When all the traditional features of the blog are set in place, your blog will become a part of the blogging community. As a blogger, you will come to understand by putting into practice some of the most integral features of the blogging toolbox. Understanding the following terms will help you to use them with confidence when communicating with other bloggers and establishing a reputable online presence.

Blogosphere

When you post content to a blog, you become part of the vast, virtual conversations talking place between bloggers, readers, subscribers and commenters. The blogosphere refers to this virtual network of blogs you participate in as a blogger.

Trackback

A “passive” or distance commenting in which a blogger references another blogger’s post via the individual post’s Permalink or Trackback link on their blog.

Pingback

A pingback is a signal that typically notifies blog directories whenever you have updated your blog. There is a section under Options in WordPress where you can also configure it to automatically ping a list of blog directories.

Permalink

While the main page of a blog may seem like a connected series of smaller posts, each post has its own unique URL which allows other writers to reference it easily. In WordPress you can choose how this URL will appear by either having a longer URL that contains the title of the post, or shorter URLs with numeric identifiers. To find a blog post’s permalink you can either click on the title of the post, or find the “Permalink” URL, usually at the base of the post.

RSS Feed Reader (aka Newsreader or Aggregator)

Instead of having to visit an individual web site to check for new content, you can use an RSS reader, which will collect content from the web site’s you subscribe to. Examples of RSS readers are Google Reader and Bloglines.

Social Networking sites

Online communities that enable communication and sharing, social networks often enable users to post photos, videos, links, music, and other information to distinguish themselves as unique. They are great ways to develop relationships with people who share your interests. Several popular sites include: facebook.com, myspace.com, and twitter.com. They can also serve as platforms to promote your blog.

Social Bookmarking sites

These are the social, web 2.0 spaces where posts can go “viral.” Links are shared and promoted through a voting system until the most popular rise to the top and earn lots of traffic. Several popular sites include: digg.com, del.icio.us, and stumbleupon.com.

Plugins

While WordPress is a great tool to begin with, it can be enhanced by user-created modifications that solve specific problems and improve usability for visitor experiences. Examples of plugins include Akismet, which effectively blocks spam, and ShareThis, which adds an easy one-click functionality allowing readers to share blog posts with their friends or social bookmarking sites.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The process of customizing your web site, through effective design and writing techniques, so that it achieves the highest search term ranking possible for the key terms that are relevant to your business.

Blog Search Engines

Websites such as bloglines.com, blogpulse.com, or Google Blog Search comb the blogosphere, allowing for real-time search for user-generated media by tag or keyword. They also usually provide popularity indexes. You can use these to find other blogs of interest or find citations to your blog you may have missed in traditional trackback or pingback notifications.

Tags

Just like WordPress categories, tags provide a way to identify the subject of your posts for effective archival and retrieval. Using a special HTML code at the base of each post, you can identify a list of keywords that describe the contents of your post – increasing the chances it will be found by visitors.