What in the World is SEO?

Thursday, 17 February 2011 16:59 |

In the world of internet marketing there are TONS of acronyms and unfamiliar words that can at times be confusing; here is a list to make navigating your needs even easier:

SEO- Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page by search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.

Conversion- Web traffic that fulfills a pre-established goal, such as purchasing of a specific product filling out a registration form, or subscribing to a newsletter.

Organic Search- Search results in a search engine that are not paid advertisements. The results that come up naturally based on their indexing within a search engine. We all want to come up on top for organic searches using keywords we are optimized for.

SEM- Search Engine Marketing. The act of marketing a website via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities.

SERP- Search Engine Results Page. The listing of web pages that a search engine shows a user once they've entered a search value.

Spider- Programs written to scour the web automatically for multiple reasons (to index web pages, for spamming purposes, etc.) aka web robots, web crawlers, bots, internet bots.

Black Hat SEO- The use of unaccepted or frowned upon SEO practices in order to get higher rankings and more traffic. Use at the risk of being dropped from the engines or at least being removed from high rankings.

White Hat SEO- The use of accepted SEO practices in order to get higher rankings, more traffic, etc.

(ref: http://www.ajazi.com/seo-terms.cfm)