It's Hip to Be Square
As an agent you probably use some industry jargon from time to time. The internet also has its own vocabulary. And even though this may not be your native tongue, it is worthwhile to at least be familiar with some of this terminology as it’s becoming ever more prevalent in all professions. Not only that, being a tech geek is considered cooler than ever. Adding some of these acronyms to your vocab definitely won’t hurt your cred with the younger generation.
Internet Terms to Know
SEM: Search engine marketing is a form of internet marketing that tries to promote web sites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). Some methods include search engine optimization, paid placement and paid inclusion.
SERPS: Search engine results pages. These are the pages that appear when you type a search term into Google, Yahoo, or MSN.
SEO: Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) via natural, or unpaid, search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the closer to the top of the page a site is presented in the search results, or the higher its rank, the more searchers will visit that site. Some efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.
PPC: Pay per click is another way that web site owners attempt to drive traffic to their site. PPC considers what words people use when searching for certain things. For example, when searching for life insurance, a person may type “life insurance,” find life insurance,” “looking for cheap life insurance,” and so on. Web site owners bid on those key words and key word phrases. The higher the bid, the closer to the top of the page the ad appears. These results will show up in the sponsored listings, or the ads to the top and right of the page.
Algorithm: You may remember this from your high school math class, but search engines also use algorithms, albeit much more complicated that the ones you studied in Trig. Google, Yahoo, MSN and all the rest use algorithms to determine where a site will be presented on a SERP. Some pieces of the algorithm are known. For example, sites that have unique, relevant content, can be easily navigated and have the correct HTML rank higher. However, there are many parts of the algorithm that remain a mystery, which is SEO and PPC involves a lot of guesswork.
Spidering: A web crawler, sometimes called a web spider or web robot, crawls the internet in a methodical, automated manner. It’s all very sci-fci. But many sites specifically search engines use spiders to create a copy of all the visited pages so they can be processed by the search engine. This is how the search engine knows what to display when you type “flavors of coffee” into the search box. Crawlers also check links on a web site or validate HTML code. This is how a search engine determines which sites have better quality content, so that it can display these sites higher on the SERP.
Ok, I think that’s good for today. I don’t want to bog you down with too many terms. But, in an increasingly web-based society, it’s useful to understand some of the things going on behind the scenes on the internet. So every time you aren't sure of a term's meaning or how something happens, look it up. One of the great things about the internet is how easy it has become to learn something new.
