As a newbie or freshmen in the Internet marketing world it can often become confusing when you hear people using strange acronyms. I know when I joined my first forum and started my first thread people on the forum began calling me the OP. OP? Huh! Who’s that? Well, I soon learnt that OP meant “opening post” or “original poster”.

In this article I am going to define all the commonly used acronyms in the IM world so as to assist you to not feel intimidated as a newbie when you hear these terms. By the way IM stands for internet marketing, but I bet you knew that one?

AM: Affiliate manager – the individual who manages and communicates with affiliates who are associated with his/her affiliate network/program.

CB: Clickbank – Affiliate Network that specializes in digital products.

CJ: Commission Junction – Affiliate network that has a host of tangible/physical products.

CPA: Cost per Action – amount paid by a program for specific action like filling out a form or entering an email address.

CPM: Cost per Thousand Impressions – the cost attributed to a 1000 impressions of an ad on a website or search engine (M is the Roman numeral for 1000).

CPC: Cost per Click – the average cost for each click on a banner or link.

CPS: Cost per Sale – amount paid to an affiliate for each sale generated.

CR: Conversion Ratio – the ratio of visitors that performed a certain action like subscribing to an email list.

CTR: Click Through Rate – the percentage of people who viewed an ad or sales letter and clicked on a relevant link.

EPC: earnings per click – (income earned from 100 clicks/100 = EPC).

IM: Instant Messaging/ Internet Marketing.

LSI: Latent Semantic Indexing – The sophisticated code used by search engines to distinguish the difference between similar terms that have different meanings.

PPA: Pay per Action – Payment made for a specific action like registering for a free trial.

PPC: Pay per Click – form advertising where an advertiser is charged each time someone clicks on the ad or link associated with the ad.

PPA: Pay per Performance – payment that is released only when meeting certain specific performance objectives.

PR: Page Rank – a number or score assigned by Google to a webpage. Higher page rank assumes authority and trust. PR could also mean press release or public relations.

PV: Page View – each time a webpage is downloaded to your monitor and viewed.

ROI: Return on Investment – Money gained or lost on an initial investment.

SE: Search Engine – Google, Yahoo and Bing are search engines.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing – involves marketing your website via PPC or organic results.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization – involves an on-page and off-page techniques that helps increase website ranking.

SERPs: Search Engine Results Page – the results generated when you search for a specific keyword.

SMM: Social Media Marketing – involves marketing your offering via platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

SMO: Social Media Optimization – optimizing advertising campaigns on social platforms.

TLD: Top Level Domain – domains like .com, .net, and .org are top level domains.

UV: Unique Visitors – a visor who visits your site for the first time.

WWW: no not the world wrestling federation but rather the “world wide web”.

The above forms a list of the acronyms that are most popular; there are certainly others in the programming sphere but a list of that size will have to be inserted into an entire dictionary.  Can you think of any other acronyms that I might have not listed here?

Author Information

Neil Jones specializes in launching ecommerce sites and is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe, this company is on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers like the Datalogic Memor. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.

Most SEOs realise that by and large the distribution of power on the web is dictated by links. In very crude terms, the more links you have and the more powerful the sites are that link to you, the more credibility you will have in the search engines’ eyes, and the better your chances of ranking are – that’s pretty basic SEO.

What is not so simple however is how the age of a link affects the power it yields, and whether you need to keep building links to a site in order to maintain power and rankings? Well, here are a few points to consider:

Domain Age

As with most things in the world of SEO, there is divided opinion on whether the age of a domain has an influence on how much authority it is given by search engines. I think this is a really good post on the subject and without getting into this difficult argument too much, my experience tells me that domain age does matter. If you subscribe to the idea that domain age is an algorithm factor, then if you think about it, link age must be as well. If a domain increases in power over time, then by definition so do the links that are contained on that domain. So I think it is reasonable to suggest that old links pointing to your site increase in power rather than decrease.

Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)

We know that with the arrival of social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which allow users to search for up to the minute information among their peers, search engines have been pushing to provide more ‘real-time’  and ‘fresh’ results in their SERPS. This spawned the term “Query Deserves Freshness” which basically means that in Google’s ranking algorithm, the ‘freshness’ of a result is taken into consideration (for certain search terms).

As fresh content tends to generate fresh links, there is a clear argument here that you cannot necessarily rely on old links to provide rankings, no matter how widespread or powerful they are.

Using simple logic, if people are not currently linking to content, it’s unlikely that it’s very popular at that time, and probably not what they want to see in search results.  I often see on my surf clothing site for example that the newest pages with the freshest links often outrank my older pages, despite them having a much larger back link profile.

Competition

Lastly, and probably most importantly, competition often forces us to continue our link building activities indefinitely. There is a great expression about link building that states all you need to do to beat your competition in the SERPS is to “match and exceed”. If you can investigate the back link profile of your competition, gain the links they have for your site as well, and then exceed what they have, chances are you will outrank them.  This logic is what drives link build efforts forward and means that you must continue to garner links to your site to prevent being overtaken by the competition.
So in conclusion, old links may get more powerful over time, but if you don’t continue your link building campaigns, you’re likely to get left behind.

Author Information

Duncan Heath is an SEO engineer and Internet marketing expert with over 5 years experience. He runs his own extreme sports site that compares everything from surfboards to flip flops. You can follow his business on Twitter.

I recently had an idea about using popular YouTube videos to help inform your domain name choices, and thought I would share it here.

Many people set up blogs not to sell anything in particular, but instead to build powerful sites over time that they can sell advertising on, sell guest posts from or dare I say it…sell links from. When setting up these sorts of sites, not a lot of attention is given to domain names. Most people go for something that sounds “cool” or is otherwise a generic phase such as “everythingandalways.com”. However if you thought carefully about domain choice, you could kick off your site’s traffic and link building efforts with much greater ease.

Popular YouTube

The first thing to do is search on YouTube for very popular (or better yet famous) videos. You can do this by sorting all the videos by “most viewed” and setting the time scale to “all time”. Here are some examples: evolution of dance, tootin bathtub baby cousins, the gummy bear song.

Next, you should check out the competition for the terms in the SERPS and also the suggested search volumes in Google Adwords Tool (yes we all know it’s flawed but it’s a good indicator). You’ll notice that the official site for Judson Laipply appears top of the SERPS (under the video results) when you search for “Evolution of Dance”. It’s also worth noting that this site is a PR5 site and has backlinks from Wikipedia, PCWorld and Wired.com.

Popular Terms

With this in mind it might not be worth going after the “evolution of dance” term, but it does show just how popular a site like this can become. If you hunt around the terms related to the other videos above however, you’ll notice there is very little competition in the SERPS, and certainly no optimised URLs. Just doing a quick check, I can see that domains such as tootinbathtubbabies.com and gummy-bear-song.com are available to buy (at time of writing).

These domains represent brilliant opportunities as there will not only be a great deal of search surrounding the terms, but very little competition standing in your way. With a little onsite optimisation and some targeted link building you should be able to move to the top of the SERPS without too much trouble and may even be considered a brand after a while due to a specific domain name, specific link building using domain name terms, and high search volume surrounding “your brand term”.

Careful Choice

I wouldn’t use this technique to determine the name for my new clothing retail site, but for a general blog I would much prefer to have a domain name that already had half a million searchers per month relating to it, than something like everythingandalways.com, which I would suggest gets none.

Author Information

Duncan is an SEO and marketing professional promoting a villas in France enterprise. He’s always looking for new ways to get the most out of the SERPS.

Newsworthy? Not hardly.

Luckily, no lasting harm was realized—I shook off what you wrote and soon moved on to some real news, managing to use certain well written information as a jumping-off point for a new article.

Yet, the taste of your “bad form” release has to be addressed, so please allow me to share the eight things I found in your piece that is at the center of our collective angst:

1. Terrible Title – 80 characters maximum is a nice rule of thumb for a good title, but you nearly doubled that limit. I couldn’t tell if you were making an announcement or crying out for help.

2. Weak Intro – You lost me after the first paragraph, let alone the first sentence. Neither had anything to do with the title which meant I had to work to figure out what your news angle was.  That angle was nowhere to be found so you failed.

3. Punishing Paragraphs – Your second and third paragraphs were much too long and could easily have been split up into several smaller paragraphs. Better yet, several sentences could have been struck out in entirety.

4. Excessive Quotes – You quoted the president of the company, vice-president of sales and the regional director, with each person saying basically the same thing. I almost expected your bookkeeper to chime in with her comments too.

5. Jarring Jargon – I realize that you are excited about your new product, but that enthusiasm needs to be tempered by reality and sensibility. I hardly know what to make of “concept of functionalities” or “holistic, groupwide simulation.” Get real and lose the Orwellian prose.

6. Pull Quotes – Your one opportunity to tell us something useful died in your pull quote. I’m glad your family rescues abandoned animals, but that tidbit has nothing to do with the news at hand. Someone goofed.

7. Stuffed Keywords – I hardly think that “redundant cycle” is a keyword phrase worth chasing after in the SERPs. Apparently, you do as I found the term scattered in five places throughout your piece. Yes, I am still annoyed!

8. Banished Boilerplate – So, you think that the press release boilerplate should be played around with, do you? Trust me, no one is interested in learning about every single unrelated product your company offers. Stick with the top performers and please keep it consistent from release to release.

Some 950 words later, I managed to sift through your release and determined that no “newsworthy” component could be found. That in itself is sufficient reason why you could have saved yourself and everyone else a whole lot of trouble.

See Also — Are Press Releases Still As Important As Ever?

This is what I think of keyword stuffed material!

A high placement in the SERPs can certainly offer many advantages for you including more customers who find your site as well as more click throughs for your ads. Up until a few years ago it wasn’t that difficult to achieve higher SERPs but the web has expanded greatly since then and a lot of people have decided to make a “killing” by doing the same.

But the search engines, particularly Google, have adjusted their algorithms accordingly and are much less likely to let a gamed article get through. Your work may still get indexed, but it may not appear any higher than page 19 for “get white teeth” or whatever phrase or words you are using.

There are some dangers whenever you resort to keyword stuffing including:

Your reputation becomes tarnished. Unless you’re happy with being labeled a spammer, you’ll have a hard time separating yourself from that title. In writing, you quickly become identified with the company you keep…or push!

Your audience dies of boredom. Keyword stuffing is always apparent and does little to edify the reader. You may gain the SERPs, but lose your readership.

So, how can you still attract the crowds without resorting to tried and discarded methods? By working more intelligently and deciding that your readers do not deserve to be insulted.

What you can work on are certain writing fundamentals including:

Develop magnetic headlines. I don’t mean headlines that simply exaggerate, but those written to compel people to learn more. Give people something to think about, raise their curiosity and put it in their minds to explore further. Besides, your keywords can be incorporated in your title.

Use similar words. If your content is an overt sales pitch, I can’t help you tone it down. But, if your article is instructive, consider using the words you want to include by naturally spreading them throughout your article. Importantly, use Google’s AdWords tool to help you find what you want. In the “get white teeth” phrase that tool shows several alternative phrases to consider: whiten teeth and get teeth white are important search terms.

You can take your work one step further by citing experts in your field and including their personal blurbs in your article. No, I don’t mean cutting and pasting what you find online, rather to contact these people for an interview. If time is of the essence, then just pitch one question their way and offer to include their answer in your article, citing them and linking to their site.

You’ll gain authority, visibility and a tremendous amount of respect if you build your content carefully. No, you may not get “instant results” but there is a good chance that what you write will get some legs and be cited elsewhere or become an authority piece. Yes, that means abandoning some of the old tactics you may have used but in the long run you’ll have something to be proud of.

See Also — Commenting? You Can Do Better Than That!

But, WP isn’t without its share of problems, most notably its vulnerability to being exploited. Many of the updates accomplished over the past few years were rushed into place when a security issue was suddenly uncovered. A quick patch and your WP was updated; your blog safe as long as you took security problems seriously and uploaded the changes.

Google SERPs

Recently, I uncovered a problem with one of my blogs that would not have been discovered had I not stumbled upon it in the first place. It seems that some of the descriptions in Google’s SERPs had been changed from article snippets to describe porn terms.

If you are not sure what I mean, do a site search (site:yoursite.com) to see the two-three line description of what your articles are about. That description should match the article, but in the case of this website some of the filthiest terminology has replaced what should be there. Yes, you have to add a dirty word to find out if your SERPs have been hacked, but include the word porn and you’ll know for sure (site:yoursite.com porn).

Frantic, I began to search the internet for answers but found very little support. Google’s site, as usual, wasn’t much help as they explained that such descriptions are generated from the website. Which got me thinking: could there be a bit of malicious code embedded in that blog? Might that code be messing with the SERPs?

AntiVirus Plug-in

Cutting to the chase, I turned to the AntiVirus For WordPress plug-in developed by Sergej Müller for help, thinking that a rogue comment got through. Turns out that my comment files were fine, but the plug-in turned up a problem with coding in the sidebar. Specifically, “AntiVirus” scans through your WordPress theme to detect problems and it was the sidebar.php file that was shown to be infected.

Isolating the problem, I discovered that a script used to rotate ads was infected. This script was built by a web designer so we removed it (from my client’s blog) and ran the virus check again—all clean. My client will work with his designer to make sure that the replacement code passes muster.

The SERPs still reflect the other junk, but I’m sure within a few days the site the problem will pass when Google Bot crawls the site. Thankfully, most visitors wouldn’t see the problem in the first place and, if they should click on the description, they’d still be able to see the blog’s pages as normal.

Whacking Mischief

Still, who wants to have their site associated with porn? Plus, you have to wonder if such mischief would eventually cause your pages to sandboxed by the search engines. Ouch.

Although I’m not directly involved with this site, I reviewed his pages and then assured him that the drop in traffic was probably seasonally related. After all, we’re in the middle of the summer months and when your site is seasonally themed, then there are times in the year when an even steeper drop will be noticed.

When Your Blog Loses Traffic

My client’s concern brought up an issue that many bloggers contend with too – a sharp drop to their blog’s traffic. Blogging can be immensely frustrating especially if you pour your heart and soul into it and the returns are just not there. After all of that work you notice that your Alexa number continues to rise, your PageRank sinks and your traffic numbers plummet. But on closer inspection and after an honest assessment of your site, you may discover a number of reasons why traffic is down. Let’s take a look at five of the more notable ones here:

Seasonal Traffic – If you have a Christmas season site, you’re probably going through one of the biggest drops since December 26th. Very few people are thinking about Christmas shopping, but I would venture to say that once Labor Day has passed your traffic will begin to tick upward, increasing noticeably in October and surging by early November. For everyone else (in the northern hemisphere), the months of June, July and August are generally slower as even web addicts like to take a break, head to the beach, visit their families, etc. They haven’t logged off completely, but they’re making good use of their warm weather time. Surf’s up!

Blogging Frequency – Have you been blogging less frequently lately? Check back to when you first launched your blog and compare how often you blogged then with how often you blog now. Over time, you may have gradually slipped to where you’re posting less frequently. Perhaps when you got started you wrote 15-20 articles per month but have since slipped to around 12. Fresh articles bring in the traffic, so consider ramping up your production to match or even exceed previous levels. Don’t let your quality slip!

Article Appeal – Maybe your subject matter simply isn’t of interest to your readers. I always tell bloggers to write about their passion as their enthusiasm will shine forth. Enthusiasm is contagious and people are drawn to blogs where the blogger knows his stuff, is excited about the topic and offers a unique and helpful perspective to his readers. If you’ve gotten in the habit of producing boring articles, then your uninspired audience will flee. Time to ratchet up your blog’s appeal!

Check Analytics – I use Google Analytics to review my traffic on a regular basis. Analytics and similar free or low cost tools give me clues on where people are coming from, what search terms brought them to my blog, which articles were most read and a host of other nifty features. You don’t have to be a statistical geek, but it is certainly helpful if you have a general understanding of these types of programs. You’ll also want to make sure that your sitemap is up to date, that Google webmaster tools is indexing all of your pages and you’ll want to check the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to see how high your pages are appearing for certain traffic generating keywords. Make adjustments as needed and your traffic numbers should increase.

Promote Wisely – I’ve noticed that some bloggers aren’t very active in promoting their articles. I arrived on the blogging scene late, launching the forerunner to this blog in December 2005. For the first full year, my site wasn’t set up to encourage commenting (people had to register which means few left comments) and my articles were stilted, not conversational in nature. By Spring 2007, my traffic numbers began to increase sharply as I understood that making my blog user friendly would be a big help. I also joined StumbleUpon, which soon began to bring more traffic to my site and carefully chose several other social media sites where I began to establish a presence and a following (Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, to name just a few). Needless to say, when I stoke the social media flame these days, my traffic numbers increase; if I neglect adding fuel to that fire, then my traffic gradually slides.

Thoughts For Your Day

Technorati tracks blogs and regularly issues a “State of the Blogosphere” report which offers excellent insight into the world of blogs. This report gives a fascinating and comprehensive look at blogging and what all of this means to you. The top blogs out there have been around for three years or longer but as you might guess, the vast number of bloggers eventually give up.

If you plan on being around for the long haul, then develop a strategy to increase your visibility in order to bring in more traffic. Quite a few of my blogging friends are committed to blogging until their fingers fall off, creating interesting and engaging posts on a regular basis. These people know where their blogs have been and they know where they’re going, setting themselves up for long term success.

Oh, what about my client who was worried about his traffic? He decided that a marketing campaign wouldn’t be worthwhile and is the process of making some changes to his web pages. The coming weeks should reveal whether these changes bring in more traffic, but if not I may have another gig to take on.

See Also — Is Your Work To Marketing Ratio 2-1?

Yes, it appears that Google is hitting its stride with the all-important, but not that important Google PageRank update, by making changes on a quarterly basis. I say important because for some people it is the chief way that they measure their site’s worth, but I also say not important because there are many different factors and tools which tell how well a site is performing.

My PageRank Report Card

For the record, Matt’s Musings went from PR2 to PR3, WordJourney from PR3 to PR2, AutoTrends held steady at PR3 while The Article Writer is back up to PR4. FYI, The Article Writer made its debut at PR6 in June 2005 before gradually falling to PR5 before dropping to PR3.

Several tiny, niche sites (and even placeholder pages) I manage acquired their first ranking, PR1 to be exact, while my client’s two blogs at SayEducate.com and SayCampusLife.com managed to hold onto their previous PR4 position.

Other Ways To Measure Success

Granted, any drop in PageRank can be frustrating especially if you’ve been link building and using other methods to promote your site. However, there are other ways to measure the value of your website including:

Alexa Rank — Once widely panned by the SEO community, Alexa has gained some respect if only for their frequent updates which occur several times each month. The lower your Alexa number the higher your score.  However, it can easily be gamed through sites like Entrecard which encourage others to visit your site to inflate traffic numbers.

Google Analytics — If you run Google Analytics, you can gain an excellent understanding of your site’s traffic trends. While you won’t get a “rank” for how well your site performs, you will be able to gauge traffic numbers including page views, sources, and how well your AdWords campaigns perform.

Compete — Like Google Analytics, you can receive site traffic history and measure how your site compares against your chief competitors with Compete. Even in the basic (free) format, you can obtain some decent information about your site as well as your competition.

Semrush — Forget PageRank as I want to see how my sites perform with specific keywords. Recently, I discovered that the sharply increasing traffic to my The Auto Writer blog was bringing a lot of good attention my way. Turns out that I secured the #1 keyword phrase for a new vehicle about to be introduced, sending 200+ extra visitors to my site each day. Semrush has a freebie tool which can help you identify some of the results for free. Pay a monthly fee and you can get a hold of all of that information.

SERPs — You can check any search engine’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) manually to see how your site is doing. Honestly, I only check Google these days because of their dominance in the world of search. However, I also use Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools to analyze all of my data.

Miscellany — Of course, I use Twitter to help build contacts online and have been particularly taken by Twitter Search which is an excellent way to find out who has been talking about your favorite topic recently.  I also like to use a good backlink checker to find out who is linking to me, I let Google notify me when certain keywords or phrases I’m following get mentioned. Additionally, I like to peak at domain tools when I want to obtain information about a client, a competitor or when I’m considering purchasing a domain or website.

So, as you can see PageRank doesn’t carry quite the weight that it some think that it should, given the many different measurements to quantify your site’s success. True, I would love to have a higher ranking from Google across my network of sites, but it is the other factors that weigh heavily and seem to bring fresh business my way.

What does this mean? Well, on surface you won’t see many changes as I’m not going to be adding scads of articles to this site in a bid to drive in traffic or to fetch new customers. I’m already managing ten other blogs and working very hard to help them rank high in the SERPs, pull in traffic, and convert customers. I’m a white hat kind of SEO guy, but if there are some gray areas to exploit, I might explore those as well.

Link baiting is, of course, the main way I help bring links in and this is only done through writing excellent content. To that end, I’ve been overhauling a few sites, taking a couple of others up one level, and using photographs and better layouts to help touch up some other pages. I’m not going to reveal all of my secrets, but I can tell you that as I track some of the changes I’ve made, the search engines love them.

So, join with me and link to this blog and if you are a customer needing some SEO assistance, then please consider me for your project. I can best be reached at matt AT thearticlewriter. com — to your success!

Update: Before I forget, anyone who leaves a comment to this thread with a link to a page they want stumbled, I’ll be stumbling that page for them to mark this blog’s transition. This offer expires at 5 p.m. ET, on March 7, 2008.

A. That “line” is called a pipe bar. You can find it on your keyboard as the upper key [shift + that key] located just above your ENTER key. The lower key is for the back slash bar.

I use the pipe bar as a separator and because it looks, in my opinion, much nicer than using a greater than symbol (>) or a semi-colon (;) to separate words.

By the way, using the pipe bar doesn’t mess up your SERPs. Search engines simply treat a pipe bar for what it is — a separator.