We spend a lot of time on calls explaining to clients how to better optimize their site for search engines. The search marketing industry has more than it’s fair share of industry jargon, and that can get confusing. So here is a short list of the ten industry terms you should, but might not yet, be familiar with.

1. SERP’s – This stands for Search Engine Results Page’s. When we say “we’ll check the SERP’s”, or “the SERP’s are showing some interesting data”, we are just referring to the same search result pages you see.

2. Anchor Text – This is a term we use to describe how a site is linking to you. The anchor text is what the actual text of the link says. You ideally want the anchor text to match the search term you are trying to get ranked for.

3. Link Baiting – The term sounds a bit shaddy, but it’s just a term to describe the idea of writing content, or adding something to your website that will create a need or desire to link to your website. For example, writing a good, detailed “how-to” will often result in many people linking back to your site. This would be link baiting.

4. Sandbox – This is a term used to describe a problem with new sites getting indexed well into Google. If your site is new, and you are not seeing some basic search rankings, your site may be sandboxed.

5. Long Tail SEO – The term long tail SEO is a term to describe the fact that most sites see most of their traffic from a lot of different search terms. If you look at a graph of the most popular terms for your site, it is likely that you will notice that it develops a long tail of smaller search terms, and that makes up most of your search traffic.

6. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – LSI is the idea that search engines can connect words that are contextually connected. For example, Google can draw the inference from SEO to search engine optimization. Keeping this in mind when you are working on your SEO will help a lot.

7. Google Bombing – This term is used to describe the technique of achieving rankings by adding a bulk of links to a site with descriptive anchor text. A great example of Google Bombing is the SERP’s for “Miserable Failure” in Google.

8. Keyword Effective Index (KEI) – KEI is an industry standard for gauging which terms to shoot for in a SEO campaign. KEI takes into account factors such as how many results are there in the SERP’s, what is the page rank of the ranked sites, how many links do they have, and how much volume is there for the term. We also take into account the click price of the term in PPC.

9. Web Accessibility Guidelines (WAG) – Web accessibility may not seem directly related to search, but it really is. The idea of Web accessibility is to create your site in a way that is compatible with people surfing the Web with disabilities. These people may need larger font, or a special browser that reads the site to them. Therefore good alt text on images, and readable navigation is key to them. This matches well with the needs for search engines.

10. Black/Gray/White Hat – These terms are taken from the hacking community and describe the level of ethics used by a search marketers. For example, in a link building campaign a black hat may add links on link farms, or link spam comments on blogs. A gray hat marketer may get links by buying them through a network of text link ads, or create a email spam campaign to sites asking for reciprocal linking. A white firm SEO firm like USWeb will advise to put out press releases and try to get publishers to write relevant articles about your product or services. The black and gray hat methods can be effective, but in the long run they rarely maintain their rankings.

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