A Digital Glossary: Real Estate Website Terms Made Easy

Jargon is annoying. The Internet, unfortunately, is full of it.

And when you’re using the Internet to market your real estate business, you’re bound to come across acronyms, terms and abbreviations that might as well be Klingon.

Thank goodness for Google. And for this article.

We’ve rounded up a list of the tech-y terms that we in the real estate website world come across most often, and we’ve defined them in an easy-to-understand way.

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301 Redirect

The simplest definition for a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another.

If you’ve previously used www.olddomain.com and you wanted to change it to www.newdomain.com, you’d implement a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Whoever types www.olddomain.com will automatically be taken to www.newdomain.com. No broken links or 404 errors!

404 Error

The name of the error message that appears when a user tries to visit a website that no longer exists.

A/B Testing

Also called split testing, an A/B test is a way to try out different versions of an online product to see which one yields more preferable results.

The analytics collected help the tester decide which version they should ultimately use. It can be used for online ads, emails, products and even versions of a website or webpage.

Alt Text

Alternative text is the text associated with an image.

It’s important for all images on your website to have alt text because this tells the search engines what the image is about. It also tells visually impaired visitors to your website what the image is of so they can better understand the content on your page.

Backlink

A backlink is a link from an external website to your website.

Backlinks help website users find additional, relevant sources of information. They also tell search engines that the website being linked to is an informative, trustworthy website. Backlinks from several high quality websites will help with your search engine ranking.

Bounce Rate

A type of metric used in analysing a website’s effectiveness or popularity, bounce rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who enter and then exit without going on to look at other pages on the same site.

Browser Cache

Pronounced “browser cash,” this term refers to a portion of your hard drive where your Internet browser stores files from recently visited webpages. You sometimes need to clear it to see the most recent version of your website.

Cookies

When you access a website for the first time, a “cookie” function is stored by the Internet browser in your computer. It’s a small file that’s used to recognize you the next time you visit the same website.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language used to define how the website will display the HTML elements on your screen. Designers can create different looks for your site by editing the CSS or adding their own CSS to the mix.

Drip Campaign

This is a marketing tactic that’s used to move prospective clients through the funnel. Rather than sending one marketing message, drip campaigns send multiple targeted messages at predetermined times within a longer window of time in an effort to convert prospects. It commonly takes the form of email marketing.

Hosting

Hosting is a service where one computer is configured as an Internet server, offering its resources for use in exchange of a rental fee. One or more users can use information, services or the content within this server using another computer called the ‘client.’

Long Tail Keyword

A long tail keyword is longer than a regular keyword and much more specific.

Instead of “Toronto condo,” a long tail keyword might say “Toronto best waterfront condo.”

Because of their specificity, long tail keywords are searched for less, but the right ones come with much less competition and a higher return; someone who searches for that phrase knows exactly what they want to find, and your website probably meets their needs.

Meta Tags

These are small chunks of HTML that are added to a webpage’s code in order to provide information to search engines. They don’t appear as text on the page itself.

Kinds of tags could include a short description of your website, relevant keywords, and when the date was published. A search engine will use this info when showing your website in search results.

Parallax Design

You may have stumbled upon super cool scrolling website designs like www.housesforsaleincalgary.com, where the web designer has created layers of content. The background of the web page will move at a different speed than the rest of the page. That’s parallax design. This type of layout uses a visual storytelling approach to show the contents of the website.

Responsive Design

Responsive design is a method of designing websites so that they automatically adjust to all devices. In other words, responsive design reformats your website for all screen sizes so that the user can interact with the site – no matter what device is being used.

SEO

SEO is one of the most common digital terms, but not everyone has a clear understanding of what it specifically means.

“Search engine optimization” refers to all of the tools, strategies and best practices used to improve where and how a website will appear in search results. It includes keywords, meta tags, image alt text, load speed, responsiveness, and so on. It’s the act or process of improving.

UI

UI stands for user interface. It refers to how a digital product, service or website looks and feels. In user experience design, the goal is to design a user interface that provides an attractive, responsive and helpful digital experience.

UX

Short for user experience, UX encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interaction with a product, service or website. It involves the person’s emotions, behaviors and attitudes when using such product or service. In user experience design, the main goal is to establish the best elements for the best possible interaction.

 

There you have it! Do you have other terms that you’ve never really been able to get a handle on? Tell us below and we’ll update this post accordingly!

 

 

 

Last Updated on June 3, 2024 by myRealPage