Stands for pay-per-click and means the same as cost-per-click.
Paid Listings
Listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion programs. In contrast, organic listings are not sold.
Pay-for-Performance
Term popularized by some search engines as a synonym for pay-per-click, stressing to advertisers that they are only paying for ads that "perform" in terms of delivering traffic, as opposed to CPM-based ads, where ads cost money, even if they don't generate a click.
Paid Placement
Advertising program where listings are guaranteed to appear in response to particular search terms, with higher ranking typically obtained by paying more than other advertisers. Paid placement listings can be purchased from a portal or a search network. Search networks are often set up in an auction environment where keywords and phrases are associated with a cost-per-click (CPC) fee. Overture and Google are the largest networks, but MSN and other portals sometimes sell paid placement listings directly as well. Portal sponsorships are also a type of paid placement.
Rank
How well a particular web page or web site is listed in a search engine results. For example, a web page about seo may be listed in response to a query for "seo." However, "rank" indicates where exactly it was listed -- be it on the first page of results, the second page or perhaps the 100th page. Alternatively, it might also be said to be ranked first among all results, or 13th, or 121st. Overall, saying a page is "listed" only means that it can be found within a search engine in response to a query, not that it necessarily ranks well for that query. Also called position.
Reciprocal Link
A link exchange between two sites.
Results Page
After a user enters a search query, the page that is displayed, is call the results page. Sometimes it may be called SERPs, for "search engine results page."
Robots.txt
A file used to keep web pages from being indexed by search engines. The Robots Exclusion page provides official details.
ROI
Stands for "Return On Investment" and refers to the percentage of profit or revenue generated from a specific activity. For example, one might measure the ROI of a paid listing campaign by adding up the total amount spent on the campaign (say $100) versus the amount generated from it in revenue (say $500). The ROI would then be 500 percent.
Search Engine
Any service generally designed to allow users to search the web or a specialized database of information. Web search engines generally have paid listings and organic listings. Organic listings typically come from crawling the web, though often human-powered directory listings are also optionally offered.
Search Engine Marketing
The act of marketing a web site via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities.
Search Engine Optimization
The act of altering a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. In the past, has also been used as a term for any type of search engine marketing activity, though now the term search engine marketing itself has taken over for this. Also called SEO.
Search Terms
The words or word or key phrase a searcher enters into a search engine's search box. Also used to refer to the terms a search engine marketer hopes a particular page will be found for. Also called keywords, query terms or query.
SEM
Acronym for search engine marketing and may also be used to refer to a person or company that does search engine marketing.
