Enhance Your SEM Vocabulary

Search engine marketing campaigns are an exciting venture for many. But as with anything new, it is easy to get lost in the jargon. Below is a list of some of the most important and most commonly used terms in SEM.

1. Auto bidding: A system that allows Pay-per-Click advertisers to automatically raise their bids one cent higher than the highest bid allowing them to always be at the top.

2. Back links: Links from other websites that link to your website or web page. This is often used as an indication of your website’s popularity. That is, the more back links you have, the higher your website may rank in search engine results pages.

3. CTR: The acronym for “Click-Through Rate.” This is the ratio between the number of times an advertisement was displayed and the number of times it was clicked.

4. CPC: The acronym for “Cost per Click.” This is the amount paid each time the advertisement is clicked.

5. Conversion Rate: The ratio between the number of times an advertisement is clicked and how often a purchase is made by the visitors who clicked on the ads.

6. CPM: The acronym for “Cost per Impression.” Although the terms states is, this is actually not tracked for single impressions but often for every 1,000 advertisement views.

7. Hits: The number of times a web page is viewed.

8. Impression: Advertising views or the number of times an advertisement was displayed and viewed by internet users.

9. Keywords: Words (or phrases) typed by internet users into the search boxes of various search engines to find specific information.

10. Link Building: The practice of linking similar websites with each other in an effort to increase the number of search engine results.

11. Link Farming: Similar to link building, this is also a practice of linking websites to increase the number of search engine results. However, this practice is considered unaccepted because it involves link building with unrelated sites.

12. PR: The acronym for “Page Rank.” This is the position of the website in search engine results.

13. ROI: The acronym for “Return on Investment.” As with any other marketing campaign, this refers to the amount of sales generated versus the investment made.

14. SEO: The acronym for “Search Engine Optimization.” This is the online marketing strategy of building traffic to a website according to page rankings in search engines.

15. Unique visitor: How many users visit a web page. As opposed to just knowing how many hits there are on a web page, this can be very important as it tells you how many individuals visit your page no matter how many times they visit it.

These are only the most commonly used terms in search engine marketing. Although there are many more out there, others even more technical, the fifteen listed about are enough to get you on the right track to effectively using Pay-per-Click advertising and search engine marketing as part of your overall online campaign. Chances are, you’ll learn more about the rest as you gain further experience.