What you need to know in 2022 about SEO and Internet Marketing
Every day thousands of people decide to start learning about Internet marketing. Whether they want to start their own online business or have a successful offline business putting up their first website, it can be pretty overwhelming. Many people quickly find that the world of Internet marketing uses its language with terms, acronyms, and concepts that are entirely unknown to the average person. This can be intimidating and cause many people to give up quickly.
This introduction to Internet marketing is not going to make you rich. It won’t get your website to the top of the SERPS (you’ll learn what that means in just a minute!). What it will do is provide you with a basic introduction to the world of Internet marketing so you can begin making progress. Armed with the knowledge here, you will ask the right questions to become successful. While all of this information is available in many places on the Internet, it is nice to have it all compiled in one easy-to-reference place. So, let’s get started!
What is Internet marketing?
Internet marketing is a broad term used to describe various activities done on the Internet. They all have in common the goal of earning money online. This could include anything from running your blog to making money by putting up ads to owning a substantial online business like Amazon.com.
Many people have the unfortunate opinion that the ‘make money online industry is a big scam, but that is not true. In 2022 (the most recent year available), online sales reached 156 billion dollars, up almost 17% from the previous year. This number continues to multiply as more and more people access the Internet and become comfortable making purchases online. Of course, much of this money is on huge sites like Amazon or eBay, but thousands of small Internet marketers are making good money every day.
To get your piece of this enormous industry, you have to figure out what you want to do to start earning money. The first step is learning the most commonly used terms in Internet marketing. Keep in mind that this is not a get-rich-quick industry, but with hard work, it is possible to start earning a nice side income or even replace your full-time job while working right from your own home!
Definitions of Common Internet Marketing Terms
SERPs – The term “SERPs” stands for search engine results pages. When someone types in a search to Google or any search engines, the page of results are known as SERPs, every Internet marketer wants their web page to be at the top of the SERPs for as many searches as possible.
SEO – SEO stands for Search engine optimization and is perhaps the single most important term you’ll need to understand. Simply put, SEO is any action taken to help get your site to rank higher in the SERPs.
On-page SEO – A subset of all SEO, on-page SEO is any action taken on your actual site to help improve your search engine results. These include using the proper keywords on your page and formatting them correctly. This is a very complex and constantly evolving subject.
Off-page SEO – A subset of all SEO, off-page SEO is any action taken outside your actual site to improve your search engine results. This includes building links back to your site and promoting your site on social networks. There are hundreds of web pages, seminars, and books written on this single topic.
Organic traffic – The free traffic to your site comes naturally from search engines, directory listings, or is sent to you from other sites at no cost.
Paid Traffic – Paid traffic is any traffic to your site from any paid source. The most common type of paid traffic is through ad networks such as Google’s Adwords program.
Spider – A spider is an automated software program sent out by search engines to locate and index all pages on the Internet. Spiders follow links from one page to another and revisit sites regularly, looking for changes. Unlike real spiders, you want these little guys crawling on your site.
Keyword density – This term is used to describe the measurement of how many times a specific keyword or keyword phrase appears on a page with the total number of words.
Longtail keywords – A longtail keyword is a search phrase with two or more words.
Internal links – Links that send people from one page to another page on your site are considered internal links.
External links – Links are links on your site; when clicked, go to another external site outside your domain.
Anchor text – The clickable text of any hyperlink. Internet marketers use keywords that they want to rank well for in the SERPs as their anchor text whenever possible.
Hyperlinks – A hyperlink is simply a clickable link connecting people from one page to another on the Internet.
Alt image tags – These tags will be displayed to users if they cannot view images. Search engine spiders also see this text to be beneficial to SEO efforts.
HTML tags – Thousands of HTML tags alter a website’s look or feel. While most sites used to be written entirely in HTML by hand, it is now more common to have pre-made sites edited through easy-to-use tools.
Meta tags are words or phrases that appear in the HTML code for a page but are not visible to the person browsing the page. They are used to tell the search engines specific information about the page.
WordPress is the most popular content management system used on millions of web pages. It started as a blogging platform and has become an easy-to-use way to make new websites.
There are thousands of other terms used regularly in Internet marketing, but this list will help you get your feet wet without becoming overwhelmed. You will pick up more and more information as you continue down your Internet marketing journey. Please remember that you’re not in this alone. There are thousands of other Internet marketers online today, and many of them would be very happy to answer any questions you have, so don’t be afraid to ask!