SEO in Pittsburgh or anywhere else in the world can be a confusing realm of unfamiliar acronyms and rapidly changing industry jargon. When it comes to search engine optimization and search engine marketing, the industry is still so new and evolving so quickly that it can be difficult to learn ñ and keep up with ñ the ever-changing vernacular. However, because strategies related to this industry are critical in order for businesses to obtain top positions for keywords related to their products and services, understanding search industry jargon is critical in order to maximize on the opportunities provided by high rankings for valuable keywords. The following is a multi-part series that describes all of the important terms related to internet marketing and SEO in Pittsburgh.

*Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one type of internet marketing that allows virtually anyone to sell the products and/or services of another person or company. Generally the people who market such products are known as affiliate marketers. These salespeople will be entitled to a percentage of the sales for traffic that they drive to a company's website that converts to a sale. Affiliate marketers use a wide variety of strategies in order to drive traffic to an offer, including article marketing, building and managing a list, press release syndication, direct mail and much more.

*Analytics (Google Analytics is a trademarked software)

In most cases when internet marketers refer to analytics they are talking about metrics related to traffic to a particular website or group of sites. This data is essential to developing a strong and consistent paid or organic search campaign and includes total website visitors, where those visitors came from, traffic demographics, time on site, bounce rate, what pages were visited and for how long, etc. Google owns a specific program for webmasters to measure traffic called Google Analytics, but in most cases analytics refers to site data regardless of how that data is acquired, mined or presented.

*Anchor Links

An anchor link refers to text that has been turned into a clickable hyperlink. This is important for SEO purposes because anchor text links pointing to a site that originate on a high authority, contextually relevant source can provide a substantial amount of traffic and link-juice. Straight links are also valuable, but generally speaking anchor text links are the most valuable and therefore the most sought after type of link.

*Article Syndication

Article marketing is a monstrous industry in and of itself, with thousands of sites and millions of people engaged in this strategy. By syndicating articles across a number of directories, blogs, private networks and other websites, a business can obtain a significant amount of readership if the articles are optimized properly. In addition, syndication generally means that the author is permitted to place to backlinks to their own site in the published work, which when syndicated properly can result in the development of a large quantity of supporting backlinks when people share the article, redistribute it or otherwise further publish it (and by proxy your links).

*Backlinking

Backlinking is basically what search engine optimization is all about. The more backlinks you have pointing to your site, the better. However, not all backlinks are created equal. The most valuable links are those from high authority sites, presented in a contextually relevant format. Many SEO experts agree that relevant anchor text links from high PR .gov or .edu websites are the most valuable ñ as well as being the most difficult to obtain.

To learn more about SEO in Pittsburgh and all of the related terms in this field, please see the next article in this series or use the links below to take action on behalf on your business right now.

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