Dear {FIRST_NAME|Valued Customer},

NetSearch Direct Newsletter fans, this is a great edition for you! We’ve broken down some of the most commonly used search engine marketing jargon for you, and given you some insight into why it’s important that you know that particular term. Sure, we know that you can probably Google your way through a SEM report, but we want you to understand “why” and more importantly figured you’d be saying…”and the point is???” You know we’re not much on the “because we said so”, and our Industry Trends article will wrap it all up nicely for you. Brace yourself, internet marketer, 2010 is…

The Year of the Data!

Trust us, knowing the basics and translating the jargon will be fundamental to weeding through what search engine marketing has in store for you this year.

Cold weather blues? Word on the street is that a new seminar will be headed your way just in time for the great thaw. Sign up now for our all-about-you Local Business Marketing Seminar on March 18th at 3:30pm. Online marketing advice, strategies, and tools that you can put into place right away for immediate results that don’t come with corporate-sized price tags; in fact, some are free. If you’ve got a business in the local area, you can’t afford to miss this. And, because it’s all about the data, we’re offering businesses a one-on-one 30 minute consultation post-seminar where you can rap with a specialist about marketing your specific business. Consultations are confidential, so bring it all to the table. Call Kate at 804-228-4400 to reserve your space today. Stay warm, NetSearch fans!

By the way, it’s tax time. Yeah, we’re not exactly thrilled either, but we know a tax preparation company that is campaigning to bring some smiles to your face during crunch time. Check out our Company Spotlight and learn how eSmartTax is entertaining millions – and saving customer’s money – by using social media marketing.

PPC Decoded:
Industry Jargon for Humans

Ever get a report from your PPC manager laden with terms that you’re sure were created in the 21st century? Maybe you’ve started managing your PPC account and are faced with data and statistics more confusing than a Tom Hanks movie. This month, NetSearch Direct thought that we’d take a step back from trends and optimization techniques and bring things back into focus – we’re decoding the top ten PPC jargon words in hopes of shedding some light on your campaigns.

1. Keyword
Okay, you probably know by now that this is the term a user types into a search engine. But truly think about keywords as what they do: they fuel search engine results. As a business owner, you need to think about which words fuel your business; that is, the words that your customers are using to find your products and services.

2. Click
The actual number of times that a user clicked on your ad. Seems simple enough, but clicks are the foundation for a number of more complex PPC terms and pieces of data; we just want to make sure we’re all on the same page here.

Keeping with our theme, we’re moving on to search engine optimization key terms – and de-mystifying the real meaning behind the jargon. Thought to be less analytical than pay-per-click advertising, SEO is actually very quantifiable; but the trick is to know what the data means and how to translate that data into useful information for your business. If you’re jumping into SEO for the first time, or have been a regular player, we’re hoping that our top ten SEO terms below will clear up any confusion behind the terms.

1. Algorithm
Appropriately enough, we’ll start with the foundation of search engine optimization. Algorithms are the formulas that search engines use to rank websites. What is the algorithm? Well, that remains proprietary to each search engine, but SEO Specialists know the contributing factors that go into algorithms, and, juggling the factors just right, can lead websites to top ranking success.

2. HTML
This stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML takes plain text and adds special formats that give the text web functionality. HTML is considered to be the foundation of web development.

3. Spider
Aka “Bot” aka “crawler”, these can be a verb or noun. A spider is a robot that is used by search engines in order to find, and index, website pages for its directory or index. A site with indexed pages has been “spidered”, or “crawled”.

National Statistics

The Year of Data Finally Explained

What is this whole “year of data” that we keep talking about? It’s based off of research and studies that are circulating among industry experts – the same experts who were talking about social media marketing blowing up and becoming mainstream last year. The basic thought principles behind the movement lie in the fact that today there exists a variety of avenues from which to leverage search engine marketing. Each platform will have its own data points, targeted audiences, and unique pull on advertising your brand; the culmination of all the data is going to be the deciding factor for companies who have to make the careful, calculated decision as to where they will be funneling advertising dollars. If you’re a NetSearch Direct customer, you know we adopted this approach a long time ago. We use data points to show our customers all the opportunities and successes their SEM campaigns have accumulated over the past month, quarter, and year. Knowing ROI and exact costs has always been a passion of ours.

With the dawning of new technology and advertising platforms that are little out of their infancy stage, data points will come streaming in by the dozens. The best of the SEM advertising best will know which data points are worth your time; the worst will throw all of them at you. The year of data will prove a great many things in search engine marketing: it will separate the experienced professionals from the ones who wing it, and it will demonstrate your agency or manager’s true value by the way that they interpret – and most importantly – use the data.