Understanding Online Advertising Terms

Written by Jessica Franke, Owner, Green Web Design & Internet Consulting

If you’re a small business owner with a website, you’ve likely spent at least a little of your time wondering how to increase your online traffic and sales. You may have heard or read about things like SEO, SEM, SMO, PPC, CPC, and other possibly confusing terms. Today, I will be discussing each of these briefly, and hopefully helping to “de-mystify” them for you.

Organic Search

When you search for something in a search engine and click on a result that has not been paid for, that is called an Organic listing.

Paid Inclusion

Some search engines and directories offer paid inclusion services, where a website owner can pay to guarantee that their website will show up in search results. A higher ranking can typically be obtained by paying more than the other advertisers.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click is just that: you pay a set amount of money each time a person clicks on your ad. The cost of each click is called the Cost Per Click (CPC). As a PPC advertiser, you bid on keywords that you hope your target market will type in when they are looking for related products and services. The more competitive the keyword(s) are, the higher the CPC for that term. Generally, PPC advertising will not affect your actual search engine ranking. When you stop paying, you stop showing up in search results.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Internet Marketing which is intended to make a website more visible in the organic search engine results is called SEM. Methods employed by SEM professionals may include, but are not limited to: SEO, PPC, Search Engine Submission, and Paid Inclusion.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The most basic definition of SEO is that it is the process of optimizing your website to conform to certain standards in order to make it more attractive to the search engines. The purpose of SEO is to make a website rank better in organic search engine listings over time, without the need for nonstop paid advertising. Unlike PPC, the results are not instant; it may take anywhere from 6 months to a 1 year to organically show up for your most competitive search terms. For this reason, most SEO is a long term commitment. Most SEO companies will also need to adjust the meta tags, alt tags, and text on your website as part of their services.

There are many different ways to rise to the top of the organic search results, and most SEO companies have developed their own method over time. Because the search engines constantly change their algorithms, truly effective SEO professionals are constantly studying the search engines and updating their methodologies.

There is one major distinction you should make when hiring an SEO company. Generally, “white hat” SEO companies follow Google’s webmaster guidelines and take great care not to do anything which may be considered “spam” by the search engines. On the other hand, “black hat” SEO companies use methods that don’t always conform to what is considered acceptable by the search engines.

Methods used by white hat SEO companies may include, but are not limited to:

Creating or Updating Meta Tags (title, description, keywords, etc); Keyword Research to find out what people type in when searching for websites like yours; Creating or updating the content on your website to include keyword-rich text; writing professionally edited blog entries on your companys’ behalf; and finding other websites to link to yours.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Thousands of social networking websites like Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Del.ici.ous, and YouTube allow users to upload, watch, and rate content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Social networking itself is a form of social media, which uses the “wisdom of crowds” assumption to decide what is popular. Blogging and RSS feeds are also popular types of social media.

The aim of SMO is to generate publicity for a website or company using social media outlets such as those mentioned above. For this reason, when doing SMO, it is wise to add “digg this”, “bookmark this”, “stumble this” and other buttons or widgets to your website to make it easy for others to bookmark you. SMO is often used as part of a comprehensive SEO plan.

==

Jessica Franke has been designing websites for over 13 years. She is a website designer and Online  Marketing specialist, among many other things.