Breaking Down Digital Media Acronyms Part 1

Digital Media is an expansive industry that picks up traits from the worlds of web design, traditional marketing, social media, graphic design, and even business development. This glossary will touch on the most commonly used acronyms, providing a mini cheat sheet to help manage all of the

abbreviations.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization is the process of achieving a higher, unpaid, and organically placed position in the results on a search engine. Search engines such as Google or Bing take many background features like key words, relevance, and new content into account when calculating the placement of a website.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing is very similar to SEO, but SEM is the form of marketing that utilizes SEO. Marketers tap into SEO through researching industry trends, following industry discussion leaders, and working with search engines to send more traffic to websites.

ROI: Return on Investment is the amount of return, be it financial, web traffic, or user engagement, a company receives from devoting resources to a specific project. For example, when a company begins to build a social media interface, the amount of time it takes for their marketing team to create accounts, develop a following, and connect with potential customers is the initial investment. The return on that investment is securing new customers, making sales, and yielding a profit.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication is a condensed and centralized feed containing all relative information to the topic of interest. For instance, if one were looking for the top news stories of the day, a news website would input an RSS feed into their site that is constantly updating the
trending headlines. Many website have imbedded an RSS feed into their sites to track trending industry topics or their social media feeds. Yahoo.com provides an RSS on their homepage that can be personalized to your interests.

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language is the language used to create web pages. Every web page you view is supported  by a design that is written in HTML. Digital Marketers use HTML on their company websites, content pages, and even designing emails.

PDF: Portable Document Format file is a document that can be easily viewed or printed on any computer software without compromising the original document design. A PDF’s text and images will appearexactly as intended, no matter the receiving device, making file sharing much simpler for digital marketers.

GIF: Graphic Interchange Formats are image files that are compressed, meaning shortened, to reduce the time for downloading by the user. Pronounced with a “J,” you have probably seen countless GIFs on social media sites. GIFs are images that are commonly animated by combining multiple images and typically have a comical caption to accompany the picture. Here are some example of the most popular Internet GIFs of 2013.

CPC & PPC: Cost per click and paid per click are terms used for brands advertising on websites. In developing an online marketing campaign, many companies choose to pay for advertisement on sites that are seen by potential customers. The websites that host the advertisements will charge the company either for a predetermined cost for each time the ad is click or the company can pay for a certain amount of clicks ahead of time.

URL: Uniform Resources Locator is the web address that is specific to each page on the World Wide Web. Every single internet page has a personalized address containing a combination or letters, numbers, and symbols.