This post follows a post I did last month: Getting Started with WordPress – Part One. As promised this post will deal with creating and managing posts and pages.

Before we get onto that subject however, there is something you need to do before creating any posts or pages. This will help with the SEO of your blog.

Go to the Options page on the Word Press admin panel, and click on the sub-link “Permalinks”. You’ll see the Default set at “http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123″ which is something you definately don’t want it set at, otherwise there’ll be no keywords set in the URL of your page and will often discourage people to visit your site if it’s seen in Search Engines.

I have mine set at “Date and name based” like so: http://www.yoursite.com/2008/04/30/sample-post/. This way I can add keywords to the URL and also have it date based, so anyone who’s looking in the Search Engines can see exactly what date it was posted and know that you’re site is pretty much up-to-date.

I would however suggest if you want your URL to just be “http://www.youriste.com/sample-post” set the Permalink to Custom, and in the text box just have “/%postname%/”.

Now that is out of the way let’s take a look at creating and managing posts.

When you create a post you have four standard things:

• Title
• Post
• Categories
• Tags

The Title is used as the title of your post and although it’s a little useful to include keywords in it, it isn’t major to do so. In fact, most people write catchy Titles to attract readers rather than stuff it with Keywords. Keep this in mind when writing your titles.

The Post is obviously where you write the content of your post so I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining how to do that.

Categories & Tags are similar. In fact, there was a time where I would use the same words for the categories and tags. This isn’t useful though for people who are looking for something specific. The categories section should be used as a general categorization and tags to be used as something more specific.

For example, if I write a post about how to create a logo in photoshop, the Category I’d put it in would be “Design”, or “How To”, but the tags could explain it more specifically by using the words “logos”, “photoshop”, “creating” etc. You can use as many tags as you like for each post. The more specific, the better!

Now let’s take a look at the other sections of the Write Post page.

Post Slug

For me the Post Slug is the most important part of the Write Post page. If you leave this blank it will create the Post Name of your post automatically from your title.

For example, if your title was to read “What’s all this then?” and the Post was actually about what is Google Adsense, the URL of your page will end up being “http://www.yoursite.com/whats-all-this-then” which is pretty useless as it doesn’t explain what the page is about and will lose Search Engine rankings.

But, use the Post Slug and type in “what-is-google-adsense” the URL of your page will be “http://www.yoursite.com/what-is-google-adsense” and has more of a chance of being in Search Engine Results for someone searching for information about Google Adsense than if you left this blank.

And of course, this does leave the title of your page intact, so no need to worry about it being overwritten.

Upload Images

You can upload images to go into your post. Word Press automatically uploads it to a folder on your server and then inserts it into your Post. It will usually place it at the top of the Post so be sure to cut and paste the code it inserts into a place where you want the image to be.

Writing Pages

Writing a Page and Writing a Post are very similar. The only difference is that you can’t include Categories or Tags into a page.

There are a lot of useful plugins available that will help with the SEO of your blog, which I will discuss in the next part of this series. These include the All in One SEO Pack which allows you to create unique Title and Meta tags for each post and page which will help significantly with getting in Search Engines for your specific keywords and search terms.

Managing Posts and Pages

This is fairly straight forward so I won’t go into too much detail with it. Basically when managing posts and pages you can View, Edit or Delete each one. It will display what date you posted it, what categories you’ve placed it in, how many comments it has, and the author of the post (useful if you have more than one person creating posts and pages).

As I said earlier the next part in this series will discuss useful plugins for your blog and how to use them. I hope you’ve found this post useful and I hope you’ll look forward to the next in the series.

Thoughts Aside
Most of the IT professionals who have done 70-270 and 220-601 as well as 70-291 are more likely to pursue 640-802 rather than 70-290 and hence are not seen studying for 642-446 at all.

Post a Comment

Name:
E-Mail:
Website Address:

Comment:

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail