101 Blogging Expressions and SEO Terms & Glossary Worth Knowing

Last Updated on June 3, 2023

I am sure that you also come across blogging terms that you have never heard before, as it happens to me all the time. What is an avatar? What is the bounce rate? What is Tailwind? What is a CMS?

I am going to walk through 101 blogging terms that are worth knowing and that will make your blogging journey a little easier. So let’s look at these blogging terms and get stuck in! 🙂

A

Alt Tags (and Alt text)

If you have an image on your webpage, the alt text (meaning alternative text), is the text you see when you move the mouse over the image.

Alt tags though are intended to provide an alternative way to know what the image is about. The alt tag is worth adding as Google appears to include consideration for this in their search engine algorithm.

Avatar

An avatar, when used on a website or blog, is an image to present your profile. An avatar is often set up on gravatar.com and shows then automatically as an avatar on your WordPress site. You can learn how to create an avatar without the need for design skills here.

B

Backlinks

Backlinks are links that are located on another site and, when clicked, go to your site. So they are links that point to your site. (See ‘Link building’ below on how to make and find backlinks).

Blackhat SEO

This is a term used to describe negative techniques for improving your site’s chance to rank in search engines.

If you try, for example, to blatantly buy links solely to try and improve your site’s search engine position, Google will often penalize you.

The opposite of blackhat SEO is to build natural links i.e. through creating genuinely helpful content that people want to link to naturally and not because they are paid to do so.

Blog

A Blog is an online site that is frequently updated. A website, on the other hand, is a site online that is updated far less often. A website can have a blog section on it though.

Blogging

The act of writing content regularly and posting it on your site.

Blogosphere

This is, in essence, the blogging world i.e. all bloggers online. In other words, the blogging world and community. You can join our own Bloggers Growth Group Facebook.

Blog Post

A blog post is like a page on your site but with a post, you can select for the post also to be part of a category.

The main strategy on a website is that you make content that rarely changes as pages (such as your Privacy page) and then the content you add regularly and want to group into sections (categories) as posts.

You can get our Blog Post Checklist here.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of times that a visitor immediately leaves a page on your site for an external site, after directly arriving onto the page from another site.

C

Call to Action (CTA)

A CTA is something that guides a user toward an action.

For example, you want to try and guide a user to go to your training course sales page.

One way to do this is with a graphic and with a powerful message to make the user curious enough to click and follow the action you would like them to take.

Category

A category is a way of grouping blog posts together into one logical section. So on this site, for example, we have one category for any posts about SEO, another for posts about Pinterest, another for ‘How to build website traffic‘, and so on.

Comments

Comments are feedback that any of your blog readers can add. At the end of your blog post (provided you have enabled comments in WordPress on the settings tab), your readers will be able to say what they think about your post, add more information or say what they wish to.

You can moderate the comments so that you avoid spam comments.

It is worth encouraging your readers to add a comment because search engines love the interaction with your readers and this will help you to rank higher in search results.

In fact, feel free to add a comment and your link to the bottom of this post!

Content Management System (CMS)

A CMS is a system for managing and controlling digital content. WordPress as a CMS, for example, manages all of the posts, pages, databases, plugins, images, and other content.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is the most popular mail list software that bloggers use for building their email lists. You can try a FREE trial of Convertkit here.

You can read our post about Convertkit here.

CPanel

If you hear the term CPanel, it will be related to your web hosting. CPanel is the interface that many hosting companies use. If you buy hosting such as with Bluehost, they will then give you a login to CPanel. On CPanel, you can set everything up such as any email addresses you need.

CSS

CSS is short for Cascading Style Sheets and it is a programing language for creating custom styles on websites. CSS is fairly easy to understand but not normally necessary to touch for most basic blogging sites.

D

Domain Name

A domain name is your website address. In other words, it is where your website will reside. For this site, our domain name is promarketingonline.com

You can get a domain name for FREE when you buy hosting with Bluehost.

Draft

When you are writing a blog post you can choose to save it a draft. A draft is a blog post thus that is not live but that you can work on until you are ready to publish it live for the world to see.

Dwell Time

Dwell time refers, in blogging, to the amount of time that someone spends on your website. If a site visitor spends a lot of time on your web pages, it suggests to search engines that your site has high-quality content. You want to have high levels of dwell time and low bounce rates.

E

Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that does not go out of date and that still has value over time. If you do a blog post about a specific date and time, after that event, the post will be old and redundant. Making content evergreen is a good SEO strategy for your site. You can see evergreen content also discussed here.

F

FTP

FTP means File Transfer Protocol and it is a tool and way in which you can upload and download files to your server (the server being the place where your website files are based). In WordPress, you can escape the need to use FTP by doing everything you need to through the WordPress interface.

G

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is a marketing platform that provides a way for you to make money by allowing Google to host ads on your website/blog.

You can sign up to Adsense and, once accepted, you add some code to your site and ads will automatically begin to show on your site. If people click on the ads, they get paid a small percentage from Google.

Google BERT

Google BERT is the latest major algorithm from Google, in respect of their search engine algorithm updates. In the past, Google’s updates were Penguin and Panda.

Google Console

Google Console is a free and very useful service that Google offers to webmasters to provide information on a range of things.

You can learn of any site errors, how your traffic is doing, and so on. If you want to do well in Google searches, I’d recommend keeping an eye on your Google Console data.

Gravatar

A gravatar image is a profile image that you see alongside someone’s comment or on the sidebar of their blog. Read our post on Gravatars here.

H

Heartbeat (WordPress Heartbeat)

WordPress constantly tries to communicate with the browser you are using, and the file admin-ajax.php is utilized for this in WordPress.

This process though, that is known as ‘heartbeat’ can slow down your site. For this reason, you may want to change the settings on the Heartbeat, to improve and optimize your site speed.

Hyperlink

A hyperlink is another way of simply saying ‘link’. A link, in blogging terms, is something that you can click on a webpage and it takes you to another page on the same site or to a page on another person’s site.

I

IBLs (Inbound Links)

IBLs are, in essence, the same as backlinks (see backlinks). They are links that are inbound, meaning they are pointing into or to your site, from other people’s sites.

IP Address

Your IP Address is your unique computer or network address and so everyone will, in effect, have their own IP Address. If you ever need to check your own IP address you can check it here.

K

Keywords

Keywords are really important for SEO (optimizing your site for search engines). You can read our post here on keywords.

L

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Also referred to as ‘semantic keywords’, LSI refers to terms and expressions that are logically related to another term.

If you are writing about cars, for example, terms such as tires, engine, motor, and so on, are logically related words to cars.

When writing for the web, including semantic keywords will make your content much stronger from an SEO point of view.

Link Building

Link building is when you find ways to get other people to add a link from their website or blog, to yours. There are numerous link-building techniques and you can find 7 Beginners link building techniques here.

Long-tail Keywords

This refers to a search term that is longer than 1 or 2 words i.e. that is 3 words or more.

A term such as “lemon tea health benefits” can be considered a long-tail term.

Long-tail terms are very useful to target when trying to rank in search results quickly because these terms are more niche and less targeted by other bloggers.

M

Meta Description

The Meta Description on a webpage/post is a short description in one or two sentences that describes what the page is about.

This description is not seen by people reading the page but helps search engines to understand the purpose of the page.

Meta Title

Similar to the Meta Description, the Meta Title is a shorter and more brief explanation of what the page is about.

N

Netiquette

Netiquette is a term that quite simply is a combination of the words ‘internet’ and ‘etiquette’.

So the term refers to Internet etiquette and is aimed at good practice for how to act online. You can learn more about Netiquette here.

P

Permalink

Permalink is a term short for ‘Permanent Link’. In simple language though it is the website URL (address) that you allocate to a webpage.

So you see, for example, that this page has the address: www.promarketingonline.com/blogging-terms/

It is often best practice, so that you optimize your site (SEO), to create URLs that have some keywords in them. So you see this page is named ‘blogging terms’.

You can learn how to set the permalink in 60 seconds on this short YouTube video:

Get more blogging tips and tricks. Just subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Piggyback Marketing

Piggyback Marketing is when you market yourself by marketing others, by attaching your product to theirs.

You might, for example, highlight the benefits of your competitor’s products and by doing so, be seen as an expert in that area and gain marketing exposure yourself as a result.

See point 7 on this page to learn more about piggyback marketing)

Pinterest

Pinterest is a search engine that is very popular with bloggers because with Pinterest you can build traffic much faster than you could with other search engines.

You can read some really handy tips on Pinterest here, that we wrote. Make sure also to join us on Pinterest here.

Plug-In

A plug-in is something you are likely to be aware of if you already use WordPress.

Plug-ins and like extra containers you add to your site to give you extra functionality to your site. Here’s a Lesson on Plug-ins for WordPress.

R

Redirect

In blogging and in web design in general, a redirect is when you set it up for one URL to automatically send visitors to a different URL.

The reason to do this might, for example, be because you have removed a page altogether on your site and you do not want to lose any traffic that still goes to that URL, so you send them to a page that is live.

A great plug-in for redirects is Simple 301 Redirects.

S

Search Intent

(See User Internet)

Semantic Keywords

(See Latent Semantic Indexing)

SEO

SEO is an abbreviation used to mean Search Engine Optimisation. The idea of SEO is that one tries to rank high in search engine results. Google and Pinterest are 2 examples of search engines.

Get more blogging tips and tricks. Just subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

To try and rank a website as high as possible, users try to optimize their site to be as optimized as possible to meet the criteria to rank high in these search results.

The techniques used are referred to as SEO techniques.

Read our post here on What is SEO…

Sidebar

A sidebar refers to the long vertical left side or right side of your blog post and webpage (if you have sidebars at all). It is common to have one or two sidebars in sites designed in WordPress.

Stock Free Images

These are images that you can download for free and re-use commercially and for whatever you want. You can learn here about where to find great quality images and photos for FREE.

Stop Words

Stop words are the words such as in, at, the. So stop words, in essence, are words between your main words.

In SEO this is important because many people try to reduce the size of their page URLs by removing the stop words.

With the introduction of Google BERT though, it is arguably worth including words in the situation whereby the stop word plays a useful role in making a query clear.

You can learn more on our Google BERT page here.

T

Tailwind

Tailwind is a scheduling tool that is extremely popular with bloggers who use Pinterest.

With Tailwind, you can schedule pins weeks in advance and build your traffic from Pinterest to your site, using Tailwind Tribes to work with other pinners.

Others similar tools in the past have included the likes of Boardbooster (which closed down) but Tailwind is an accepted partner by Pinterest, hence its popularity with many bloggers. We use Tailwind also here at Promarketing, for our Pinterest account.

You can also find some Tailwind tips here.

Theme

When talking about themes, we are usually referring to WordPress Themes. A theme in this context is a template for how your site looks visually and is the design behind the scenes.

Buying a template can save you a massive amount of time, given that for around USD$50 (GB£40) you can buy a lovely design and that works on all devices.

You can find a range of WordPress Templates here.

Traffic

Traffic, when talking about websites, is the number of site visitors and people you get to visit your site.

The more traffic (site visitors) you get, the greater you generally have an opportunity for creating greater sales.

You can read our post on How to Increase Traffic to Your Site here.

U

User Intent

User Intent is a very useful and important concept in SEO and we have a post here all about it!

Get more blogging tips and tricks. Just subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

• Read the post on User Intent here

V

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is when you manage to get a piece of information, such as a page or image, to get spread by others en masse.

On Pinterest, getting an image from one of your website pages to go viral can mean that you get a tonne of traffic to your site.

See our post on How to go viral on Pinterest.

W

Wix

Wix is a term you might hear often because Wix offers a platform that includes free web hosting. Make sure to read out post on Free vs Paid Hosting though!

WordPress

WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System). A CMS is a platform on which you can blog.

The CMS gives you, in other words, a way to make a website online and to add posts, pages because the CMS is the management tool that you use to hold it all together.