Are you looking for a glossary of blogging terms?
You need one.
After blogging for over five years, I can honestly tell you the blogging terms keep piling up. They certainly don’t get less.
By bookmarking this blogging glossary of blogging terms, you have a handy reference to check when unfamiliar terms come your way.
Do you want to be a better blogger?
Much of your success depends on your understanding of blogging terms that may be unfamiliar to you.
I know first-hand how frustrating not understanding blogging vocabulary can be. Not knowing needed definitions while I was trying to blog frustrated me and slowed me down when I first started out and often still does.
You may be a great blogger, but if you want to be an even better blogger, make sure you are familiar with these 119+ blogging terms.
Are you ready to end your confusion and start being a better blogger by being more informed?
Let’s dive in and learn new blog terminology. Bring on the blogging terms!
119+ Blogging Terms to Help You Be a Better Blogger, a Glossary
A
- A/B Testing – Splitting the population that is receiving your message, using a different approach with each, and then comparing your stats to see which approach was more effective.
- Affiliate – An affiliate marketer is a person who earns commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products.
- Alexa Score – Alexa.com measures your last three months of traffic. The lower your Alexa score, the better.
- Alt Text – A word or phrase that can be inserted to tell website viewers the nature or contents of an image.
- Anchor Text – The clickable text in a hyperlink.
- Auto Blogging – 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 feed from other blogs.
- Automate – Something that’s automated is controlled by a machine rather than a person. In blogging, this means converting a process to a largely automatic operation.
B
- Backlink – A backlink is any link that points to one page, from another page.
- Beta – Not in general use yet. Still in the testing stages.
- Beta Reader – A test reader. Generally, they are used to review your writing before the public sees it.
- Black Hat SEO – Characterized by the use of traps to achieve short-term SEO benefits.
- Blog – A regularly updated website or web page typically one run by an individual or small group that is written in an informal or conversational style. Also called “weblog.”
- Blogger – A person who writes for a blog.
- Blogging – Add new material to a blog.
- Blog Hop – Bloggers hop from blog to blog. This exposure helps generate traffic.
- Blogosphere – The blogging world.
- Blogroll – A collection of links to other blogs that you like reading.
- Blogversary – Your blog’s birthday.
- Bounce Rate – Basically, someone looks at your site and leaves, or bounces, away from your blog. Percentage of visitors who left the page without checking any other page. The lower the score the better since it indicates fewer people are leaving without checking out more posts or pages.
- Brand – 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. Related Reading: Here is more information about brands and branding.
C
- Call to Action – A call-to-action (usually abbreviated as CTA) is an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action. It is, quite literally, a “call” to take an “action.”
- Click Bait – A headline that gives you the feeling that you’ve developed a catchy, viral, eminently shareable piece that’s bound to draw readers in. That’s what click bait does. It’s designed to be sensational so that it can be the magnet that brings people to a web page.
- Click-Through Rate – A measurement of how many people clicked on a particular link. You can measure CTR on your website based on the number of visitors. Can also be used with email marketing to measure people who clicked on a link within your email.
- Content Marketing – A sales funnel. You write quality posts, promote your content, convert visitors to subscribers, and market them a product.
- Content Syndication – The process of pushing your blog, site, or video content out to another site, either as a full article, snippet, link, or thumbnail.
- Content Upgrade – A specific, relevant incentive for subscribing to your blog. The content upgrade should relate to the content of the post, also called “a lead magnet.”
- Conversion Rate – The number of visitors to a website or recipients of an email who take action beyond viewership.
- Copyright – A person’s legal right to their works, physical or intellectual.
- Creative Commons – A type of licensing generally used at photo sharing sites.
- Curated Content – Hand-picked content with a focus on quality (See Content Syndication).
D
- Direct Traffic – People type your URL directly into their browser.
- Domain Authority – Domain Authority is a metric on a scale of 1 to 100 where 100 indicates the best and 1 means the worst. The higher the score, the higher the rank in search engines. This is Moz’s metric. Ahrefs has the DR, a comparable metric.
- DP – DP stands for Domain Pop. This means Domain Popularity. In essence, 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 longer periods of time in order to nurture prospects or leads through the marketing funnel.
E
- Editorial Calendar – A tool used to identify when you are going to publish the content you create.
- Email – Messages distributed via electronic means using a network.
- Engagement– Retweets (and other methods of sharing), likes, and comments.
- Evergreen Content – Content that is relevant all year round.
- Expert Interview Also called an Expert Roundup or Expert Roundup Interview. You decide how many experts to interview. Ask all of them the same question. Show their bios and link to their sites. Most include pictures of the respondents.
F
- Favicon – A favicon is that little image you see at each of your internet tabs.
- Forums – Blog forums are like chat rooms. People come together to discuss a topic of interest.
G
- Google Search Console – Formerly “Webmaster Tools.” Also called “GSC.”
- Graphic – A visual representation of your content.
- Gravatar – An image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog.
- Guest Post – Writing and publishing an article on someone else’s blog.
H
- H1, H2, H3 – These are heading tags for different size headings. Ideally, they should contain your keyword.
- Host – The company that provides the space on their servers to store your blog.
- HTML – A language used for creating effects on web pages.
- Hyperlink – A link from a document to another location or file, typically activated by clicking on a highlighted word or image on the screen.
I
- Inbound Marketing – Inbound marketing is about bringing potential customers to you instead of you going to them and fighting for their attention.
- Internal Link – An internal link connects one page of a website to a different page on the same website.
- Influencer – A person who has an above-average impact in a specific niche.
- Infographic – A visual image such as a chart or diagram used to represent information or data.
- Intermediate Blogger –
An intermediate blogger is someone that know’s the X and O’s of blogging. They already have a lot of posts on their blogs and know the best practices of blogging such as:
- Creating quality content that people want to read
- Optimizing their content for search engines
They might rank 10th for a few of their posts but they haven’t done all the things needed to get enough traffic to their blog.
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K
- Keyword – A word or phrase someone is looking for.
- Keyword Research – An SEO method that entails finding and searching for keywords (the most highly used and relevant keywords) for improving your own rankings.
L
- Lead Magnet – The incentive you give people for subscribing to your blog.
- Like for Like– You like something of theirs and they’ll like something of yours.
- Link – A link is a word, group of words or image that you can click on to go to a new page or a new section within the current page.
- Linking – According to Mark Hinkle, linking is the currency of the web. Linking to a blog post that helps make your point is a service to your readers.
- Link Baiting – A link building technique. Crafting content so other content creators will link to it.
- Link Building – A technique invented by Brian Dean which involves boosting your SEO by getting other content creators to link to your site.
- Linky Party – A place to show your blog posts by leaving links and visiting other blogs.
- Longform Content – 750 words or more content in an article is considered “longform”. While writing more words takes longer, there are many advantages like a lower bounce rate and you establish yourself as an authority in your niche. One of the reasons Google considers you a better blogger is having quality longform content.
- Long Tail Keywords – longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use. How long, you ask? Long tail keywords are generally at least four words long.
Are you ready for more blogging terms?
M
- Media Kit – It’s like a blogger’s resume containing impressive statistics and accomplishments.
- Medium-Tail Keywords – a focus SEO keyword with two or three words.
- Meta Description (MD) – The description seen by search engines on your blog or posts. Important for great SEO.
- Microblog – A social media site to which a user makes short, frequent posts.
- Monetization – The process of making money through your blog with revenue you’ll earn through affiliate networks, Adsense, or any other ad network.
- Meta Title (MT) – SEO Title
N
- Niche – The specific content you blog about. A niche provides the blogger direction and focus while telling the reader what the content will be about.
O
- Off-Page SEO – The site awareness you are able to generate for your page or post.
- On-Page SEO – The content of your actual page or post, and how helpful or relevant it is to the searches.
- Opt-In – An incentive for people to subscribe to, or opt-in to, your blog. See “lead magnet.”
- Organic Traffic –  Traffic that comes from search engines, not including paid advertising. Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the most popular search engines.
P
- Page – 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 of a web page.
- Page Views – The number of times a user visits a web page.
- Paid Search – People click on display or PPC ads to get to your website.
- Pain Point – Your readers’ problem. A successful blogger is one who solves problems, or pain points, for their readers.
- Panda Penalty – Google changed their algorithms to penalize blogs with thin content by putting them at the bottom of the search results.
- PPC – Pay Per Click is a form of advertising. You get paid when people click the ads on your site.
- Permalink – The URL of the post you publish.
- Pingback – Person A posts something on his blog. Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post.
- Plagiarism – Plagiarism is taking someone else’s work or ideas and misrepresenting them as your own.
- Plugin – Software that can add functions or extend functions of a WordPress blog.
R
- Reciprocal Links – Reciprocal links are links between two sites that have been created and linked to each other for a number of possible reasons. The site owners may do this to give visitors a chance to see both sites, as they may be related, or as a show of partnership.
- Referral Traffic – People visit your website by clicking on a link from a different website.
- Retweet – A re-post or forwarded message on Twitter by another user.
- Rich Answer – Google is answering search engine queries. This started in April of 2015.
- ROI – Return on Investment – Is what you are putting in worth what you are getting out? Often used in reference to Return on Time Invested.
- RSS Feed – Stands for “Rich Site Summary,” a way for people to subscribe to your blog.
S
- SAHM – An acronym that means Stay at Home Mom.
- Search Engine Optimization – See SEO.
- Self-hosted blog – A blog where the blogger owns the site and the domain name.
- Semantic Search is based on contextual searching wherein there is an effort to understand user intent.
- SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing your blog in order to achieve better search engine results. SEO is considered complex and therefore one of the hardest blogging terms to understand.
- SERP – An acronym that means Search Engine Results Page.
- Short-tail keywords – Short tail keywords are focus SEO keywords with only one word.
- Sidebar – An area on the side of your blog that you can add widgets to.
- Sitemap – A list of the pages on a website- used by search engines for “crawling” and ranking your site.
- Skyscraper Technique – Involves building links to your blog for the purpose of improving SEO.
- Slug – a short, abbreviated title in their URLs.
- Social Media – The interaction with various people on online platforms.
- Social Media Engagement – Social media engagement can be defined as a conversation between brands and their audiences via social media platforms.
- Social Proof – Also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect correct behavior for a given situation. Everyone wants to hop on the bandwagon if they think other people are too.
- Social Search – Refers to searching user-generated content related to search queries on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
- SMS – Shaking my head. If people give you the SMS acronym on a social media site, they are frustrated with you. They indicate that with the acronym that means Shaking My Head; it’s as if they are shaking their heads in disbelief.
- Spam – Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it
- Spammer – A person who sends undesired messages.
- Sponsored Post – A post bloggers are paid to write.
- Stop Words – Stop words are common words in the slug that can hurt your SEO.Â
T
- Tagline – A tagline is a short phrase, or sentence, used to convey what your site is about.
- Target Reader – Who you want your audience to be. Who do you want to read your blog?
- Theme – The overall style of your blog.
- Thin Content – A page with no real value besides building traffic. It contains no great insights into the industry, no good information about your product, and nothing that you couldn’t find on another, similar site.
- TLDR – Too long, didn’t read. You might want to reference an article you didn’t read in its entirety. Let your readers know with this acronym explaining why you didn’t read the whole article.
- Traffic – The number of people visiting your website. Often an indicator of how successful a website is.
- Tweep – A popular name for a Twitter user.
U
- Unique Visitor – A distinct, individual visitor to a website who is only counted once, regardless how many times or web pages they visit.
- User Intent – The goal someone has in mind when they make a search.
V
- V. A. – a term for a virtual assistant, an assistant who helps you online.
- Visit – A visit is one individual visitor who arrives at your website and proceeds to browse. A visit counts all visitors, no matter how many times the same visitor may have been to your site.
W
- WAHM – An acronym that means Work at Home Mom.
- Webinar – A seminar conducted over the internet.
- White Hat SEO – Optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that are considered ethical.
- Widgets – Tools or content that can be added to your sidebar.
Conclusion: How to Be a Better Blogger with a Blogging Glossary of Blogging Terms
In conclusion, having the definitions of these blogging terms will not only help you be a better blogger, but you will be able to blog faster. You won’t be stumped by these terms or delayed because you have to take your time to look up the meanings.
Readers, please share this post so other bloggers can have access to the definitions in this blogging glossary. They can be a better blogger with this list of terms by their side. You will be a better blogger as well when you use this list as a reference of blogging terms.Â
Were there any new terms you learned? Is there any blogging vocabulary any I missed? If so, please share the blogging term and definition in the comment section.
Sources:
- blog.drumup.io
- blog.verticalresponse.com
- blogtrafficbuilder.com
- busybloggingmom.com
- google.com
- hubspot.com
- iseochecker.com
- juleskalpauli.com
- marketingpilgrim.com
- marshajustwrites.com
- mediashower.com
- neilpatel.com
- quicksprout.com
- sitepronews.com
- tendenci.com
- trickyenough.com
Blogging Terms: FAQ
What do you call a blogger?
A blog is short for “weblog.” Therefore, a blogger is someone who writes a blog, or weblog, on the internet.
What are people who read blogs called?
People who read blogs are members of the blogging community called the “blogosphere.” They are referred to as blog visitors or blog readers. When we talk about enhancing their experience on the blog, we refer to them as “users.” Thus, we discuss enhancing “user experience.”
What is a blog entry called?
A blog entry is called a “post.”
What is a spomment?
A “spomment” is an abbreviated word for spam comment.
2019 UPDATE: Marketing Terms Defined
More marketing and blogging terms:
Affiliate Marketing – In affiliate marketing, a business rewards an affiliate for bringing a visitor or a customer to the business.
Blog Marketing – Marketing using blogs.
Business Marketing – Allows companies to sell their products or services to other businesses that resell them.
Buzz Marketing relies on word-of-mouth to make sales.
Content Marketing – According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is creating and distributing content with the ultimate purpose of making sales.
[Read How to Easily Build an Effective Content Distribution Strategy.]
Context Marketing – The ability of a company to deliver what the consumer wants within the context of their history of purchases.
Database Marketing – Database marketing is marketing using the databases of customers or potential customers to make sales.
Digital Marketing – Marketing on the internet using electronic technologies.
Email Marketing – The act of sending emails to a group of people.
[Read Why These 7 Email List Providers Are the Best in 2018.]
eMarketing – Internet Marketing or Online Marketing
[Read eMarketing: How to Convince a Customer to Purchase Your Product.]
Global Marketing – Marketing internationally and capitalizing on international differences and similarities.
Guerilla Marketing – a marketing strategy that relies on low-cost, non-traditional advertising. For example, publicity would be considered guerilla marketing.
Inbound Marketing – a way of selling customers services and products using social media, content writing, and SEO.
Influencer Marketing – a form of marketing that relies on the influence of influential individuals over potential customers.
Information Marketing – information marketing relates to selling informative products for example an ebook.
Internet Marketing – a synonym for ecommerce, selling using electronic mediums.I
Location-based Marketing is based on selling online and offline using a consumer’s location.
Map Marketing – a study of different market conditions plotted on a map
Niche Marketing – a small segment of the market has specific needs, and the marketing goal is satisfying the needs of that segment of the market.
Offline Marketing – marketing without the use of the internet.
Online Marketing uses the internet to market products and services. Online marketing is also called “internet advertising” and “online advertising.”
Permission Marketing – A term devised by Seth Godin which entails marketing when advance permission is given.
Relationship Marketing focuses on keeping your customers and making them happy.
Retail Marketing – how retailers make consumers aware of their goods and services.
Search Engine Marketing – marketing using search engines.
Situational Marketing relates to the consumer’s situation. For example, a situational marketer might ask, “When does my potential customer want to receive an advertisement?”
Social Media Marketing – using social media sites to promote a product or service.
Trade Marketing – focuses more on the needs of the brand than the consumer.
Viral Marketing – a marketing technique that encourages potential customers to share information about a brand’s product or service.
Video Marketing – When the video is placed on a social media site, a new marketing strategy emerges, social video marketing. This strategy is designed to increase audience interest in a product or service by watching a video.
Related: If you enjoyed these blogging terms, here you will find more website terminology.
Janice Wald is the founder of MostlyBlogging.com and co-founder of the Mostly Blogging Academy. She is an ebook author, blogger, blogging coach, blogging judge, freelance writer, and speaker. She won the Best Internet Marketer Award and the Best Blogger Award at the 2021 Infinity Blog Awards. Wald was also nominated as 2019 Best Internet Marketer by the Infinity Blog Awards and in 2017 as the Most Informative Blogger by the London Bloggers Bash. She’s been featured on Small Business Trends, the Huffington Post, and Lifehack.
