So you have written a post for your WordPress blog. Congratulations! Now all you need to do is have more viewers read your post. How do you do that? Well, this article is all about giving your WordPress blog posts the perfect finishing touches so that more viewers can read your posts. A lot of traffic will then go to your blog site, and you will become an authority of your niche in the online community.
Reduce the Title Length
After adding the new post, you need to put the title and the body of the article where they belong in the Edit Post page. Have a look at your title. Is it too long? Well, you need to trim it down to seven words or less. There are several reasons why this is important, but one of them is that you don’t want your blog post URL to be too long. Once you’ve done that, check the Permalink under the title box where you inserted your title. Click on edit, and then copy paste your title to the link, and WordPress will automatically supply the dashes. Furthermore, if your title contains words such as ‘and’ or ‘or’, words that Google doesn’t look for because they are too common, you don’t have to include them in the Permalink to make the link even shorter, provided that the title still makes sense by dong so.
More Tag
Now take a look at the body of your article. Remember that in the home page of your blog, your post title is listed along with a few parts of the body. You can define which part of the body is shown in the home page before another link prompts visitors to Read More. You can do this by putting a More tag by clicking on the more tag button at the Edit Post page, in line with other features such as bold and italic. The following is a picture of the more tag button:
Figure 1. The more tag button.
In connection with the more tag button. You can also edit the Read More text which reads “read more” by default. You can customize this to say, “Continue reading article so and so,” for example. You can do this by at the “Read More” Text feature under SEO Details and Additional Style.
Add Tags
Adding Tags to your blog post is very important because it contributes largely to describing your post and allowing it to be found through searching or browsing. You can add tags at the Post Tags section at the Edit Post page. There is a blank space where you can type in specific words, usually subject words, that define the content of your article. For a start, you can use the Suggested tags located at the bottom of the Post tags section. You can click Suggested tags by Yahoo and WordPress will automatically show you Yahoo’s suggestions on what tags you should label your article with. You can then choose some or all of these suggestions by clicking on them and then clicking add in the Post Tags section.
Of course, you can then proceed to typing what you think are the words that best define the content of your article. You can start looking at the title, and see if it contains words or groups of words which you want to add as tags. Then, scan the whole document from top to bottom and look for key words or phrases which you can add as tags. Not only that, you can also use words that are not found in the article. For example, if you are doing a review about a PDF research article online, you can add the words PDF and research as tags, even if these words aren’t found in your article. In addition, it is also a good strategy to add names as tags because people like to search for names. Following our previous example, you can tag the name of the author of the PDF research article you made a review about.
Add Category
Under the Post Tags section in the Edit Post page, you have the Categories section, which contains all the categories that you made for your blog posts. It is very important that you choose the right category for your blog post so that it will not appear lost or out of place in a certain category. Apparently, you should figure out what the main thought of your article is, and this is especially important if your blog is composed of several categories which are sub-niches to the general niche of your blog. For example, if your blog is all about behavioral targeting, you can have categories like behavioral marketing, behavioral advertising, and behavioral targeting. You need to know which category to put your article, but if you’re really not sure, it may be wise to just label it under the category which is the overall niche of your blog.
Add Post Image and Thumbnail Image
A blog post looks so much better if it has a high quality picture in it. Thus, it is very important to have a thumbnail image and a post image for your article. When a visitor views your blog home page, he will be more enticed to read the rest of the article if it is accompanied by a thumbnail image, and reading the article, he will find it more visually interesting at least if it is accompanied by a post image.
To put an image to your post, I suggest that you look for pictures at Flickr. However, be sure to use those pictures under the Creative Commons license. According to creativecommons.org, “Creative Commons is a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright.” Indeed it is the surest way of using a picture online without having to worry about copyright issues. To do this, you need to search for pictures in this link: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. Once you find the picture that you are looking for, clicking on it will lead you directly to its own page. In this page, there is an ALL SIZES on top of the picture which will take you to the page containing links to all sizes of the picture, from thumbnail to original. For the thumbnail image, click on the thumbnail size button. This will show you the thumbnail version of the picture. Right click on that picture and choose Copy Image URL. Then paste this URL to the Thumbnail Image blank on the Post Image and Thumbnail section of the WordPress Edit Page. Then, type a thumbnail image text at the bottom. This text is usually the title of your blog post, so just copy that. Do the same for the post image, but this time, click on the Small size button in the Flickr page.
Meta Description
Meta Description is very important for your blog post as well. This is usually composed of a phrase or sentence, or two, which summarizes the entire content of your article. This is actually the first couple of lines which appear with your link and blog post title at a Google Search listing. You can write the meta description at the Meta Description box under the SEO Details and Additional Style section.
When writing the meta description, it is very important to include the title of your blog post and some of the tags you chose for the article. This makes your article a lot more relevant to visitors who may have used your tags in Google search to come across a listing which contains your blog post. Furthermore, the meta description should be the short summary of your entire article. This is important because when people read it in the Google listing, they will learn right away what the post is about and will really benefit from the information they get from just a few lines. Then they will think to themselves, “Oh I learned about this from your blog post without even opening it yet.”
Published on date
Finally, you can also edit the date when you want your blog post to appear on your blog. When you have edited several blog posts and are ready to publish them all, you don’t have to publish them all on the same date or immediately. You can choose to Publish some of them a week after and the others the following week, or even publish one article per week at a time, depending on your preferences. You can do this by looking at the upper right portion of the Edit Post page, in the Publish section. Click on Edit, then select a date when you want the post published.
The good thing about this is that your blog will seem to be very busy when it appears to be posting blogs every now and then. Another good thing is that after setting a date, if you check the home page of your blog, you will see on the upper right portion, a very cool feature which lists Next Week’s Topics, which are the titles of the posts which you set to be published next week. This gives you the upper hand on the Google listing for when these future posts will finally appear next week, because some of the tags for those articles already appear in your page at present.
These are the finishing touches you can do for your blog posts in WordPress. Do all of these before hitting the Publish button, and see amazing results! Enjoy!
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