is not “indexable,” or if a site has experienced a reduction in indexability, it becomes extremely difficult for getting its URLs to be included in search results.
Indexing
A shortened form of the term search engine indexing.
Industrial Marketing
An older name for what is now most frequently called B2B Marketing, still used with some frequency in older, more traditional industries.
Infographic
Though around for many years (since cave drawings, perhaps), infographics (short of information graphics) have picked up serious steam on the web recently. Often serving as a terrific form of link bait or an ideal way to encourage social sharing, an infographic is a representation of data in a graphic format designed to be easily understandable at a glance.
Ingenio
The first provider of a pay per call advertising system.
Inktomi
A search engine technology firm acquired by Yahoo. Inktomi technology now drives the natural search listings within Yahoo Search Marketing.
Integrated Marketing
An approach to marketing aimed at unifying different marketing methods such as PPC, SEO, email, display and traditional (direct mail, phone calls, etc.). The objective is to complement and reinforce the impact of each method, learn from the data generated by one method to enhance the efficacy of another, and achieve a whole greater than the sum of its parts. With the long and considered sales cycles of B2B Marketing, Integrated Marketing properly done almost always produces far superior ROI.
Internal Linking
The act of building properly structured links from within one’s own site for search engine optimization. The opposite of internal linking is external linking. All else equal, external links are more powerful, but internal links are often easier to control.
Internet Meme
Popularized by lolcats, internet memes are concepts that spread rapidly from person to person via the Internet. Memes are often funny in nature, and appeal to a broad group of people.
Invisible Text
The highly risky search engine optimization technique of making text on a page invisible either through color changes within HTML, the placement of graphics, or adjustments to one’s cascading style sheet. This is one of the more common causes of the Google Death Penalty.
Invisible Web
The term that describes the amount of information on the web that is not indexed by search engines. Another term to describe this is “Deep Web”.
The Deep Web is not a part of the surface web, and it is speculated that the invisible web is substantially larger than the surface web.
IP Address
A specific Internet Protocol number for computers on the Internet. IP addresses are generally unique for an individual computer, computers behind a firewall may share an IP address for the purposes of machines outside the internet.
IP Address Lookup
The process of determining an IP Address.
IP Spoofing
The act of hiding a computer’s actual IP address and reporting another address to other computers being accessed. This is generally done to hide the source of nefarious activities.
