To become a better blogger you need to have some grasp on the lingo that is thrown around often in the blogging community. It’s important to be familiar with blogging terms to take your blog to a more professional level.
Don’t let blogging terms that you are not familiar with intimidate you from becoming a better blogger.
In this post I’ve listed some of the more common blogging terms that are used so you can be more familiar with these terms.
Now there are no blogging police that will come and get you if you don’t remember all these, as there are a bunch of blogging terms listed in this post. So feel free to come back and reference anything you need to brush up on.
Adsense
Adsense is an advertising program that is run by Google. Google Adsense allows web site owners to put ads on their websites and receive a payment for active click throughs on the ads placed on the site.
This is one way to monetize a blog.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is an arrangement where an online retailer will pay commission to have traffic or sales generated from a website as referrals.
Often the commission is paid as a percentage or flat fee per sale basis with some program offering bonuses for higher amounts of sales.
This is one of the ways bloggers monetize their blogs.
Anchor Text
This is the text that is a web link:
For example this is a link and the text is the anchor text to the Starting Your Blog page.
For SEO purposes search engines use the anchor text of a link to help determine ranking of a page.
WordStream.com has some great information on anchor texts.
Avatar
An avatar is a image that represents an individual user.
BBlogers
This is a common hashtag used for beauty bloggers.
Blogger
This is a person who writes for and runs a blog.
Blogosphere
This refers to websites that are blogs as a group.
For example, if you were to start your own blog you would become a part of the Blogosphere.
Blogroll
Blogrolls are lists of links to other blogs that a blogger reads or supports/recommends.
Blogrolls are not used much anymore but were once used often on blogs.
Bounce Rate
This is a term that is used within web traffic analysis. Bounce Rate is the the representation in percentage of the visitors who enter a website and leave after viewing the page they entered the web site on instead of clicking through to another web page on that site.
Brand
A brand distinguishes a product or organization from it’s competition.
Branding
Branding is an aim to establish a presence in the market that attracts and retains customer while setting you apart from you competition.
Call to Action (CTA)
Call to Action is a marketing term used in advertising. CTA refers to something that is designed to prompt an immediate response.
Category
In blogging a category is a group of blog posts that are in a similar portion of a topic. This allows you to keep similar content together easily.
In WordPress each post is put into a category. If you have not assigned a category to your post it is put into the Uncategorized Category.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Click-Through-Rate is the ratio of users who click on a link to the number of users who have viewed the page with that link, this could also be a link in an email.
CTR is used commonly to measure an online advertising or email campaign’s success.
You will see CTR often on an affiliate programs information in places such as ShareASale.
Collab
Collab is short for Collaboration. This is when two or more people come together to create something or achieve a goal they agreed upon.
Comments
Comments are a feature available for blog posts where users can interact with the content you put in your post and give their feedback.
WordPress allows you control over comments, you can have them set for moderation or even turn them off all together if you would like.
Content
Content is anything that is shared and put up on a website. It consists of text, videos, images, audio, and any information shared in posts.
Content Management System
Content Management System (aka CMS) does just what it says, it manages content. WordPress is a CMS.
Content Management Systems are any software that is able to organize and keep the content you want to put out on the web or even just on one computer. It does not necessarily have to be on the internet to be considered a CMS.
Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate is the percentage of people that complete a goal or outcome.
For example this could be the rate of total visitors to your blog compared to the amount that subscribed by email for an offer you had.
Copyright
Copyright is the rights of the owner of intellectual property, and this is protected by laws.
For example, you can not just go to any website and use an image that you find there because you like it and put it on your blog. You would be violating copyright. You also can’t copy someone’s articles and post them on your blog without that person’s permission, that would be a violation of copyright.
Wikipedia has some great information on copyright.
Where to Get Royalty Free Images for Your Blog
cPanel
cPanel is a administration tool that is used by many hosting providers to allow users to configure and manage their hosting accounts and websites.
CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. This is a language that is used to help style the presentation of documents written in HTML or XML. Basically CSS will manipulate how elements are shown on your computer screen.
You can find more out about CSS at W3schools.com.
Draft Post
A Draft Post is a post that has not yet been published to your blog and therefore is only able to be seen by those with access to the admin panel of your blog. Once you publish your post it is no longer in draft status.
Engagement Marketing
Engagement Marketing is a marketing strategy that directly engages users/customers and encourages participation in a marketing campaign.
External Link
An External Link is a hyperlink that send the person who clicks on it to another domain that is not the same domain they are currently on.
Favicon
Favicons are the small graphics/logos that appear in the tab of the web page next to the page title, they can also show in bookmarks next to the title or in some URL address bars of certain browsers.
Footer
A footer is also refereed to as a page footer. Footers are located at the bottom of a web page beneath the main text or body of the web page.
Footers of a web page are located between the <footer> and </footer> HTML Tags.
Guest Post
This is when another blogger writes a post that appears on a blog that is not their own.
Header
This is the top part of a website. Headers are located between the <header> and </header> tags within the HTML code of a website. Generally themes, logos, navigation menus, and titles go in headers.
HEX Code
HEX Codes are representation of colors for HTML code, HEX is short for hexadecimal. You can find the HEX Code of a color through HTMLColorCodes.com.
HTML
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. This is the language that is used in all web pages. HTML is often used with CSS and sometimes JavaScript or PHP (these are 2 different programming languages used for the more technical parts of web pages.
You can learn more about HTML at W3schools.com.
Hyperlink
A hyperlink is just a link from a web page to another location on the internet or on the same website.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on influential people instead of a specific target market. Social media is the platform used for this type of marketing, and identifies people who have influence over potential customers.
Internal Link
An Internal link is a hyperlink that is from one web page to another web page or content that is within the same website.
JavaScript
JavaScript is a programming language that is used in web development often.
Keywords
Keywords are topics or ideas that define what a piece of content is about. Search engines are designed to search for words within web pages and documents, giving priority to words that occur in the title and numerous times throughout the content.
Landing Page
A Landing Page is a single web page that a user “lands” on upon clicking an intended link. Sometimes landing pages are referred to as a “lead capture page” or a “destination page”.
LBloggers
LBloggers stands for “lifestyle bloggers”. This is often used as a hashtag on social media.
Link Building
Link Building refers to the actions that are intended at increasing the number of and also the quality of links inbound to your web site.
Often link building is done with the intention of increase rankings with search engines.
Meta Description
A Meta Description is a brief description that summarizes a web page’s content. This is usually about 160 characters long and is a HTML tag that search engines use and show in search results under the title of the page
NoFollow
NoFollow is a value that is added as a value to a HTML element to direct search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the current website’s ranking with that search engine due to the link’s target.
Open Source
Open source simply means that programming code is available to be read, viewed, modified, and distributed by anyone.
WordPress is open source and this is one of the things that helps it be the most used CMS on the web.
Pageviews
Pageviews refers to how many times a particular web page has been loaded in a browser or “viewed”.
Permalink
A permalink is a URL that is permanent, meaning the content that is contained on a web page can be permanently found at a designated URL that will not change.
Within Content Management System many times content is rotated, this can make linking to certain information hard to do. Permalinks allow people to be able to link or bookmark specific content and know that the URL will not be changing.
In WordPress permalinks are options, but it is recommended to use them.
PHP
PHP is a popular general purpose scripting language. This is popular in server side scripting and is used in web development. It is often used in Content Management Systems.
WordPress uses PHP extensively.
You can learn more about PHP at php.net
Pingback
A Pingback notifies bloggers that there has been a link back to a certain blog post.
WordPress has an option to allow or disallow pingbacks on individual posts.
Plugin
A plugin allows you the ability to add functionality to integrate applications and add cool stuff to your blog. Plugins range from hooking up your blog to an email service to adding cool widgets to your site.
WordPress currently has over 54,000 plugins, and more are being added every day. WordPress plugins are usually able to be added by the press of a button from your Admin panel.
Redirect
Redirects are alternative URLs that are used to send a user that clicked on a link to a different location.
For example if I wanted to send a user to Google and track that I could easily use a redirect to do so by having www.BloggingYourBlog.com/searchRediret send whoever clicks on that to www.Google.com
Responsive Design
Responsive design is a way that a website is designed to allow flexible layouts. This means that no matter what device (computer, tablet, or smartphone) or screen size is used to access that website it is viewable and usable by the user.
RSS Feed
RSS is a technology that allows updates to be received by other people. People can subscribe to your RSS feed and receive content as it comes out in a feed reader.
Websites like Feedly use RSS feeds to show users content from blogs that they have selected to be updated from.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing a website’s visibility within search engine results.
SEO for Blogging
SERPs
SERPs are Search Engine Results Pages. This is the page that is displayed when you search for something in Google or another search engine. SERPs display the results of a search query and oftentimes advertisements that are related to the keywords in that search query.
Sidebar
Side bars are located on the side of the blog, usually this is referred to as a column. For BloggingYourBlog there is one sidebar on the right hand side, and it is considered a 2 column layout because the post and page content is displayed in the first column of the page.
On mobile platforms the side bar will sometimes be hidden depending on the theme and exact screen size, and also how they are doing their responsive layout.
Sponsored Post
Sponsored posts are posts on a website or blog that are for advertisement for a particular company and/or item through promotion by that website’s owner where they are reimbursed by the company.
Promoted Posts are another term that is used in-place of Sponsored Posts.
Tag
Tags are keywords used to describe the content of a post. Tags are kind of like categories but drilled down further.
For example, lets say you have a Gardening Blog, and you published a post about growing strawberries in tiered pots in your Container Gardening category. So for tags you can still have a tag of container gardening, another for strawberries, and another for tiered pots, you could also throw one in for fruit gardening.
Theme
A theme changes the appearance of your blog. You could say it’s the design of the graphical interface. Themes modify the way the blog or website is displayed.
WordPress has both free and premium themes available. You can also hire developers and designers to make a custom theme to make your blog completely different from any others out there.
Awesome and Free WordPress Blog Themes
Web Host
A web host is a company that provides space on a server for your website to be hosted on, typically you share a server with other people who purchased the same service from the web host.
XML
XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It is useful for sharing and transmitting data and is usually used with HTML.
You can find out more on XML at W3schools.com
Thank you explaining these terms. I had find out about most of them by looking the terms up!
Man oh man… Boy do I wish I’d run into a post like this months ago when I started blogging. This is a great source of information!
Great extensive list for newbie bloggers! The A-Z of blogging
What a great list of blogging terms! There were a couple here that I didn’t know. I definitely think it’s important to know the lingo and different terms when you’re just starting out as a new blogger. It makes things so much less confusing!
YES, THANK YOU! I just currently started my blog and I’m so overwhelmed and always finding out things I didn’t know about before!! These terms are seriously SO helpful and I’m definitely going to bookmark your post!!
Oh boy. This is intimidating, so many terms that I did not know. I will study this further. It is really important as a new blogger to understand the terminology. It will make things easier in the long run.
Such an excellent complete list of all terms related to blogging! Thank you for explaining these to us 😀
– Nyxie
http://www.nyxiesnook.com
Awesome! Thank you! This is very helpful for this newbie!!
This is a great article especially for new bloggers and for bloggers as well who are not that knowledgeable when it comes to technical terms.
An essential guide for every new Blogger!
This is such a helpful post – I’m pinning it for reference in the future! x
londonsnewgirl.blog
This is such a good list!! Thank you so much for sharing! I’m going to be bookmarking this page and referring back to it often!
Emily | https://www.thatweirdgirllife.com