The basics of blogging: what is it, and why should you care?

Blog has been around for years. According to the facts, the first blog was created in 1994. And your well known Blogger, the blogging platform that is owned by Google since 2003, was created in 1999. You can check out the entire blogging timeline in this cool link. 

A blog is a log kind of website, a website where the writer updates it regularly with new posts, and the posts are presented to the viewer in a chronological order. Sometimes they can be separated into categories. To give you a simple example, think of a food recipe website. The recipes are added and presented chronologically, so you will usually see at the top the most recent recipe, however, the author can decide to separate the recipes into categories, such as, desserts, breakfast, main dishes, gluten-free and so on. You get the idea.

Even news websites are blogs, since they update their content on a daily, or even hourly or less, with the latest news and present them of course with chronological order, the newest being at the very top.

Why should you care?

Blogs are very flexible and one can create a very powerful website with a blogging system. Nowadays, the most popular blogging software is WordPress and many websites are built with that. Originally, it started as a blog only, but now one can design so called static websites, that are not necessarily blogs, as in, they don’t have periodical updates that are presented in a chronological order, but they have a few informative pages. These websites are not really blogs, even though they are built with a blogging software. That means that in the future, if the owner wants to start blogging, they have the ability to do so.

Additionally, a blog usually consists of a title, one image or more, the main content and that is called a blog post. The writer needs to think also about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. To be more specific, the writer needs to think about the title and the main content should include smart words, or keywords, that will help other people find them via search engines.

So if I were to google for “gluten free pasta recipes” the ones that have worked with SEO should appear on the top results. Now this is not exactly fair, as there are other blogs that have done a great job with their SEO and do not appear on the top results, but the competition is tough, and there are so many more factors to consider, but for the purposes of this guide, we keep it simple. With that in mind, make sure that you write as a title “Gluten free pasta with tomato sauce recipe” or something like that, and avoid vague titles like “The best dish you will ever eat”. Even if that’s true, it will be hard to be discovered for “gluten free pasta”. I won’t go into more details about this one, but I hope you get the idea 🙂

So if you are completely new to the concept of blogging, I hope my explanation helped you.

If you do know what a blog is and you want to start your own, then I hope you can take a look into my other blog posts, as I have a lot of articles that can help you out.

Thanks for reading 🙂