Understanding Internet Marketing Terms: A Quick Guide

Developing your complete internet marketing and advertising strategy can be confusing at first, especially when you're just getting started in banner advertising and understanding the value of cost per clicks, keywords and search engines, and what a page view really means.

If you're planning on selling advertising for your website, it's even more important to understand today's terminology and basic concepts so you can present something of value to clients and prospective advertisers. Making a media kit with these key points in mind will help you reach into the marketplace with ease; here's a quick guide on the basic internet marketing terms for your small business or online venture:

Page view: the measuring system for assessing how many times a particular page has been visited. This is helpful when you're creating different campaigns on a specific page, or simply uploading an article or blog posting on a topic. Page views give you a chance to see which topic is generating the most interest-and which ones aren't.

Search engine marketing (SEM): This is the process of marketing yourself through a variety of search engines and portals, using different tactics to alert search engines that your website is real, as well as using specific keywords to create a target marketing campaign.

Conversion rates: an important statistic to consider throughout your marketing campaigns, giving you a sense of how much it costs to acquire a customer, and at what rate customers are clicking through the site and actually purchasing something. This will have more value for your business when you're trying to sell specific ad spaces.

Keywords: the specific word or phrase that people search for on the search engine. Keywords are found throughout the website's main pages and article banks to increase search engine rankings.

Cost per thousand impressions (CPM): this is the calculated cost of ad space, banners, or link ads that an advertiser pays for. They pay for 1,000 ad impressions of that space at a time.

Cost per click (CPC): this is the calculated cost of ad space where advertisers ‘pre-pay' for clicks. In this case, the advertiser is paying the site each time a visitor clicks on the ad, instead of paying to place the ad a number of times.

Clickthrough rate: the statistic generated after an ad campaign, that outlines how many people clicked on a particular banner ad, link placement, or other advertising in order to get to an offer or advertiser's website. Once you have this calculated for each spot on your website, it becomes much easier to construct a powerful media kit with the statistics.

Meta tags: these are often used by website developers in order to improve search engine optimization on your site. Meta tags are hidden HTML code and words that are used throughout the site to alert the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): this is the process of making your website more easily identifiable by search engines, and various tactics can be used to improve SEO throughout the site. Examples of this include displaying fresh, keyword-dense articles on a regular basis; making sure images are tagged appropriately with keywords; and using proper formatting in blog entries or articles that make use of header tags.

Understanding basic internet marketing terms is essential for creating a powerful media kit and presenting your business at its full advertising potential. If you're looking for ways to attract advertisers on a regular basis, you'll need to understand the fundamental principles of SEO content, pricing strategies for your ad space, and how to report conversion rates and other statistics.