A Helpful Guide To Blogging Terminology (Part 1)

Following hot on the heels of our super duper guide to social media for bloggers, welcome to our very serious and hopefully very helpful guide to the wibbly wobbly world of blogging terminology. If you can’t tell your linkies from your pinkies or your algorithm from your arsehole we’re here to help. After all, we’ve all been new once and would hate for you to have to figure all of this stuff out for yourself.

Before diving head first into the wonderful world of blogging we’d never heard of any of the following. Our lives have now been forever enriched by knowledge of:

Domain Authority (DA)

A number from 1 to 100 generated by a company called Moz (a shortened version of mosquito to emphasise how incredibly annoying their ranking system can be when you don’t move up it for months on end!) that takes a wild stab at how far up the Google search rankings you might appear. Probably thought up by someone for a laugh after one too many shots. Updates used to be published once a month causing wild celebration or wailing and gnashing of teeth depending on whether your DA had gone up or down. Now they change every day, allegedly, so in the morning your blog may be good enough to get decent pay for a blog post, but by the afternoon it might be too shit for anyone to go near. Clever eh?!

Very loosely the more links you get to your site from other high ranking sites the higher your DA will be. Absolutely irrelevant unless you want companies to throw money at you for putting links on your blog to their product / site.

So, um, actually incredibly relevant, unless you’re doing it purely for the love of blogging (like us!).

However, it’s worth noting that NO BLOGGER HAS EVER SOLD FOLLOW LINKS BECAUSE SELLING FOLLOW LINKS IS BAD.

‘Follow’ Links

Where you put a ‘normal’ link to someone else’s website on your blog. Either because you genuinely like them (organic link) or because someone has waved some money at you and your morals won’t pay for nappies and wine.

Google loves organic follow links. Google hates paid follow links and may be mean to you if you have loads plastered over your blog! It may even stop showing your posts in its search results, so your page views may drop by one or two per year. THE HORROR! If you really overdo it the CEO of Google will personally come to your house and kick your squarely in the crown jewels.

‘No Follow’ Links

What Google wants you to use for links that you’ve been paid to put on your blog so it knows you’re just pretending to like the linked website rather than actually liking it. It’s the equivalent of a giant winky emoji and is achieved by plonking the words REL=NOFOLLOW somewhere in your code.

‘No follow’ links have much less impact on the other site’s DA than follow links hence why brands love follow links (and might spunk more money at you if you risk the wrath of Uncle Google).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Fiddly bits that you can do on your blog to make it allegedly more likely to do well in search results. Things like doing internal and external links to other posts or picking decent keywords or having properly tagged photos. Just what you want to be doing after spending 4 hours pouring your heart and soul into your post.

You can spend hours on this but at the end of the day you can’t polish a turd. If your content is crap no bugger will want to read it!

SEO – You can’t polish a turd. But you can roll it in glitter.

NB: Not to be confused with SEOs (people that email you trying to get you to put follow links to their brands on your blog in exchange for £1.50 and a bag of Turkey Twizzlers).

Keywords

Dull as dishwater. If you’ve written a post about donkeys you can pick the keyword of ‘donkey’. But if a billion websites have used the keyword ‘donkey’ no one will bother scrolling down Google to get to your page unless you have a really high DA. Which you don’t.

But if your post is about two-legged donkeys and you use the ‘long tail’ (more than one word) keyword ‘two-legged donkey’ you could well be near the top of the results page on Google for anyone searching for two-legged donkeys. Quite what weirdo would be searching for two-legged donkeys is another matter entirely, but you get the concept…

Alternatively you can write a post about any old shit and still pop in the keyword ‘two-legged donkey’ a few times if you’re that keen on tapping into the two-legged donkey enthusiast market.

But bear in mind that two-legged donkey enthusiasts may not take kindly to being driven to a post about engorged breasts or baby-led weaning, so exercise extreme care when using the ‘two-legged donkey’ keyword.

Linkys

A thing where someone can set up a thingy on their website and anyone can then add a post to it. Normally weekly and normally limited to a theme, such as comedy parenting posts.

In exchange for adding your post you then normally have to comment on a certain number of other posts. You’ll then get comments back from other people who have added posts too.

Good for finding new blogs to read. Good for getting more comments on your post. Also good for getting more page views on your post. Not so good if the posts you have to read and comment on are wank.

Or about deer hunting.

Or are really, really not-very-exciting craft posts. Although with those you have the benefit of being able to copy and paste:

‘That looks so cool. I must try that with my toddler’.

Or are really, really not-very-exciting reviews of things. Although with those you have the benefit of being able to copy and paste:

‘That looks cool. I must get that for my toddler’.

Not so good if you enjoy doing other things in your spare time. Like playing with your children. Or eating.

Wasn’t that useful?

If you liked it and think one of your blogging pals would benefit from our stellar advice, why not pin the image above, or share the post on social media?! We’re sure they’ll love you for it…

Get yourself ready for part two, coming to a computer screen near you very soon! It’ll have loads more super useful info for new bloggers and it’s just a click away!

Or if you want some genuinely helpful advice on getting your blog seen by potential readers here’s a proper guide to boosting your traffic!