I have some user-submitted variables that I want to display in a different part of my site like this:

<div class="pre_box">Term: </div>
<div class="entry"><?php $key='term'; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?></div>

Occasionally, these variables might be empty in which case I don't want to display the label for the empty variable. In the example above I would want to hide the <div class="pre_box">Term: </div> part. Is there some simple way to check if a php variable like the one above is empty and prevent the label from being displayed?