A dictionary of search engine marketing terms

When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market, but as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to try to keep their ads relevant.

Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.

A few general link building tips:

• build conceptually unique linkworthy high quality content
• create viral marketing ideas that want to spread and make people talk about you
• mix your anchor text
• get deep links
• try to build at least a few quality links before actively obtaining any low quality links
• register your site in relevant high quality directories such as DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com
• when possible try to focus your efforts mainly on getting high quality editorial links
• create link bait
• try to get bloggers to mention you on their blogs
• It takes a while to catch up with the competition, but if you work at it long enough and hard enough eventually you can enjoy a self-reinforcing market position

When links occur naturally they generally develop over time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral articles receive many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of quality as well, such as:

• increased usage data
• increase in brand related search queries
• traffic from the link sources to the site being linked at
• many of the new links coming from new pages on trusted domains

Log files do not typically show as much data as analytics programs would, and if they do, it is generally not in a format that is as useful beyond seeing the top few stats.

Generally link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons:

• many authority sites were at one point hub sites that freely linked out to other relevant resources
• if you are unwilling to link out to other sites people are going to be less likely to link to your site
• outbound links to relevant resources may improve your credibility and boost your overall relevancy scores

"Of course, folks never know when we're going to adjust our scoring. It's pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in mind." - Quote from Google's Matt Cutts

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are:

• a website going offline
• linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
• moving a page's location
• changing a domain's content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site's links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

How does the long tail applies to keywords? Long Tail keywords are more precise and specific, thus have a higher value. As of writing this definition in the middle of October 2006 my leading keywords for this month are as follows:

Notice how the nearly 10,000 unlisted terms account for roughly 10 times as much traffic as I got from my core brand related term (and this site only has a couple thousand pages and has a rather strong brand).