Digital Marketing – A layman’s guide to the basics By Nathan Murphy at Alloyfish

SEO
This stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of trying to manipulate Search Engines (Like Google or Yahoo) results to show your website higher than others. It requires good understanding of the modern methods Search Engines use to rate a website’s relevancy and importance. Search Engines are constantly changing how they rank websites to prevent this manipulation, and if caught doing optimisation badly you are likely to be penalised! - gone are the days of making thousands of links or articles where every second word is the key term you require!

PPC
Pay-Per-Click is paying for adverts to be shown beside search terms – see ‘sponsored links’ on Google search results. It costs the advertiser money every time you click on an advert and in competitive terms clicks are often in the region of £4 to £5 each!

Pay-Per-Click is great though, it means the person is specifically searching for the search terms you are paying to advertise on. Also you can advertise at certain times or locations to improve your targeting.

Good long-term optimisation and appropriate split testing is required, the page you send people to from the advert, and how well you convert will go in to determining where you appear in the sponsored links (top, or bottom) and your budget will determine how many times you are shown.

Beware of ‘Google Resellers’, often their offering is simply a con, there is always a catch (rubbish rarely searched keywords or slack guarantees usually)

Viral Marketing
This is a process of making something that is very interesting and releasing it on the internet. It works through people emailing it, or sending it to each other virally. Many great examples of this (Anyone see ‘will it blend’ – Google it if not). Viral adverts today are best as videos and for your wallet’s sake not too expensive.

Idea is everything here, if you have a bad idea then it doesn’t matter how well produced it is, it will fail. Get a decent set of creative minds to figure this one out!

Reputation Management
The process of ‘setting the record straight’ or giving ‘the other side of the story’. Good for burying bad press or helping make reviews sing a preferential song… be careful what you believe! This is a powerful way of boosting sales or balancing bad news.

PPM
Pay-Per-Mille – basically you pay for 1000 showings of your advert on a website. This is popular with site owners rather than search engines and can be great to get targeted visitors by subject. The quality of the campaign graphical elements will make a big difference to the campaigns effectiveness.