9 Important blogging terms you need to understand

There are a lot of blogging terms you are going to learn when you start blogging, it is almost sometimes a different language is spoken and most people will automatically assume that you understand.

There is no need to get overwhelmed by the different terms and understanding them all in-depth, however, just understanding what each one means can make a huge difference to your blog. Especially when it comes to dealing with brands and SEO agencies for paid campaigns. Some of the blogging terms you may here on a regular basis and others will be thrown into the mix throughout your blogging time, but taking a few minutes to read will help you feel a little less out of your depth.

Here are 9 blogging terms you need to understand

Disclosure –

This is a key one and it is likely to be one that you will end up having the most debates with over email. It is a legal requirement from the ASA to disclose your work with brands. Now, this is not your having to write a disclosure on all posts.

However, if you are paid to write a post with a link, gifted a product or paid to write about a brand, you have to disclose this. The easiest way to do this is at the beginning of the post with a simple use of #Ad or #Advertisment. There are some alternatives that can be used by there are the simplest. The ASA has shared this PDF which explains everything clearly for you.

This is a key blogging term to understand, you can be fined if you are found in breach of these.

Domain authority –

Domain authority or DA as it is more commonly known becomes key for bloggers who are working with SEO companies. Now you may be wondering what is domain authority?

Well, it is basically a search engine ranking score that is produced by Moz and is used by many SEO companies and some PR companies too. The score is made up of a complex algorithm that takes into consideration things such as the total number of links, linking root domains and various other things. It is basically a score to indicate how you rank in search engine results. Ranking out of 100, the higher you rank, the better.

Now firstly, if your blog does not have a high DA, do not panic. It is not the be-all and end-all of your blog, it is just another metric used by some to work on budgets for campaigns.

If you are building a blog to sell links though, you do need to work on getting your DA higher and this is done by building up your links back to your blog via other bloggers linking back to your content and even big sites and news websites linking back. It will not happen overnight and it does take time so do not be disheartened at the time it takes to build it up.

Anchor text –

The anchor text in the post is simply the text that is used to be a clickable hyperlink.

Now the anchor text is usually a selection of text-specific for the target page, for example, on my main blog I have a recipe post for fairy cakes. To link to this from this blog I would write something such as the following in a post:

This is a delicious fairy cake recipe

Ensuring the anchor text is relevant is key to the post.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) –

SEO is the main way to increase your blog’s exposure on the internet.

Taking away the social shares and promotions, ensuring your site has good SEO is going to be key for you to grow your blog and its exposure. The basis of SEO is the fact that bots are used to crawl sites, taking into account things such as keywords, meta description and a whole host of other things. Once it finds these things, they are put into an algorithm to rank your post or page in a search engine such as Google.

Good SEO can see your posts turn up on the first page of the Google search.

Keyword –

The keyword is the word that describes the content on your post or page and is the one that you would like to rank the most for on that post.

You can have multiple keywords in Rank Math plugin which allows you to boost your ranking for multiple items, however, the key thing to this is getting the keyword that is going to rank because it is searched. In the next few weeks, I will talk to you about using Rank Maths and Keysearch to boost your keyword rankings.

Meta description –

Adding a meta description to your blog post or page is very important as it is the HTML element of your blog that summarizes your content for the search engine.

It is key here that you have a good length description and it uses your keyword for it to be ranked. It is also the content that you see when you use a search engine such as Google, so the actual content of the meta description is key.

Pageviews –

This one is pretty clear and easy to understand, it simply means the views on the page or your blog.

There may however be 2 different sets of data you will be asked for, this will be your page views and your unique page views. The only difference between the two is one is overall page views and the other will be unique, which means it only counts the first view from an individual, even if they come back to read the post again.

Both stats are useful for brands and PR’s as they look to see the traffic on your blog and also the reach your blog can get.

Widgets –

Widgets are the content that you can add to the sidebar or footer of your website.

For me, I like to keep it simple with some information and categories etc. However, you can have a whole host of things in there such as tag clouds, menus, pictures, advertising and so much more. Widgets can help visitors navigate around your site and help sell your blog a little more if you add the right information.

Plugins –

These are key to any blog and can help your blog in many ways. There are a few key plugins I use on all my blogs are they are as follows :

• Add widget after content
• Classic Editor
• Disqus for WordPress
• Easy table of contents
• GDPR Cookie consent
• Jetpack
• Litespeed cache
• Rank Math SEO Pro
• Site kit by Google
• Social media and share icons (ultimate social media)
• Ultimate Category Excluder
• Wordfence Security

These plugins do a variety of things to help the blog run such as SEO, social shares, comments and all in between. It is up to you what you use on your blog and I would do your research before you start to add your plugins. As you can imagine, the more you have, the slower your site may run.

I know this is a lot to take it and it may take you a while to get used to some of the blogging terms, however, every little bit you understand is a chance for you to build your blog to the best it can be. Now after 10 years I know where I should focus and target my attention, it has taken this long to get to grips with it all and even now I am still learning.

Hopefully, this post will help you get started and we are going to be looking at social media tips in the coming weeks to help boost your confidence in promoting your posts.