THREE THINGS YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS ARTICLE:
1. The meaning of common types of jargon you’ll encounter in digital marketing
2. An idea of why these terms and words are important to your marketing plan
3. The most important ideas behind digital and content marketing
Every industry has its own jargon. Often it’s just a shorthand way of identifying who is in-the-know and who isn’t. But jargon can also be intimidating for those who are new to content marketing or digital marketing. It doesn’t have to be—and to make the whole process of understanding this stuff a little easier, we’ve compiled this handy jargon-guide.
The nice thing about understanding these terms is they often refer to things you interact with every day. For example, anyone who has used to Web knows what a SERP is—you just don’t know that jargon-y term for the search engine results page.
So the next time someone tells you your long-tail keywords aren’t showing up in the anchor text of the H1 on your SERP, you can slap them, safe in the knowledge that you know exactly what they’re talking about.
Anchor text:
Anchor text is the blue, underlined text you see when a word or phrase has a hyperlink behind it. For example, this text is a link to our parent-company home page: if you click on it, it will take you there. The link itself is behind the words. The words “this text is a link”, then, is anchor text. Anchor text is important because it helps search engines work out how to index pages.
Blog:
Although it started out as a web-based log, like a diary, nowadays a blog is a regularly-updated collection of articles housed on your website. Blogs have grown in popularity ever since Google announced that one of the criteria for a high-quality site was that it be regularly updated. The easiest way to update a website regularly is to add a blog to it, and regularly update it with new content.
Call to action:
This phrase comes from the world of copywriting. A call to action is a direct appeal for a reader or viewer to do something as a result of reading or hearing your content. That doesn’t just mean buying something. A call to action might ask people to sign up for a newsletter. Without a call to action you lose the opportunity to build an audience for your content.
Discoverability:
With the growth in popularity of sites such as Facebook, Amazon, and LinkedIn, many people are discovering content without actively searching for it (as you would using a search engine). As a result, more digital marketers are focused on making content easily found, whether by search engines or on social media sites. Hence the idea of ‘discoverability’. It may involve looking at both free and paid strategies across a range of media.
EDM:
EDM is an acronym for many things, but in the world of content marketing it stands for Electronic Direct Mail or Electronic Direct Marketing. It is a newsletter than you send via email. An email list is the best way to regularly contact with your customers.
Featured image:
The featured image on a web page or blog post is the primary image on the page, and the image that is used in any snippets of the page in search engine results, or in social media links.
Google Analytics:
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that helps you track and measure information about visitors to your site. It’s a must-have for any business owner doing digital marketing. Other (paid) tools can give more detailed data, but if you are starting a digital marketing campaign, setting up your Google Analytics account is a must-have first step.
Google Search Console:
This is like the flipside of Analytics. Where Google Analytics is looking at your website from the outside in, Search Console looks from the inside out. It is also free. Search console can tell you how your site works, whether there are any errors that is stopping Google from indexing it, and how Google’s bots see it.
H1 headline:
This is the headline at the top of your article. It’s different to the headline at the top of the page, which is your page title. For an explanation of the difference, see this article.
Keywords:
Keywords are the words you think people will use to find your product or service. Often they’re not single words, but phrases. If you use the same or similar keywords in your page title, article heading and the text of your content, it will help search engines index your content correctly, and help searchers find it. It’s important to get keywords right: some are more competitive than others, so it’s good practice to target a large number of different keywords rather than putting all your efforts into ranking for just one.
Landing page:
A landing page is a page on your website that serves as an entry point for the site. If you send out an email newsletter with a link back to the ‘contact us’ page on your website, then that Contact Us page is a landing page.
Link building:
Link building is the process of getting other web sites to link to your site. It is important because search engines use links as an indicator of authority. The more genuine sites link to your site, the better your search engine rankings will be.
Long-tail keywords:
Long-tail keywords are unique or unusual keywords or phrases that do not attract a lot of searchers. Even though fewer people use these keywords for search, long-tail keywords account for the vast majority of search engine requests. Some SEO experts have estimated long-tail keywords to account for up to 80 per cent of all searches.
Meta description:
A meta description is a short description of the content of a page. It is displayed by search engines and some social media sites to help searches determine if a page is the one they are looking for.
Page title:
This is the heading at the top of the browser window, and also the headline Google reproduces in search results. It is different to the article heading (often called the H1 heading). For an explanation of the difference, see this article.
Search engine:
A search engine is a program that searches a database of pages that are on the World Wide Web for keywords, phrases, or characters. The most famous ones are Google and Bing, but there are others including Dogpile, Yandex, Yahoo, Altavista and more (there’s a list of search engines on this site). Search engines do not search the web itself every time you type in a query. They search an index of the web that they store on their own servers.
SEO:
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimisation. It involves making changes to your website to make the contents of it visible to search engines (particularly Google, but also other search engines). It generally refers to direct actions you can take to make your website easily indexed by computers. See also Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and discoverability.
SERP:
SERP is an acronym for Search Engine Results Page—the page of results that come up when you type a search query into Google or another search engine.
Social media:
Social media are websites and applications that help you make or share content with people in a particular group, community or profession. The best-known examples of social media are You Tube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, but there are many others.
Tags:
Tags can be used on pages, blog posts and images to help content management systems order the content of a site. In the past tags were used by search engines for ranking information—that doesn’t happen now, although filling out alt tags on images with keyword phrases can help search engines work out how to index your site.
Unique content:
Unique content is content—primarily articles, but also images—that are unique to your site. It has become more important since Google announced that the algorithm they use would identify and reward unique content.
Want to learn more?
If any of that is unclear, please feel free to leave a comment. I do read them and comment back, and I’m more than happy to discuss it with you.
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