Seo Jobs Jargon Buster For Beginners

SEO

SEO is short for Search engine optimisation, which covers all manner of activities aimed at making web sites visible to search engines in order to rank well.

SEM

SEM is short for search engine marketing. Although many would say this is a posh name for SEO jobs there is actually a different emphasis on search engine marketing. Whereas the objective of SEO is purely to gain high rankings, SEM has the additional more commercial goals of generating higher volumes of relevant traffic for commercial gain. In essence, good SEO won't necessarily lead to success on it's own, SEM is arguably more of a complete package.

PPC

PPC stands for pay per click and refers to the option to pay for phrases to appear high up search engines. SEO jobs require a lot of patience to achieve results, and in many cases organisations don't have the option to wait the necessary time it may take to gain high positions. With PPC one has the option to bid for a phrase to appear at a certain position in a special section of the page called the 'sponsored links' either at the top or down the right hand side. In this scenario, the company will pay an fee for every click on that phrase. PPC rankings are more or less an instant way of a new site ranking listing where organic listings may take months.

Organic ranking

On any search engine there are broadly two types of results which appear on a given page after a search. Firstly, there are the sponsored links which are paid for with PPC, and this are normally down the right hand side of the page and labeled 'sponsored links' and then usually there will be between one and three at the top above the organic search results with a slightly different coloured shaded background.

Inbound links

In bound links are links to your website form another website. This is the basis of most SEO jobs, to build as many inbound links as possible. These do of course need to be high quality links although what constitutes a high quality link is not only a vast topic on it's own, but it is also evolving all the time.

Meta tags

These are essentially labels for aspects of a website and it's pages, which a search engine reads to see what it's about. Each page should be labelled with a 'title' tag, a brief 'description' tag and a bundle of 'key words' which will let search engines know what that page is all about.

People in SEO jobs are often a little over zealous with their technical terminology. Hopefully this will help you understand their pitch a little better next time they call!

Good Luck.