Web Marketing – A Brief Glossary

There are increasingly a range of acronyms being thrown around in web marketing that sometimes slip out when interacting with clients. Here’s a brief overview of some of the more common e-marketing acronyms to ease the conversation.

• SEM
  Search Engine Marketing
  SEM is a broad term covering the range of activities you might engage in to improve the extent to which you generate revenue via search engines
• SEO
  Search Engine Optimisation
  SEO focuses on the organic listings as opposed to sponsored listings, or PPC. The position of your site in the listings for a given search term is determined by a wide range of factors, each contributing to the search engine’s algorithm. They can be broadly divided, however, into two groups:
  • Content Relevancy: The greater the extent to which the content of a page matches the search term in question, the better it will rank (subject to the engine’s spam protection measures).
  • Trust relevancy The greater the extent to which a page is connected (by hyperlinks) to sites also well connected to other sites relevant to the search term, the better it will rank, based on it being a trusted resource.
• PPC
  Pay Per Click
  Many search engines present two listings when the user makes a search – the main, organic search results, and the sponsored listings. To achieve a sponsored listing, you must agree to pay a certain amount to the search engine every time someone clicks on your listing. Your bid compared to that of your competitors determines your position in the listing – bid prices can range from a few pence for less competitive phrases to several pounds for very competitive phrases. Most often however clicks will cost less than £0.50.
• SMO / SMM
  Social Media Optimisation / Social Media Marketing
  More recently, a new area has opened up in web marketing with the arrival of social networking and in particular social news websites, such as Digg, Reddit, and a host of others. These sites allow you to submit content to their ‘Upcoming’ listing, presented initially in reverse date/time order. As time passes, if your site receives votes, it maintains it’s high position and may reach the ‘popular’ listing. This is encouraging marketers to be creative and generate interesting content, as the potential returns of getting ‘dugg’ are substantial in the short and long term.