Remarkablogger

Guest Blogger Week continues at Remarkablogger with Joel Williams of Blog Tech Guy

With the launch of Wordpress 2.5 many things in the Wordpress admin dashboard have changed. However some things remain the same, and one of those is how each part of a Wordpress post affects what is displayed on your blog. For ease of use, I’ve used a screenshot from version 2.3.3 as this will be the one most familiar.

The WordPress Write Post Screen

Number 1 is number one for a reason. The title of you blog post can actually appear three times on a post page (see later screenshot). For this example, the title of our post is “Blog Post Headlines”:

• The post URL. If you have permalinks set to include the post name, then this title will appear in the URL of your post e.g. www.mywebsite.com/blog-post-headlines. Search engines like this as it tells them, and their users what the post it about.
• The title bar of your browser. At the very top of your internet browser window is the name of the page that you are visiting. Depending on how you have set this up this could say Blog Post Headlines by My Website Name
• The actual title of the blog post, either in H1 or H2 title tags. Title tags are what makes the text size larger than that of the text in the post, and search engines place more importance on them as it gives an indication of what the page is about.

Number 2, the Post Slug, shows you what your permalink URL will be, as mentioned above. It cleans up commas, quotes, apostrophes and other punctuation in your title. If you wanted to have a different URL to your title, you can actually change it here, but usually it’s nice to be consistent.

Number 3 is the text of your post. Whilst I won’t get into the details of search engine optimization here, your post should contain your keywords in a natural way, be on a specific topic, have associated images with descriptions relevant to your post, and most of all be unique, interesting content for your readers!

Number 4 and Number 5 are a way of organizing your posts can can also act as keywords for your post, so it’s best to make them relevant to your post to again help people find it. I like to think of Categories as broad definitions, for examples, Dogs, or Cars, with Tags being more specific, such as Irish Wolfhound, or Toyota Camry. This organization is up to you, but think about your post and what important areas you are talking about.

The image below shows where each of these actions turn up on your blog page. You will see that the tags (Number 4) are not visible on my theme. they appear as my meta keywords for search engines. Number 3 appears below my categories.

There are many things you can do to improve how your post reads to the reader and also how it appears in search engines. Enjoy your blogging!

Joel Williams runs Blog Tech Guy, a blog technical support website, reclaiming your time to concentrate on writing and promoting you blog.