Blogging Glossary

When you read this site or other sites on the web, you will come across many terms and acronyms and might wonder what that means. If you are new to blogging and to the world of internet, this is one of the first hurdles you will need to pass – understanding what the blogger is trying to say. For that, you have to acquaint yourself with common terminology related to blogging and internet in general.

As you keep reading and keep executing you will slowly get it but in the initial days, you will be a little confused over the terminology used in blogging. In this page, I have tried to explain commonly used terminology and acronyms in short, so you understand what that term actually means. Think of this as a glossary of anything related to writing and maintaining blogs.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.

So let’s say you are writing a blog on “Recipes”. Your blog has developed a good following and has decent traffic. Now you write about an affiliate product on your blog and promote that product. When somebody clicks a link on your site, goes to the company website of that product and buys it, you earn a commission. The company pays you that commission on a monthly basis for each valid sale that came through your website.

API

API stands for application programming interface.

It is a set of routines and code which a provider provides, using which you can achieve a given set of results in a given set of circumstances. API’s are generally provided by software service providers so that their users can use the API to achieve desired results.

So let’s say you sign up in an e-commerce website as a seller and want to display products from a specific category on your website. You can use the API of that e-commerce website and write a piece of code which will display specific products from a specific category on your website. Whenever that category is updated with new products and old products are removed, the same changes will be automatically reflected on your website.

Ajax

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

This is a technology using which a webpage can communicate with a web server or scripts stored in some web server. Using this technology, you can send as well as receive information in a variety of formats, including JSON, XML, HTML, and even text files.

Alexa

Alexa.com is an internet company which provides estimated traffic statistics of a website and “Alexa Rank” of a website which ranks website according to their popularity on the web and how much traffic it receives on a given month. While I do not take Alexa data that seriously, a lot of bloggers do. It is worth noting that although the traffic estimates that are shown on the website are not an exact match but it is still a good way to do “Guesswork” on a website’s popularity, traffic, and other things. The company also provides SEO tools and other marketing tools which you can use for a paid subscription.

Akismet

Akismet is an anti-spam service which prevents comment spam for WordPress blogs and websites. Akismet analyzes millions of comments on a regular basis and flags them as spam, thereby helping bloggers and website owners save time and effort in eliminating spam comments from their sites, which results in good user experience.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that is used to make a hyperlink.

So we can link to this website in different ways. I can say “Click here” or “Homepage” so in the former case, the anchor text is “Click here” while in the latter case the anchor text is “Homepage.

Anchor texts are a good signal for SEO and one should use anchor text wisely to improve search engine optimization of their blogs and websites. Spammy anchor texts pointing to third party sites can severely harm your rankings. Learn more about Anchor texts

Blog Roll

A Blogroll is a list of links that are displayed in your site’s template or in an individual page.

Blogrolls were very popular in the primitive days of blogging when bloggers used to recommend other sites in their website as a blogroll. It continues to be popular today and is a great way to feature the most useful websites to your readers, however the usage has diminished overtime and it is not as widespread anymore.

It is not a bad practice to include Blog Rolls in your website or blog and it won’t harm your search rankings, provided you do not overdo it, do not participate in link exchanges and do not link to sites with low quality content or spam.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.

So let’s say your website gets 100 visitors every day and out of these 100 visitors, 80 people leave the site from the first page itself without going to any other page. In this case, the bounce rate is 80%.

Blogs with low popularity have higher bounce rates compared to blogs with higher popularity. A generic website may have a greater bounce rate than a blogger due to short attention span of readers but this metric varies from one website to another.

Bookmarks

A Bookmark saves the address of a website which lets you quickly access it in future, without having to type the address manually or remember it.

Blogger or Blogspot

Blogger or Blogspot is a blogging platform which you can use to create blogs for free, without having to setup a web server and deal with technical things. It comes with your Google account and is extremely easy to start a blog, write content and build a readership.

Blogger is ideal for hobby bloggers but if you want to write blogs for a living, I would highly recommend using self-hosted WordPress.org over any other blogging platform.

Blackhat SEO

Black hat SEO is a terminology used to depict illegitimate ways of gaining search engine rankings. Usually, black hat methods do not follow SEO guidelines set by Google and other search engines and these methods focus only on getting search rankings by hook or crook.

Banner ads

A banner ad is a form of advertising which is used by websites to display advertisements of an advertiser. When clicked on the banner ad, the visitor is often redirected to the advertiser’s website.

Banner advertisements are very common on the web and it has been in practice since the web’s inception. Banner ads comes in different sizes and positions, please refer to this image to get an idea about banner ad sizes.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth or server bandwidth is often referred to as the amount of data that is transmitted by your web server to your site visitors within a given period of time (usually a day). So if the average size of your website’s pages is 1 MB and your web hosting provider gives a limit of 1 GB of bandwidth per day, you can at most serve 1024 visits.

Most web hosting plans do not impose any limitation on server bandwidth but if you are opting for dedicated or VPS plans, there could be limitations. You should check with your webhost on bandwidth limitations and setup your website accordingly.

Back link

A backlink is a link which another websites uses to link to your website or blog or any internal page of your website.

When you link to your own site’s page, it is called an “Internal link”. Backlink is that link which is placed in another website which you do not have or own. Backlinks are a strong indicator of SEO and authority of a website and it is generally considered a good practice to gain more backlinks in a legitimate way. Backlinks that are purchased or sourced unnaturally can harm your search rankings so you have to be careful with them.

CMS (Content management system)

A content management system (CMS) is a software which you can use to manage the content of your website or blog. A content management system can be cloud based or self managed but the goal of the content management system is to help you manage the content that is published in your website.

WordPress is the most popular content management system with bloggers but there are other content management systems like Drupal, Joomla.

CSS

CSS stands for Cascading style sheet.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the design and presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML. Without CSS, the design of a webpage will default to the design that comes with the browser, which is often ugly and not reader friendly.

A CSS document helps you design the website the way you want it to look and is often coded into a .css document and called in the source of your web page. CSS can be internal or external, depending on how your website is coded. Here is a good entry level tutorial on CSS

CTR (Click through rate)

Click through rate is that metric which tells you the ratio of how many people clicked a link that is contained in a document to how many people viewed that document.

So let’s say you have a blog post with three links in it – Link A, link B and Link C. 100 people viewed that page and out of those 100 people 10 people clicked on Link A, 23 people clicked on Link B and none of them clicked on Link C. In this case, click through rate of Link A is 10%, click through rate of Link B is 23% and click through rate of Link C is 0.

Click through rates are a strong signal of usability and it is often a great metric for marketing and checking where users click. CTR is also used to measure performance of advertisements, conversion rates and other things.

CamelCase

CamelCase is the practice of writing words in such a way that each word in the middle of a phrase begins with a capital letter.

So This Is a Camel Case Statement Where Every Word Of the Phrase Begins With A Capital Letter.

Camel Case is often used to write Titles and headlines of a blog post but it is discouraged while writing the actual content of the psot.

Captcha

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether or not the user is human.

You will see Captcha tests when filling out comment or registration forms of websites. This is to ensure that the form is being filled by a human brain and automated bots are not filling it. Webmasters, bloggers and site owners use captcha to reduce spam and allow only authentic submissions.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a term often used in Search engine terminology which refers to the practice of serving different text to users and different text to search engines to inflate rankings.

Cloaking is an illegitimate way to lure search engines to get more traffic and should not be practiced at all. It results in bad user experience and can severely damage the reputation of your site in the eyes of search engines. Learn more about Cloaking as mentioned in Google webmaster guidelines.

Conversion or Conversion Rate

Conversion of conversion rate is often an analytic metric which is used to measure the ROI of a goal against a given set of circumstances.

So let’s say you put a banner ad in the left corner of your website and get 10 clicks a day. You remove that banner ad and put it at the bottom corner of your site and get 4 clicks a day. This is called Click through rate.

However, you observe that the people who clicked the ads in the left corner of the site did not do a registration on your site but the people who clicked the ad at the bottom corner of the site did register.

Based on this data, we can conclude that the conversion rate of signups in higher for the bottom corner ad, compared to the ad that was put on top. Although the CTR was less, the conversion rate was high.

Deep Linking

Deep linking is the process of linking to the exact webpage of a website, rather than linking just to the homepage of the site.

When you credit a source, you should link to that exact page and not to the homepage to ensure that when your readers click through the link, they can see the exact content that you are referring. This philosophy of linking to the exact content that you are mentioning in your webpage is called Deeplinking.

Domain name

A domain name is an identification string which is used to quickly see the content that is hosted in an IP address.

When you read a website on the web, you are actually making a request to read the content stored in an IP address. It is difficult to remember IP addresses of different websites since they contain arbitrary numbers. Hence, the concept of domain name has evolved which helps you remember the name of an IP address and lets you send a request from your browser so you can read the content on that webpage.

So if you have a son, you give him a name e.g John and do not refer to him in any other way e.g a 5 year old human being with two hands, two legs, living in XYZ location. Domain name is the exact same thing but for websites which let’s you read the interact with a website without having to remember it’s IP address.

Domain name registrar

A domain name registrar is a company or organization or commercial entity that manages the registration of Internet domain names. You cannot create domain names on your own and you will have to buy it through a company which manages the buying and management of domain names. Popular domain name registrars include Godaddy.com, namecheap.com, Name.com.

Most of the hosting companies also allow you to register a domain name, when you avail a web hosting package from them.

Evergreen content

Ever green content is referred to as content which will always stay “Fresh”, no matter how old it is.

Readers want to read new content which you write on your blog. As time evolves, old content on your site remains unread in your archives and they are no longer relevant after a given period of time. However, “Ever green content” stays relevant and fresh no matter when it was written. It makes sense today, it will make sense 5 years down the line and so on.

Ever green content is a good way to attract links from other blogs and give your readers valuable resources to read.

FTP

FTP is the abbreviation for File transfer protocall, a standard network protocall used to transfer files between a computer to a web server.

When you purchase a web hosting plan from a web hosting company, you are often given FTP credentials using which you can transfer the files of your website to your web hosting server. To transfer files using FTP, you can use desktop based FTP clients like FileZilla

Favicon

A favicon is a file containing one or more small icons associated with a particular website or web page. The favicon is visible in the top left corner of the browser tab where the website is loaded and is often a visual identifier of the webpage which is being loaded.

It is upto the website owner to set a desired favicon for his website and one can choose to have no favicon at all. A favicon helps to differentiate between websites when many sites are open in the visitor’s computer.

Feedburner

Feedburner is a service from Google which let’s you manage RSS feeds of your blog or website in a better way, compared to the default one. Using feedburner you will have access to useful analytics on your website’s RSS feed, email subscribers, content and other things.

Google Adsense

Google adsense is a program run by Google which let’s you monetize your online content and earn money selling contextual advertisements on your website or blog or YouTube channel. Companies or Individuals who want to display or promote their products through ads enroll in the Google Adwords program while publishers who want to earn money for the online content join the Google adsense program.

Google adsense is by far the best contextual advertising program out there and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to earn revenue from their sites through contextual advertisements.

Google Analyics

Google Analytics is a website analytics service provided by Google which lets you measure your website’s analytical statistics, traffic, visits, pageviews, impressions and other things. Using Google analytics you can draw conclusions on your website’s performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, setup Goals, see geolocation, language, technology which your users use to access your website, what browsers they use, what screen resolution is the most popular and so on and so forth. Here is how you can integrate Google analytics in your WordPress website.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service offered by Google which lets site owners, bloggers and webmasters see insights about their sites and learn how the site performs in Google search results. This is one of the recommended ways to stay compliant with Google webmaster quality guidelines, ensure Google can crawl and index the content on your site and make sure things related to the SEO of your site is in shape.

Ignoring Google webmaster tool guidelines is a no no if you are serious about blogging and use it to make a living online, like I do.

Gravatar

Gravatar is an abbreviation for “Globally recognized avatar”. The service let’s you add multiple email addresses to your account and associate the same or different pictures with each email address. When you post a comment on any website which uses the Gravatar system, your picture is shown in the comments area that recognizes your identity on the web.

.HTACCESS

Htaccess is a configuration file for use on web servers running the Apache Web Server software. Notice there is a “dot” infront of the filename, without the dot the file is not configured to work properly.

When a .htaccess file is placed in a directory which is in turn ‘loaded via the Apache Web Server’, then the .htaccess file is detected and executed by the Apache Web Server software. These .htaccess files can be used to alter the configuration of the Apache Web Server software to enable/disable additional functionality and features that the Apache Web Server software has to offer.

HTML

HTML stands for Hyper text mark up language and is the language used to code web pages.

The websites which you visit are all coded in HTML. Some use PHP or other scripting languages for its functioning but at the heart of the website, the structure and content is coded in HTML language.

HTML Sitemap

An HTML sitemap is a page on the website which let’s your site visitors navigate through the site easily, from an index page.

Generally, the HTML sitemap will contain important sections of the website and let the user browse to the depper pockets of the website without having to search and find content on their own. An HTML sitemap is usually segemented by topics, categories, tags, date and may not contain more than 1000 links per page.

An HTML sitemap has some SEO value but you won’t lose much if you don’t have one. That said, it is a good practice to offer a useful HTML sitemap to your website visitors so that they can navigate the site properly and find content or pages that interests them the most. This video by Google engineer Matt Cutts explains the benefit of using an HTML sitemap.

Hotlinking

Hotlinking is the practice of embedding image, document or other video content in your website by copying the link of the video file hosted on the source server and not copying the file itseld to your own.

This is usually done to save bandwidth and is considered a malpractice. When you hotlink images and other content from someone else’s server you are keeping the traffic in your site but you are using someone else’s server resources. Hotlinking should be avoided and you should also prevent other users from hotlinking your content (this can be done through an HTACCESS file).

IP address

An IP Address is a unique string of numbers separated by periods that identifies each computer using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a network.

When a computer is connected to a network, the network assigns the computer an IP address. This IP address is the address of the computer in the network it is being connected to. If the computer is connected to the internet, it can be accessed through the IP address it has. If the computer is a web server and hosts files of a website, the website can be accessed through the IP address of the computer. This need several configurations on the computer and is a little technical in nature.

Inorganic traffic

Inorganic traffic is simply put any traffic which you get when the user arrives by not typing a search keyword in search engines. This may include traffic from social media, traffic from advertisements, traffic from marketing campaigns, email newsletters and so on.

Organic traffic is the traffic which comes to your website by typing something in the search engines and Inorganic traffic is all traffic excluding Organic traffic.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming language which is used to run scripts on web pages that adds interactivity on the site. Javascript codes adds a lot of added functionality which HTML does not provide

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is an seo technique in which a webpage is stuffed with unnecessary keywords so that it has a higher chance of ranking in search engine result pages. Ideally a website should have content in the most natural way as it is possible but keyword stuffed pages are written with the sole goal of ranking for the purpose of particular keywords.

Keyword stuffing is one of the black hat seo techniques and should be avoided to stay complaint with Google webmaster quality guidelines.

Keyword research

Keyword research is a practice which is used by bloggers and site owners to improve the visibility of their site in search results for specific keywords. Keyword research is an integral part of Search engine optimization and there are many tools and web services available which let’s you perform keyword research for the niche you want.

Keywords

In search engine optimization, a keyword is a particular word or a group of words which describes what a specific web page is all about. Keywords convey the message to search engines that this page is about this topic and not that topic. Appropriate keywords on a page help search engines understand the theme and content of the page, so it can display the same to users when found relevant with a query.

Landing Page

A Landing page is that page where a visitor lands, once he clicks a link from another site or clicks a link from the search engine. Any page on the website where the visitor first lands can be marked as a “Landing page”

Site owners and bloggers often create different landing pages to capture different visitors with different intents and then they funnel the users towards their sales or other objectives. The goal of a landing page is to convert the visitor into a sale, into a lead, into revenue or anything else.

Linkbait

A “Linkbait” is a special page or content on the website which is used to attract links from other websites, either organically or through referral. When you create a really useful resource which provides lots of useful information about a topic or niche, you are basically creating a “Linkbait”. Linkbait can be of different types, it can be a funny post, a controversy, something which will attract widespread attention from other sites and will cause them to link to yours is often called a “Linkbait”

These posts have high chances of getting links from other sites since people generally appreciate good work through a hyperlink. Linkbaits adds more SEO juice to the website and is considered a good seo practice by many.

Long Tail of Search

Long tail of search refers to a long keyword string used by a user on a search engine to find your website or blog post.

Google and other search engines will show different links depending on the keyword the user is searching for. If the keyword phrase contains just one word, the search results will vary, compared to when the keyword has multiple words or phrases.

Long tail of search refers to the long query strings which users type to find the most relevant content which may contain the answer they are searching for.

Example of a long tail keyword phrase – how to solve overheating problem in Intel computer

MicroBlogging

Microblogging is a special form of blogging where the blogger published really small posts called “Micro blogs”.

Microblogging is generally followed in Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media/micro blogging communities.

Micro niche

A “Niche” is typically a market about which the blogger writes about.

If you write a blog related to computers, software, technology, your niche is “Technology”. This is a Niche where you operate your blogging business. This niche is fairly big and has the maximum number of bloggers so expect cut throat competition to rank for keywords you want.

A micro niche is simply a subset of the broader niche. So let’s say you start a blog on “web applications” and keep writing about web applications alone. In that case, you are operating in the technology niche but limiting yourself to only one corner market or “Micro niche”

Meta Description

The meta description is a ~160 character snippet, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a page’s content. Search engines show the meta description in search results mostly when the searched for phrase is contained in the description. Optimizing the meta description is a very important aspect of on-page SEO

A newsletter is a regularly distributed publication which is given to users within a given interval of time.

When you start blogging, you can offer your posts as email newsletters which will let your readers read the content from their email inbox. This will spread your content and readers will be able to read the content without having to visit the site every other day, checking whether new content is available or not.

A newsletter is a great way to build readership and loyal audience for your blog and you should use an email newsletter service to deliver your blog posts via email.

Niche

A “Niche” is typically a market about which the blogger writes about.

If you write a blog related to computers, software, technology, your niche is “Technology”. This is a Niche where you operate your blogging business.

There can be other Niches – “Health, sports, beauty and lifestyle, fashion, movies” and so on.

No follow meta tag

A Nofollow meta tag is a way for webmasters to tell search engines – “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link”. It is a way to tell search engines not to pass seo juice from a specific page to other pages where it has links to.

If you have lot of links on a webpage and you do not want to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute in all the links, the no follow meta tag is a good way to ensure that all the links of that particular webpage are nofollowed by search bots. Here is the syntax for Nofollow meta tag

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

Nofollow link

A Nofollow link is a link which contains the rel=”nofollow” attribute in it and it tells search engines not to follow this link or flow seo juice out of this link. This is a way not to pass pagerank from specific links of your site, if you do not want Google and other search engines to pass seo juice from those links to other pages(both internal and external). Learn more about Rel nofollow links

Noindex Meta tag

A No index meta tag is a way for webmasters to tell search engines not to index the content of the page.

So when search bots arrive at a specific page of your site and see the Noindex meta tag, it will not index that page which means this page will not be shown in search engines. If this page also contains the rel=nofollow attribute, search engines will neither index the page nor it will pass any seo juice to other pages which this page links to.

Organic traffic

Organic traffic is the traffic which a website receives because of Organic search terms that users type in search results.

Organic traffic is very different from referral traffic since in organic traffic, there is no effort involved in acquiring users or customers for your website. The users type keywords in search engines and they find your website, without you having to do anything. Organic traffic is the most efficient way to gain users for your website or blog on a continued basis, and most websites or blogs rely on organic traffic alone to sustain themselves.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism if the practice of copying someone else’s work or idea and calling it your own without giving due credit where it should be given. Plagiarism could mean stealing text, content, images, videos and other intellectual work produced by an author or a company and using it in your work without attributing the source of the work. Read more about plagiarism.

PPC (Pay per click)

PPC stands for pay-per-click, this is a marketing model in which someone pays a fee to host their advertisement on search engine result pages, websites or blogs. It is a way to purchase visits to your own website from someone else’s.

Pay Per Click model is used when you do not have much organic traffic to your own website and you need to purchase traffic from a website which has organic traffic.

So for example, we have two people – Peter and John. Both have websites which deals with tours and activities in London.

Peter has lots of organic traffic coming to his website from search engines, blogs, social media and other channels while John does not have organic traffic. John wants people to come to his website and buy services and products but since his website does not have traffic, he is unable to do business.

John goes to Peter and asks whether he will allow advertisements on his site and he will pay Peter when someone clicks on an ad and lands into John’s website. This concept of buying traffic from another site to your own is called Pay Per click. Learn more about Pay per click.

Pageview

Pageview is a metric which is used to count how many times a particular page of your website was loaded in a visitor’s browser. Unique pageview means how many unique users have loaded a particular page of your website while total pageview means how many times a particular page was loaded in the visitors browser.

Pingback

A Pingback is a type of notification which is generated when someone links to a page on your website.

A Pingback has to be generated from your end to request a linkback from the website who is linking to you. This is generally taken care of by your content management system e.g WordPress, Joomla or Drupal which has Pingback capabilities built into its core. A Pingback is a good way to keep track of who is linking to you but it is recommended not to show pingbacks on the site since it may lead to poor seo results(cross linking, spam linking and other things).

Podcast

A podcast is a series of episodes which is delivered to a user when he subscribes to podcast content that you are delivering.

So let’s say you write a website and deliver podcasts to your readers in the form of audio or video. When a user subscribes to your podcast, he will receive new content in his computer or device, the moment you add new content to your podcast. A podcast originated from the word – iPod and Broadcast and generally refers to the concept of “Automatic broadcasting”.

Pop up

A pop-up is a small browser window which either appears on some action or appears on its own when a user is on a webpage. A Pop up can be either full screen or a small browser window and is often considered “obtrusive”

RSS Feed

RSS stands for really simple syndication. It is a way to syndicate content automatically when new content is available, without having to explicitly visit a website or page. RSS feeds also benefit users who want to receive timely updates from favorite websites or to aggregate data from many sites.

RSS feeds is a great way to consume content from multiple sites at one place, usually a feed reader. When you subscribe to the RSS feed of a website, you will automatically be notified when new content is published on the site, without you having to visit the site on your own. Learn more what an RSS feed is

Re-Blogging

Re-blogging is the practice of publishing someone else’s post on your blog with a link to the original source.RE-blogging is heavily followed in the Tumblr community and is not considered a good practice with respect to seo. A site which has too many re-blogged content may be listed as a spam site and will not rank well in search engines.

Re-blogging is followed by bloggers who want to curate content from different sources at their own blogs, rather than creating content on their own. If you’re passionate about a subject but don’t want to write about that subject but collect useful content, links and media around that content in your blog, you should adopt the concept of “Re-blogging”.

Referral traffic

Referral traffic is the traffic which you receive from other sites when someone clicks a link and arrives at your website. Referral traffic is often reported in analytics tools such as Google Analytics where traffic is segmented into two parts – organic traffic (the traffic which you receive from search engines) and referral traffic (the traffic which you receive from other sites).

Rehashing

Re-hashing is a term used to refer to the idea of publishing content that is already available from a source without adding any significant value or change.

Most of the content you read in blogs is actually re-hashed content and very little content is available as “purely original”. There is a dearth of original ideas and the blogging community often re-hashes someone else’s idea or thought without adding significant value, which leads to a lot of noise and it feels more like an echo chamber with noise and no signal.

Responsive design

Responsive web design is a concept in web design wherein the design of a website or application “responds” to the screen size of the device and adapts to it to give a good user experience. Websites whose design are not responsive in nature do not have the capacity to adapt to a smaller or larger screen size and thus it breaks when viewed from a different device, mobile, or tablet.

Responsive web design ensures that the website’s design remains readable and accessible, no matter what device it is viewed on. The design will adapt to the screen size, browser and other device specific environment to provide a good user experience. Learn more about responsive web design here.

Retweet

When you post someone else’s tweet on your profile, it is counted as a Retweet. It is synonymous to re-blogging where you post someone else’s content on your blog.

Rich Media

Rich media is a form of content which is not text.

It can be audio, video, presentations or other form of content but not text. An advertisement on the web can be composed of Rich media elements that may include audio, video, presentation or other content types. Rich media is more interactive in nature since it has non text elements which has interact with the user

digital advertising term for an ad that includes advanced features like video, audio, or other elements that encourage viewers to interact and engage with the content. While text ads sell with words, and display ads sell with pictures, rich media ads offer more ways to involve an audience with an ad.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file placed in the root directory of your website which tells search engines which directories to crawl and include in search engine results and which directories should not be crawled and included in search engine results. Learn more about Robots.txt

SERP

SERP is an acronym for Search engine result pages. When you go to a search engine, type something and see a list of results, that page where you see the results is called an SERP.

Spam

Spam is unwanted, unsolicited messages sent over the internet to users at random with the intent of advertising, spreading malware or other illegal attempts. A spam can be in the form of an email message, a blog comment, a friend request, a tweet and any other method of sending information to someone unsolicited.

The person who sends this unsolicited messages is called a Spammer and his activity is often called as spam. Learn more on spamming.

Split Testing

Split testing, also known as A/B testing is a way of conducting experiments over a website to improve a specific metric. It usually involves experimenting user activity with different designs and measuring user activity around those designs. Depending on the design and functionality of the test cases, the user activity will change which will yield different results. This way the owner of the website will be able to understand what improved a particular metric.

In Split testing, results from each variation are stored and compared to check to see which variation yielded the maximum results in similar circumstances.

Subscriber

A subscriber is a person who receives your content updates on a regular interval, either through an RSS feed or through an email newsletter. A blog subscriber is someone who consumes your content on a regular basis.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a term to create an entity which groups similar things together.

In WordPress, the word Taxonomy is used to describe tags and categories, these are the two types of taxonomies which WordPress ships by default. You can use Tags and Categories to group posts together and create a set. You can create unique taxonomies for your blog e.g quotes, mentions, links and so on.

Text Link ads

A text link ad is an advertisement which appears in the form of text links in your website page. Generally, an advertiser contacts you to put text link ads on your site, in exchange of money or any other benefit.

An advertisement can appear as a banner ad, a video ad, a thumbnail but a text link ad is usually a link embedded in your website which looks like a normal link but in reality, someone has paid you money to put that link. Text link ads are a strict no no for good seo and a website which has too many text link ads embedded in it might even be banned from search engine listings.

Timestamp

A timestamp is a sequence of characters or encoded information identifying when a certain event occurred, usually giving date and time of the day, when that event happened.

When you write a blog and maintain a website, there are lot of activities which you do on a regular basis. You write posts, you answer to comments, you save drafts and a lot of things are done on a regular basis. The content management system records all this activity in its database and also stores when that change was made. This information is stored in the form of a timestamp wherein, the date, time is stored when any change is made in the website or in the content management system. Learn more about TImestamps.

Title

A Title is an HTML tag in a webpage which briefly defines what this page is all about. The title tag is visible on the browser tab and is often shown in search engine result pages, if found suitable by search engines and if it is relevant to the content of the page in question.

Trackback

A trackback is a notification system in a content management system which allows a website owner to keep track of who has linked to the site and which page has inbound links to it. A trackback is similar to a ping back but there is a difference – a trackback has to be created manually and sends an excerpt of the content along with the link while ping backs are automated and does not send an excerpt.

URL

URL is an acronym for Uniform resource locator and refers to a web address. Any web address is basically a URL.

Unique visitors

Unique visitors refers to the number of distinct individuals requesting pages from the website during a given period, regardless of how often they visit. Visits refers to the number of times a site is visited, no matter how many visitors make up those visits.

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG stands for “What you see is what you get”. It is an editor which allows the user to see how his blog post is going to look like without publishing it. WordPress uses a WYSWYIG editor but the editor of other blogging platforms are not always WYSWIG.

Apart from blogging editors, some web development tools are also WYSIWYG. Example – Adobe Dreamweaver.

Web hosting

Web hosting often refers to a service provided by a company which lets you host the files, databases and all other necessary things needed to make a website live, in exchange of a fee. They save your files, maintain the computer where these files are kept, ensure that your site is up and running, help preserve the databases associated with your website and in return of all these services, they charge a monthly or annual fee.

Web server

A web server is a software program which runs on a computer that contains the files of your website and serves it to users, when they request to open a page of your website. Apache is one of the most used web server programs and powers most of the sites hosted on the web.

Widget

Widget can have various definitions but in the language of internet, a widget is a small utility application, often found embedded in a website or blog which serves a specific purpose. The widget is not an inherent part of the website and can be found in other websites as well, but the widget is supposed to perform the same action no matter in which website it is embedded. Example – Facebook fan page Widget, blogroll widget etc.

WordPress

WordPress is a content management system which can be used to run your blogging software or website. You can use WordPress.com to create a free website or use WordPress.org to host a self hosted WordPress blog in your own web server or with a web hosting company where you have an account.

Writers Block

Writer’s block is a state where an author loses his ability to produce original writing or content and feels stuck. This is hurdle and creativity barrier which most authors face from time to time.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is an XML file which contains the most important links of a website which is to be crawled by search engines. While an HTML sitemap is useful to the users who use the website, an XML sitemap is used by search engines to find out which pages has new content, which pages has changed and needs to be crawled again. In short, the search engines use the XML sitemap to navigate through a website and find content which has not been found yet.

eBook

An ebook is an electronic version of a book which can be read in a computer or any other device which supports the display of an ebook through an ebook reading software. Most ebooks are written in PDF and read using Adobe PDF which can be read through a computer or a mobile or tablet device.

iFrame

An iFrame is an HTML document that is embedded in another HTML document through an <iframe> html tag. iFrames are used to embed dynamic content from a webpage into another webpage and if often used to load widgets, or dynamic content hosted on another website or application.

vLogging

vlogging stands for Video blogging. A vblog is a blog that contains video content and a vlogger is the blogger which published video content. vlogging is the act of publishing video content instead of just text.

This is surely not a comprehensive blogging glossary since there are many more complex terms which one needs to know before diving into the world of writing blogs. However, I have tried to keep this list short and concise and have excluded the very complex concepts from this list, so you don’t feel overwhelmed. You will learn the complex concepts on your own when you talk the talk and walk the walk. I have only introduced the basic ones, so when you get it and start doing, the complex ones won’t be much trouble.