December 23, 2008
SEM – Search Engine Marketing
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a term that refers to the activities related to making a web page or web site more visible in the Search Engines. It can include activities like SMM (Social Media Marketing), Article Marketing, Blogging, Blog Commenting, PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising, Discussion Forum particicpation, as well as many and various activities beyond the scope of a simple definition. Many people will use SEM and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as if the terms weren’t interchangeable – like they mean the same thing – but they really don’t.
SEO refers more specifically to designing a web site so that it is optimized for the Search Engines to more easily include the site and the pages in their index and to design them in such a way that they are likely to rank higher. This includes things like using Key Words, making the site in compliant standards, avoiding unfriendly design such as scripts and Flash, and a whole body of techniques. SEO can also be used to describe the design of the Articles written for SEM, or the wording of the Blog or Forum posts, but is distinct from them as activities.
Filed under Internet Marketing by Tracy Phaup
LSI – short for Latent Semantic Indexing – isn’t a particularly easy thing to describe very briefly, but we’ll try.
It’s a subject that gets talked about quite a bit – whether people actually use those terms for it or not – because the search engine powerhouse Google uses it to determine whether or not the content of any given web page actually relates to the keyword or keywords being searched for. It will examine the contents of the entire page, and apparently takes into consideration the contents of the site as a whole, and determines what the actual subject of the page is by examining the key words and how they are used in relation to each other.
So, for example, if you’re publishing an article on your blog that uses the word “key” as a main part of your topic, depending on the rest of the content Google will use LSI to determine if the page would be best served to someone looking for information on the Florida Keys, the key to internet marketing, or how to optimize a page for key words.
Ultimately, the idea behind is a an analysis of the natual language of a web page. What that means for bloggers and webmasters is that while keywords are still important, they need to be used in relevant and unique content.
Filed under Internet Marketing by Tracy Phaup
A/B Testing is essentially testing two different forms of an internet marketing effort. It could mean testing two different keywords, landing pages, banner designs or even two entirely different web sites. Any variable in the marketing can be testing to see which variable produces the best results.
Filed under Internet Marketing by Tracy Phaup
