If you own a website then you need to promote it. To promote it (or have an online marketing agency promote it for you) it’s a good idea to understand exactly what is happening and what the plethora of terms used actually mean.
Our industry is awash with buzz words and jargon that the average man cannot make head nor tail of. We believe in a ‘No Bull Hits’ approach to such things and try to make things clear and concise to all. We’ve written this guide to help people navigate their way through the minefield of jargon and industry gibberish!
● Search Engine – Google, Bing or Yahoo are example : It’s a website people use to search the internet.
● Search Query – The words or phrases that people type in to a search engine and search for. Also known as a “search term”.
● SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – The methods used to improve a websites visibility and position (Or “ranking” – see below) in search results on Search Engines.
● Ranking: The placing of your website when someone searches for certain terms within a .search engine, for example: “When people search for ‘Party Balloons’ – “My website RANKS on page one of Google”.
● Organic Search or Organic Listings – (Or “Natural Search”) The term Organic means the traffic that comes to your website from search terms that are not sponsored but found naturally. SEO is about making this process happen.
● Keywords or Key Phrases: The terms you would like your website to be associated with when people search for them.
● Keyword research – The process of deciding which search terms you should concentrate on promoting within your website. An example would be Googles’ Keyword tool which shows the number of searches for certain terms per month.
● Google Bot or Web Spider / Crawler – A program that searches the internet and associates websites to certain search terms or phrases so that they will “rank” on search engines. (Google Bot is Google specific.)
● Indexing- When a Search Engines’ Bot has crawled the web and ranks the URLs found using various criteria and places them in the database, or index.
● Algorithm – The mathematical formula use to designate a website it’s given place in the rankings. For example, Googles’ Panda or Penguin algorithm.
● Hyperlink – A clickable link on a webpage that leads to another webpage or website.
● Back Link – A Hyperlink from another website that leads to you own. See inbound Link below.
● Inbound link – A link from another website to your website. A natural inbound link will pass on some of the linking websites link juice. This is a good thing.
● SEM – Search Engine Marketing – The procedure of promoting a website, through the use of SEO or Pay Per Click methods.
● SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages – The page or pages of the Search Engine which displays the websites relating to your search.
● Web Analytics – The study of web traffic and visitor behaviour. Google Analytics is one fine example of this, measuring statistics such as visitor numbers, where the visitor came from and how they behave once on your website.
● SPAM – SPAM relates to any dodgy SEO technique that violates a Search Engines guidelines or terms of service. Example of this would be hidden text, keyword cramming or repetitive links to the same page. The is punishable with a rankings drop or permanent exclusion from search engine results.
● HTML – “Hypertext Markup Language” – The code which is used to create the content or layout of web pages.
● URL – “Uniform Resource Locator” – To put this in very simple terms this is the address that identifies a place or website on the internet. For example: www.dpom.co.uk is our website and www.dpom.co.uk/blog points to our blog / news section.
● Black Hat SEO – Shady SEO techniques with a view to powering a website through the search engines ranking to page one. These can lead to big place penalties. Examples of this would be “Pay $30 for 1000 links.
● White Hat SEO – “Natural” link building which promotes your website in accordance with a search engines permitted guidelines. An example of this would be writing a quality blog for your website or creating a backlink from a quality article that is on another reputable website to your own.
● PPC or Paid Search – “Pay Per Click” the sponsored listings that appear in the search engine results page. (On the right or above the natural links for Google results)
● Link juice – The value of links between websites. For example, having a link from your website to another website or visa-versa. Assuming that the other site is reputable then search engines will recognise this as a good thing.
● Long Tail Keywords – From an SEO perspective, the “Long Tail Keywords” are the terms searched for less frequently but make up 70% of all search engine enquiries. Find more info here.
● CTR – Click Through Rate – The percentage of people who see an advert on a webpage and click it. A high click through rate indicates that an advert is performing well.
● Optimising – The process of improving the quality of content or ease of navigation on your website or the quality of links from other websites that point to your own with a view to improving your ranking in Search Engines.
Adwords Specific Terms:
● Exact match – An exact term that people search for in a search engine. Example (With punctuation): [buy paper plates online]
– when people use this exact phrase, your Google Adwords should be targeted for those words and you will only show in the results if that exact term has been typed in the search engine. This makes for highly targeted traffic.
● Broad match – This includes synonyms, related searches and variations of a search. Example (With punctuation): buy paper plates online
– This is less targeted and will yield much broader results such as people who searched for buy paper online, or any combination of words including your match terms. It makes the traffic less relevant.
● Broad match modifier – No synonyms or related searches but close variations. Example (With punctuation): +buy + paper + plates + online
– This includes all of the words that have been searched for in any order: buy online paper plates, paper plates buy online.
● Phrase match – A phrase and the close variations of that phrase. Example (With punctuation): “paper plates”
– Any description that is searched for will show so long as the keywords are in that order. Such as: red paper plates, buy paper plates, wedding paper plates.
● Negative match – Terms that you do not wish to attract traffic from. Example (With punctuation): – princess
– You may wish to negate some terms from showing you in the results. Following the paper plate example, you may not sell specific princess paper plates, so be sure to include this in your negative keywords. If you have a Google Adwords campaign it is important to include negative keywords to fine tune the traffic or visitors you attract.
Conclusion
Whilst this guide is by no means a complete guide to all terms gibberish, it should provide you with an excellent go to – tool for understanding the key phrases that you will come across in the SEO and Adwords industry.
If you do not understand some of the long explanations you read when you search for definitions of those terms or are unsure if you are being given correct information, then this guide aims to help you make sense of the industry buzz words.
With SEO and Adwords being essential to the success of your website, it is essential to understand (at least in part) some of the processes that go into that and it’s always best to start by understanding the terms used!
