That’s the start of one of the most popular questions we’re asked. So, we thought it might be useful to explain some common and relatively simple web marketing words:

Referrals - Referrals are the pathways that bring a user to your site. It is very important to know if your potential customer came from a website where you are ranking for keywords, or if they have come from a link that you have established on someone else’s website.

Hits - Hits are when a web server requests a file be brought to a specific web server. In truth, they’re pretty meaningless. They do not show you how many people actually conduct business on your website. Think of it this way: What’s the point of having 1 million hits on your site if no one does what you want them to do once they arrive?

Page view - This is when a single page has been requested to be loaded by someone visiting a site. On the web, this would happen when a “surfer” clicks on a link that directs them to a certain site. This can be very useful to the owner of the website, because now you can alter site and see if those changes bring back potential customers more often.

Visits - Visits are when a person views all the pages of your website, or when that person has been on your website for a select period of time, usually somewhere around thirty seconds. To go a step further, a unique visit means that you are counting each person who visits your website only once.

Relevance - Relevance is the importance placed on certain words within a website by the search engines, namely keywords, pages and websites. There are three different areas of relevance, according to search engines: Content, keyword and link relevance.

If you are just starting out with a SEO/SEM firm, these are some of the basic keywords you need to know. It’s either that, or keep nodding your head and pretending to know what those Search Enginer Marketers are blabbing about.

We just covered the importance of having a good SEO-infused Page Title for all of your website pages. But let’s also take a moment and focus on the importance of having a good URL structure to go along with those page titles.

What do we mean when we say, “URL stucture?” Well, simply put, it is the way that the pages of your site are organized and labeled to show up in the address bar of Internet browsers. It is also a key piece of the puzzle that search engines use to crawl and subsquently rank your website.

From the moment you set out to develop a website, you have to think about its structure, from the home page to the products/services pages and down. At lifeBLUE, we always sit down and “map out” each page a website will contain, how those pages are related to one another and what paths both users and the search engines will find desirable. The key is to have a clearly labeled and keyword-rich site architecture that directs everyone along a logical line of progression through the website.

What does that mean for how you should structure your URLs? First, the home page should be labeled “index.htm,” “index.html” or “index.php.” Sitting on your home page, your address bar should not show anything beyond “www.mypage.com.” From there, it’s important to label your main pages and directories as succinctly and as keyword-richly as possible. If you have an “About Us” page and a blog, like most do, label those “about_us.html” and “blog.html.” Or, you can make the blog into its own folder and it will show up as “/blog.”

From there, be sure to group as many things as you can into related folders. If you have a large directory of hats you are selling, the best way to structure that, with SEO in mind, is like this: “www.myhatsite.com/hats/hat1.html” and “www.myhatsite.com/hats/hat2.html.”

Remember: Keep it concise, use keywords and group items into folders. Make your pages logical and navigable for both people and search engines. That will put you one step closer to top rankings.

The simple line of text that lies in between the <title> tag on every web page across the net is probably the most influential, and oft-ignored, factor that contributes to good organic search engine ranking. For all the clients that come through lifeBLUE, it is sometimes astonishing to see how frequently this simple “good web page guideline” tactic has not been implemented. Well, current and future clients, respect the love of the page title.

Google still reigns supreme as the most important search engine to consider in your marketing campaign. It should be no suprise, then, that Google is the engine where page titles have the greatest effect on good rankings. Having a keyword-targeted, unique page title for every single page of your website will help the search engine crawlers to identify and label each page accordingly, while also matching your page with a (hopefully) highly-targeted searcher.

For example, if you have a website that sells health insurance to Dallas-area businesses, labeling your home page with “Dallas Health Insurance Provider - My Company” is a whole lot better than “My Company - Index”. Repeat this concept throughout your website (if you offer specific products that have their own pages, label each page with a unique title) and you will be one step closer to top placement in the SERPs.

As the search engines have evolved to better combat web spammers and to reward websites that provide services or products that are directly related to a searcher’s query, the page title has become a beacon of importance that cannot be overlooked. Just think, as easy as it is for spammers to create 1,000 pages that are all slightly different when it comes to content and keywords, it is much more difficult to produce unique page titles that stand apart from each other and will garner trust. In that same light, webmasters that intelligently lay out their page titles to match their content will be rewarded when visitors coming in from the organic search listing are taken directly to a page related to their query and not the index page or some other root page within the site.

Here’s the best part: Editing page titles requires only an elementary understanding of .html. If you are smart enough to publish a website, you can enact this change for your own benefit at any time. Good luck.