As an SEO expert, it is important to understand all SEO Terminology.
Please review each term below and read the description, as you will need to know these for the SEO Qualification exam.
SEM – Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing is the process of improving rankings in Search Engine Results Pages through natural / organic SEO (free) and paid inclusion (PPC) i.e. through ad networks such as Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcentre etc. It also includes media buying, which is the buying of advertising space on other peoples websites.
PPC – Pay per click
Pay per click is an advertising model used by search engines and website owners to sell you clicks / visitors to your website in return for a fee for each click. The amount someone pays for a click is known as its CPC.
Clicks are normally sold by a bidding method, e.g. highest bid for a keyword will display the advert in the highest / best position or fixed price per click. There are of course other models to the PPC method and other factors in pricing the click sold.
CPC – Cost per click
Cost per click is the terminology used when describing how much an advertiser pays a publisher for sending them one click from their search engine or website.
Cost per click is an SEM term.
Canonicalization (Canonicalisation)
In web search and search engine optimisation SEO, URL canonicalization deals with web content that has more than one possible URL. Having multiple URLs for the same web content can cause problems for search engines – specifically in determining which URL should be shown in search results.
CTR – Click Through Rate
Click through rate is often used in SEM campaigns and refers to the amount of times an advert was shown divided by the amount of times it was clicked.
Example – an advert is shown 100 times and clicked 5 times – your CTR is 5%
CPA – Cost per action (aka Cost per acquisition)
An SEM term referring to an agreed price being paid by an advertiser to a publisher when an action has occured as a direct result of a click from the publishers advert.
Examples include: a purchase being made, a form being filled in or a digital product being downloaded.
Robots
Web Robots (also known as Bots, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web. Search engines such as Google and Bing use them to index web content, spammers use them to scan for email addresses or scrape data, and they have many other uses.
We use Robots to tell the search engine what to index and what not to index.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is highly rated by Search Engines and SEO’s as one of the most powerful factors in search engine rankings.
Remember this – Search engines run automated programs, called “bots” or “spiders” that use the hyperlink structure of the web to “crawl” the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web.
Your (anchor text) links should be structured like this…
<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com” title=”A description of the linked to page”>Anchor text</a>
The anchor text is usually the keyword you wish to rank for, or what the linked to page is about.
Page Rank (PR)
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm which Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of many factors used to determine which pages appear where in search results.
XML Sitemap
A Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a website along with additional meta data about each URL (e.g. when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
HTML Sitemap
An HTML sitemap primarily focuses on helping human visitors navigate your website, however they are also a useful tool to help search engines crawl and index your site too. Best practice would see you adding both an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap to a site.
CPM – Cost per Mille
CPM is the cost per 1,000 impressions of an online advert such as a banner or text ad. An advertiser would pay the publisher a set fee for every time the advert has been shown 1,000 times.
