Blogging Terms You Need to Know in 2024 Blogging Glossary

Starting a blog can be overwhelming, with all the content that you want to write and all the new terms that you will need to learn. In this post, I am posting terms that I find important to know as a blogger. This list is going to be updated regularly.

1. What is AdSense (Google AdSense)?

It is what website owners usually use to earn money from displaying advertisements on their websites/blogs. This helps you, as a website owner, earn money from other businesses that are trying to promote their services on Google’s ad network.

2. What is A/B Testing?

It is a method used to learn what your customers like and prefer. Usually, you will test two variations and see the results. From the data you get, you adjust future actions based on that.

This method helps to deliver the best results based on what the customer prefers. It is most commonly used in affiliate marketing, YouTube thumbnails, and web design. It all depends on the conversion goals of the experiment.

3. What does Above-the-Fold (ATF) mean?

When you open a website, the first thing you see is what is called above the fold. So the minute you scroll down, you are no longer in what is called above the fold. 

This term is important to understand as a blog or website owner. Above the fold is what your site visitors will see when they land on your page.

Optimizing ATF means a higher chance your visitors will stick to your website, and a higher chance means you will increase your Google ranking. The goal here is to deliver the best customer experience.

Let’s Take an example from ProBlogger Website. The below picture shows what their ATF looks like. We can see the logo of the website, a call to action to join a Facebook group, the menu, and what ProBlogger is about with some call to action.

4. What is Affiliate Marketing?

For bloggers and website owners, affiliate marketing is a source of income that depends on promoting a product of another business, be it a physical or digital product.

Each time a website visitor buys the affiliated product, you, as the website owner, earn a percentage of that sale. Usually, digital products offer a much higher percentage compared to physical products.

5. What is Affiliate Marketing Disclosures?

Under US law, it is mandatory to have an affiliate disclosure or statement if you are an affiliate partner.

It’s usually a statement that clarifies to your website visitor that a company pays you to promote their service or product. The disclosure is important, as most companies require it.

6. What is an Affiliate Platform / Network?

To find companies that will pay you as a website owner or blogger to promote their products, you can register with affiliate platforms like ShareASale, AWIN, and CJ Affiliate and choose and apply for the products or companies you want to promote.

So affiliate networks are like the middle man that makes it easy for both publishers (you) and businesses to find each other. 

7. What are Analytics?

Since you are building your website, you will need tools to measure the site’s performance. Key metrics include the number of visitors, average session time, engagement rate, and so on. Knowing more data about your website performance is essential to making future decisions about the website.

One of the most used platforms for analytics is Google Analytics. The information gained from analysing this data will help you understand whether your current effort in writing blog posts is helping grow your website.

8. What is Anchor Text?

This was tricky for me to understand. When you read a blog article, you see text that is underlined, usually with a different colour than the rest of the article, and if you click on it, it takes you to a different page. That is an anchor text.

You can see it in the picture. This anchor text is important for search engines because it helps them understand the context in which you are linking to another page, but it is also important to the user as it helps them understand what they should expect if they click on that link. Clear, straightforward anchor text is important to both your users and the search engines.

9. What is Alt Text?

Alt text actually means image alternative text. Each picture that appears on your website has an alt text, which is basically the description of your picture.

Since search engines cannot see the picture (at least not yet), they need to access the alt text to understand the picture topic and therefore index it. It’s hard to get indexed if Google does not understand what your picture is about in the first place.

Alt text is also used by screen readers for people with visual impairments. Screen readers will read the alt text, which makes it accessible for people with a lack of sight.

10. What is Alexa Ranking?

Every blog owner wants more visitors to their website. Alexa Ranking is what you can use as a website owner to understand your website ranking, and from there, you can start your journey to track your website growth.

The rule of thumb for Alexa ranking is that the lower your website number, the more popular it is. Alexa rank uses the number of daily viewers and the number of viewed pages to give a ranking of how popular the website is.

The tool is delivered by Amazon; it was shut down in 2022. However, the system’s APIs are still working, and there are similar tools that provide the score so far. 

11. What is Atom Feed?

It was developed as an alternative option for RSS Feed in 2005. Atom feed is used for content distribution and what it does is to allow the users to access posts from multiple websites or blogs without the need to visit each and every website.

After the user subscribes to the feed, they receive a summary of the latest content in their browser. From the summary they will have the option of clicking to go to the website to read the post.

12. What is Audioblog?

From the name it should have something to do with Audio/Sounds don’t you think? In brief it is blog type where the blog posts are accompanied with audio files.

An audio blog should contain recordings and can contain texts, videos, and photos aswell,l which is in contrast with apodcast,t which can only contain audio. Audioblogs can increase your audience exposure by making it easy for people with visual impairments to listen to your content.

Also, having it can add a personal touch to your content, which can help you reach and maintain your blog visitors. As you know, the more unique your content is, the better the chance your visitors will remember you and return to your website.

You can use your own voice, or you can try and use some well known text-to-speech services to convert your written text into an audio file. AI-enabled text-to-speech services are getting better and better, and they even have the option to clone your own voice and use it in the process. You can Check out this tool from ElevenLabs that can convert text to speech, it has one of the most used voiceovers in social media. You can also clone your voice.

13. What is an Anonoblog?

An anonoblog is a term used for authors who blog anonymously or using a pseudonym. Anonoblog is a good option for people to express themselves without fear of repercussions, be it social, political, or economic. However, it can also be a tool to spread misinformation.

14. What is Astroturfing (SEO)?

Depending on the context, for example, in marketing, It is the process where a business starts creating fake positive reviews about their company/product to help manipulate the viewer’s opinion and create the impression of popularity about the product/business.

This falls under black-hat SEO, and fake reviews are often spotted by Google easily. The business or website risks being penalised by Google if an astroturfing campaign is used by them. 

The term is also used in a political context, which does not differ much from the marketing definition. The purpose of astro surfing in political views can be to try to manipulate the general public’s view of a specific policy or topic through fake comments on social media.

15. What is a Blog?

On any given day, a question might pop up in my head, and the next thing I do is type the question into Google. Most websites that answer the question do so in their blog articles.

We use blogs every day, but do you know what a blog was originally? It is a combination of the words “web” and “log”. So a blog is a weblog. The first blogs were personal in nature, a diary that got updated frequently.

This involved a more sophisticated form of online presence for both individuals and businesses for information and update sharing. Blogs are now the main source of information for people around the world.

16. What is a Blog Header?

It is simply the first thing you see when you enter a blog, before you scroll down to read the blog post.

How your blog header looks depends on many aspects, like the type of content you are providing, the target audience, your personality, and the mood you want your audience to feel when they enter your blog.

The two most important elements that you should at least show in your header are: your logo and the navigation bar. It is an important part of your blog/website, as it is the first impression that your visitors will have about your blog and your content.

17. What is a Blog Footer?

A website or blog footer can be found after the visitor scrolls down to the end of the page. website footer will be shown at the end of every page in your website/blog. There many different elements that you can include in your blog footer, but the essential ones are: 

• Your website policies: This includes the copyright notice, privacy ppolicy, andterms and conditions of use. 
• Your website’s site map
• Your contact informations 
• Social media accounts 
• Main pages in your website / Blog
• FAQs page
• Possibly the main products you want to sell

The design of the footer and the elements you want to include depend highly on your business goals, target audience, and the mood you want to set.

18. What is a Blog Sidebar?

Depending on the type of blog design you go with, you can have one or two side bars. In case two side bars, you will see the blog article in the middle, sandwiched between two columns.

For one sidebar design, you will see the article content taking the majority of either the right or left side of the page, with one column for the sidebar. What you can put on the side bar can be anything from:

• Contact information
• Your Picture [Author picture]
• Categories of your content 
• Latest posts 
• Search box 
• Ads space 

Some blogs like to maximise their revenue by filling their sidebard with ad space. However, this method can have a negative impact on your website visitors’ experience. At least from my experience, if I enter a blog/website with so many ads, I leave the fastest I can.

19. What is a Blog Carnival?

A blog carnival is, from my interpretation, like a regular event that can be organised and hosted by a blog, where readers and other bloggers can contribute to this event.

Usually, a blog carnival focuses on a specific topic that is related to the blogger who is hosting the event. The blogger will receive a number of submissions, and he will be taking on the role of the editor to decide whether or not the posts will be posted in the blog carnival based on their relevance to the carnival topic and their quality. Majority of blog carnivals post new issues in their regular schedule.

Visitors to blogging carnivals usually expect fresh new content based on the schedule of the carnival, and this is what makes it a good opportunity for increased traffic.

20. What is Blaudience?

It is a term that consists of the words “blog” and “audience”. Blaudience refers to the viewers of a blog.

21. What is Blawg?

It is a term that refers to blogs about law or law-related issues. It consists of the word “blog” and the word “law”. You can see they take the “aw” from law and place it instead of the “o” in blog. Most of blawgs are written by layers, law students and people who have good understanding about law related issues. 

22. What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate is a measurement in Google Analytics of the percentage of visitors that did not engage with the content. So in Google Analytics, a session is considered as engaged if it meets one of the following criteria: 

• The viewer has been on the page for more than 10 seconds. 
• The viewer has engaged in a conversion event (something like signing up to an email list, making a purchase or something else that you define as a conversion event). 
• The visitor viewed more than 2 pages on your website. 

So if any of the previous criteria have been met, the session is considered as an engaged session. If the viewer did not meet any of that criteria, it is considered as a bounce rate. The average bounce rate depends on the website industry. For example, for the education industry, the average bounce rate is around 42%. For the e-commerce and retail industries, the average is between 20% and 45%.

23. What is Blue Ocean?

Blue Ocean is a strategy that was coined in 2005 by Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne to denote industries that have not yet existed and, therefore, are unknown.

Red Ocean, on the other hand, refers to the existing market, in which companies try to outperform each other in order to win a share of the market. The market in those industries is red from the cutthroat competition. While blue ocean refers to the empty ocean, that has great opportunities and an untapped audience. 

This blue ocean strategy can also be applied to blogs, because for so many niches and industries, the competition is hard, and for a new blog to start ranking, it can take a lot of time and effort. However, there are still some blue ocean markets that haven’t been explored and have good potential.

24. What are Backlinks?

The first time I heard about the keyword backlinks, I had trouble understanding it, and why these “backlinks” are so valuable in the internet world. So a backlink is simply a link from another website to your website. Easy?

When these links come from reputable websites, your content will be much more authoritative in the eyes of Google’s algorithm. The more backlinks you get to your website in general, and for each web page in your website specifically, the better your chance is to rank higher in Google searches, and therefore get more traffic to your website.

But there are some criteria for the types of links that do actually help your website rank higher. For example, and as said earlier, the more trustworthy the website that is linking to your content, the better it is for you. Also, links from websites that have no relevance to your type of content are not as valuable as those that are from the same type of content/ niche that you write about.

25. What is Black Hat SEO?

The term Black Hat SEO (Search Engine optimization) refers to the set of practices that are used to gain higher rankings in the search results and  are against Search Engines guidelines and terms of use.

Since search engine traffic can grow or break a website, it is important to understand what practices can be used to increase the webpage ranking without violating their terms of use.

Previously, Google’s ability to identify websites that use black hat SEO was weak, and therefore, so many websites used these methods and tactics to gain ranking in search results. Butcurrently, Google’s algorithm is so advanced that it is able to spot those who use black hat methods to gain ranking.

If your website is designed to violate Google’s guidelines, you risk being penalised. Some black hat SEO tactics include: keyword stuffing, cloaking, providing low quality content, using misleading redirects, using private blog networks, and much more.

26. What is Badbot or Spam Bot?

Bots are computer programs that are designed for a specific purpose. Let’s take a well known example of a good type of bot, which is Google indexing bots.

These types of bots are used by Google to discover new content and index it. On the other hand, there are so many types of bad bots that are designed for several harmful goals. Some examples of bad bots are DDoS bots, which are designed to attack and disturb a website by overwhelming it with traffic from different sources.

Other types of bad bots that you might need to know are: web content scraping bots, take over bots, and spam bots. There are several practices that can limit the impact of bad bots on a website, such as implementing captcha puzzles, using bot detection softwares, and implementing bot management policies such as blacklisting traffic that comes from suspicious IP addresses.

27. What does Blacklist From Google mean?

Being on Google Blacklist is not the same as being deindexed from their search results. Being on Google Blacklist is usually because your website has some suspicious or harmful codes and is spreading malwares to its visitors.

It is usually an indication that the website was hacked. What a website visitor will see when they try to access a Blacklisted website is a sign that says “This site may harm your computer” or “Reported Attack Page!”, There are many different versions of the message.

Usually, if a website is blacklisted, you will see a huge drop in organic traffic. As said earlier, being blacklisted is not the same as being de-indexed, because usually the reason for being blacklisted is that the website is spreading malwares. However, the reason for a website to be deindexed can be due to black hat SEO practices, or the content deindexed being of poor quality.

28. What is Blog Hopping?

Blog hops are events that can be organised one time or in a recurring way. They are considered a networking event where all the participants will sign up to post something related to the agreed theme.

The posts will usually be posted on the same day, sometimes over a period of a few days. The goal of blog hoping is to allow bloggers to connect with each other. Usually, it’s also good for driving new traffic to your website and also can help in your SEO efforts. Blog hopping can also help in creating social proof, because most of the participants usually comment on each other’s posts.

But the most important benefit is to make new relationships and connections with other bloggers in the same niche. This type of relationship can be beneficial in the future.

29. What does Blogoshpere mean?

It is a term that refers to the online world of blogs and websites that are interconnected with each other and where authors can publish their ideas and opinions. 

People all around the world can connect with each other and express their opinions on different topics they deem important or necessary in a language that is usually informal and therefore very convenient for the readers. Blogosphere also the blog’s readers, as they are the building blocks of the community.

The word first originated in 1999, when people around the world created and managed their own blogs (it was called online diaries at the time) because of the newly released software that helped ease the process of creating and managing websites.

30. What is Blogsnob?

It refers to blog owners that do not reply or respond to their commenters, if it’s people that are not in his network.

31. What is Blogstorm?

It is a term describing when bloggers in the blogosphere write collectively posts about a specific topic or an event, which attracts the attention of the media and therefore the event/topic gets published and spoken of in television, newspapers, and radio. 

32. What is a Call to Action (CTA)?

This terms is used for marketers, advertisers, and blog / website owners as well. The call to action CTA  term refers to the desired action that you want your readers to take after they finish a post.

This can range from soft call to action, like wanting them to continue reading another article, to hard call to action, like wanting them to buy something from your website.

In case of a business website, call to action usually is to buy the product, or service the company provides. Sometimes it can be to inquire about the price of the product or to call your company number to schedule a free trial. What distinguishes Call to action is the use of simple, direct words like Buy now, Get it For Free, Contact Us now. 

Call to actions is used more often in advertisement, as it can break a campaign or be its success. Businesses using advertisements has to have strong call to action to increase the click rate. In the blogosphere, bloggers use call to action to instruct the viewers to read more of their content, or some times to buy a product they are affiliated with, or it can be to register in their email list.

Final Words

Knowing and learning all the blogging terms can take some time. The best thing to do is to bookmark this list so you can revisit the page whenever you want to know a specific term. This list is going to be updated from time to time.