10 Must-Know Blogging terms for Newbies

Blogging is super easy but at the same time, it is super difficult. All the information that you need to feed yourself with is so overwhelming. There is so much a blogger needs to know about, so many blogging terms that keep confusing you all the time.

Don’t worry. In this post, I am going to list some the basic blogging terms that a newbie blogger must know about. This would be more like a summary post where I would give a brief description of those terms and then you can go on and know more about each one of them.

1. WordPress: Undoubtedly, WordPress is the most popular platform used for blogging but people often get confused between the .com and .org product of WordPress. .org is a more advanced version of wordpress and is obviously recommended if you want to take full control of your website. Here, on this post about 3 Blogging platforms for newbie bloggers, I have mentioned the difference between these two. Have a look.
2. SEO: though I feel it is over hyped but it does matter what major search engines think of you. You do want people searching on search engines like Google to land on your website. Right? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a technique through which you can make the google robots (bots) understand what your website is about. There are terms like meta keywords, focus keywords, meta description that are necessary to do the SEO. But what exactly SEO does? It helps you to try and appear on the first page of web search for a particular keyword.
3. Backlinks: Backlinks are hyperlinks on other sites that point back to your site. Backlinks are considered as signals that your website is good and trustworthy. But because people have used this feature to misguide search engines lately, you need to be very careful with backlinks. There are two kinds of backlinks – Do follow and No Follow. Do Follow backlinks are the ones which search engines consider as the ‘signals’ and No Follow ones are just ignored by search engines.
4. Widgets & Plugins: Can you see different blocks on the right side of this article? Those blocks are called widgets and they let you add new design elements to your blog. Plugins are short pieces of codes that help you add new functionalities. Basically, widgets helps in better design and plugins are the ones that work in the back end to provide more features. WordPress.org allows you to use a ton of different plugins to make your blog better. Each plugin performs a specific function.
5. Niche: I never heard of this word before I stepped into blogging. But now, niche is the most important blogging term which you should consider even before you start your blog. Niche is basically the main category of your blog. For example – photography, blogging, technology and so on. Finix Post is a multi-niche blog (which is often not recommended by pro bloggers).
6. Google Analytics: While talking of search engines, people mostly care about getting good rank in Google search. Also, Google has made a number of tools available for bloggers that certainly make their life easier. Google Analytics help you track how many visitors visit your website with a lot of details about your readers. (Don’t worry. It doesn’t tell me what your name is or where you live).
7. Google Webmaster Tools: This is a special tool that helps you manage the back end part of your blog that is relevant to search engines. There are a number of things like sitemap, no index, search queries, crawl errors etc which you can manage through Google Webmaster tools. Every search engine usually has its own webmaster tools for example Bing has Bing Webmaster Tools and so on.
8. Affiliate: You would hear this blogging term a lot. Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate sales, Affiliate programs… This is one of the best way to make good money through your blog. You sign up for an affiliate program of a particular site and try to sell their products and you get a commission for each sale. Know more about Affiliate programs by clicking on the link.
9. Adsense: Adsense is a program by google that allows you to show ads on your website and if a person clicks on them, you get some money for that. You get paid for displaying the advertisements. There are number of such programs like Chitika, Infolinks but adsense has always been the most popular one.
10. Social Media & Social Bookmarking: People often get confused between these two. Social Media is of course stuff like Facebook, twitter etc. But what is social bookmarking? Social Bookmarking allows you to communicate by sharing links of articles found on the web. See this post about best social bookmarking sites

I believe even after such a long post, I would have left a lot of important blogging terms that a newbie blogger must know about. If you have any in mind, do leave a comment or if you are a newbie blogger and have  any question related to blogging or some blogging term, please ask. I will be happy to answer