IMPORTANT TERMS FOR SEM (SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING)

IMPORTANT TERMS FOR SEM : SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

If you have a website or blog, or if you work with anything related to the Internet, you’ll certainly need to know a bit about search engine optimisation
(SEO). A good way to get started is to familiarise yourself with the most common terms of the trade, and below you’ll find 13 of them. IMPORTANT TERMS FOR SEM

1. SEM: Stands for Search Engine Marketing, and as the name implies it involves marketing services or products via search engines. SEM is divided into two main pillars: SEO and PPC. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it is the practice of optimising websites to make their pages appear in the organic search results. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it is the practice of purchasing clicks from search engines. The clicks come from sponsored listings in the search results.

2. Backlink: Also called inlinK or simply link, it is an hyperlink on another website pointing back to your own website. Backlinks are important for SEO because they affect directly the Page Rank of any web page, influencing its search rankings. IMPORTANT TERMS FOR SEM

3. Page Rank: PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. The basic idea behind the algorithm is the fact that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links (weighted to their value) to a page, therefore, the higher the probability that such page is important.

4. Anchor text: The anchor text of a backlink is the text that is clickable on the web page. Having keyword rich anchor texts help with SEO because Google will associate these keywords with the content of your website. If you have a weight loss blog, for instance, it would help your search rankings if some of your backlinks had ”weight loss” as their anchor texts.

5. No Follow: The no follow is a link attribute used by website owners to signal to Google that they don’t endorse the website they are linking to. This can happen either when the link is created by the users themselves (e.g., blog comments), or when the link was paid for (e.g., sponsors and advertisers). When Google sees the no follow attribute it will basically not count that link for the Page Rank and search algorithms.

6. Search Algorithm: IMPORTANT TERMS FOR SEM Google’s search algorithm is used to find the most relevant web pages for any search query. The algorithm considers over 200 factors (according to Google itself), including the Page Rank value, the title tag, the meta tags, the content of the website, the age of the domain and so on.

7. SERP: Stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s basically the page you’ll get when you search for a specific keyword on Google or on other search engines. The amount of search traffic your website will receive depends on the rankings it will have inside the SERPs.

8. Sandbox: Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries. Once Google verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the sandbox and into the main index.

9. Keyword Design: To find the keyword density of any particular page you just need to divide the number of times that keyword is used by the total number of words in the page. Keyword density used to be an important SEO factor, as the early algorithms placed a heavy emphasis on it. This is not the case anymore.

10. Keyword Stuffing: Since keyword density was an important factor on the early search algorithms, webmasters started to game the system by artificially inflating the keyword density inside their websites. This is called keyword stuffing. These days this practice won’t help you, and it can also get you penalised.

11. Cloaking: This technique involves making the same web page show different content to search engines and to human visitors. The purpose is to get the page ranked for specific keywords, and then use the incoming traffic to promote unrelated products or services. This practice is considering spamming and can get you penalised (if not banned) on most search engines.

12. Web Crawler: Also called search bot or spider, it's a computer program that browses the web on behalf of search engines, trying to discover new links and new pages. This is the first step on the indexation process.

13. Duplicate Content: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. You should avoid havimg duplicate content on your websites because it can get you penalized.

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