Talk SEO and SEM: a Guide to Internet Marketing Lingo

By Brenna Kimber

If you’re new to online marketing, you will find a conglomeration of terms that may be unfamiliar like SEO, PPC, SEM, FFA and more. It’s like swimming in a sea of acronyms. Understanding these terms is essential to your online marketing survival. So this is what they are and what they mean.

Banner Ads

A type of ad that involves a graphic image that appears much like a banner. The graphics are meant to catch the eye of Internet users and entice them to click on them for more information.

Cost–per–Click (CPC)

Cost–per–click is the amount of money the search engine charges the webmaster each time a PPC ad gets a click. Prices can range from 10 cents to hundreds of dollars per click.

Directories

Human–compiled lists of websites usually arranged by topic. They can be searched by keywords much like search engines.

Doorway Page

Pages that act as doorways to the actual website. These pages usually contain a graphic, little text and say “click here to enter.” Doorway pages are used to try to rank well in a search engine for a specific term. For the most part, search engines discourage the use of doorway pages.

FFAs or links pages

These are pages that host lists of links to websites. There are no qualifications for submitting to these sites, and the links are kept for a short period of time. These links are often irrelevant, are not widely used by humans and have little effect on link popularity.

Landing Page

The page you land on after clicking on a link.

Link Popularity

This term describes how many websites link back to yours. The more websites you have linking back to you, the higher your link popularity. Search engines look at the quality of those websites linking back to you as well. So the more high–quality links you have, the better.

Natural (Organic) Listings

Natural listings are the unpaid area of search engine results. Sites obtain these results by having good SEO or by being deemed relevant and important by a human editor.

Paid Listings

Also called paid inclusion or paid placement, paid listings are listings that search engines sell for specific keyword searches. These listings are usually included at the top of the results or in the right hand margins. Some engines, like Google, separate the paid listings from the unpaid with a different background and the label “sponsored listings.”

Pay–per–Click (PPC)

Pay–per–click advertising means you bid for certain keyword phrases or terms and pay the search engines to place an ad on those search results. The search engines charge you every time someone clicks on your link. Most PPC ads are placed in the right hand margin of search engines.

Rank

Term used to indicate exactly where you are listed in the search engine. A good ranking puts you at the top of the results where the most people will see it.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on investment is the amount of profit you made having invested either in PPC programs, paid listings, search engine submission or an array of other activities.

Search Engine

Huge databases of websites that people can search to find websites relevant to the topics or information they are interested in.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Separate from SEO, search engine marketing is the actual process of researching, submitting and placing of a website in the various search engines and directories. Some uses of the term include keyword targeting as well as advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The process of readying a website to be listed well in search engines. Several factors are involved in making a site search engine friendly including the design and content of the site, Meta tags and link popularity.

Spider (Crawler or Robot)

A spider is a component of a search engine that automatically searches the web and its web pages. It follows links, makes copies of pages and stores them in the search engine databases.

There are several other terms and aspects to marketing online and getting your website to do the work for you. A balance of SEO and SEM along with paid and natural listing techniques is required for ultimate ROI. At least now you know what all that means.

References

Sullivan, Danny (editor) Search Engine Optimization & Marketing Glossary. Retrieved August 2, 2006, from SEMPO Web site: http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/sem_glossary

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