Basic key terms and concepts to understand SEO

B2B  Stands for Business to Business. When businesses sell products/services to other businesses and not to consumers.

B2C  Stands for Business to consumers. When businesses sell products/services to consumers.

Call to action  A CTA is a phrase written to motivate the reader to take action. (sign up for our newsletter, book car hire today etc.).

CAN-SPAM  The U.S. law that regulates commercial email. It stands for "Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003."

CRM  Customer Relationship Management.

Database  In email marketing, the database is the list of prospects to whom emails are sent. It also contains additional information pertinent to the prospects.

DNS (Domain Name System)  DNS converts a domain name into an IP address.

DomainKeys  An email authentication system designed to verify the DNS domain of an email sender and the message integrity.

Double opt-in  The act of getting subscribers to confirm their initial subscription via a follow up email asking them to validate their address and hence opt-in again.

Hard bounce  The failed delivery of email communication due to an undeviating reason like a non-
existent address.

House list  An email database that a company generates itself without purchasing or renting names. HTML  HyperText Markup Language. HTML emails usually contain graphics and can be interactive.

IP Address  The Internet Protocol (IP) address is a exclusive number, which is used to represent every single computer in a network.

ISP  Internet Service Provider - this is the company that is providing you with access to the Internet e.g. MWEB, AOL, Yahoo! etc).

Open rate  The percent of emails determined as opened out of the total number of emails sent. Opt-in  Give permission for emails to be sent to you.

Opt-out  Also known as unsubscribe - The act of removing oneself from a list or lists so that specified information is no longer received via email.

Sender ID  A method used by major ISPs to confirm that emails do originate from the domain from which it claims to have been sent.

SMTP  Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is a protocol for sending messages from one server to another.

Soft bounce  The failed delivery of an email due to a deviating reason like an overloaded mail box or a server failure.

Spam  Email sent to someone who has not requested to receive it - EVIL!

SPF  Sender policy framework is an extension of SMTP that stops email spammers from forging the "From" fields in an email.

Text  Text emails or plain text emails do not contain graphics or any kind of markup.
Unique forwarders  This refers to the number of individuals who forwarded a specific email on.

White list  A list of accepted email addresses that an ISP, a subscriber or other email service provider allows to deliver messages regardless of spam filter settings.

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