Same Game, Different Name - Other Abbreviations
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SEM: Search Engine Marketing. It is the act of marketing a website via search engines. It can be either improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings, or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities. It's very similar to marketing in general.
SERP: Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page/Positioning. This refers to the organic (excluding paid listings) search results for a given query.
PR aka PageRank: This refers to a top secret ranking algorithm invented by Google; it is the source of all their wealth). It determines a web site's position on the SERP. As a strategist, it's your job to hack this unknown algorithm. Page rank is actually patented, so it doesn't have any real world corollary. Also, PR is a score from one to ten that Google assigns each page it indexes. A page's visible PageRank, shown in the Google toolbar, is often several months out of date.
PPC: Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads. It was invented by Overture and mastered by Google, the monopolistic search engine we strive to hack.
301 Redirect: Method of redirecting an old web page to a new location. This method is used when you change a page and you want the search engine spiders to find it through the old page.
TLD: Top Level Domain. The three main domain extensions: .com, .net, .org. If you're not using one of these extensions, well...let's just say it's better to have these extensions.
CTR: Click Through Rate. This is the standard method of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. It's calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of times the ad was shown (also known as an impression).This metric is used in PPC campaigns (see above).
JF aka Junk Food: This is what I eat as I do SEO work (very, very bad for you).
Ethical Terms
SEO aka Search Engine Optimization: Optimizing websites for search engines. Organic SEO means optimizing the site for search engines and getting a good position in the SERPs without paying any money for it.
The next few terms were given by this thread, here. I tweaked the wording a bit. For the original wording, you can check the above link.
Anchor Text: The anchor text is very important in SEO. It means the specific text for a hyperlink. It is the word (or phrase) that the link is put in. Anchor text is taken into consideration by certain search engine algorithms as a factor in a web site's relevance. For example, if site A links to a page in site B with the anchor text "blue widgets," a search engine spider crawling that page would see that and think the page in site B is relevant to "blue widgets" -- so when someone searches for "blue widgets," site B's page is more likely to come up. This also depends upon factors on site A (is site A an authority site on blue widgets?), and of course what the spiders turn up when they index site B, among other items.
Ethical SEO: You can think about ethical SEO as the opposite of unethical SEO. It is SEO made without using any activities that might get your site banned in the most important search engines. It's also known as white hat SEO.
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