When it comes to marketing your services on the internet it seems that everyone is an expert these days, in fact the other day I over-heard a conversation in a Starbucks, ok when my ears heard the term "bounce rate" they picked up and I immediately tuned out my wife and began eavesdropping on the conversation.
What I heard appalled me, I listened as one business owner was discussing with a peer how his son was maintaining their company website and was discussing how his son had explained to him how great his very high bounce rate was and how they could only hope he could get it higher... at which point I choked and consciously made a choice to stop listening before I became sick. I really hope that the gentleman had the facts all wrong and had misunderstood what his high school aged son had told him - but my experience tells me that likely he hadn't, that really they both likely had no clue.
If you don't know why this would have bothered me you are on the right page and should at minimum familiarize yourself the following terms. Although these won't equip you to become your own design, development and web marketing expert, they will at least qualify you to have a conversation with someone who can perform these services for you.
SEA Search Engine Analysis - The analysis of sites in relation to search engine performance can be separated from the optimization. This is the fact finding involved in working with existing websites, it is critical to both identify the elements of the site that are beneficial and detrimental. For the die-hard I'll optimize it myself kind of guy these services can contracted separately for guidance so as not to do more damage than good to your current ranking.
SEOSearch Engine Optimization - Often over generalized and used too broadly the process of Search Engine Optimization is the process of removing any obstacles that may prevent spiders from indexing your site, enhancing your website content to achieve appropriate keyword densities, meta tags image descriptions etc. It is the getting it ready for the spiders work. This is critical, and should be done by a professional.
SEM Search Engine Marketing - Often wrongly assumed to be part of the optimization process this is the advertising to the engines, the look "I'm over here and this is what I'm talking about" this is the backlinks, the blogging, the directory listings, the syndication of elements of the site (listings, blog entries etc). This is where I say that with guidance from a professional there is a lot of work you can do yourself and not pay a professional to do (at least for some).
Spider, robot, bot, crawler - These are simply programs developed to traverse web pages locating content, the best know of these is likely " GoogleBot" Google web spider that crawls your pages and indexes the content. Every search engine has its own hence different results on different search engines - however general principles do apply to most. Other common bots include bots that are used for scraping and harvesting email addresses for spamming.(CMS) Content Management System - There are many different systems available, some of the more prominent would include Joomla, Drupal, and some might include Wordpress in this list although more of a blog system.
Bounce Rate - The percentage of visitors that immediately leave your site upon arriving at it.
Time on Site - Pretty straight forward - this is an analytical representation of the time spent on the website or page based on analytic tracking and web logs.
Site Stickiness - refers to a combined effect of bounce rate, time on site, pages visited and return visits metrics. Basically when they come do they stay and how often do they return.
Long Tail - refers to the longer more specific search terms, SEO specialists generally will refer to this in relation to marketing for niche markets rather than broad search terms.
example of long tail and the value of long tail results from a client of ours: The term "Madeira Property" (Madeira Island Portugal) received 465 hits in a set period of time, in that same period he also received an additional 417 from Google Ads referrals and an additional 2080 hits from various long tail terms such as "manor house for sale madeira" and "retirement home for sale in madeira" none of which alone contributed more than 35 hits on the site.
Long Tail results of 10-30 hits contributed more than 400% more traffic than his individual key search terms (which he receives top 3 rankings across Google, Live, and Yahoo)
LSI Latent Semantic Indexing - Often misunderstood and used by the misinformed as a fancy way to say "Long Tail." Latent Semantic Indexing is simply a methodology of indexing data in a more "intelligent" manner if you will. LSI is probably better illustrated by the following example rather than wordy explanation.
let's say we use LSI to index our collection of mathematical articles. If the words n-dimensional, manifold and topology appear together in enough articles, the search algorithm will notice that the three terms are semantically close. A search for n-dimensional manifolds will therefore return a set of articles containing that phrase (the same result we would get with a regular search), but also articles that contain just the word topology. The search engine understands nothing about mathematics, but examining a sufficient number of documents teaches it that the three terms are related. It then uses that information to provide an expanded set of results with better recall than a plain keyword search.
Example from http://www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/lsa_definition.htm
META Tags - OK Meta from the Greek meaning "beyond," so these are the tags that are beyond what the site visually shows. These days generally speaking the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) tells the browser what content is to be shown, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) tell the browser how it looks, while the META Tags tell the browser or spider what the content is using tags to represent elements like the page title, a short description of the page contents and a list of the keywords/phrases that apply to the pages content among other pieces of information such as tags that can specify things like whether the page should be indexed etc.
Static Page - An HTML page (Web page) that displays the same information for all users. Although it may be updated from time to time, it does not change with each user retrieval.
Dynamic Page - A Web page that is returned to the user with custom content based on the results of a search or some other request. Also known as "dynamic HTML" or "dynamic content," the "dynamic" word is used with Web sites to refer to custom results individualized to each user.
URL - Universal Resource Locator, simply the website address.
Widget, Module, Add-on - A small application or program used on web pages to provide a specific function.
Site Map - A page or group of pages that link to every accessible page on a website, although originally intended as a usability feature for websites that could be difficult to navigate due to size and or complexity the Site Map has become primarily a SEO tool to ensure that there is an easy path to any and all pages you wish to have indexed by the search engines
Landing Page - Generally referred to as the page a user lands on when they click a CPC (Charge-Per-Click) or PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad. Often used to harvest email addresses, track campaign results and promote specific products or services it is a targeted message rather than a general link to the home page of the site.
Lead - is someone from whom you hope to close a sale.
Prospect - is a lead who has demonstrated, through action, a commitment of time, energy, activity, or money, but has not yet closed the sale.
OK, if you understand all of these now you are fully equipped to be just dangerous to your website - kind of like the home seller who reads your blog and thinks he can sell privately just as effectively as you.
In all seriousness you hopefully you now understand enough to not fear being misled by specialists promising you the moon.
PS: there is no way to buy yourself #1 on Google, despite what many promise and promises of #1 for generalized terms cannot be guaranteed while obscure relatively worthless terms are easy to get to.