5 Marketing Definitions For The Entry-level Marketing Job Seeker

After having multiple interns to help me with my marketing, I could say that most college graduates will go into the business world with a significant lack of understanding of the important facets that shape marketing today.

Therefore, I have listed some marketing definitions every aspiring marketing professional should know prior to graduating college and entering the job market:

1. SEO - I know this definition is very simplistic, however an understanding of SEO is not usually commonplace among college students. I can attest to three interns who, upon being asked the definition of SEO, gave an answer such as, "we learned something like that... I think."

Search engine optimization or (if you want to go by the acronym SEO) is the foundation of online marketing in the year 2011 and, most likely it will be just as important when we are 80 years old, barring some bizarre upheaval in the way the world uses the internet.

In a nutshell, search engine optimization is the studying of search engine algorithms to determine how to rank highly when people search specific keyword phrases. The end goal is to get incoming leads and minimize the number of cold-calls that a firm has to make.

If someone tells you that search engine optimization is not important, ask them how the second page is, because the economy is always better on the first page of Google.

2. Landing Pages - Landing pages are separate pages on the website, constructed to highlight one or two keyword phrases for Google. Usually, you cannot get to these pages from the site's homepage as, unless a very nuanced writer authored them, the pages are typically unnaturally written, stuffed with keyword phrases so that they resemble a spam email more than an informative page. Landing pages are a facet of marketing that the aspiring marketing professional will have to learn early, simply because being able to style a webpage, yet still keyword stuff it, takes a significant amount of skill.

The aforementioned topic could probably be a book in and of itself. Luckily for me, I have enough content to last me a while.

3. Ezine websites - Ezine sites are article websites that cater to the nonprofessional writer and allow the general public to publish articles on topics of their choice. There are many advantageous reasons to write for these publications. One main factor is to get your name ranking highly in Google search terms, as most hiring companies, upon recruiting a marketing professional, will Google the applicant's name.

Additionally, writing for the sites will force the reader to become an expert in the topic, thereby not only helping them to get the job, but to excel in the position after obtaining the offer.

4. Google Analytics - Google Analytics is a web-based software that tells the marketing professional, among many other things, how many visitors (both unique and returning) are coming to a particular website on any given day. The program also covers the amount of time each visitor is staying on the website and the subsequent bounce rate of that particular site. Google Analytics will tell the viewer what keywords are most popular in leading to visits on the website, as well as what pages the visitor lands on, and which webpages are most popular.

5. PageRank - PageRank is a numeric value given by Google that aims to quantify how important a particular website is in the eyes of the search engine. PageRank is judged on a number basis between 1 and 10, 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. There are many factors that go into the PageRank that a particular website is given, and most believe that there is little correlation between the PageRank of a website and where it ranks amongst particular Google search terms.