If you are a newcomer to the world of websites and digital publishing and you are hoping to make it big, to drive user numbers and page impressions and the revenues that are associated with that, then you are entering a very exciting and rapidly changing space. Such has been the growth of digital publishing and content that a little more than twenty years ago it did not exist. Commercial websites sprung into prominence in the late 1990’s as everyone sought to make their fortunes online. Then the dot.com bubble burst and it all changed. In short it is a space that has changed continually over the last two decades and a space that has brought with it its own terms and acronyms. To help you navigate where digital is now, here are some key terms unpacked and explained.
Search Specialists
One of the most frequently heard terms in digital publishing is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. In short, this is a mixture of technical publishing elements, targeted writing and linking that ensure that when sites like Google and Bing trawl the internet in order to return you the best possible answers to your searches that your site is easily found. If you appear on page three of the Google results you will find that very few people are clicking through to you as a result of search. To effectively receive the traffic that you want you need to be top of the list when people search, and it is SEO that helps you get there.
Programmatic
Advertising has changed a lot over the last decade. As the supply of advertising impressions has consistently outstripped the demand for advertising placements from the big brands, so the price for advertising has dropped further and further. The CPM (cost per thousand) rates for advertising are low and as a result programmatic advertising has come to the fore. In short, programmatic advertising is a solution that marries supply and demand, and which finds the best prices for both the buyer and seller. This is all something that happens instantly as you open a web page. It has done a lot to cut out expensive middlemen and administrative hassles as the entire transaction happens online.
Responsive
Once upon a time a website worked for pretty much any screen that you showed it on. This was because it could only really render on a standard desktop. Now however it is far more complicated as a website can be viewed on anything from a mobile phone to a tablet, through to a laptop or a desk top. The dimensions and sizes of the screens are all very different and the experience of browsing something on a phone is very different to using a large screen monitor. As such it is very important that the technology is in place to make sure that the user experience is as optimal as possible and that websites change and shift accordingly depending on what sort of browser they are opened up in.