internet marketing terminology
SEO / Search Engine Optimization
Refers to the act of altering a site so that it may rank well for particular terms, specifically with crawler-based search engines.
SEM / Search Engine Marketing
Sometimes refers to “Search Engine Marketing” or to a specific individual or title as in “Search Engine Marketer”. As noted above, SEM is a subset of Internet Marketing and includes both SEO and managing paid listings (PPC).
Crawlers / Spiders
Programs used by search engines which continually index content and other information on web pages. After landing on a page the crawler will follow links on the page, digging deeper into the site and moving on to other sites. If the content on a page has changed but has yet to be crawled the new content will not come into play regarding the ranking of the site. Modern spiders are extremely sophisticated and fast, in the past it was a legitimate concern that new content or new pages might be overlooked in search engines, however this is less of a problem today. Using Google Webmaster Tools you can see how often and how much Google indexes your site. Often Google will index over a dozen pages on a low to medium traffic site a day
SERP
Acronym for “Search Engine Ranking Page”, this is the page with your search results.
PPC / Pay-Per-Click
The most common form of paid listings on the modern web. In this model you pay each time a user clicks on your advertisement, taking them to your website. The names of the major programs are Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter. There a host of terms associated with PPC which will be discussed during a later presentation on PPC.
Organic / Natural Listings
Normal search engine listings that are neither local search listings nor paid listings.
Search Engine Submission
The act of submitting pages to a search engine. In my opinion this was more important in the past. It is important to submit new sites and make sure that the search engines index the pages and to submit important new areas or pages of a site. However it is recommended to occasionally confirm that all pages are index, this can be done by running a “site:www.examplesite.com” query in a search engine. Just because a site is indexed does not mean that it will rank anywhere, just that the search engines know that it exists.