What does incorporation mean and how is it applied to the Bill of Rights?

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Incorporation means applying protections from the Bill of Rights to actions by state governments, not just the federal government, through the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court uses selective incorporation, gradually rendering many rights binding on the states via the Due Process Clause, but not all rights have been incorporated. This lets the states be constrained by most, but not necessarily every, fundamental right in the Bill of Rights. The idea reflects that the Bill of Rights originally restrained only the federal government, and the Fourteenth Amendment over time extended many of its protections to state action. So the correct view is that incorporation is selective, applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, rather than total incorporation, legislative-by-act incorporation, or automatic binding of the Bill of Rights to states.