Any blogger or upcoming blogger must know top blogging terms because it makes your blogging experience simpler.
If you’re a blogger, this is your go-to list of terms you need to know. This post will help explain some of the most commonly used words and phrases in the blogging world. Bloggers use these terms to make their content more exciting and engaging for readers. They also help bloggers stay on top of industry trends to write about relevant topics to their audience.
The following are blogging terms I have come across over the years. The terminologies are endless, but we shall start with the most popular for now. Here’s a quick rundown:
Blog: A blog is a website or web page with regular postings about any topic imaginable. Most blogs have an author who writes posts and comments from other people who visit the site, including replies from the original author and discussions between readers on various subjects related to the blog post being discussed.
Microblog. A social media site to which a user makes short (300words) and frequent posts.
Self-hosted blog. It is the type of blog where the blogger owns the site and the domain name.
Blogger. A person who writes for a blog.
Media Kit. It works like a blogger’s resume containing impressive statistics and accomplishments.
Blogging. To add new material to a blog termed blogging,
Niche. The specific content you blog about. A niche is a great topic that provides the blogger direction and focuses while telling the reader what the content will be about.
Tagline. A tagline is a short phrase or sentence customarily used to say what your website is about.
Target Reader. It is an individual or group of people you want to read your blog.
Theme. The overall design of your blog or website.
SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing your blog to achieve better search engine results. SEO is done by creating quality content which search engines will rank your content on the first page when someone searches the topic.
Off-Page SEO. It is the site awareness you can generate for your web page or a particular post.
On-Page SEO. Your actual web page or post’s content and how helpful or relevant the content is to the searches.
White Hat SEO. It means all ethical optimization techniques, strategies, and tactics.
Brand. It could be You, your product, your service, or your organization.
Branding. The action marketers take to get you to experience positive emotions when thinking about their product, service, or company.
Monetization. The process of making money through your blog, earning through affiliate networks, AdSense, or any other ad network.
Hits: The number of users that get into your site at a specific time.
IRL: IRL stands for In Real Life. Bloggers use this term when they are talking about their personal life rather than blogging.
Domain Name: It is the web address of your blog that the audience uses to find you on google or any other platform. For example, we use WWW.grammarly.com to get into sites of Grammarly. It is the domain name of Grammarly.
PPC. Pay Per Click is a form of advertising where you get paid when people click the ads on your website.
Paid Search. People click on displays or PPC ads to get to your website.
ROI. Return on Investment is the approximate measure of an investment’s profitability. ROI is also often used for Return on Time Invested.
Sponsored Post. It is a type of post bloggers are paid to write.
Copyright. A person’s legal right to their works, whether intellectual or physical.
Email. Messages are distributed via electronic means using a network.
Page. It is a static page on your site that doesn’t automatically update.
Page Rank. An algorithm used by the Google search engine to measure the authority and relevance of a web page.
Page Views. It is the number of times a user visits a web page and is recorded every time your web page is opened on a browser.
Link. A link is a word, group of words, or image that you can click on to go to a new site page or a new section within the current page.
Linking. According to research by successful bloggers, linking is the currency of the web. Linking to a blog post that helps make your point is a way to be relevant to your readers.
Reciprocal Links. Reciprocal links are links between two sites that have been created and linked to each other to show readers that they are related or to show a partnership and give a chance to readers to see both sites.
Link Building. A technique invented by Brian Dean involves boosting your SEO by getting other content creators to link to your site.
Skyscraper Technique. Involves building links to your blog or website to improve SEO.
Link Baiting. This link-building technique is done by crafting content so that other content creators will link to it.
Linky Party. A place to show your blog posts by leaving links to your site or blog and visiting other blogs.
Keyword – A word or phrase an individual is looking for online.
Link Exchange: It collaborates between two bloggers who exchange links to get higher traffic on their blogs. However, this practice is not encouraged by google.
XML: XML Stands also known as Extensible Markup Language. It is a helpful way to share, transmit and describe technical data of your blog on the internet.
XHTML: XHTML also stands for Extensible HyperText Markup Language. XHTML is a successor of HTML. These days almost all web pages are created in HTML.
Listicle: A term for describing a list of blog posts that you will write in the form of the piece.
Zombie blog: A spam blog is termed a zombie blog.
Keyword Research – An SEO method entails finding and searching for keywords (the most relevant and highly used) to improve your rankings by knowing what content gets attention.
Long Tail Keywords. A blogger uses longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use. Long-tail keywords are generally at least four words long.
Medium-Tail Keywords. It is a focus SEO keyword with two or three words.
Short-tail keywords. Short tail keywords are focus SEO keywords and have only one word.
Social Media. These are websites and applications that are meant to enable users to create and share content. Participating in this is called social networking.
Social Media Engagement – Social media engagement can be defined as a conversation between brands and their audiences via social media platforms.
Social Search. It is a type of search that uses user-generated content to find queries on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, and Facebook.
Affiliate: This is a blogger who earns commissions from marketing and promoting a company or products. By use of affiliate marketing, these individuals are part of what you can call a referral program or revenue sharing program that compensates you for recommending a service, product, or company on your site.
Engagement: Engagement means how much your audience is engaged with your blog content. The engagement of a site can be determined by the number of likes, comments, and shares.
Auto casting: Autocasting allows you to create a new app with a custom name and icon. It makes it easy for users to access the app without typing in the full name or searching for it on their computer. A shortcut allows you to click and use an application.
Audio blog: Audioblog is a new social media platform for audiophiles and music lovers. It allows you to explore the world of music, discover contemporary artists and albums, and share your thoughts on everything related to sound quality and music.
A/B testing: This is a technique most bloggers use with email marketing campaigns. In this case, the blogger separates his client list into two, 50/50, and uses a different approach with each to later compare the statistics and find out which approach was more effective.
Above-the-Fold: The content appears at the top of your web page before scrolling down, called Above-the-fold.
AdSense: Google ads are used to run your blog and turn your blog into a money-making machine. The program is called Google AdSense; it is designed for website publishers and bloggers looking for opportunities to display a particular message informing of texts, video, or image ads on their web pages to earn money when a user clicks on the ads. Advertisers pay Google by either the click [PPC] or impression [CPM], and Google shares a percentage of that revenue with the AdSense publishers.
Bounce Rate. It is the percentage of visitors who leave your page without checking any other pages. Here is when someone looks at your site and bounces away; the lower the score, the better since it shows you fewer people are leaving without checking out more posts or pages on your website.
Engagement. All methods of sharing content, i.e., retweets, likes, and comments.
Expert Interview. Also known as an Expert Roundup or Expert Roundup Interview. You decide which experts you wish to interview. Ask them all the same question. Show their bios and link to their sites, sometimes including pictures of the respondents.
User Intent. The goal an individual has in mind when they search online.
- A. a short form for a virtual assistant, an assistant who helps you online.
Webinar. A seminar, meeting, or discussion is conducted over the internet.
Traffic. It is the number of people visiting your site, one of the indicators of website success.
Organic Traffic. Traffic comes from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, without including paid advertising. It means the traffic that comes from Unpaid sources is called organic traffic. It is often called free traffic.
Direct Traffic. It is where people type your URL directly into their browser.
Alt Text. You can insert a word or phrase to tell website viewers the nature or contents of an image.
Astroturfing: Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (such as an activist group) to make it appear as though it originates from or is supported by grassroots participants. It can refer to online activity, such as posting propaganda-laden messages on social media or paying someone to write positive reviews about a product, and offline activity, such as putting up posters with supporting slogans without revealing who paid for them.
Anchor Text. The clickable text is in a hyperlink.
Auto Blogging. To pull in content from other blogs and feature them on your site. This type of aggregating is usually done with a plugin that pulls in the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed from other blogs.
Biblio Blogosphere: Biblioblog sphere is a humorous reference to a librarian blog to any particular niche.
RSS Feed. Rich Site Summary provides updates when a site adds new content. It is a way for people to subscribe to your blog.
Automate. Something that’s automated is controlled by a machine rather than a person. In blogging, this means converting a process to an automatic operation.
Backlink. A backlink is any link that points to one page from another page.
Internal Link. An internal link connects one page of a website to a different page on the same website.
Beta. Not in general use yet. Still in the testing stages.
Blaudience: Blaudience is the terminology for regular readers of a website.
Blath: Blath is the combination of two words blog and math. So a blog related to math will be called a Blath.
Bot account: A social media account set up by an automated process and not a natural person to boost follower count or engagement falsely.
Bounce rate: A bounce is when a single-page session ends on your website. That’s right, we mean the percentage of people who viewed just one page before leaving without ever going through to completion and adding their name or digits into any sort of registration form whatsoever! As an analytics measure for behavior tracking visitors via Google Analytics, you might want to keep an eye out because it indicates how engaged readers are with what they see within these pages.
Visit. It is when an individual arrives at your website, proceeds to browse and click. It counts all visitors, no matter how many times they visit your website.
Click-Through Rate. It is a measurement of how many people clicked on a particular link. You can measure CTR on your website based on the number of visitors. You can also use email marketing to count people who clicked on a link within the email sent.
CAPTCHA: Captcha is the test that identifies the visitor as either a robot or a human. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Dark Blog: A dark blog is a blog that a general audience or reader cannot access.
Desktop Blogging Client: It is a tool that you can use to get offline access to publish or edit your content on your site.
Deep Linking: Deep linking is a way to engage your readers to spend more time on your website. We usually give links to related blogs in deep linking, so a reader spends maximum time on the site.
Editorial Calendar. A tool used to organize when you are going to publish the content you create.
Longform Content. Seven hundred fifty words and more considered long-form might take some extra time, but there are many advantages since you establish yourself as an authority in your niche, like a lower bounce rate. Such content is taken to be of high quality since you tackle a question comprehensively for viewers. Google instantly considers you a better blogger because of this.
Content Marketing. A sales funnel. You write quality posts and promote the content, which helps you convert visitors to subscribers, making it easy to market them a product.
Fisking: A sarcastic or witty refutation of a blog entry termed fisking.
FLOG: Flog is a term for a ghostwriter. For instance, it determines a person that writes a blog other than the claimed author of the blog.
Flame War: Arguments in the comment section of a blog are termed as a flame war.
Gulag: Gulag is a term that is used to represent a depressing blog post.
Evergreen Content. It refers to content that is relevant all year round.
Thin Content. A simple page on your website is meant to build traffic, with no great insights into the industry or information about your product or service.
Content Syndication. The process of pushing your blog, website, or video content out to another website or blog. You can do this either as a snippet, link, thumbnail, or even an entire article.
Curated Content. Hand-picked content focusing on quality to help with syndication.
Blawg: Blawg is a combination of two words blog and law. It means a law-related blog will be blawg.
Bloggers: It is a common term that beauty bloggers in the blog industry use.
Bleg: Bleg is also a combination of the word blog and beg. So bleg is a type of blog in which bloggers can request a contribution from the site readers.
Blistless: When a blogger does not give attention to modern content, it is termed blistless. It is a reference to what happens to the email list of a blogger who has lost interest.
Blog Carnival: Those blogs that contain links to different blogs covering a selected topic, usually employed by frequent diary contributors of a website.
Blog Client: Blog Client is a free blog editor that allows you to create, publish and maintain your blog from one convenient location. Blog Client has been designed to be as intuitive as possible so you can start blogging straight away without any prior knowledge of HTML or CSS. You will also have the ability to customize your blog with a range of templates and widgets – there’s no need for a coding experience! Bloggernacle: A blog that you write for Mormons or written by Mormons called bloggernacle.
Blogiversary: Blogversary is about the birthday of your blog.
Blog Farm: Blog Farm is a platform that offers thousands of resources for bloggers so that you can create better content. We have created the most extensive collection of resources related to blogging and publishing. Our resources are organized into categories so you can find everything you need for your blog right away.
Blog Feed: If you’re getting the blog posts for your website through an XML-based file that stores a machine-readable version of each position in either RSS or Atom structured format, then syndicating them is as simple as adding one more entry to this list. Bloggers can quickly do so by using feed widgets on their pages with no coding necessary!
Blog Hopping: Blog-hopping is terminology for readers who follow the link of a blog and get into various other sites.
Blog Site: The URL or web location of your blog.
Blog Header: The uppermost section of the blog post is called the blog header. You can use this section to show your crucial navigation links, your site logo, and your site title.
Blog Footer: The blog footer is the end section of your blog. You can insert navigation links in the blog footer.
Tag Cloud: Tag cloud contains the list of all the tags and keywords of your site.
Bloglet: Bloglet is a short blog entry.
Blogger: Blogger word is a combination of two words, pioneer and blog. A blogger that does blogging with a pioneering attitude is called a blogger.
Blogroll: It is a list of blogs that a reader gets on the footer or its sidebar.
Blog Snob: It is a blogger that usually doesn’t reply to the comments on the blog.
Constipation: Blogstiptaion is the terminology for bloggers who stick to the same topic and do not come with fresh ideas.
Blogstorm: A blog swarm also happens when there’s an immense amount of activity surrounding one particular subject. It can be argued that it occurs after posting controversial content on blogs which could cause controversy for the person in question, but I’m sure these events are not something to worry about!
Blog Stream; A blog that follows the mainstream media and news coverage.
Bloll: A bloll is a troller that specializes in trolling bloggers.
Bots: Bots are the form of automated accounts that leave spam comments on the site.
Content Upgrade. A specific, relevant incentive for subscribing to your blog. The content upgrade must relate to the post’s content on the website to work as “a lead magnet” for new users.
Beta Reader. A test reader. Generally, they exist to review your writing before the public sees it.
Domain Authority. Domain Authority is a metric by Moz on a scale of 1 to 100, where 100 indicates the best and 1 means the worst. The higher the score, the higher you get ranked in search engines. Ahrefs has the DR (Domain Rating), a comparable metric.
- DP stands for Domain Pop or Domain Popularity. In simple terms, this refers to the number of backlinks pointing to your website. Links are an indicator of how popular your domain is.
Drip Campaign. A drip campaign is a method used in direct marketing to acquire customers through lead nurture programs. It involves sending marketing information to prospects repeatedly over more extended periods to increase your blog’s users/ visitors or leads through the marketing funnel.
Black Hat SEO. Characterized by the use of traps to achieve short-term SEO benefits.
Blog Hop. Bloggers hop from blog to blog. This exposure helps generate traffic.
Blogosphere. The blogging world.
HTML. It is the language used for creating effects on website pages.
Hyperlink. A link from a document to another location or file. You can activate it by clicking on a highlighted image or word on the screen.
Hosting Service: There are different hosting companies on the internet. You use their paid hosting service, and in return, they take responsibility for hosting your site and making it visible online.
HARO: HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out. HARO connects online journalists and publishes with an expert to answer their queries and show contributions in a blog post or article.
H1, H2, H3. These are heading tags for different size headings and should contain your keyword.
Host. The company that provides the space on their servers to store your blog or website.
Blogroll. A collection of links to other blogs that you like reading.
Avatar Blog: The Avatar Blog is a professional blog written by industry professionals to educate and inform the industry of fashion, beauty, health, and fitness. This blog has a highly interactive page design focusing on user experience to allow all its readers to share ideas and views. The blog’s writers are fashion designers, stylists, fashion writers, make-up artists, and fashion influencers who have developed a great passion for fashion blogging over the years.
Anonoblog: There are several types of anonymous blogging platforms that you can use to publish online content anonymously. These platforms allow you to maintain your privacy and identity when publishing online content while still allowing others to read the content you post.
Alexa Rank: The Alexa rank is a way for online buyers to measure the popularity of your website. It’s calculated by taking the number of visitors and comparing it to how many other sites draw traffic from those same people. If you want to know more about what an Alexa Rank is and how best to utilize this information to increase your website’s ranking, then keep reading!
Blogiversary. The day you started your blog.
Call to Action. A call-to-action ( abbreviated as CTA) is a line of text or an image that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action. It is a “call” to take an “action.”
Click Bait. A well-developed headline with a catchy, viral, eminently shareable text that’s bound to draw readers in. That’s what clickbait does. It’s designed to be sensational to be the magnet that brings people to a web page.
Lead Magnet. These are incentives you give people for subscribing to your blog.
Opt-In. An incentive for people to subscribe to, or opt-in to, your blog.
Conversion Rate. The number of visitors to a website or recipients of an email who not only view the email but go ahead to purchase the product or service you are selling.
Curated Content: A hand-picked content called curated content.
cPanel: It is a tool that you can use to configure all the technical settings of the account without any professional need called cPanel. The cPanel support is usually provided by all the web hosting plan providers.
Celeblog: Celeblog is all about blogs that have information about media personalities and celebrities. These blogs usually take information from Paparazzi sources.
Clix: Clix is a personal circle of online communities of a blogger.
Cost Per Click: CPC is the amount you pay for each click on your advertisement on Google or Facebook.
eBook: Ebook is a digital form of a book that you write, and a reader can get it at the Amazon Kindle store or in the form of a PDF from the site.
Cost per mile: Amount of money you spend for 1000 impressions for your advertisement on an ad platform.
Creative Commons. A type of licensing used generally at photo-sharing sites.
Google Search Console. Formerly “Webmaster Tools.” Also called “GSC.” To help you monitor how your pages perform in google search engines.
Internet Water Army: The Internet water army stands for the team paid to post comments on a site. They are usually used to spread false information.
Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing term is for the overuse of the primary keyword in a post. People often use it to get higher traffic in their blog posts. However, it’s not a recommended method.
Graphic. A unique and customized visual representation of your content.
Gravatar. An image that follows you from site to site appears beside your name when you post on a blog or leave a comment.
Infographic. A visual image such as a chart or diagram represents any information or data organized to help viewers access a lot of information about your website or a particular post.
Intermediate Blogger. An intermediate blogger is someone that knows all the basics of blogging. These bloggers have a lot of posts on their blogs and know the best practices of blogging, like creating quality content that people want to read and optimizing for search engines. They might rank 10th for a few posts since they haven’t done everything needed to get traffic to their blog.
Favicon. A favicon is that little image you see at each of your internet tabs.
Forums. Blog forums are like chat rooms where marketers and bloggers discuss a chosen topic of interest.
Guest Post. Writing and publishing an article on someone else’s blog.
Influencer. A person who has an above-average or high impact in a specific niche and topics online.
Like for Like. It is a content marketing strategy where you like something of theirs and that like something of yours.
Meta Description (MD). The description seen by search engines on your blog or posts; is significant for great SEO.
Meta Title (MT). It is an SEO Title.
Pain Point. Also known as your readers’ problem, solving these problems or pain points will make your blogging successful.
Panda Penalty. It is when blogs with thin content are penalized by putting them at the bottom of search results.
Permalink. It is the URL of the post you have published.
Pingback. This content marketing strategy is where bloggers link each other’s posts to their web pages.
Plagiarism. Plagiarism is where a blogger takes another’s work and misrepresents it as their own
Plugin. Software that adds functions or extends functions of a WordPress blog.
Referral Traffic. These are viewers who visit your website by clicking on the link from a different website together.
Semantic Search. It is a search with meaning” approach based on contextual searching where you put an effort to understand the searcher’s intent.
SERP. It is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Results Page.
Sidebar. An area on the side of your blog that you can add widgets to customize your website or blog.
Widgets. These are tools or content that can be added to your sidebar for easy access by your audience.
Sitemap. A list of the pages on a website- used by search engines for “crawling” and ranking your site.
Spam. This term means flooding the internet with many copies of the same message to force your message on people who would not wish to receive it.
Spammer. An individual who sends undesired messages.
Stop Words. Stop words are commonly used words that can drop your SEO ranking.
TLDR. “Too Long Didn’t Read” This is an explanation you can leave at the end of the article you didn’t read thoroughly to let other readers know why.
Final thoughts:
If you’re starting in the world of blogging, it can be challenging to know where to start. The following list of top blogging terms will help new bloggers find their feet and begin this exciting journey! What are your favorite tips or tricks when getting started with blogging? Share them in the comments below so we can all learn together!
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