Understanding Search Engine Marketing

As with any other type of business, search engine optimization carries it own lingo and when first learning how SEO can help your website and business it can be very easy to become lost. Whether you are optimizing your website yourself or paying an outside company to do so these terms are important to know. Remembering the following terms can help you successfully launch your SEO campaign.

Algorithm
Algorithm is the term used by many search engines on how they formulate the page rankings. For example, search engines will send a ‘spider’ which searches and analyzes your webpage and then use the data to determine how high or low your site appears on the search engine.

Click through Rate (CTR)
Click through Rate is a term used specifically for Pay per Click campaigns for the amount of times people are clicking on an advertisement out of the number of times the ad is shown. CTR is a very good measure of an advertisement’s effectiveness.

Cost per Click (CPC)
Cost per Click is another Pay per Click term and is simply the predetermined amount of money a company pays for a person clicking on an advertisement. CPC is dependant on the keyword and the placement of the advertisement.

Keyword
Keywords are simply the word or words used when using a search engine. It is important for businesses to know the keywords customers are using to find the products and services that the site is providing.

Natural Listings
Natural Listings or Organic listings are non-advertised listings in search engines. Most of the time natural listings are offered for free by search engines, however they do not guarantee how high or low the website will be ranked.

Pay per Click (PPC)
Pay per Click is just the opposite of Natural Listings, and cost every time a user clicks on the website link. However, while it does cost money, PCC campaigns guarantee how high the page rank is and where website will be located.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is making your website more search engine friendly. Doing so increases the page rank, making it more likely to be found when a customer does a keyword search.

Spider
A spider is a program that crawls through websites to find information and data to determine where the site will be located in natural search listings.

While these are just a few of the many terms used in Search Engine Optimization they are necessary to learn so that you make sense of your SEO campaign. Knowing the basics will help you understand your SEO professional or help you learn how to do your own Search Engine Optimization.