Blogging, it’s all the rage these days with every company worth it’s salt having some sort of blog. We even run a Blogging Training course in Brighton, Sussex. One of the most popular blog software is WordPress which powers over 18 million sites worldwide.

You know all of this though don’t you? So you’ve started your own blog with WordPress and you’re on your way to becoming a blogging machine!

Its not enough just to have a blog and write anything you want, you have to make sure that people will want to read it! You have to make sure people can find it! You need to optimise your WordPress blog for search engines! We offer SEO Training if you want to learn more.

WordPress training is an option to reach this state of blogging nirvana, but today I’ll give you my 8 tips to writing a WordPress blog post

So read on…

8 Things to remember

1. WordPress Titles

This is probably the most important part of the blog and sometimes the most difficult, without a great, searchable and interesting title, nobody is going to find it and those that do might be put off by a boring title.

• Sum the post up as briefly as possible; short titles are easy to remember and easy to search for
• Keywords, Keywords, Keywords! if you’re writing about..say..a guide to writing a blog post then including names of popular blogging software, words like “training, blog, post” etc will help people that are searching for, in this case WordPress help, find your post.
• Think about phrases your potential fan base might search for, such as “What things should i remember when writing a blog post?” then use those phrases to write your title.

2. Permalinks in WordPress.

The permanent link is the URL of the page where your blog post sits. This is important as this is the first thing that is indexed by the search engines. Get it wrong and your post could be lost in the blogosphere.

• Keywords; Your probably thinking “What? More keywords?” and the answer is YES, they are even more important in the URL because that is the first point of call for search engines and blog directories
• Keep it short; get rid of all the short unnecessary words like “a”, “if”,”or”, “and” etc these are ignored by search engines anyway so it’s no great loss

Have a look over here at our WordPress SEO tips page for a more in depth look at permalinks

3. Adding Images in WordPress

Images are great, they break up the text and give the reader something cool to look at. This post is dotted with images, mostly to help explain the points, but also to keep you engaged!

• Optimise your pic’s, large file sizes kill the browsing experience. No one wants to read a blog that takes 5 minutes to load because of huge images
• Alternate Text is somewhere to put some keywords about the image and post
• Make sure the image fits into the theme you use! If the theme has a specific width then the image should be small enough to fit. Don’t ruin a great picture with terrible placement

4. Links in WordPress

Creating links is dead easy and they happen to be useful for helping people find your post. WordPress uses both pingback and trackbacks to notify other blogs that you have linked to them and then posts a link to your blog on the comments section of the other blog.

Pingbacks are automatic but trackbacks are not, so you’ll have to do some setting up to get trackbacks to work…something something

You can instantly see how useful this is. If you tend to reference a lot of blogs and sources then having your blog automagically linked on the other blog is great for getting readers.

5. The “more” tag

Whatever you put above this tag will appear as a summary on the main page of your blog post. This is your chance to write an enticing and exciting introduction to compel readers to “read more”!

So make use of it, don’t make it too long or too short. A short punchy paragraph introducing the rest of the post should be above the more tag.

and lastly…

Things to think about

6. Beware of Copy & Paste!

If you’re pasting content from another blog or a news site then beware of the formatting. It will tend to look great in the text editor, but it will often import HTML codes that will mess up how your post looks.

Simplest way to avoid this is to use the “paste as plain text button” in the WordPress text editor

7. WordPress Categories

If you are talking about a bunch of different topics on your blog then its best to set up a few categories so readers can jump to the content they want. Setting up categories is as simple as hitting “new category” and away you go.

8. WordPress Tags

Tag your work! Tags are also used by the search engines and blog directories to help direct potential readers to blogs. Use the same keywords you have used throughout the post as tags. Trying to reuse tags from your other posts will help readers find a cluster of your posts.

Similar posts you may like

1. Blog Post Ideas – 10 Top Tips for Blog Inspiration
2. How to write a great blog post – 10 Top Tips
3. WordPress SEO – 10 top tips
4. How to get blog traffic
5. What’s new in WordPress 3.0?

Tags

advanced wordpress course, advanced wordpress training, blogging, Blogging Course, Blogging Training, blogging training sussex, blogs, categories, course, optimisation, optimize, permalinks, post tags, SEO, seo training, sussex, tags, training, Wordpress, WordPress Course, WordPress Training

Share This Post