Indian ad market to grow by 7.8 per cent in 2013: Magna Global

Indian ad market to grow by 7.8 per cent in 2013: Magna Global

By afaqs!
June 14, 2013

Television and print will contribute over two-thirds of all ad revenues generated in India in 2013.

The advertising market in India is expected to grow by 7.8 per cent in 2013, with television and print contributing over two-thirds of all revenue, as per Magna Global's advertising forecast.

According to the forecast, digital media will grow by 31 per cent, faster than any other category, with mobile and video outgrowing traditional display. Television will grow by 6.6 per cent. While print's story is still relevant in India and will continue, the newspapers category expanding in language and regional pockets is estimated to grow 6 per cent; magazines, however, will remain flat.

Radio and out of home advertising will grow by 8 per cent in 2013. With the investment climate expected to warm up and demand from external economies backed by solid domestic consumption, Magna forecasts the advertising revenue to grow 11.9 per cent in 2014.

The Indian economy experienced its worst near decade slowdown in 2012, with real GDP growing by 4.0 per cent as compared to 7.7 per cent in the previous year (source IMF). Downgrading of the economic outlook by rating agencies hampered the investment climate. The government took some measures to reduce subsidies, opened up FDI in retail and planned to introduce targeted subsidy through direct cash transfer to cut expenditure. However, the impact of these reforms remains uncertain in the short to medium term. In its April report, IMF forecast 5.7 per cent of real GDP growth this year and 6.2 per cent in 2014.

Magna's Global forecast

Magna Global predicts the global advertising market to grow by 3.0 per cent this year, to $486 billion, thus slowing down from 2012 (by 3.9 per cent), and then accelerate by 6.1 per cent in 2014, to $515 billion. Compared to Magna's previous forecasts, published in December 2012, this represents a small downgrade for 2013 (0.1 per cent) and a small increase for 2014 (0.1 per cent). Magna's analysis covers ad market conditions in 73 individual markets, adding three new markets this time: Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Kenya.

The predicted acceleration in ad revenues is in line with expectations of accelerated economic growth in the second half of 2013 and throughout 2014. In its April 2013 report, the IMF predicted 2013 real GDP growth to reach 3.3 per cent globally and to accelerate to 4.0 per cent in 2014. Although the economic forecast is still modest for developed markets (1.2 per cent and then 2.2 per cent growth) and for Europe in particular (0 per cent and then +1.3 per cent), it will in many cases bring the economic environment to the point where business growth triggers not only ad spend growth but, in some markets, faster-than-GDP growth. In markets where marketers have been cautious, they may at last switch from optimisation mode to expansion mode.

Digital media will continue its double-digit growth in 2013, as ad revenues will increase 13.4 per cent to $113.6 billion. Growth will be driven by search (14.6 per cent to $52 billion), video (21 per cent to $6.6 billion), mobile formats (54 per cent to $12 billion) and social formats (39.6 per cent to $8.2 billion). Other formats will barely grow, and actually decline in many markets due to the commoditisation and deflation of display inventory, the forecast reveals.

Television advertising growth will slow down in 2013 due to the absence of global televised events. Following a 5 per cent growth in 2012, ad sales will grow by only 2.0 per cent to $196.5 billion, but TV remains the leading media category (40 per cent market share) ahead of digital. Print formats continue their decline: in 2013, newspaper ad revenues will decline by 3.3 per cent and magazine revenues by 5.1 per cent to a combined $110 billion (a 23 per cent market share). Radio advertising will grow by 1.1 per cent to $32.5 billion and out of home media revenues will increase by 2.9 per cent to $32.6 billion.

Advertising News from Afaqs

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Indian Advertising News

How to Find Advertisers for the Website

How to Find Advertisers for Your Website: The Ultimate Guide

by Daniel Scocco

 

Direct advertising sales is arguably the best method to monetize a website. Finding advertisers for your site and actually closing the deals, however, is not as straight forward. Over the past 6 months I had more than 10 high profile companies sponsoring Daily Blog Tips, and through out this article I will share what I have learned along the way.

 

The Pros

• More money: The first advantage of selling your own ads is the fact that you will cut the middlemen out, increasing your revenue potential. Suppose you sell text link ads on your sidebar through a certain company, and the text links sell for $50 monthly. Since you are using the company network to sell the ads, they will eat 50% of the price, and you will end up earning only $25 monthly for each text link. If someone is willing to pay $50 for a text link on your site, though, it means that they are getting $50 of value out of it. Why, then, should you share that with someone else?
• Independence: Sure, large advertising networks have access to a wider pool of advertisers, and they have more credibility to close the deals. But if you have all the requirements in place (see the section below) and spend some time looking at the right places, I am sure that you will be able to sell your own ads just as efficiently as the larger networks.
• Flexibility: The third advantage of selling direct advertising is that you will have much more control over where and how the ads will be displayed (i.e., you can avoid intrusive advertising). Google Adsense is nice, but unless you blend it with the content – annoying some of the readers – you will get terribly low click-through rates.
• Credibility: Finally, having sponsors and direct advertisers on your blog might help your credibility. Even small and poorly crafted blogs can stick some Adsense units here and there. Having established companies that are willing to partnership with your site, on other hand, can signal that your content has quality and that the site is somewhat professional.

The Cons

• Time consuming: While selling your own ads has many advantages, it is no panacea. The first drawback of this monetization option is the time that it will consume. This time will be spent optimizing your website for the ads, finding potential advertisers, negotiating with them, and handling the administrative matters (e.g., making payments, tracking statistics, delivering reports and so on).
• Many requirements: Selling direct adverting is not as easy as making money from Google Adsense. As you can see from the section below, you will need to have a popular blog, a professional looking design, special software and the like.
• Unstable: Unless you close deals for very long periods, which is unlikely, you will find your self looking for new advertisers or optimizing your website to attract new ones every other month. The opposite is true for most advertising networks, where you just need to plug some code and they will do the rest of the work. (If your site or blog is just a hobby, therefore, direct advertising might not be the best option)

What You Need to Have in Place

• A popular website: Before landing direct advertising deals you will need to have a good amount of traffic on your site. There is no “magical” number here, but a good rule of thumb would be 1000 daily unique visitors. If you are below that mark you should focus on building traffic instead of looking for advertisers. Other factors like Google Pagerank, RSS subscribers and Alexa rank might also help. (Notice that small websites might also be able to sell direct advertising, but usually the time spent on that will not justify the results)
• A clear focus: You might have the most popular site on the Internet (well, not as extreme as that, but you get the point), but unless your site also has a very clear niche and a defined audience, advertisers will not find it very attractive. This means that you should avoid rambling about 100 different topics on the website. Advertisers want to deliver a message to specific people, and the more specific the better.
• A professional looking design: If you are planning to monetize your website through sponsors, you probably should invest some money into a professional looking design. Advertisers will be associating their product or service with your website, and not too many of them would be willing to get mixed with an ugly, MySpace looking site.
• Give visibility to the sponsors: This point is connected to the previous one. Not all templates and themes will be suitable for selling direct advertising. Preferably you want to have an idea of what kind of advertising you will sell (e.g., 468×60 banners, 125×125 banners, text links) and design your website according to those objectives. Advertisers want visibility, so reserve a good spot for them.
• Adserver software: In order to serve your ads, rotate banners and track statistics you will need to install an Adserver. If you are looking for a simple solution you should try WP-Ads. This WordPress plugin will serve ads for specific ad zones that you create. The only drawback is that it does not count clicks (only impressions). If you need a more sophisticated solution check OpenAds. You will need to spend some time learning how to use it, but it offers virtually all the features you will ever need.
• “Advertise Here” page: It is very important to have an “Advertise Here” page. On this page you want to give some details about the website, like audience, traffic and any other factor that might be of the interest of potential advertisers. Secondly, make sure that you have some link to that page on the navigation bar and if possible close to the zone where the ads will be displayed. You can see a perfect example of such layout on Copyblogger.com.
• Standard letter to approach advertisers: While some advertisers will contact you after reading your “Advertise Here” page, the rest of them will need to be directly approached by you. In that case, it is a good idea to create a standard letter to contact the advertisers. There is no “one size fits all” solution here, but you can follow some general guidelines:

  1. Introduce yourself and quickly explain what the email is about
  2. Explain why you decided to contact them and what they have to gain
  3. Give details about your site (traffic, subscribers, topic, audience)
  4. Give details about the advertising options (location on the site, max number of advertisers, monthly price)

  That is it, after that information the advertisers should be able to decide if they are interested or not. If they reply, then you will fix the details. Bear in mind that all the info I mentioned should be contained in 2 or 3 paragraphs. If you send an essay to potential advertisers they will just skip it altogether.

• Accepting payments: You might have everything in place, but if you are not able to cash payments – or more importantly, if advertisers are not able to pay easily – you will end up losing deals. PayPal is the best option here. Notice, however, that a personal account will not suffice. You will need at least a premier account to be able to accept credit cards.

Where to Find the Advertisers

Once you have your direct advertising program established, you will start to receive inquiries from people. On the beginning, however, you will need to hunt advertisers down. Do not get discouraged if get turned down initially, provided you have all the aforementioned requirements, sooner or later you will find someone willing to take a shot on your site.

• People linking to your site or articles: If a company is willing to link to your articles or to add your website under its “Links” or “Resources” section, it is also probably willing to discuss about advertising on your site. Keep track of those incoming links.
• People leaving comments/e-mails: The same principle applies to people leaving comments on your blog or sending you e-mails. If among them you see an employee or the owner of a company that could be interested on your website, bingo! Contact him or her and get the conversation going.
• AdWords advertisers: Through out your search for advertisers you will notice that most of the established companies are not aware of the benefits of online advertising. If a certain company is already spending money on Google AdWords, however, it is very likely that it would also be open to other forms of online advertising. Think about some keywords that are related to your topic and Google them. Check the sponsored links that will appear and contact them. (You can also check the advertisers that appear on the Adsense units of related websites)
• Other advertising networks: While Google AdWords is by far the largest advertising network on the Internet, there are many others that could be useful. Check the companies that are spending money on AdBrite, Text-Link-Ads, BlogAds, SponsoredReviews and so on.
• Banner advertisers on similar sites: Check out popular websites on your niche and see what companies are advertising there. Provided you offer them an interesting deal (i.e., a reasonable price for your size), I am pretty sure they will be interested.
• Create a “Potential Sponsors” bookmark folder: This technique produced outstanding results for me. I have a bookmark folder on my browser called “Potential Sponsors.” Every time I come across a company or website that could be interested in sponsoring my website, I bookmark it. Currently I have over 100 bookmarked sites on that folder, and I have not approached half of them yet.

How Much to Charge

• You need to provide value: It is all about value. A potential sponsor or advertiser will want to see some returns for the money he will be spending on your site, and this can be seen as visibility (impressions) and leads (clicks and possible sales). Make sure, therefore, that your advertising deals will deliver.
• The numbers: Remember that there are some pretty cheap advertising options out there (e.g., Google AdWords), and you will need to be competitive. Provided you reserved a good spot for the sponsors (sidebar or header, preferably) you could start charging a $0,5 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). If your blog is generating 100,000 monthly page views, therefore, a banner spot on your sidebar should cost around $50. Start low and build your way upwards. Popular blogs (e.g., TechCrunch) have a higher CPM, sometimes as high as $10, but you will need a huge credibility to arrive there.
• Cross-check: You can easily check if you are charging a suitable rate by using Adsense units on the places where you will sell direct advertising. Analyze how much you would gain with Adsense, and adjust your rates accordingly. Secondly, you can also check similar sites that are already selling direct ads.
• Be flexible regarding the terms: Flexibility is key. First of all make advertising agreements on a month-to-month basis. People don’t like to commit to something they are not completely sure about. If someone proposes you a longer deal, offer a discount in exchange.
• Offer test periods: Unless you have a very popular website, you will find potential advertisers reluctant to spend real money. If you are confident that the deal will create value for both parties, however, you can use that on your favor. Offer a free test period whenever needed. Some of the times the advertiser will turn you down after it, but other times they will confirm the deal. Either way you have nothing to lose.

Best Tag Lines for the Website

The Best Website Taglines Around the Internet

A tagline can make or break a website (well, maybe not, but it is cool to be dramatic). Below you will find a collection of the best taglines around the Internet. Some of them are funny, some are clever; but all of them deliver the message! Hopefully it will serve as inspiration.

1. The Straight Dope: Fighting Ignorance since 1973 (It’s taking longer than we thought).
2. Maxim Philippines: The best thing that ever happened to men … after women!
3. The Consumerist: Shoppers bite back.
4. Random Acts of Reality: Trying to kill as few people as possible…
5. Joshuaink: Same old shit, different day.
6. The Superficial: Because you’re ugly.
7. Smashing Magazine: We smash you with information that will make your life easier. Really.
8. The Best Page in the Universe: This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong.
9. Scaryduck: Not scary. Not a duck.
10. The Art of Rhysisms: Chronologically inept since 2060.
11. Needcoffee.com: We are the Internet equivalent of a triple espresso with whipped cream. Mmmm…whipped cream.
12. Ample Sanity: Life is short. Make fun of it.
13. Rathergood.com: The Lair of the Crab of Ineffable Wisdom – a load of stuff by Joel Veitch that will probably crush your will to live.
14. The Breakfast Blog: In search of the best eggs in town.
15. Dooce: Not even remotely funny.
16. Pink is the new blog: Everybody’s business is my business.
17. Shoemoney: Skills to pay the bills.
18. Oh No They Didnt’t!: The celebrities are disposable, the content is priceless.
19. YouTube: Broadcast Yourself.
20. Waiter Rant: Do you want Pommes Frite with that?
21. Newshounds: We watch FOX so you don’t have to.
22. Sabrina Faire: All the fun of a saucy wench, none of the overpriced beer.
23. Defective Yeti: A maze of twisty passages, all alike.
24. All About George: All about George Kelly… you know, if you go in for that sort of thing.
25. Go Fug Yourself: Fugly is the new pretty.
26. kottke.org: Home of fine hypertext products.
27. Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
28. Gawker: Daily Manhattan media news and gossip. Reporting live from the center of the universe.
29. Get Rich Slowly: Personal finance that makes cents.
30. hi5: Who’s in?
31. Fotolog: Share your world with the world.
32. Jezebel: Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women, Without Aribrushing.
33. Autoblog: We obssessibely cover the auto industry.
34. Boing Boing: A directory of wonderful things.
35. Perez Hilton: Celebrity Juice. Not from concentrate.
36. DumbLittleMan: So what do we do here? Well, it’s simple. 15 to 20 times per week we provide tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane.
37. Lifehacker: Don’t live to geek, geek to live!
38. Gizmodo: The gadget guide. So much in love with shiny new toys, it’s unnatural.
39. John Cow Dot Com: Make Moooney Online with John Cow Dot Com
40. WebWorkerDaily: Rebooting the workforce.
41. The Simple Dollar: Financial talk for the rest of us.
42. TrafficBunnies: Making your hits multiply like rabbits.
43. Mighty Girl: Famous among dozens.
44. The Sneeze: Half zine. Half blog. Half not good with fractions.
45. Buzz Marketing: Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Your favorite tagline is not here? Just post a comment and I will update the list.

Importance of Keyword Research for Blogging

The Value of Keyword Research for Blogging

One of the most high-return, valuable, and important activities in search marketing is keyword research. Getting high rankings for your keywords can essentially make or break your blog’s performance. Quality keyword research will help you determine which keywords your target market is using in their search queries. Determining which phrases and terms you should target during your SEO efforts will help increase your blog’s traffic. You’ll also get to know more about your target audience in general.

Keyword research does more than get more visitors to your blog. It’s essential for getting the right kind of visitors. Your research can help you predict demand shifts and respond to market condition changes. In time, you’ll learn how to use your keyword data to produce services, products and content that your target audience is currently seeking.

How to Judge Keyword Values

Do you have any idea just how much a particular keyword is worth to your blog? Let’s say that you own an online shoe store. Are more of your sales coming from visitors who are searching for “brown boots” or “blue shoes”? There are various keyword research resources to help you determine the most popular search terms. However, most of these tools don’t show, directly, just how valuable the traffic is that you’re receiving from those searches. In order to truly understand a keyword’s value, you need to have a good understanding of your own blog, make a few hypotheses, test them, and repeat the process again. Ask yourself the following three questions to help you understand how valuable a particular search term is to your own blog:

1. Is the keyword or search term relevant to the content niche of your blog?
2. When your visitors reach your site, will they find what they were searching for when they used the keywords?
3. Will an increase in traffic result in accomplishing your goals or financial rewards?

* If you answered yes to all three of the questions above, you’re ready to proceed.

Do Your Own Searches

One way to get valuable insight into the competitors you have for a particular keyword is to understand which sites are already ranking for it. This gives you a good idea of just how hard it may be for you to rank for that same search term. Simply enter the term into various search engines and see what comes up. Are there search ads running along the right-hand sidebar or top of the page? Did your organic search brings up multiple search ads?  This typically means that key phrase has really high value. Multiple search ads appearing directly above the organic search results is an indication that keyword or phrase is lucrative in terms of SEO rankings.

Keyword Research Resources

One commonly used starting point for keyword research is the Google AdWords Keyword tool. These are some of its benefits:

• Makes keyword suggestions
• Provides an estimation of search volume
• Predicts your costs for running paid campaigns for a particular term

There are many other sources available for SEO keyword research that can provide you with much more data, but many of them also cost money – the nice thing about the Google keyword tool is that it’s free.  Yes, some of the data is off sometimes, but I’ve also seen every other tool out there be off, so if you are just starting out then using the Google tool is great.  Remember, this tool is used to give you an estimate of potential traffic – don’t discount your ‘gut’ instincts if you find some keywords that you want to try to target just because a tool says there is not much traffic.

How to Use Youtube Annotations

10+ Ways To Use YouTube Annotations

YouTube annotations can really help get your viewers to take action or understand what you are saying. Use them to your advantage. Don’t go all willy-nilly and just garbage up your video with them. Think about your annotation call to actions!

Use one to point out text you forgot to say or that you said wrong

Maybe you have made a How-To video and said upper left and should have said upper right, instead of taking the video down, make a LARGE annotation pointing out the correct place.If you have mentioned a book, herb, website…and you know it will be hard for your viewers to spell or understand what you said, then write it out in an annotation so they can write it down themselves.Place this type of annotation at the point when you say the words

Make a menu to different times/topics/questions in the video

If you have a long video, you can place an “annotations menu bar” across the top and link to other parts of the video that may be the question or topic they want.To do this, you will make an annotation and link to the same video and set the start time to the place in the video that has that topic or question. You can make a few small annotations with an entire list that will run the same during the entire video. Or just skip to a part and from there an annotation to the next section and so on. This saves them from watching 20 minutes of stuff they don’t need and lessens the chance of them just getting frustrated waiting and end up leaving.

Lead to the next or previous video in a series

Maybe you have made short videos showing how to do something with several steps and you have broken the steps into separate videos. You can use a “Next” or “Previous” annotations in an upper corner so the viewers can go back a step or skip ahead.Next and Previous annotations can run the duration of the video.

Lead to a similar video of your own

If you have one or more videos that are very similar you can make a card at the end of your videos and give the viewer a chance to click directly to it.As an example – This picture is from our Animal Quiz videos. I use my editing program to make a card and after each quiz the viewer has the option to click on another quiz. I have about 70 quizzes, at this time, and due to the age of the viewers, I use the image of 3 animals and annotate to their quiz. Each video will have different animal choices.Depending on your editing tool, you may be able to insert a small video and the viewer can see it playing and be interested in clicking the annotation.There are so many ways to do this, just do what you can with the editing tools you do (or don’t) have. My Bonus Tip – If the video you are linking to is in a playlist – Open the Playlist, click on the video you will be annotating to, copy the very long link that includes the word “LIST“. Insert that link as a Video Annotation!Now when they click that annotation, not only will they see the single video, they will also have the entire playlist to the side. You can get MASSIVE views this way.

Lead them to anyone’s video that you feel is important or that you mention

If you are doing a video response or maybe you got the idea for your video from someone else. You can make an annotation leading the viewers to it.This will show in the “Referral” section of their YouTube analytics. If you send enough views, they may take note and return the favor. It also means that if your video is viewed away from YouTube, the viewer may still have the link handy. As most people just link in the description, but the description rarely travels with embeds. 

Lead them to a playlist

As with any annotation, you can use an image, text card or just say visit the Playlist. If they have enjoyed this video they may want to see all of them you have on the same topic.Hint – Keep clean playlist! One topic ONLY per playlist. Do NOT send them to a list of jumbled up things. They will not like that. If your playlist is very narrow, they may watch several of them.

Make subscribing easy

We all want YouTube subscribers, so make it easy for them. Say the words, show them text or a button and remind them to click!

Lead to your site with a link

(if you are a partner with an associated website). Since this automatically opens in a new window, you can place it at any time during the video. I would suggest that you get the viewer interested in visiting your site before you have the Associated Website link, otherwise it could be distracting and look spammy.Having a button or text at the end of the video saying to visit your site is always a fine choice.My Hint – I do not just link to the home page. I link to a particular product or article page that is directly related to the video.

Use the text to give a web address that you cannot link to

If you are not a YouTube Partner, you can still use a text annotation to show them your site name. You can write out the domain name in full or write something like “Visit Fuzzy Wuzzy Anipals“. They will need to search it and it is not as handy as a clickable link, but it is better than nothing. Give a coupon code

Give a coupon code

If you are using video to describe a product, an annotation is an awesome way to give out a coupon code to the viewer as a “bonus” for watching the video. I would personally, NOT mention the coupon in the video. Just use an annotation to tell them. This way you can take the coupon off or change it at any time. If you mention (with spoken words) it in the video…what happens in a year when you no longer offer that special.

How To Backup All Of Your YouTube Videos

This is going to be a super-short post (with video) showing you how to download and backup all of your YouTube videos to your computer. Tweet This I’m going to refer you to a free video download program BUT it’s important that you watch the video (it’s only 5 minutes long) BEFORE you download and install “Free YouTube Download“.

Why You Need To Backup Your Videos

If you upload all of your videos to YouTube yourself, you probably already have copies on your computer. With Google Plus’ Hangout On Air craze, the videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube for you and you will need to download them manually if you want backup copies. Last Sunday, Hot Blog Tips hit the 100 video mark and the vast majority of those are Google Hangouts On Air (HOA).

What Happened To Our YouTube Channel…

A couple of months ago our YouTube Channel was hacked and a video was added by someone. We deleted the video and I quickly instituted Google’s two-step verification login. This is a second layer of protection and no one is supposed to be able to log into our account without a temporary code that is generated every couple of minutes via a phone app on my android. The password alone is useless.

And It Happened Again

Apparently that two-step login process doesn’t stop all hackers because our YouTube channel was hacked yet again, Sunday night. We were lucky that only another video was added and nothing else was touched. What if they had deleted our videos? I had not backed up most of the Hangout videos.

 

Pros and Cons of Optimizing for Mobile

The Pros And Cons Of Optimizing For Mobile

Last week I run a poll asking people if they were used to browsing the web on a mobile device, and the result is shown below:

The results are inline with what I expected. The audience here is made of bloggers and tech-savvy people, so it’s natural that a high percentage of them use mobile devices to browse the web regularly.

What encouraged me to run that poll was an email from a reader complaining about the lack of a mobile version of my website. In a way I wanted more data before making a decision.

So will I create a mobile friendly version now that I have some numbers? Probably no, and that is because I still think the cons of doing so out-weight the pros. Consider that a mobile version of a blog is usually a screen which displays only the content of the posts, much like an RSS reader. The pros of using it are:

• The user can read your latest posts more easily.
• The readability is better.
• The pages might load faster.

And the cons:

• It becomes harder to find content other than the latest posts.
• The branding/visual aspect is lost.
• The user has less control regarding how to navigate the site.
• The user won’t see parts of your website that might be important (e.g., ads, subscription forms and so on)

If your website is relatively clean, though, and you consider that most smartphones are coming out with decent screen resolutions, you’ll see that the pros of using a mobile friendly version become less important.

For instance, many readers commented that this site displays fine on the iPhone 4, and that they don’t have problems reading the content or browsing around.

So in my opinion optimizing for the early mobile devices could have made a big difference (i.e., 2-3 years ago), but there weren’t many people using them anyway, so you could skip it. These days there are a lot more people accessing the Internet via mobile devices, but most of these devices feature good screen resolutions, allowing the users to browse websites normally. As a result, optimizing for mobile might not be that important anymore.

This is true for content based websites, at least. For service oriented ones (e.g., a social network or an online store) mobile optimization might be more critical.

20 SEO Terms You Should Know

If you have a website or blog, or if you work with anything related to the Internet, you’ll certainly need to know a bit about search engine optimization (SEO). A good way to get started is to familiarize yourself with the most common terms of the trade, and below you’ll find 20 of them. (For those who already know SEO, consider this post as a refresher!).
1. SEM: Stands for Search Engine Marketing, and as the name implies it involves marketing services or products via search engines. SEM is divided into two main pillars: SEO and PPC. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the practice of optimizing websites to make their pages appear in the organic search results. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it is the practice of purchasing clicks from search engines. The clicks come from sponsored listings in the search results.
2. Backlink: Also called inlink or simply link, it is an hyperlink on another website pointing back to your own website. Backlinks are important for SEO because they affect directly the PageRank of any web page, influencing its search rankings.
3. PageRank: PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. The basic idea behind the algorithm is the fact that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links (weighted to their value) to a page, therefore, the higher the probability that such page is important.
4. Linkbait: A linkbait is a piece of web content published on a website or blog with the goal of attracting as many backlinks as possible (in order to improve one’s search rankings). Usually it’s a written piece, but it can also be a video, a picture, a quiz or anything else. A classic example of linkbait are the “Top 10″ lists that tend to become popular on social bookmarking sites.
5. Link farm. A link farm is a group of websites where every website links to every other website, with the purpose of artificially increasing the PageRank of all the sites in the farm. This practice was effective in the early days of search engines, but today they are seeing as a spamming technique (and thus can get you penalized).
6. Anchor text: The anchor text of a backlink is the text that is clickable on the web page. Having keyword rich anchor texts help with SEO because Google will associate these keywords with the content of your website. If you have a weight loss blog, for instance, it would help your search rankings if some of your backlinks had “weight loss” as their anchor texts.
7. NoFollow: The nofollow is a link attribute used by website owners to signal to Google that they don’t endorse the website they are linking to. This can happen either when the link is created by the users themselves (e.g., blog comments), or when the link was paid for (e.g., sponsors and advertisers). When Google sees the nofollow attribute it will basically not count that link for the PageRank and search algorithms.
8. Link Sculpting: By using the nofollow attribute strategically webmasters were able to channel the flow of PageRank within their websites, thus increasing the search rankings of desired pages. This practice is no longer effective as Google recently change how it handles the nofollow attribute.
9. Title Tag: The title tag is literally the title of a web page, and it’s one of the most important factors inside Google’s search algorithm. Ideally your title tag should be unique and contain the main keywords of your page. You can see the title tag of any web page on top of the browser while navigating it.
10. Meta Tags: Like the title tag, meta tags are used to give search engines more information regarding the content of your pages. The meta tags are placed inside the HEAD section of your HTML code, and thus are not visible to human visitors.
11. Search Algorithm: Google’s search algorithm is used to find the most relevant web pages for any search query. The algorithm considers over 200 factors (according to Google itself), including the PageRank value, the title tag, the meta tags, the content of the website, the age of the domain and so on.
12. SERP: Stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s basically the page you’ll get when you search for a specific keyword on Google or on other search engines. The amount of search traffic your website will receive depends on the rankings it will have inside the SERPs.
13. Sandbox: Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries. Once Google verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the sandbox and into the main index.
14. Keyword Density: To find the keyword density of any particular page you just need to divide the number of times that keyword is used by the total number of words in the page. Keyword density used to be an important SEO factor, as the early algorithms placed a heavy emphasis on it. This is not the case anymore.
15. Keyword Stuffing: Since keyword density was an important factor on the early search algorithms, webmasters started to game the system by artificially inflating the keyword density inside their websites. This is called keyword stuffing. These days this practice won’t help you, and it can also get you penalized.
16. Cloaking. This technique involves making the same web page show different content to search engines and to human visitors. The purpose is to get the page ranked for specific keywords, and then use the incoming traffic to promote unrelated products or services. This practice is considering spamming and can get you penalized (if not banned) on most search engines.
17. Web Crawler: Also called search bot or spider, it’s a computer program that browses the web on behalf of search engines, trying to discover new links and new pages. This is the first step on the indexation process.
18. Duplicate Content: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. You should avoid having duplicate content on your website because it can get you penalized.
19. Canonical URL: Canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation. A canonical URL, therefore, is the standard URL for accessing a specific page within your website. For instance, the canonical version of your domain might be http://www.domain.com instead of http://domain.com.
20. Robots.txt: This is nothing more than a file, placed in the root of the domain, that is used to inform search bots about the structure of the website. For instance, via the robots.txt file it’s possible to block specific search robots and to restrict the access to specific folders of section inside the website.