The Blogger's Guide to the Galaxy
A simple glossary of terms for bloggers to do with the web and AI and stuff, beamed straight to your planet.
I will add simple definitions of terms here related to websites, website design, the internet, AI and so on. I will link to them in my articles. These will ideally be a way into the subject and will have the philosophy of 'no question is stupid'. The simpler the better.
I am just starting to build this out so it will grow over time. At the moment there are only a couple of entries.
Contents
What is a bot?
Bot is short for robot. Bots are automated programs that visit your site for different reasons - both good and bad. They sit there day after day, covered in Dorito dust and drinking Ribena, hoovering up information about websites.
They do this much quicker than humans and they do it by following the links between pages, looking at sitemaps and so on.
Some are on the side of the Jedi — such as search-engine crawlers that index your posts so they can appear in Google search result. Others are more Sith-like. They scrape your content to republish it somewhere else. They look for security weaknesses or they flood your analytics so that you get curious and click on their website.
What is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO?
SEO is the process of making your website easy for search engines to find, understand, and trust. Think of the internet like the infinite library in the short story by Borges. However, there is no librarian and so there are people who have set themselves up as judgy librarians - like Google.
Google wants to answer someone's question by delivering the best piece of content to them. They do this so people will be happy with their service, which in turn allows them to make more money from advertising.
You can make Google like your website better by making it possible for their bot to analyse it. Also by linking your pages internally so it knows the website hangs together ok. By structuring your pages in a way which lets them analyse it easily. And by looking at who is linking to you.