We thought we’d add some terminology here so that you have a better understanding of our content. Please use the contact form to let us know if there are other terms you’d like to add:

Domain Name - A domain name is whatever comes after the www. In the case of this site, our domain is kizmetech.com. Your domain is something like real estate on the web. If you own one, you should have the registrar name, username and password somewhere safe and accessible. You never know when you will need it.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization - is the practice of adjusting code and content on a site to attempt to obtain the top positions on the Search Results Pages (SRPs). The rules and best practices have changed a lot over the past 10 years that people have been practicing SEO.

SEM or Search Engine Marketing - is the practice of distributing digital content on the world wide web to take advantage of the many distribution channels available to market your goods and services. Here the goal is to not only obtain high search engine rankings but to establish traffic through other trusted web sites as well.

WordPress - The blog platform upon which this site is based. Some very inventive people decided it could be made flexible to be the platform for a whole website and not simply a blog platform. It is based on the industry standard combination of PHP language and MySQL database.

Joomla - a free open-source Content Management System (CMS). It is extremely powerful and flexible and is better suited to larger organizations that wish to incorporate multiple functionalities such as a blog, community resources, intranet, extranet, etc.

Blog or weblog - a site whose content consists of a reverse chronological listing of articles organized by date and category. Blogs have recently become one of the hottest marketing tools for businesses because of the way the frequency at which they are indexed by the major search engines. Search engines have recently begun to put a higher relevance on articles and content that has a recent date stamp. It is a great way to take capitalize on “hot” keyword opportunities that frequently arise based on current events.

Intranet - a site whose main purpose is to provide resources and content to employees of a particular company.

Extranet - a site whose main purpose is to provide information and tools to the clients of a particular company .

Portal - is a service based site like Yahoo! catering to a horizontal market, offering email, newsfeeds and cutomized interface, or it can be a vertical portal catering to delivering only industry related material and services for subscribers.

CMS or Content Management System - is an interface for people with little or know technical knowledge to manage their own web content. It can be based on any number of different technologies. You want to make sure you choose one that is standard, so that you don’t have to rely on one particular developer to make changes to it on an ongoing basis.

POS or Point of Sale - is a system used to sell inventory or food. In this decade, if you don’t choose a POS that can interact with your website you are really missing out with regard to efficiency. If you have a POS and you are either venturing out on the web for the first time or adding an e-commerce component, make sure your web developer understands the “backend”of your POS and can interface with it.

DNS or Domain Name Server - When you buy your domain, sometimes you buy it from a service who will also host it, so you will never have to worry about this. But if you host with your developer or a local company, you have to tell the domain registrar where your files are hosted. That’s called pointing your domain, or changing the DNS. Your host will provide you a server address such as ns1.yourhost.com and ns2.yourhost.com. There should be at least a primary and a secondary. When you do change your DNS, it will take 12 to 72 hours to “propagate” on the internet, sometimes it happens gradually and sometimes all at once.

Domain Registrar - is a retail company regulated by the the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to sell and maintain the registration of your domain name.

Hosting - is just renting space on a server somewhere with sufficient bandwidth to support traffic to it. There are all kinds of host servers out there on a variety of operating systems, that use different control panels, and that provide various levels of service. Choosing the right host can be easy with just a little bit of education, not choosing the right host can be a disaster.

ISP or Internet Service Provider - is the company that provides the DSL, cable, satellite or (please no) dialup to your home and office. When you sign up at your ISP, make sure you keep your account information handy for setting up your email and/or your wireless router.

Widget - is a piece of code that can be used on any web page. Lately people have been giving away widgets as a marketing tool. WordPress uses widget to allow users to drag and drop content sections into the sidebar of the website.

Plug-in - is a modular application, built to add features to a particular program. Both WordPress and Joomla have many plug-ins available to enhance the functionality of the base program. For example adding editable calendars, enhanced registration capabilities, photo galleries, etc.

SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - you can check out the long and formal definition on Wikipedia, what it means to YOU is that it controls your outgoing mail. Some ISP’s require you to use their SMTP server, others let you use the one your web host provides. Find out when you sign up so that you can set up your email seamlessly. The ISP usually doesn’t really care if you can successfully use email outside of the email account that they provide in association with your account. Make sure you know your host and/or ISP’s settings, if they require authentication (username and password). Keep this information safe and handy.

POP3 or Post Office Protocol version 3 -you can check out the long and formal definition on Wikipedia, what it means to YOU is that it controls your incoming mail. Make sure you know your host and/or ISP’s settings, if they require authentication (username and password). Keep this information safe and handy.

PHP - is a scripting language that can be embedded into html (standard web language) to make calls to a database and then display the results. It is rapidly becoming the web development industry standard for creating dynamic web pages.

MySQL - is a lite version of SQL (Structured Query Language) which is a pretty powerful database query language. In conjunction with PHP, it is rapidly becoming standard for web developers to use it and almost all hosts support it.

Viral Marketing - Almost everybody has received an email from a friend or family member with some whacky YouTube video. Well, that video “went viral”. Viral content is content that inspires people to distribute it for you. A good web marketer can help you come up with a viral marketing campaign that is right for you, IF it is right for you.

RSS or Really Simple Sindication - is the technology used to allow you to subscribe to frequently updated information such as blogs. Say you really like the content of a blog, usually there’s a subscribe button, you can either feed all new posts to your MyYahoo or Google home page, or you can have emails sent to you with full articles or teasers. RSS has been around for quite a while now, but has proved to be less than really simple, as it is only now starting to take off and most businesses still don’t know how/why to add feeds to their websites.

KEI or Keyword Efficiency Index - When you are doing keyword research, you will find certain statistics important. You will want to know the amount of searches performed for a phrase in a particular time period, and you will want to know how many people are competing for the phrase. The KEI is that ration, traffic/occurrences.

Page Title - is the title of the browser window on every page and what appears in your bottom bar when you minimize the window. We call the title in the content a Header.

Page description - is a couple sentence description of the content on the page. It is often, but not always, used on the search results pages below your page title. So if someone were searching for widgets, Google gives back a list of results, the first line is your page title and links to your page. The second and third lines are often your description, however if the search string used is found on your page somewhere besides the description, that content will be used instead.

Hypertext or Editorial Links - are links within your content to other pages on your site. It is a very powerful inter-site linking structure. Google sees contextual links as the most relevant and this type of linking really boosts your link popularity and overall ranking. This, as in all things, can be overdone. Pages should have about a 10 to 1 ration of body text to link text.

Analytics - if you place code on each page of your site, you can track the behavior of your visitors, where they come from, which pages they visit, how much time they spend on your site, and much more.

CSS or Cascading Style Sheet - a revolutionary language for creating html pages. Change a single file and change the entire look and feel of your site. Check out this site to see the power of css. Pages load faster, use less code and are easier to handle.

Open Source - means that the code behind the application is public, not proprietary and anyone can develop and offer features and functionality. Using open source software is a sustainable principal, because communities pop up to support the software and the business owner or manager is not tied to a single developer for solutions and answers.

Latent Semantic Indexing - A very complicated calculation that breaks down to this bit I “borrowed” from  KnowledgeSearch.org :  “LSI adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.”