How to create a Blog | course - 2 | Blog terms explained

We had seen the basic procedure for creating a blogger account and also learnt how to select the best 'blog Title' as well as 'domain address' in the previous post Course - 1 | create a blog. Before going through initial basic settings that is needed to start a blog, we will understand some blog terms. 

Log in to your blogger account and you will be landing by default to the below shown page. As you can see the blog name 'Test EBS' that I created in my previous section. Now click your blog name (in my case 'Test EBS').

If I have say three blogs then all that blog names should appear hear, like the one shown below. 

Ok, clicking your blog name his will take you to the 'Overview' section of your blog. As you can see in the below picture, there are 10 functional parameters, some of which will be useful all through your blogging works. Since, they are useful during blogging, we will understand something about them as follows

Overview 

Like the name indicates, it gives an overall status of your blogs traffic. You will get a quick status of page views, comments etc. The below snapshot shows how the overview looks. Note the terms and functions.

Posts 

This will display a collection of posts that you created (published as well as draft) along with page view status. This is where you create new posts as well as edit already published articles.

The below picture illustrates how Post section looks. As you can see there is a list of posts with labels and page views.

Pages

Pages differ from post. Pages are more or less like the tabs and is the place dedicated to include categories (links). Pages can be considered as 'Static' as they remain visible to the visitors. Posts are the place where articles are written and shared to the world. A page can hold group of similar posts, but a post is meant for specific article. Pages are not updated in RSS feeder and is meant mostly for the use of some kind of static articles like 'About me'. Bloggers allow you to create only 20 pages while it allows you to create unlimited number of posts. 

Just keep the following thumb rule while choosing between a page and a post

• For writing articles that is share-able in social media, use posts
• For including list of similar posts as a directory (category)  or to just write a static page like 'About Me'; that is not shear-able, go for pages

To make you more clear; the page that you are reading now in this blog is a 'Post' and the page that will be seen by clicking any of the above tabs (placed at the top of this post - HOME, SEO, SMM, Create Blog etc) is termed as 'Page'. Just go through them and understand how I categorized post links.

The below picture shows a snapshot of 'Pages' section of this blog. Just refer this for quick understanding.

Comments 

This is a section where your posts comments (published as well as waiting for modification) would be displayed. Remember the comments has been published can be deleted anytime later. The picture shows the same. You can note the tabs 'Remove content', 'Delete' and 'Spam'.

Google+ 

Google+ link allows you to change settings to link your blogger account with Google+ account so that whenever you publish a post, then it may or may not get shared automatically based on your settings. By default, your blog will be linked, that will be fine.

Stats 

Stats is the juncture where you will be spending more time in blogger. This page will give you details similar to analytics like page views, post-wise traffic, sources of traffic (URL's and referring sites) and audience (location of view, browsers). Stats will be more useful to track your blogs status once you start blogging. Check my blog stats and note what are all shown in that page.

Earnings tab

This will not be useful for now. It will be useful only when you start monetizing your blog. For now take it lightly.

Layout

OK, here is the useful section. Layout is all about your blogs inner arrangement. Layout will allow you to

1. Add new gadgets like pages (tabs), ads, social sharing buttons, subscribing links etc.
2. Delete some unwanted gadgets
3. Customize or reorder the location and placement of gadgets

Below picture shows this blogs layout. Compare the shown layout with this blog and you can easily understand about layout. note that we can re-arrange them by dragging and placing anywhere (except some gadgets; that we will learn soon).

Template 

Template helps you to edit HTML as well as customize the design of your blog.  It will help you to

• Choose new designs
• Change the existing design like background, text, colors, blog widths and everything needed to make the blog customized.

Settings

As the name indicates, settings allows you to change/update your preferences. This is where some of the 'search engine optimization' techniques were employed. We will learn about that in-detail in the next section. For now just go through the below picture and see the various sub-headings under settings. The sub-groups being

1. Basic - settings for Blog Title, Meta description, blog address
2. Posts and comments - settings to include or exclude word verification, member sign in for comments etc
3. Mobile and email - settings to mail posts after publishing
4. Language and formatting - Translation, time and date settings
5. Search preferences - settings for meta tags, re-directions, crawling and indexing etc
6. Other - Blog feed, footer and analytics settings

You may check the next part - Course - 3 | Basic Blogger settings required before publishing a post in my next course.

Hope this helps.

Feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions by posting a comment below. 

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