PPC
Nov 08, 2012 Staff

Search Term Glossary


You can't be successful in digital marketing if you don't know what you're talking about. Search Engine Journal has published a list and definitions of fifteen search-related terms that every business should understand, summarized below. For more in-depth definitions, see the original article.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A type of online promotion that seeks to increase traffic flow to a website from the results provided by the search engines.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
An advertising alternative to SEO in which the advertiser bids the amount they’re willing to pay each time a search engine user clicks through from the sponsored listings area of the search results.

Content Marketing
An inbound online marketing technique that relies on populating a website with high-value, highly-shareable content to build brand awareness.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)
The practice of driving website traffic and customer relationships through an engaging presence on social networking sites.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
An all encompassing term for all the above strategies designed to attract website visitors.

Algorithm
Complex, frequently updated formulas that automatically parse search engine indexes and return results based on a number of criteria.

Keyword
The string of words search engines users type into the search boxes on their browsers.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
The results of user search queries, shown as the result of each engine’s complex ranking algorithms.

Conversion
A completed action that occurs on a website that indicates a meaningful, measurable connection has been formed with a website visitor.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The process of improving the number or quality of conversions that occur on a website.

Split Testing
A common tool used in CRO plans, which involves installing programs that randomly serve up different webpage variations in order to determine which variant performs better.

Backlink
An HTML connection between two webpages, the number and quality of which plays a major role in the SEO value of a given website.

Anchor Text
The text-based element of a backlink that appears on the referring page.

PageRank
A measure of page authority, as developed by Google, based on a logarithmic scale that accounts for the number and quality of external backlinks pointing at a site.

Meta Tags
Pieces of HTML code that can be added to a website that provide information to the search engines, but that aren’t visible to site viewers.


View Original Article

Published by Staff November 8, 2012