Are you new to the world of Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization? Familiarize yourself with some of the terms you will encounter. Here are some of the vocabulary you will hear from us as we discuss your campaign.

Algorithm – This is the mathematical formula search engines use for indexing, sorting and ranking your website. Search engines often change and update these formulas to keep relevant results and prevent SEOs from understanding and exploiting them.

Anchor Text – This is the part of your text content linked to a related web page. Your keyword usually serves as the anchor text. Search engines use these to determine the relevance of a text to the site it points to. It will look like this in HTML: Anchor Text.

Backlink – These are links from one website pointing to another site. Two factors make a good back link: a high-performing anchor text and relevancy of the websites’ content to each other..

Click Through Rate (CTR) – This is the percentage of clicks your site gets versus how many times your link appears on the internet. If you get twenty clicks for every thousand times your link is on display, you get a percentage of 2%. What SEO does is to increase this number by targeting and attracting specific visitors.

Conversion – This does not exclusively refer to the income you generate using your website. This is the number of visitors that complete one of your goals or objectives. It may include having visitors sign up for your newsletter or buy a product online.

Cost Per Click (CPC) – This is a pay per click advertising method where you only pay for an ad you placed when visitors click that ad. It is one of the most popular ways of increasing traffic to a website.

Crawler – This is the program search engines use to gather data on different websites by following links from one website to another. Other terms are spiders or bots.

Index – This is where you will find all the information crawlers find. It is also known as the Search Engine Database.

Impression – The number of times a site displays your ad to visitors.

Keyword – This is the word or phrase used to optimize your site. These are the words online readers type in search engine boxes. SEO campaigns revolve around these words. A website optimized for specific high-performing keywords will get higher SERP rankings.

Link Building– An SEO practice where you drive traffic to your website by linking your site to different content sources. The more links a search engine crawler traces back to your site, the higher your ranking will be.

Meta Description Tag– This is the short description in your HTML code. Only search engines can see this description of your website. Search engines no longer use this for ranking, but it helps them determine what your site is about.

Meta Keywords Tag– Meta keywords have a low impact on your ranking today, but they are important just the same. They tell the search engines what your web content is all about.

Page Rank (PR) – This is Google’s numerical ranking of websites. The ranks go from 0-10, with 10 being the most relevant website for your search.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)– It is a large-scale SEO method which uses paid advertising methods like PPC advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is the overall process of boosting your ranking on SERPs. SEOs do this by optimizing your website for specific keywords. It makes use of various strategies such as link building, content development, and SEM to name a few.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – This is the report page you get when you conduct a query on search engines. The list you get after searching for keywords on a search box is your results page.

Traffic – The number of times your page receives visitors in a given period of time.

Unique Visitor– This is the number of unique IP addresses and visitors that visit your site in a given time frame. If you visit a site three times today, you leave three impressions but you only count as one unique visitor.

White Hat SEO– White Hat SEO is the proper way of doing search optimization. White hat SEOs abide by search engine guidelines and apply methods that do not violate their rules.