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.