My Blog Dictionary

The primary reason I made this blog entry is to help fellow bloggers understand the world of blogging easily by knowing the basic terms used in the blogosphere. This dictionary is also intended to those people I mentor so that this site would be a source of information/reference for them. I believe that the basic foundation of a competitive blog is search engine optimization. One should increase the traffic into his web site or blog site and one has to start with the basic terms that the blogosphere uses in order for them to easily optimize their sites. You may not be able to understand all the terms that a certain forum teaches because of the lack of knowledge about a certain basic term. A question will arise after a question so it will take a lot of your time. I intentionally did not include some of the terms that I got from my source because some of them are not basic but advanced. So I intend to share them in another article maybe. I may not have included all the basic terms so I intend to update this dictionary of blogging terms from now and them. I hope that this would be informative for everyone.

1. Backlinks - (or back-links (UK)) are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

2. Blogosphere - is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. It is the perception that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social network.

3. Blog Hopping -to follow links from one blog entry to another, with related side-trips to various articles, sites, discussion forums, and more

4. Blogroll -A list of blogs. A blogger features a list of their favorite blogs in the sidebar of their blog.

5. Blog site -the web location (URL) of a blog, which may be either a dedicated domain, a sub-domain, or embedded within a web site.

6. Blogger - Person who runs a blog. Also blogger.com, a popular blog hosting web site. Rarely: weblogger

7. Directories - A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites/blog sites and categorizing those links. A web directory is not a search engine, and does not display lists of web pages based on keywords, instead it lists web sites by category and subcategory. The categorization is usually based on the whole web site, rather than one page or a set of keywords, and sites are often limited to inclusion in only one or two categories. Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness. It is an advantage for a blog site to be listed in directories for it to be known by other users of the web.

8. Feeds - the XML-based file in which the blog hosting software places a machine-readable version of the blog so that it may be "syndicated" for further distribution on the web. Formats such as RSS and Atom are used to structure the XML file. (e.g. RSS, Atom)

9. Forum - an Internet forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as Web forums, message boards, discussion boards, (electronic) discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards, fora (the Latin plural) or simply forums. The terms "forum" and "board" may refer to the entire community or to a specific sub-forum dealing with a distinct topic. Messages within these sub-forums are then displayed either in chronological order or as threaded discussions. Forums can be used as a place to make backlinks to your site.

10. Google AdSense - commonly just AdSense, is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a cost-per-action based service.

11. Hits - Number of users visited is often referred as hits. (website / blog hits)

12. Monetizing Blogs - is the process by which a certain blog site is made for it to make money out of the ads posted by third party providers or by offering services in a certain blog site.

13. PageRank - is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

14. Podcasting - Contraction of “iPod” and “broadcasting” (but not for iPods only). Posting audio and video material on a blog and its RSS feed, for digital players

15. Search engine optimization (SEO) - is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

16. Subscribe - the term used when a blogs feed is added to a feed reader like Bloglines or Google. Some blogging platforms have internal subscriptions, this allows readers to receive notification when there are new posts in a blog.

15. Template - used on the "back end" of a blog that work together to handle information and present it on a blog.

17. Vlog -a video blog; a vlogger is a video blogger (e.g. someone who records himself interviewing people of a certain field).

18. Web Widget - a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets including: gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets often but not always use DHTML, JavaScript, or Adobe Flash.