 General Terms in Blogging |
When you enter the world of blogging, you may hear a lot of new terms like posts, comments, trackbacks, and so forth. These are the parts that make a blog successful and usable in the real world. In the following sections, we will discuss in brief what these terms mean.
Post
Posts are the core part of a blog. Every time someone writes an article in a blog, it is known as a post. Whenever a post is made, visitors can make comments and follow-ups. In most of the blog engines, each post has a separate URL, which is also called permalink. With the help of different administrative panels, blog users can make posts in their blogs. For example, if a blog is text-based, there must be a system available to write the posts. If it is a photoblog, there must be tools available to manage pictures before posting. In audio blogs, there are also facilities for streaming the audio files.
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| Comments
Comments are actually follow-ups made to posts by the visitors to a blog. Comments may either be made by anonymous users or may require registration to write. These days many blogs allow anonymous users to comment, but with a necessary spam protection system. Comment spams are those useless automated comments that aresimply advertising a product or a website or that are totally irrelevant to a post. These days some online marketing agencies are spreading advertisements via automated bots (bots are "robot" scripts). So if you allow anonymous commenting, be aware of comment spams.
Permalinks
Permalinks are an abbreviation for permanent links. Generally, a permalink is a permanent URL to a specific post in your blog. To optimize blogs for search engines and to make the URLs more readable, people use permalinks. Permalinks are short, straightforward, and easy to remember. In commercial websites with huge content, permanency of URL is a must to provide better marketing and advertising of the content.Let me show you why permalinks are friendlier with search engines. |
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| For example, suppose a URL is in the form http://example.com/ex.php?id=1&stat=4. When this page is linked from another site and the robots of search engines get this link, mostly they tend to skip the dynamic part of the URL. That is, the search-engine robots browse only up to http://example.com/ex.php, which by no means delivers the exact content you wanted to show. Moreover, consider the permalink URL that refers to the same blog post: http://blog.example.com/posts/php-lookback-2005. This is more readable and user-friendly. So permalinks are of great importance to bloggers, if they want to increase their site rank, publicity, and traffic.
Trackbacks
Trackbacks are referral links in which someone refers to your post in their blog. Basically, trackbacks are simple notifications that are sent when someone refers to the content of another blog. When someone trackbacks your post, a link to his or her blog will be displayed as a comment in that article so that you will be aware of all the referrals. However, spammers are also ready to abuse this useful system to advertise their product or websites.
RSS
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a very strong medium to distribute the up-to-date content or news from your website to the people who subscribe to RSS in your blog. WordPress and almost every other blog engine supports auto-generation of RSS feeds. RSS works great as an advertising medium. If you are not familiar with RSS, then let me explain it briefly.
A typical blog post RSS contains a link, a title, and a small excerpt of the ten to fifteen most recent posts. So when you make a post in your blog or someone posts a comment, the RSS updates automatically and your RSS subscriber gets an automatic notification about the update. They can then examine the RSS feeds and find the latest content. These days RSS is a very popular tool, but is highly criticized. This is because there are three independent forms of RSS that are not fully compatible with each other. They are RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and RSS 0.91. Atom is rather a more matured syndication system that takes the best from RSS and is developed in a structured way.
Tags
Tags are keywords relevant to your post through which someone may find it. When you make a post, just find some keywords that best describe your post. These keywords are tracked by Technorati (see below to know about Technorati) and other indexing tools. For example, if you post about a natural disaster like an earthquake or hurricane, tag it with relevant keywords like land subsidence, earthquake, disaster,and death. When people want to know about recent earthquakes, they may search with one of these terms, which will help your content to come in the front page.
Simply use your common sense for choosing keywords. Don’t abuse this tagging feature by using irrelevant tags to increase the traffic. If you abuse, there are chances of being banned from those indexing services and that will cause a major failure in your blogging life.Please note that some blog engines, for instance Blogger, do not support trackbacks and tags unlike WordPress. |
