If you’re just starting out in blogging or SEO it’s pretty easy to be overwhelmed by the many new terms you’ll be reading about. Its not uncommon for newbie bloggers to get confused or lost with all the acronyms and specialist lingo that’s talked about so often.
Below is a handy cheatsheet of the frequently used blogging terms and SEO terms to help get you started.
Enjoy!
A
Article – In terms of blogging article and a post are synonymous. An article is a single post on a blog.
Avatar – An avatar is an icon representing a particular person in a forum or blog community.
B
Backlink/Backlinks – A backlink is an incoming link from one web page to another website. Backlinks are particularly important for SEO.
Blog – A blog is a website which are usually maintained by an individual or group of people. They are updated on a regular basis and are usually based on specific topics or niche. A blog can be a personal website or part of a companies online presence. Blogs also encourage interactivity through comments from its readers and being social by sharing content via social networks.
Blogroll – A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs or websites.
C
Call-to-action (CTA) – A call-to-action or CTA is a piece of content which is intended to get reader to perform a specific act. A good example is getting the user to subscribe to a newsletter.
Category – A category in relation to a blog is a topic that is addressed on the blog. For example if you have a blog about baking your categories could be Cakes and Baking Tools and Recipes.
Comments – Comments are ways for your readers to give feedback and opinions on your posts. You should allow your readers to comment on your blog as it encourages interactivity and website stickiness.
Canonical Link – A canonical link is a way for webmasters to prevent duplicate content issues on their websites. Duplicate content is penalized by search engines and a canonical link shows the search engines the “preferred” version of the page and is used for SEO.
Crawled – In the terms of websites and SEO crawled refers to search engine spiders indexing a website/blog.
D
Directory – A blog directory is a website listing blogs of different categories and rating them by their popularity. You should list your blog in a directory as it will help generate more relevant traffic.
Duplicate Content – This is content which appears more than once on the same website.
E
Excerpt – The excerpt is a small summary of the article shown on the blog post listing pages (front page or archive pages).
F
Featured Image – A featured image is the image which usually appears at the top of a post and acts are the post thumbnail in your blog post listings. The featured image is an important part of a post as it is one of the first things seen by your readers. It is also used when sharing posts via social media such as Facebook and Google+.
Feed – A blog feed or news feed is something your readers can subscribe to that will inform them about the latest updates form your blog. Users will usually add your blogs news feed to a news feed reader such as Feedly.
H
Header Tags (H1, H2 etc…) – A header tag is used to identify specific sections of a blog post. The use of head tags is important for SEO as search engines will see text within H tags as important content.
Header – The header is the top part of your blog. It usually contains common items such as the blog name and logo. Navigational menus usually appear in the blog header.
Hosting – Hosting is referring to the location your website or blog physically lives. Every website or blog is being hosted. There are many types of hosting available from shared to dedicated each offering their advantages and disadvantages.
HTML – HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and is the language which renders each and every webpage to the screen. It consists of many elements and tags which start with <...> and end with <.../>.
I
Indexed – When search engines crawl your website that add it to their index. This makes your site available in the search engine results pages, your website has been indexed.
K
Keyword(s) – Keywords are the terms and phrases within your writing that represents the main topic of your post. Your keywords should be relevant to your topic and target audience. Keywords form a key element to your SEO and should reflect your knowledge on a given topic.
L
Link – A link is a piece of text on a website which links to another page on the internet. This page could be another page on your website, called an internal link or a page on another website, called an external link.
Long-tail Keywords – These are similar to keywords but are used to define your topic to a more specific level. Long-tail keywords usually compose of 4 words or more. For example a keyword maybe “basketball shooting” and a long-tail keyword maybe “left handed basketball shooting drills”. As you can see the long-tail keyword is much more specific. Long-tail keywords should form a core component of your SEO.
M
Meta Description – The meta description is a 160 character snippet which is used for summarizing the content of a page or post. The meta description is not used for SEO but is shown on the SERP when your page is listed.
Meta Title – See Page Title
N
Newsletter – A newsletter is a bulletin which is issues periodically to people who subscribe to it. A newsletter can make up an important part of your website marketing as it allows you to contact your readers and share your latest content without them having to visit your website. A newsletter list can be a very valuable asset to a blog.
Nofollow – This is a HTML attribute which stops search engine spiders from following the link from one page to the target page. This stops “link juice” being passed from one website to the other.
P
Page Title – This is the title of the page which search engines will list on their results pages.
Permalink – A permalink is the link to an individual post or page in your blog. In terms of blogging you can usually design the permalink structure of your blog, this allows you to create user friendly URLs.
Plugin – A plugin is an additional piece of software which is used to extend the existing functionality. The term plugin is usually relating to the WordPress blogging platform.
Post – See Article
R
Redirect – A redirect is a way to direct a user from one URL to another. Redirects are most commonly used when a webmaster makes a change to their website permalink structure. The most common form of redirect is a 301 permanent redirect. When a user visits a URL which has a 301 redirect they will be automatically sent to the new URL specified by the 301.
Learn How To Update WordPress Permalinks without Breaking your Search Engine Rankings
Robots.txt – Robots.txt file is a standard used by websites to communicate with search engine crawlers and other web robots. It is used to inform the crawler/robot about parts of the website which should not be scanned.
RSS – See Feed
S
SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website to gain a higher listing in the search engine result pages.
SERP(s) – Search Engine Result Page – this is the page you see after you perform a web search.
Sitemap (XML Sitemap) – A sitemap or sitemap.xml file is a list of webpages in a website which search engine crawlers used to help them index a website. A sitemap is typically organized in a hierarchical fashion.
Stylesheet (CSS) – A stylesheet contains programming code which instructs how the browser should render the webpage and is used in conjunction with HTML.
T
Theme – A theme is a package used to change how a website looks. Themes are used in Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress.
U
URL – This is the address of the post or page on the World Wide Web.
W
Widget – A widget in a small block that performs a specific function. Widgets are commonly seen in sidebars of CMS systems. There are many types of widgets such as text widgets, image widgets, newsletter sign up widgets.
WordPress – WordPress is an online open source CMS system. It is the most common platform used by bloggers. It has an extensive array of themes and plugins which makes it incredibly powerful and customizable. This website runs on WordPress!
There you have it, hopefully the above list cleared up any questions you were having about different meanings when it came to your blogging.
If you liked this post don't forget to share and leave a comment in the comments section below.
Happy Blogging - Mathew