I am the first to admit that I use a lot of terminology on this site – terminology that is no doubt confusing to many people starting out in blogging and internet marketing. Below, I describe many of the terms that I use on this site.
Citation Flow (CF) – This is a term from Majestic. They give every site a Citation Flow and a Trust Flow (below) measure which are a way to determine how many links a site has to it from other sites and whether they are quality links. Citation Flow is measuring the amount of links to a site. It’s a relative measure, meaning it’s only useful to compare CF between sites.
Domain Authority (DA) – Domain Authority is a measure from Moz. They assign a DA and Page Authority (below) to every site/page on the internet. It’s a relative measure and meant to judge how likely that site is to rank in search engines. The higher the DA, the more likely the site is to rank in search engines.
Domain Name – The domain name is basically the address of a site on the internet. eg the domain name of this site is digitalnomadwannabe.com
Expired Domain – An expired domain is a domain name that was used for another site and it isn’t anymore. Expired domains are usually used to build a Private Blog Network (more below) as these domains often still have links to them.
Hosting – Hosting is basically a service where a company “hosts” your website on their servers. For your site to be seen on the internet, it has to be located somewhere where everyone in the world can access it. Hosting usually costs money, either monthly or annually.
KeySearch – KeySearch is my favourite keyword research tool. You can read more about it and see it in action here.
Keyword – A keyword is basically a set of words that people regularly search for in search engines. For example, in travel people often search for terms like “Sydney attractions”, “things to do in Sydney”, “flights to Sydney”, etc.
Keyword Research – Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people search for in search engines for the purposes of writing articles that will rank in search engines for these keywords. For example, I just wrote an article about Oman so I did keyword research to determine the best wording of my article so that more people would find it in search engines (and thus come to my website and read it).
Niche Site – A niche site generally means a site built around a certain niche which is optimised to make money. On this site, I am generally referring to Amazon affiliate niche sites which are niche sites built around a product (or set of products) that are optimised to get targetted Google traffic and then send that traffic on to Amazon.
On-Page SEO – On-page SEO is SEO strategies at a page level – which are strategies like using good keywords and linking to quality external sites.
On-Site SEO – On-site SEO is about SEO methods applied to a site. These are strategies like a good internal linking structure or a domain name which is optimised for ranking.
Off-Site SEO – Off-site SEO applies to SEO work that is not done on your actual site. This basically means link building to the site from other sites or social signals.
Page Authority (PA) – Page Authority is a measure from Moz. They assign a Domain Authority (above) and Page Authority to every site/page on the internet. Page Authority is similar to Domain Authority but is assigned at a page level, rather than domain level. This means that different pages on your site may have different PA. It’s a relative measure and meant to judge how likely that page is to rank in search engines.
Private Blog Network (PBN) – A PBN is a strategy to gain links for a site (usually a niche site). It basically involves setting up or buying a set of sites that are used just to link to another site so that that site ranks better in search engines. A PBN often uses expired domains but it can also use new domains or sites built on platforms such as blogger.com.
SEO – SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This basically refers to a set of strategies to help sites rank in search engines (typically Google).
Trust Flow (TF) – This is a term from Majestic. They give every site a Citation Flow (above) and a Trust Flow measure which are a way to determine how many links a site has to it from other sites and whether they are quality links. Trust Flow is measuring the quality of links to a site – a high TF means lots of good quality links to a site, a low one can mean either not many links or spammy links. It’s a relative measure, meaning it’s only useful to compare TF between sites. It’s also useful to compare TF and CF for a site. If CF is a lot higher than TF then this is a sign of spammy, low quality links.
WordPress – WordPress is a free blogging platform that makes setting up a blog or site and posting new content easy. No technical knowledge is required to use it.
I am constantly adding to this page. Please let me know any other terms you would like described here and I will add them.