Definitions of Some Popular Web Marketing Terms
Auto responders
These are a great bit of kit that can capture a prospects e-mail address and then send them e-mail messages in support of your product. The e-mail systems are sometimes referred to as permission based marketing, as subscribers must “opt-in” to receive the communications. Professional e-mail systems like Aweber are very careful to keep within the anti-spam rules. With subscribers required to “double opt-in” and an “opt-out” option is given in every follow-up e-mail. The beauty of these products is that they allow the marketer to establish much greater rapport with the prospect giving valuable information out in return for being listened to. Remember, it takes on average 7 “touches” with a business for a customer to have the confidence to buy.
Back Links
These are absolutely key to getting your web site found on the internet. Back links are internet based hyperlinks on other peoples web sites that link/point back to your website. Both web surfers and search engines will follow this link. It will give you both increased traffic and exposure/votes for the search engines. The more back links you can get, the more your site gains authority, and the higher the search engines will rank you
Keywords
This is one of the most important of all internet marketing definitions.
The whole internet search system works around a database where websites are “spidered”, categorised and stored according to the words found on it and any sites related to it by links. When searchers enter their search words or terms, the search engines have to present webpages in the results which have a high relenancy with what the user has searched for. If you aren’t labelled as relevant to those terms, you won’t show. These all-important words are called “keywords”. If you want to be found when people search for “blue widgets” then these words must be used in your site and anything relating to your site and these will be your keywords. If you have “blue widgets for sale” then you are going to have to add more keywords to your list like “buy blue widgets” or “where to buy blue widgets”. Remember, you would naturally say on your site “I have blue widgets for sale” whereas the searcher will search from their point of view “where can I buy blue widgets”. Can you see the difference. Although the search engines can relate some of these terms, you are better to include the keywords or search terms the searcher will use rather than what you would say. Please see the definition for latent semantic indexing for advanced keyword information.
Landing Page
Web surfers can hit your website from many different ways. The landing page defines the page that they land on first. You can have many different landing pages within your website, but these pages must perform the function of attracting your visitors attention, holding them and ultimately leading them to whatever action you wish them to take. Landing pages should be exceptionally relevant to what the surfer has searched for. The more relevant your landing page, the more Google will thank and reward you.
Link Bait
As defined elsewhere on this page, when you are promoting a website, you should be trying to increase your back links at all times. A great way of doing this is by supplying a piece of content on your site that is so good and original, that visitors will add links back to it from their own sites. Examples of this could be internet based tools, resources, video or text. This is harder to do in practice and is the “holy grail” of web marketers.
Link Juice
This is a very modern concept even for the internet world. This defines the value that the search engines place on a link to, from, or within a website. Higher authority websites have more link juice. Link juice flows from one web page to another. If you get a link from a high authority site, you will receive some of that authority/importance. Your aim is to “collect” or store this juice. Avoid too many links off your site where this juice can escape. Try and route the juice through your site in such a way as to maintain or increase your site or web pages authority.
LSI Latent Semantic Indexing
This is where search engines look at not just the direct search query text as entered by the searcher, but expanding this to include related terms used by all sites ranking highly for the direct text. It tries to define a holistic relevance to a search term. For example, if you searched for “hire Harry Potter” meaning the film, Google would also show the sites ranking for the words “rental”, and “chamber of secrets”. The search engine attempts to make relevancy jumps that humans can do naturally. It means that to be ranked high in the SERPs for a particular keyword phrase, you are going to have to deal with synonyms and other related phrases to support the main phrase. There is one school of thought that suggests “silo” architecture (I think it is better described as “chair legs” Where if, for example, your high level keywords are “insurance broker”, then that is the chair seat. You then have to have a number of supporting legs (e.g. car insurance, home insurance, business insurance, holiday insurance). Each of these terms supporting the “higher” level term. Bigger sites with good site architecture will often rank the best for terms because of the supporting content.
Natural listings
Natural listings is used to describe the listings of sites that are found by the search engines as opposed to the paid for, or sponsored links that are always presented on the SERPs. The natural listings are generally found on the left hand side (especially in Google and Yahoo) Although sometimes there are paid for links placed in the first 3 positions on the left. Sometimes they are referred to as the “free listings” however as many will tell you to get a top listing in a competitive sector is very expensive, in time if not in cash.
PPC campaigns
This is internet advertising where you “pay per click”. This is where you register with a search engine or other supplier and pay to have your advert/listing to appear when searchers trigger the keywords that you have chosen. This is unbelievably powerful and dangerous all at the same time. Huge amounts of money have been wasted on these campaigns by some and yet whole businesses have been built on the back of it by others. The ability to change what you bid for these clicks, set daily budgets and to get you conversion rate tracked with ease, mean that very solid business can be built. Examples of PPC suppliers are Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter.
Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links are like back links i.e. they are internet based hyperlinks. However reciprocal links are a pair of links. One linking to your website from a partner, the other linking from your site back to the partner. These are no where as powerful as an un-reciprocated back link.
SEO
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”. This is the practice/industry related to ensuring your website is highly ranked/found by the search engines. There are 2 branches of this, “white hat” and “black hat”. These refer to whether the practitioner is trying to work within the acceptable standards for this discipline (white hat) or trying to trick the search engines (black hat). You should only use SEO contractors or techniques from the “white hat” side. Down the other road you can be punished by being dropped completely from the search engines. You would have to start all over again.
SERPs
This stands for the “search engine results page” which is the page shown on your computer after you have entered a query into a search engine. The aim is to have your site ranked highly on the SERP. Having your page high on page 1 of the SERPs is required as a very low percentage of users will click on the subsequent pages.
Social Bookmarking
This is another very current and hot topic. Web users, tired of sifting through countless webpages when they are looking for something are joining groups where they lean on other “like minded” individuals to tag or bookmark good and relevant web pages. There are many of these groups e.g. Digg, Stumbleupon, del.icio.us. They all have different features, but when trying to market on the web you want to be encouraging users to bookmark your pages on these sites so others can find you. Depending on which sites are involved, having back links from them can be beneficial (however, many of these site use the “nofollow” attribute for hyperlinks meaning no link juice is passed on.)
Text anchored links
This is where you add descriptive text between your hyperlink tags. This text gives surfers and search engines good information about what they will find when they click your link. Search engines read this and will rank the site the hyper link points to, for the words used.