Know your digital jargon
These days it’s common knowledge that it’s not only people in IT jobs who need to know technology or digital jargon – it would be in the interests of every Internet user to understand the tech-speak that drives the online domain. And since IT jobs constitute a much wider range of expertise than when IT was a relatively new field, there are many more terms than these listed below. We’ll focus specifically on digital marketing terms:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the optimising (through various methods) of certain on-page and off-page elements of a website in order to help the website to rank better on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s). What this does overall is increase your site’s visibility to searchers.
Black Hat SEO
This comprises the unethical methods of increasing a website’s search engine ranking. Keyword stuffing, purposefully creating non-organic links, as well as cloaking (sending the searcher to a different page than the one they assumed to be clicking on) are three methods of Black Hat SEO. The Google Panda and Penguin updates eliminated many black hat SEO sites from Google’s index and emphasised the need for website managers and SEO professionals to employ the correct techniques.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
This method of pricing Internet advertising involves the advertiser paying a bid-on amount every time a searcher clicks on their advert. The amount paid is often based on a competitive bid that the advertiser has won for a specific keyword. When a user searches for that keyword, the advertiser’s advert appears and if the user clicks on the ad, the advertiser pays the bid amount.
Keywords
These are the words or phrases an Internet searcher will type into a search engine in order to research a product they are looking for. Marketers who have targeted a specific demographic can optimise websites to include targeted phrases or keywords (or related keywords) that are popular with that demographic so that their websites appear more readily and closer to the top of that user’s SERP’s.
Landing page
This is a specifically designed webpage on which the searcher will “land” after clicking on an Internet advert for the product or keyword they are looking for. The landing page must have a call to action or a lead generating form where the user can submit their personal details if they are happy that they have found the product/company they are looking for. The purpose of the landing page is to capture the details of the user (for an intermediary marketer) or to generate a lead that will be converted into a sale if the salesperson closes the sale.
Link Exchange Process (LEP)
LEP’s are an example of organic linking between websites to improve SEO ranking. When another website endorses your site by linking to it, and you return the favour because you favour their web content too, the link exchange process has taken place and you are able to mutually assist each other’s rankings.
What’s your favourite online marketing jargon?
