Below you will find a glossary of common internet marketing related terms. These terms will be used frequently throughout this website, so if you ever come across a term in an article you don’t understand, please check here first. If it’s not here, please leave me a comment on that article or get in touch with me and I will be happy to help explain further.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website to improve its organic search performance. This includes strategies such as keyword research, content creation, internal linking and more.
Learn more about Search Engine Optimization
Pay Per Click (PPC)
As the name implies, PPC, also known as Search Engine Marketing, is the process of paying for website traffic. This process also involves keyword research but focuses more on campaign optimization, landing page optimization and budget spend.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is the process of building up a list of email addresses and then sending content to users via email. This content could be website updates, special promotions or other marketing material. It is a way to stay connected with your audience and help drive them back to your site.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a method of generating traffic through sharing your websites content on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Each social platform behaves in different ways and thus will change how you approach marketing on each various platform. Social Media is also another great way to interact and connect with your audience on a more personal level.
Mobile Optimization
Mobile Optimization refers to the process of improving the performance and experience of a web page on a mobile device. This includes everything from page load speeds, content layout, button sizes and more. Google puts heavy emphasis on how well a web page is optimized for mobile devices and will soon begin ranking a mobile website before the desktop version of the site.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Building on Google’s emphasis on mobile performance, they recently released “Accelerated Mobile pages”. These are essentially stripped down versions of a normal web page designed for faster content consumption and, more importantly, load times. Often you’ll see AMPs don’t have images to increase their load times.
Local SEO
The process of improving the organic performance of a website in a given geographical location. For example optimizing a Los Angeles dentist’s website to appear when a user searches for dentists in Los Angeles or near Los Angeles. Local SEO is more involved than regular SEO as it includes all the same tactics as normal SEO but requires more specialized link building and content formatting strategies.
Backlinks
A backlink is any time another site links to your site. Backlinks are ranked in terms of quality. Having a backlink from an authoritative website, especially in your given topic, will help you gain better ranking and authority over time. Producing quality, unique content consistently is a strong way to naturally generate backlinks. Never, ever buy backlinks. This is a quick way to get your site blacklisted by the search engines.
Internal Links
Internal links are a means of optimizing a website. The more links pointing to a page on your website, the more important search engine’s view that page to be. It’s important not to overdo your internal links and to diversify the anchor text you use for each link.
Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the text you use in your links. Using a variety of different, but relevant, anchor texts for your internal links to a piece of content will help that piece of content rank for a broader range of keywords. This is because search engines use anchor text to help decide what a piece of content is about. So avoid using 1-2 word anchor texts like “click here”.
White Hat vs Black Hat
White Hat and Black Hat refer to the means in which you do your work. You’ll often come across terms such as “White Hat SEO” and “Black Hat SEO”. White Hat SEO means you are doing things the correct way, whereas Black Hat SEO refers to doing things the wrong way. Practicing Black Hat SEO will eventually get you in trouble with Search Engines and result in penalties. If it seems like a short cut or too good to be true (i.e. buying backlinks) it is probably black hat. If it takes time, thought and energy, its probably white hat. When in doubt, please ask.
