Search Engines & Internet Marketing

Search Engine OptimizationInternet marketing strategies and techniques, keyword analysis, search engine and spiders, affiliate programs, web analytics and collaboration

Search Engine

Google, Yahoo and others are popular search engines that enable users to find other web sites and internet resources. Search engines work by indexing the web and adding web site information into a set of massive databases. [1]

A program used to search for documents on the web relating to keywords or key search terms entered by a user. A search engine is comprised of two parts: a Spider which fetches the documents and an Indexer which reads web documents and creates an index using the words and ideas within each document. Some of the top search engines are Google, Alta Vista and MSN. [8]

A tool or program which allows keyword searching for relevant sites or information on the Internet. General and topic-specific search engines are prevalent today, for example, Education World, WebCrawler, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo are examples of search engines. [6]

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an act of increasing the number of visitors to a particular web site by adding appropriate keywords and phrases, and thus ranking high in the search results. The higher a web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that your site will be found by a search user. For general and competitive web sites it takes a lot of professionalism and time to tweak the web site in order to be well optimized and search engine friendly. [7]

The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimising a website, including the content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process. [6]

Search engine optimization describes a part of the process to making certain a website appears to its best advantage in search engine results pages. Some search engine optimization processes, described as “Black Hat”, involve attempting to deceive search engines into believing a site is more relevant than it is. [4]

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.

SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine. [2]

The process of making a web site able to be indexed by a search engine spider and receive high placement in the index for specific key words or search terms because of relativity. The higher a site ranks in the index, the better the chance is of someone finding the site when using the targeted keywords or search terms. SEO should start at the beginning of a site’s conception and ideally, a site should be built around the target keywords. Good web site developers will optimize a site as they are building it.

Note: Care should be taken when choosing a web site developer or SEO company to insure that they do not use unethical methods which could cause a site to be banned from search engines once they discover them. [8]

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing involves a strategic approach to driving/attracting users to a website. This includes:

• Attractor design
  Creating copy and imagery to drive a user to click-through to a website
• Paid placement or pay-per-click (PPC)
  Determining where a website should be promoted to attract an audience
• Search engine optimisation
  Developing web content to achieve a high ranking in search engine results pages (SERP)

[3]

Internet Marketing

Leveraging the Internet as a means of communicating a company’s messaging, attracting prospects and customers, and conducting market research. [6]

Internet marketing may be a combination of:

• Search Engine Marketing
• Permission-based Marketing
• Viral Marketing
• Buzz Marketing

Traffic

Traffic is the amount of data transferred (downloaded) from a web server, as users view webpages, movies, documents, etc.). The term traffic is also used when describe the popularity of a website, i.e. more traffic is loosely equivalent to more people visiting. [3]

Hits

A hit is an indicattion of how many times the information has been viewed or downloaded on a web site. For example if you are looking at your log files for your website, it might say you got 898 hits for a particular image, this does not mean that the image was downloaded, it means that a browser asked for that image 898 times. It can also mean the number of URLs received in a search. For example, someone could say ” I got 143 hits for vancouver web design ” . This would mean they searched for vancouver web design and got 143 URLs back in the SERP ( Search Engine Results Page) . [6]

Rank

In SEO and SEM terms, rank (or ranking) refers to where a Web site or Web page is ranked within search engine results. For example, if your Web site is about microphones, when a person queries “microphones” in a search engine, your ranking indicates where in the search results your Web page is listed (e.g. within the top 5 results, on the first page, the 300th page and so on). A Web page rank within a search engine is also commonly called a position. [2]

Meta Tags

A special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page’s content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices. [2]

Keyword

A word or phrase that a user believes is relevant to the information he or she is seeking. The user enters keywords into an online search form. The search engine then examines each record in its database to find those documents that match the keywords. A keyword search(as opposed to a concept search) is a search for documents containing one or more words specified by the user. [6]

Keyword Analysis

Is when you check to see what keywords your visitors are using or will be using when searching for your website. There are many ways to do a keyword analysis. Read more about keyword analysis. [6]

Keyword Searching

Using a word or combination of words to search an electronic resource (CD-ROM, search engine, online catalog or database. Keyword looks for words in titles, corporate names, subject headings, and contents notes. [6]

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to optimizing your web pages for Search Engines instead of your visitors and could impact your image as a company. This does not violate Search Engines Guidelines, however it might drop your conversion rate of visitors dramatically since it looks and reads out of context, is as close to spam as you can get. It is a technique where too many instances of the keyword are put into a web page without any context or use to make it keyword rich or increase keyword density. This practice is considered spamming and should be avoided at all times. [6]

Keyword Prominence

Describes how high a keyword is found on a web page. The higher the keyword is, the more weight it is given by the search engine because the more important words of a web page are generally placed near the top of the page. [6]

Keyword Weight

Denotes the number of times a keyword appears in a page as a percentage of all the other words in the page. In general, higher the weight of a particular keyword in a page, higher will be the search engine ranking of the page for that keyword. However, repeating a keyword too often in order to increase its weight can cause the page to be penalized by the search engines. [6]

Spider

A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It’s called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler.

Because most Web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines, like Alta Vista, have many spiders working in parallel. [2]

A spider is the term given to the electronic information gatherers that search engines send out to index the web. [1]

Spider Trap

A condition of dynamic Web sites in which a search engine?s spider becomes trapped in an endless loop of code where a spider?s request for a page from a Web server is met with a the server?s request for an information input from the spider, which cannot provide information to the server as it is only collecting data for the search engine?s index. Spider traps are the result of poorly written cgi scripts and potentially can crash a server and/or prevent the spider from returning to a site. [2]

Robot

A program that runs automatically without human intervention. Typically, a robot is endowed with some artificial intelligence so that it can react to different situations it may encounter. Two common types of robots are agents and spiders.

OR A device that responds to sensory input. Robotics. [2]

Click Through

The number of times a visitor has clicked on an advertisement (or any hyper link) and has been re-directed to your website. [6]

Click Through Rate

The percentage of those clicking on a link out of the total number who see the link. For example, imagine 10 people do a web search. In response, they see links to a variety of web pages. Three of the 10 people all choose one particular link. That link then has a 30 percent clickthrough rate. [6]

Buzz

A highly intense and interactive form of word-of-mouth communication. [6]

Buzz Marketing

A low or no cost method of marketing associated with people telling other people telling other people about a company’s products or services. [6]

Viral Marketing

A stragety that encourages individuals to pass on marketing messages to other people. Viral marketing creates the poteintal for expoteinal growth. Like a virus, viral marketing is based on the premise that growth will spread exponetially. [6]

Contextual Advertising

Advertising on a Web site that is targeted to the specific individual who is visiting the Web site. A contextual ad system scans the text of a Web site for keywords and returns ads to the Web page based on what the user is viewing, either through ads placed on the page or pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a site about sports, and the site uses contextual advertising, the user might see ads for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia dealers or ticket sellers. Contextual advertising also is used by search engines to display ads on their search results pages based on what word(s) the users has searched for.

Contextual advertising has attracted some controversy through the use of techniques such as third-party hyperlinking, where a third-party installs software onto a user?s computer that interacts with the browser by turning keywords on a Web page into links that lead to advertisers that are not paying the Web site to advertise on its pages.

A contextual ad is the advertisement that dynamically appears on a Web site. [2]

Opt-in Policy, Permission-based Marketing

An opt-in policy requires a potential customer to self-select the services they wish to subscribe to, and how any information they provide may be used. Also referred to as permission-based marketing.

In practise, an opt-in policy involves creating forms where services such as email newsletter subscriptions are unchecked by default. The benefit of this approach is that a user who has actively considered the offering before signing-up, is a more qualified potential customer. [3]

Opt-out Policy

An opt-out policy is where an existing customer receives electronic communications – usually on the basis of a prior relationship – without providing express permission.

The European Union Privacy and Electronics Communication Directive (introduced in 2003), makes provision for electronic communications (both email and text/SMS) to be initiated with existing customers on the conditions that:

• The communication relates to products or services similar to those originally provided, and
• The customer is provided with a means of opting-out of further communication.

[3]

Paid Search

A type of contextual advertising where Web site owners pay an advertising fee, usually based on click-throughs or ad views to have their Web site search results shown in top placement on search engine result pages. Some search engines will make it easy for users to determine which search results are natural and which are paid, while others will mix the results making it more difficult for users to determine which are the paid search results. Also called sponsored search. [2]

Affiliate Program

An automated marketing program where a Web advertiser or merchant recruits webmasters to place the merchant’s banner ads or buttons on their own Web site. Webmasters will receive a referral fee or commission from sales when the customer has clicked the affiliate link to get to the merchant’s Web site Web site to perform the desired action, usually make a purchase or fill out a contact form. The most common types of affiliate programs include pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, and pay-per-sale. [2]

Mailing List

Users can subscribe to any number of online mailing lists, on a number of web sites. Usually they are for interested parties to receive information about the web site, or relevant news and updates. Design Talkboard has a mailing list as part of its discussion forums, which anyone can subscribe to if they want to keep up to date with the latest design and graphics news. [1]

Web Analytics

A generic term meaning the study of the impact of a Web site on its users. E-commerce companies often use Web analytics software to measure such concrete details as how many people visited their site, how many of those visitors were unique visitors, how they came to the site (i.e., if they followed a link to get to the site or came there directly), what keywords they searched with on the site’s search engine, how long they stayed on a given page or on the entire site, what links they clicked on and when they left the site. Web analytic software can also be used to monitor whether or not a site’s pages are working properly. With this information, Web site administrators can determine which areas of the site are popular and which areas of the site do not get traffic and can then use this data to streamline a site to create a better user experience. [2]

Business to business B2B

Design communication targeted from commercial companies at other commercial organizations, as opposed to between the company and their consumer.

Often these communications will take the form of trade magazines (or web site) or targeted advertising within the financial press, for example. [1]

Web Collaboration

Web collaboration provides an organization with the capability to collaborate with customers or internally via the Internet in real time. Web collaboration packages generally consist of Web-based tools within Web sites to assist an organization in the area of sales, new revenue-generation opportunities, and to enhance customer satisfaction. Web collaboration is essentially the back-end software or service that allows your center to share Web pages with customers while offering voice and text chat assistance or to conduct single or multi-user conferences and seminars. Web collaboration can be used in an Internet (IP) environment or integrated with an organizations’ existing telephone infrastructure to provide automated customer assistance for a client’s Web-based inquiries [2]