Affiliate Marketing Learning

There are a few basic terms that you should understand right off

the bat. These terms are the most often misunderstood by beginners. There are

other terms you’ll need to know, but let’s get through these first.

Rank, ranking: a website’s actual placement or position on the free (unpaid) listings

section of a search engine results page for a certain search term or phrase. It is

meaningless to speak of website rank without specifying what search word or phrase

you are ranked on. When someone says to you “My website is #1 on Google”, you

need to ask “OK, but for which search term?” Your ranking on Google is dependent

on a number of different factors, which is the subject of a significant portion of this

guide.

PageRank: Google’s patented system for specifying a web page’s importance,

which is but a single, albeit important, factor that determines rank. Many people

confuse a page’s rank (what position they are on a search results page) with a

page’s PageRank (PR) value. They are totally separate. Because of the confusion

around PageRank, it will be discussed in detail later on.

Keywords: Keywords for those words and phrases that best define what a web

page is all about, and are found in a variety of places on web pages. When someone

enters a search term or phrase into Google, Google tries to find those web pages

whose keywords match the search phrase the best. This is an oversimplification

here, but you should get the idea. Some people confuse keywords with the META

“Keywords” tag. They are not the same thing. The days of filling up the META

Keywords tag with as many terms as possible are over. Google, along with most

other search engines today, ignore META tags as they have been so abused.

Page title: The title of a web page is the text contained between the

<TITLE></TITLE> tags at the top of an HTML file and is displayed in the top bar of a

browser window. It is not the first heading of a web page or any other large text that

may be displayed at the top of a web page. This is an important distinction to know.