With blogging, the language is: CSS, HTML; XHTML, links, pings, trackbacks, URL’s, posting, stats, addons, widgets, plugins, SEO, page rank, RSS, and much more
When I was “blogging without a blog”, a month or more before I actually had a blog, the language of blogging, made my head spin. To top it off, many years ago I had read that if you’re reading something, and come onto a word you don’t understand, the remaining text, is difficult to comprehended. That held true for me, as I would stare at a page, and it all looked like a foreign language to me.
After five months, the blogging language, is making sense to me.
To put some of the blogging terminology into perspective, I am creating simple definitions for newbie bloggers.
1) “Post” – this is what you’re writing. Your post contains words. These words are considered the “content” of your post. You’ll often hear, “A good blog contains great “content”. That just means that your post, is a well written article, with many words.
A site which is filled with flashing banner ads, Google ads, etc, and only a few words, would be a site with poor “content”. From what I’ve read, a search engine can’t “read”graphics or images.
2) “Publish” – When you send your “post” out into the world wide web (WWW), to share your thoughts and/or opinions with others, you are publishing your post. This is no different that a newspaper publishing a daily issue, or a magazine, publishing a monthly issue. You’re publishing an article, on the internet, to share with the world.
3) “Publishing frequency” – This is how often you choose to publish a post. Some bloggers claim to publish up to a dozen posts a day. Others, publish once a month. Consistency in publishing is important. If you publish several posts one day, and don’t publish again for several weeks, you may confuse the search engines.
4) “Search Engines” – These are Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, ……………..there are dozens. After you have published your post to the www, these search engines are notified by a “ping”, that you’ve updated your blog. The search engines come to “visit” your site. To do so, the search engines use what are often referred to as “crawlers”, “spiders”, “bots”. etc…. These are actually the computers of the search engines, and they nose around your site, making a record of what your wrote. Your post then gets “indexed”.
5) “Indexed” means that your post now has a home on the world wide web. If someone is searching for the same subject which you wrote about, they may find your post in the pages that are indexed by the search engines. Hopefully, your post ends up on page one, of the index, but oftentimes, it’s buried much deeper. With indexing, you’ll often hear the term, “search engine optimization”, or SEO, for short.
6) “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO), is writing your posts to try and gain “top billing”, or to be indexed on the first page (i.e. for a Google search), and the best, is to be in the first position. You can find many articles on the internet about SEO, and how to gain a higher position.
One way of gaining a higher position, is by using “keyword density”. For example, if you’re writing about fly fishing, and you want to try and get a “higher billing”, you would incorporate your keywords “fly fishing”, not only in your title, but also repeat the words several times in the first paragraph, and throughout your post. If you repeat the words too many times, this could be considered “spam”, and if that’s the case, you probably won’t get indexed very high. Plus, you want your post to read smoothly, and make sense to your readers.
Writing only for search engine optimization, can stifle your writing style. My belief is that if you consistently write good articles, your site will be found. But…..I do think it’s important to use keyword density….to a degree.
So…….there’s your lesson for today.
Stayed tuned, for Part 2 of the blogging language.
Photo Credit lovelypetal’s photos

Links create love in blogoshpere.
However, “no follow tags” are set as a default on many blogging platforms. Even if you use the CommentLuv plugin, when your blog is crawled, the bots and spiders don’t give commenters “credit” for their link.
Today’s Lesson
On my travels through cyberspace no follow tags are often discussed.
A visit to David Lano’s (previous NBOTW) blog, got my attention. He had a “No Nofollow” placard on his blog post. Curiosity got the best of me, so I asked David about it, and also asked him to monitor how inserting No NoFollow, affected his blog, comments and spam.
After using the NoNoFollow plugin for nearly a month, we communicated via e-mail. Here are David’s answers to my questions:
Q: Is Akismet catchng those spam comments, or are you having to moderate them?
A: I don’t have moderation turned on and so far I have only had 1 spam comment that has slipped through the Akismet filter.
Q: Has adding the NO NOFOLLOW, increased the amount of comments you recieve?
A; Yes, the removal of the NOFOLLOW tags has led to an increase in the amount of overall comments. It has only been a few weeks since I have removed the NOFOLLOW tags, but I have already seen an increase in readers’ interaction.
Q: Personally, would you like to see more blogs use this?
A: Yes, personally I would like to see more blogs remove the NOFOLLOW tags in comment links. I think a blog is incredibly weak without the interaction and participation of readers. Removing the NOFOLLOW tags in links can be a huge incentive and benefit for regular commenter’s and creates a snowball effect in the distribution of information between authors and readers.
Q: Do you have any other observations you care to share?
A: The most important factor in the success of my blog is its ability to spark conversations and distribute information. Anything I can do to encourage this behavior is a must have.
David’s answers sold me on the idea of using a no nofollow plugin. I installed the Lucia’s Linky Love plugin. Installation mirrored other plugins. Once activated, I went to “Options” and typed in my choices. It’s working behind the scenes spreading link love through cyberspace.
As stated in David’s blog , concern over the “no follow” tags has created a new “movement” named the “No Follow-I Follow – Dofollow Community” This is a community currently managed by: Andy Beard. Through the links on David Lano’s blog, I also found a post by Andy Beard titled “Ultimate List of Dofollow Plugins…”
Thank you David for sharing your results with me, and for providing the links to make it happen.
Today’s Assignment
Are you currently using a no nofollow plugin?
If not, are you ready to add one?
Will you join the No Nofollow community?