Review: SEOBook's Search Engine Marketing Glossary

SEOBook, a well-known site for all things search engine optimization, has recently published a comprehensive glossary. Their SEM glossary breaks down several hundred terms often used by those in the Search Engine Marketing know. In today's review, I will be exploring this resource in more depth and figuring out whether it's as useful as it seems. Disclosure: SEOBook paid me (just in time for the holidays too) for this review.

SE.. What?

First off, you'll need to know/remember what SEO and SEM are all about. Search Engine Marketing is a niche yet lucrative online industry revolving around spreading the brand, name or voice of online establishments through the use of search engines. Businesses have quickly come to realize that the web is where it's at and more and more of them hire Search Engine Optimizers every year for this exact task.

However, there are not too many SEO professionals compared to say, web developers. Therefore, all the good SEO guys are always busy and very expensive. Some can charge several thousand dollars for a few hours of work or consulting. So what's the startup in a garage in Silicon Valley or the amateur blogger hoping to get their name out there supposed to do? Learn the mysterious art of SEO and SEM on their own.

What are the benefits of SEO?

There are tremendous benefits of search engine optimization work on the standard, unoptimized site. I had some SEO work done on this site in the summer and within a few weeks my traffic went from a daily average of 2,500 unique visitors to roughly 4,000 unique visitors per day. Those extra visitors are all from search engines. An optimized site can help your blog, portfolio or whatever your site hosts, rank higher on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and beyond.

If you run a small business or eCommerce site, the benefits of search engine optimization may determine whether or not your profits increase in the long-run.

Enter SEOBook's SEM Glossary

If you have ever tried to find a good central resource for SEO/SEM knowledge, you'll have experienced my pain. There is no W3C-caliber site for this genre of expertise. SEOBook is slowly trying to change that and their glossary is the first step.

SEOBook's glossary covers more than just the basics. It includes things like HTTP codes (200, 301, 404 etc.), influential people such as Danny Sullivan and all the advertising terms like PPC, CPC, CPM and CTR.

As an added bonus, the glossary is licensed under a Creative Commons license allowing you to modify and distribute it how you please. There's not much more I can say about a glossary, but here are some example terms:

Branded Keywords Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand. Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle, and are some of the highest value and highest converting keywords.

Some affiliate marketing programs prevent affiliates from bidding on the core brand related keywords, while others actively encourage it. Either way can work depending on your business model and marketing savvy, but it is important to ensure there is synergy between internal marketing and affiliate marketing programs.

Cybersquatting Registering domains related to other trademarks or brands in an attempt to cash in on the value created by said trademark or brand.

Hidden Text SEO technique used to show search engine spiders text that human visitors do not see.

While some sites may get away with it for a while, generally the risk to reward ratio is inadequate for most legitimate sites to consider using hidden text.

Aaron Wall created this glossary and runs the SEOBook blog. The glossary is extremely useful and has already earned a bookmark in my browser, and I only bookmark things I use - the rest get sent to my del.icio.us. I would like to see an offline version of the glossary as well. Perhaps a nicely styled PDF that gets updated every month or so. I wrote this on my flight to New York and was referencing the style-lacking glossary I printed to PDF. It might also be neat for Aaron to include some type of contact form or way to contact him so people can suggest additions to the glossary. For now, you can leave a comment on this post if you'd like to see a term added to the glossary.