This glossary of terms is provided by Yesup SEO, a leading SEO services.
Search Engine Marketing is still an emerging field, so you are likely to hear terms defined in different ways by different vendors. To make Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing more understandable, here is a glossary of industry terminology.
Algorithm: A set of mathematical rules that describe or determine a circumstance or action. In the case of search engines, unique algorithms determine the ranking of Web sites returned within search queries. Although some of the qualities used to determine ranking (for example, meta tags and number of referring sites) are known, the search engine companies closely guard the precise functioning of search engine algorithms to prevent the manipulation of the system.
Above the fold: The portion of a Web page visible without scrolling down. (Derived from the newspaper industry where the top stories appear just below the newspaper’s name and above the fold of the paper.)
Affiliates: Web sites that get a commission of some kind in exchange for sending sales or other predetermined conversion activity to merchants’ Web sites. Affiliates range from hobbyist sites to highly evolved commercial ventures with multiple merchant relationships.
Automated submission: Submitting a page or pages of a site to multiple search engines via software to automate the process. Most search engines frown upon auto submissions because they eat up unnecessary bandwidth. The exception may be when you have a prior relationship with the search engine, such as through a paid inclusion program or trusted feed relationship.
Black hat practices: Unethical practices. For example, loading your page with invisible text in order to “trick” the search engines into ranking your page highly is often considered black hat SEO.
Cache: Some search engines (most notably Google) show the page of a site as it existed when it was added to the engine’s database. If a page has been edited since it was added, the cached version will not be exactly the same version a user would see when visiting the page.
Cloaking: Showing the search engine one page and the end user a different page. Search engines (surprise!) frown upon this tactic.
Conversion: In search engine marketing, this usually refers to the number of visitors from the search engines who take the desired action when they reach the Web site. Conversions can include signing up for a newsletter, calling or emailing for more information, or making a purchase.
Crawl: What a search engine’s automated robot (also known as a spider or bot) does when following links from page to page on the Internet.
Direct feed/trusted feed: Paid partnership programs with some search engines that permit you to feed information about your pages through a direct XML feed to the search engine without the search engine crawlers needing to visit your site. This is generally reserved for large (500-plus pages) sites, such as dynamically generated ecommerce sites with query strings (question marks and equal signs) in the URL. Google and MSN don’t accept direct feed.
Doorway pages: Pages that are created primarily to rank highly in the search engines and are not generally meant for human visitors to see. These are often hidden within a site (or perhaps hosted separately and link to a site) and cannot be navigated to through normal site navigation. Doorway Pages are also known as Gateway Pages.
Duplicate Content: Content which completely mirrors or is almost identical to another block of content. Duplicate content is usually unintentional (such as a standard Web page or print-friendly page) but sometimes it is by design, such as when sites recycle content to artificially increase its traffic. Various methods are used by search engines to limit duplicate content from appearing in search results, such as discarding these types of pages.
Dynamic URL: A Web page address that is created on the y at the server level from content contained within a database. Dynamic URLs often contain query strings such as question marks, ampersands, and equal signs. The search engines are hesitant to crawl dynamic URLs because they can lead to in nite loops that may trap their spider and cause a server crash. Dynamic URLs can often lead to duplicate content, which is another reason the search spiders are reluctant to crawl them.
Everflux: the frequent updating of search results at Google, almost on a daily basis. Everflux occurs between major updates, when individual pages are updated, added or removed from the engine’s index.
Gateway pages: See Doorway pages
Index: A database of Web pages the search engine has crawled and found useful and unique enough to include.
Invisible text: Using a font for page content that is the same or similar color as the page background so a search engine will read it but a human visitor will not. All search engines consider the use of invisible text to be a deceptive practice.
Keyword density: The number of times a keyword or phrase is used in relation to the number of words on the page in total, usually presented as a percentage. If the page has 100 words and 10 of those are keywords, then density is 10 percent. The idea is to make the site more relevant to engines by increasing the frequency of keywords on a page.
Keyword phrase/key phrase: The words a person uses when querying a search engine to find what they’re looking for. A keyword phrase is also what an SEO would optimize a given page to rank highly for.
Keyword prominence: The position of keyword phrases within the HTML code and copy of a Web page.
Keyword stuffing: Repeating keywords excessively or putting an inordinate number of keywords into the copy or HTML tags of a page. All search engines frown upon this practice.
Landing pages: The page a user lands at after clicking a link.
Link bursts: a rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing to a website. Unsubstantiated link bursts can be a red flag warning to search engines, but there are now ways to qualify the value of new incoming links (i.e. the quantity of traffic passed from the link source).
Link churn: a rapid decrease in the quantity of links pointing to a website.
Link farms: Subsets of sites where each member of the community must link to each other members’ sites. Because the links are required, the search engines generally place little value on these types of links.
Link popularity: The part of a search engine’s ranking criteria which considers and analyzes the quanityt and quality of external links a site has. Pages deemed to be popular are often given a boost in the search engine rankings for the keyword phrases related to it.
Machine-generated pages: Pages that are created automatically to blanket the search engines with low-quality, high keyword-density pages in an attempt to dominate the search engine results. All search engines frown upon these types of pages. They often go by many different names and are sometimes said to be a “proprietary” system for gaining high rankings.
Manual submission: Personally visiting a search engine’s “Add URL” form and pasting in the URL and other information asked for in order to let the search engine know about any given page.
Meta tags: HTML codes that are not visible to the average site visitor but that are intended for the search engines to help them better classify a site. The two tags important for search engine optimization include the Meta keyword tag and the Meta description tag.
Mirror pages: Duplicate pages intended to gain extra rankings in the search engines. Most search engines ignore all but one copy of any duplicate content.
Natural results: See organic listings.
NoFollow: A link attribute designed by Google to tell search engines not to follow a particular link. NoFollow practices have led to a lower volume of link spam on blogs, but some argue that it diminished the valuable conversation taking place between sites.
Organic listings: Search page results that are provided free and are based on the search algorithms of the search engine. A site might have a high organic ranking without paying the search engine anything at all. Conversely, a high-spending advertiser in a keyword category might not appear anywhere near the top organic results.
PPC: An acronym for Pay Per Click Advertising A term from general online advertising indicating that the advertiser will pay for the ad by the click it receives (as opposed to by the money it makes, the views it gets or the time period it’s displayed.) Many search engine advertisers use the term PPC to describe their campaigns, not realizing it has a broader meaning.
Paid inclusion: Paid partnership programs with some search engines permit you to feed information about your pages through a direct feed to the search engine without the search crawlers needing to visit your site. This is generally reserved for large (500-plus pages) sites, such as dynamically generated ecommerce sites with query strings (question marks and equal signs) in the URL. Google and MSN do not accept paid
inclusions. Also known as trusted feed or direct feed.
Ranking: Where a page shows up in the search engine results of any given search query.
Reciprocal linking: Exchanging links with another site.
Relevancy: How a search engine determines where any given page’s ranking should be. Relevancy is based on a complicated mathematical formula called an algorithm, which takes hundreds of factors into consideration.
ROI: An acronym for Return On Investment. The amount of money made from a campaign (search engine marketing or otherwise), less the amount spent.
Robots.txt: A file located within a root directory of a website which offers instructions to search engines on which files to crawl or omit.
SEM: An acronym for Search Engine Marketing. Any form of marketing that includes the search engines. SEM encompasses paid search engine ads (PPC), as well as the optimization of pages in the organic search results (SEO).
SEO: An acronym for Search Engine Optimization. The process of altering a Web page’s copywriting and HTML coding to be relevant for specific, targeted keyword phrases that relate to the site in question.
Search engine optimization copywriting: Writing the visible text on pages so they use the targeted keyword phrases being optimized for in order to gain search engine visibility.
Search engine spam: Pages that make use of deceptive techniques in order to appear more relevant to a search engine query than they really are.
Search marketing: See Search engine marketing.
Spider: An automated robot that crawls through the Web via links on site pages.
Submission: Letting a search engine or directory know the URL of a page in order for the page to be included in the engine’s database. Can be done through an add-URL page at a search engine/directory or through a paid inclusion program.
Supplemental Results: A secondary index for Google which appears on-screen to the user when matching page is not shown in the main index. Documents with supplemental results are not as trustworthy, because of low link authority, complex URLs and duplicate content or some variation). Supplemental pages will rank lower than primary search index pages and are crawled less often, with their outbound links carrying far less value.
Title tag: An HTML tag used by search engines and browsers to help describe what the page is about. The information provided in this tag is assumed to be highly relevant to the page, and therefore it is generally given a lot of weight in the search engine ranking algorithms when determining relevancy.
Trusted feed: See paid inclusion.
URL: An acronym for Universal Resource Locator. This refers to the address system employed by the Internet to locate resources such as websites. URL information includes the type of resource accessed, the server address and the file location.
Vertical creep: When non-paid, non-organic listings appear in search engine results pages. For instance, the results may be news stories or maps the search engine deems relevant to a query.
Webmaster: a person who is responsible for creating, designing, revising and/or posting information on the worldwide web.
White hat practices: Ethical SEO practices. While there is far from a consensus on what constitutes white hat and black hat practices, Google’s Webmaster pages (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters) lay out some “quality guidelines” as a basis practices it considers ethical.
If you have any questions about this glossary of terms, or wish to make a suggestion, please contact Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
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This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
The world of search has changed, and websites aspiring to rank highly across search engines on competitive keywords have to employ comprehensive Search Engine Optimization and Marketing tactics and strategies. Social Media Marketing is also essential to all website marketing efforts, since it empowers sites to gain valuable online exposure across Social Community Websites and Networks.
Social Media MarketingThe world of search and website marketing has really changed over just the past few years. For many in search, it seems like it was not too long ago that webmasters could have their sites ranking highly on search engines for certain keywords if they took care of the basic tags – meta and description.
Times have changed since then, of course, as there is so much competition in search that now webmasters have to apply extensive search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies on their sites, in order to get them to rank highly for their keywords across the engines. Video submissions to such venues as You Tube and Meta Café have recently become staples in all SEO and SEM work.
Social Media Marketing is a relatively new and powerful website marketing tool, and involves increasing a site’s online exposure, across the numerous Social Community Websites and Networks that are now out there. This increased exposure also involves getting people on these sites and networks to discuss that particular site, as well as its products and/or services, so that a dynamic viral marketing effect is created.
Social Media sites include such popular venues as Amazon, Craig’s List, Digg, Ebay, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Google, Live Journal, My Space, Orkut, Twitter and Yahoo. Adept webmasters or SEO people can access these social media communities, and collect relevant data on user behavior and interests, so that they can find out what customers really want.
Social Media Marketing involves several tactics and strategies, including the following:
1. Submission of the website to all major Social Media Networks and Websites
2. In-house production of promotional video for the site, and submission of the video to www.youtube.com. The video’s listing on You Tube is also optimized, and placed on top of the site’s ranking lists, thereby ensuring maximum exposure
3. Optimization of the video across major search engines, with frequent engine-indexing
4. Creation of community and friendship groups on Facebook, Friendster and Twitter, with subsequent recruitment of people from around the world who are interested in the Streaming Community
5. Participation in various forums on Community Networking, with the client site introduced to online visitors through Streaming Community Websites
6. Submissions of site articles, newsletters and press releases to several submissions websites
7. Submission of the site’s listing to Live Journal
8. Employment of MSN Messenger as a full-fledged website marketing tool, to inform the cyber world about the site
9. Strategic submission of site-related pictures to Flickr, so that visitors notice these submitted materials
10. Creation of relevant site blogs, with these blogs indexed by Google
Webmasters and SEO Consultants working on a site can effectively complement their SEO and SEM work with these types of Social Media Marketing strategies, further empowering that site to significantly increase its online presence, attract more relevant traffic, and ramp up online conversions.
If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
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This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
Content submissions and article submissions have been powerful online marketing tools for webmasters or SEO Consultants wishing to SEO their client sites. These efforts are now increasingly complemented by site video submissions.
Video Submissions
For quite awhile content submissions and article submissions have been powerful online marketing tools for webmasters or SEO Consultants wishing to SEO their client sites. These efforts are now increasingly complemented by site video submissions.
Video submissions involve producing a 30 or 60 second video on the site, perhaps introducing the site and its various products and/or services, and this can usually be done in-house, with brochure fotos and logos. Video submissions do not have a voice over, so you basically have to concentrate on making sure that the pictures and graphics look nice, and that the video flows well.
Client site video can be submitted to several video submissions venues, but two of the most popular ones are You Tube (www.youtube.com) and Meta Café (www.metacafe.com). Submissions to You Tube are particularly effective because that venue is actually owned by Google itself, which means that your site will be soon indexed by Google directly off the You Tube submission.
This brings us to the big advantages of video submissions. The obvious one is that more people will find out about your site online, via your video. You can tell how many online visitors have seen your video by the number of hits it incurs, which is listed just beneath the video itself, on the far right. If you have a video for a car dealership site posted on You Tube, for example, and after two months it says that there are 288 hits, that means 288 people online have seen that video.
The hits are nice, of course, but it not really what you are after. The main purpose of these video submissions is to ensure that search engines such as Google and Yahoo are finding those videos and from there going to your site and indexing it. Search engines value new information, whether it is in the form of an article or a video, particularly if that new information serves to educate and inform people about a company and its products and/or services. For this reason, search engines accord a high “information value” to video submissions, particularly if they are more educational as opposed to promotional.
If you are a Webmaster or an SEO Consultant aiming to increase the online presence of a particular client site, you would do well to make sure that video submissions, particular to You Tube and Meta Café, are part of your website marketing mix.
If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
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Here are details on the Paid Search Advertising Programs offered by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
What is the definition of Paid Search Advertising?
Paid Search Advertising refers to general online advertising, in which the advertiser pays for the ad based on the amount of clicks received, as opposed to the revenues earned, the views received or the time period displayed. Many search engine advertisers employ the terms PPC or Pay Per Click to describe their specific ad campaigns, not fully realizing that this acronym comprises a much broader meaning and scope.
In a typical Paid Search Ad campaign, advertisers pay per click and search engines promise that they will run the brief text ad and hotlink near the organic listings, for the precise keywords or keyword phrases selected. These campaigns allow the advertiser to control the hotlink URL, the copy and sometimes even the rank, depending on the engine.
A Paid Search Ad campaign can be launched right away, and will complement the advertiser’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program.
Paid Search Advertising – Overview of Programs
Pay search advertising flowchart
1. Account Set-up
The Yesup Paid Search Ad Programs start with a staffing guarantee – we guarantee that all campaigns are directly managed by trained and experienced paid search ad experts, and are assigned a senior Account Manager.
2. Keyword/Search Term Research
Finding the right keywords and/or search terms is an ongoing and never-ending process, which takes into account several factors: seasonality, new negative keywords, new buzzwords or news-driven terminology, product launches and competitors’ behaviour.
Much research goes into discovering the keywords and/or search terms which make paid search ad campaigns successful, including everything from talking to customer service and sales, surveying customers, studying incoming traffic logs and internal site search queries. Focus groups could be conducted.
3. Campaign Copywriting
Text copy for each ad campaign is written in-house, and features artistic, creative and original ideas. Ad text copy could include or leave out pricing information, and could be in the form of either a more aggressive hard sell or merely informational and/or educational. Campaign copywriting should be continuously tweaked and capitalizations paid attention to, so that there is consistency with information displayed in visible click-URLs.
4. Auction Management
Auction management tools are systematically employed to stay on top of these often complex processes, and are equipped to expand ad campaigns across multiple search and shopping engines. These include the following: Google AdWords; Yahoo! Sponsored Search; Yahoo! Local Sponsored Search; MSN Search (Microsoft Ad Center); Ask.com (Ask Sponsored Listings); AOL Search; Shopping.com; and IndustryBrains.
Activities included in auction management are:
* Initiating campaigns for new keywords or keyword phrases
* Managing bids & considering ad ranking
* Day-parting
* Geo-targeting and Local Matching
* Coordinating with SEO results
* Testing ad text copy offers, and visible URL tweaks
* Ensuring that links hit the right landing pages (live landing pages)
* Tracking all campaign spending
5. Measurement & Evaluation
We effectively measure and evaluate all PPC campaigns by employing the appropriate tools, but it all starts with understanding the client’s original objectives (i.e. brand awareness vs. increased sales and revenues or increased return on investment). State-of-the-art analytics software is employed to fastidiously measure the following:
* Ad views reported by the search engine or shopping engine (not unique views)
* Clicks on an ad and cost per click, as reported by the engine
* Clicks on an ad as reported by our own company servers
* Potential fraud click
* Conversions, either through the client site’s own analytics package or through our own hosted landing page site
We track several factors which might impact on conversions:
* Bid Term
* Day Part & Day of the week
* Season
* Copy, visible URL, offer on ad
* Ad rank
* Search Engine which the ad appears on
* Landing page (if testing conversions)
6. Campaign Optimization
A comprehensive evaluation of each ad campaign is conducted and an evaluation report is prepared, and then several optimization techniques are employed to advance the campaign to the next level. Test results are considered at the new stage, new tests are planned and conducted, and budgets are determined or expanded.
We employ several highly sophisticated software tools, with bids changing automatically as the marketplace shifts over the day. We take the time to personally review each account and we employ the latest software to continuously manage all aspects of every campaign.
7. Conversions & Landing Pages
Our expert conversion consulting services empower client websites to more effectively compel visitors to take action, whether it is buying, registering or downloading white papers or information. Landing pages or microsites may also be designed by our creative design teams, sending paid search traffic to these pages and enabling us to better manage results.
8. Coordination of Paid Search Ad & SEO Campaigns
Our multi-faceted team ensures complete and effective coordination of Paid Search Ad and SEO campaigns, so that they complement each other and are in complete sync.
Paid Search Ad – Programs & Prices
Program Services and Support
* Consulting and training services may be provided to help a client’s own staff handle paid search campaigns
* Preliminary analysis reports are available
* Paid search clients are assigned a senior Account Manager for regular consultation, and have access to continual technical support from experienced paid search professionals
* Customer service is available from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
* All email enquiries are responded to within 24 to 48 hours
* Other available services include: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Conversion Consulting & Redesign, Website Design & Layout, Other Online Advertising and Marketing
If you have any questions about this information, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
