10 Common Blog Terms to Know

Here is a list of 10 Common Blog Terms that you should know when you start using blogging to gain exposure for your business and drive traffic to your site while you connect with your current customers and prospects.

Article – Article and blog "post" are frequently both used. An article is a single post on a blog.

Blogosphere – This refers to the collective community of all blogs and bloggers on the Internet.  If you want to search for other blogs on the internet.  Technorati is a great site to search for blogs of interest.

Directory – A blog directory is a website that lists blogs, usually ranking them by their popularity and ordering them by subject or category. One way to help generate traffic to your blog is to add it to blog directories.  You can add to Technorati.

Feed – This is a news feed used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it in RSS reader or via e-mail.

Hyperlink – Used synonymously with the word "link", this is clickable content within a web page that takes the user to another page, website, or within part of the same page. The text that comprises the hyperlink is referred to as the "anchor text".

Keyword(s) or Key phrase(s) – When you write your blog you should think about the topics that are important and relevant to the audience you are trying to reach.  When you create content around these topics which are your keywords or key word phrases you are more likely to have your content show up to those that are searching for you.

Nofollow – This describes a link that has an attribute which prevents the link from being crawled by search engines.  Since building links to your content is important to getting found in search engines you want to be sure that your links no not have the nofollow attribute.

RSS – Short for Really Simple Syndication, a means by which users can subscribe to a feed, a blog feed for instance. Because content is published in a frequent basis subscribing makes it easier for users to follow content and updates.

Subscribe – It is important that your content is seen by your target market and that once they reach your blog they come back when you have new content.  Getting visitors back to see your new content is to get them to subscribe either via RSS feeds or email.

Comments – One great feature of blogs is that you can solicit comments from your readers in response to your blog post.  Comments can help grew your blog and increase the readership.  It is suggested that you allow your readers to comment on your blog and monitoring these comments and being sure to respond to them if need be.