Web Fundamentals Bloggers Should Know About

I’ve had the chance to talk to quite a few fellow bloggers recently, some new to it, others more seasoned, and I’ve been really surprised to find that so many of them don’t know as much as they should about some important web fundamentals.

A lot of you may know these inside out, others may have heard them used but never investigated further, and for some they may be completely foreign.

Snippets from Wikipaedia:

1. Backlinks
   Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page.
2. Google PageRank
   PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
   Search engine optimization (SEO), considered by many to be a subset of search engine marketing, is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines, usually in “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
4. Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
   A search engine results page, or SERP, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.

To put all of that together, the general idea is – combining search engine optimization techniques and quality backlinks, you will increase your PageRank, meaning you will rank higher on search engine results pages, which will in turn will drive more search engine traffic to your site.

There are a heap of nuances to it all, but for those of you who this is new to it is a good starting point.