You’ve installed WordPress for the first time, lined up your theme and have added a few wordpress plugins. Now you have to write some posts and you ask the questions, “is there a system I should employ while writing?”
The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. No you shouldn’t change your writing style or purpose for the sake of search engines or WordPress. Yes, there are are some best practices you need to follow when writing which will help maintain clarity and popularity. So pay attention to the following suggestions, they’ll go a long way to help increase visibility and visitors.
Title Tags
The single most important element that will help your visitors find your content is going to be your post title. Think of something that’s not too short, that’s relevant, that’s appealing and attention grabbing, and also contains relevant keywords to your content. Avoid punctuation like commas, quotes, or periods. (You don’t require a full stop at the end of your title.)
For example, rather than a title: I like WordPress
I’d write something like: Distinct SEO’s Top 10 Reasons We Love WordPress
Read More…
You’ll notice you just clicked the ‘more’ button to read the rest of this post. That’s by design. You’ll see in console while writing new blog posts a button called ‘more’. It inserts the code <!–more–> wherever you insert it that will break the page and make people click from the homepage into the actually post page.
This action prevents duplicate content from showing up in the search engines (duplicate content is undesirable). You don’t want to feature content in a full version on both the index page AND the individual post page.
Selecting One Category
Every post has a category to be filed under. If you don’t manually select a category then the default category will be selected for you. Generally you’ll want to remember to put the post in the right category since the default category is usually the irrelevant ‘Uncategoried’ option. Remember the duplicate content issues from above? The same holds true here, we only want to pick ONE category because to put it in two will put the same content in two separate locations.
Additional Media
WordPress is powerful enough to host and/or house additional content that will complement your written words. Videos, audio, and images can be inserted and go a long way to attract and retain readership.
Headings
If your article naturally flows into sub-headings then use the<h1> to <h6> tags. So primary headers would look something like his <h1>Primary Header</h1> and secondary ones <h2>Secondary</h2> all the way down to six (you can go down more but that would be a weird page of sub headings).
You’ll have to insert these tags in the HTML view (rather than the Visual view) and the result should be something like this:
I’m an H2 Header
HTML v. Visual View
Speaking of view, you have two options when writing new posts, the ‘Visual’ and ‘HTML’ views. I choose HTML because it reduces the amount of unnecessary HTML that might sneak its way into the post. For example, if you’re copying and pasting from Word or the web, you’ll want to do that directly into the HTML view. If not, all the styles and funny things that are part of the code will transfer to your post.
Generally this isn’t a huge issue, but it can lead to some design headaches.
Post Tags
One way to help you attract more attention is to insert ‘post tags’ seen at the right of your screen. Tags are 1-2 words that describe what you’re writing. Post tags for this post would be something like: wordpress writing, writing blog posts.
This component is not necessary to successfully submit a new article.
Once you’re done with your article and you’ve followed the steps listed above you can click PUBLISH to the right. The neat thing about WordPress is you can delay publishing to a time in the future by clicking ‘edit’ by the Publish row to the upper right.
I will continually add new insights here, but for now these are the crucial aspects to help you manage your blog posting. Happy blogging!