The World of Web Publishing - WordPress 101

It’s great to have a WordPress website but in order to make it really work for you, you have to get found and that’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.

In developing your website with WordPress you have already made great strides in getting noticed because WordPress is built from the ground up to be found.  Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo love WordPress sites.

So what can you do to enhance your visibility?

First thing to do is make sure you have a good theme.  There are thousands of themes available free of charge and some are very good but some are not.  Even the really good ones are sometimes badly supported or not optimized for the search engines.  My recommendation is to go for a tried and trusted premium theme.  They cost from $40 to $100 but its money well spent if the design works, can be customized, is well supported and is designed with SEO in mind.  Remember, your website is your shop window to the world and you only get once chance at a first impression.

Of the free themes that are customizable and have good SEO, I would recommend taking a look at the ‘Pixel’ theme or ‘Painter’.  There are many popular premium themes like ‘Thesis’ which are well supported with forums where users can discuss development, plugins and customization.  My favorite themes are those from StudioPress as they cover all of the prerequisites for support, customization and Search Engine Optimization as well as having an excellent support forum.

Every time you update WordPress or add a new blog post, it sends out a signal (Ping) to the search engines.  By default WordPress should be set to Ping but it’s worth checking that Pinging is switched on.  You’ll find a sub-menu (within the Settings menu) called ‘Discussions’ in your WordPress Dashboard.  You should ensure that the ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) ’ option is checked.  If you do not wish to have specific articles or posts ‘pinged’ then you can override this option on individual posts.

Permalinks

Just about the most important aspect of searching is what’s displayed in the web page or post URL (URL = address of the page or post).  You want it to be descriptive and reflect what people are searching for.

By default WordPress displays categories, pages and posts in a database oriented way.  For example, you might have created a page called ‘Healthy Recipes’ but when you see the URL in your web browser it will show something like:

http://www.myhealthydomain.com/?page_id=662

The same goes for posts and categories.  You might blog about a particular nutritionist and title your post ‘meet Mavis Stewart’ only for the URL to show:

http://www. myhealthydomain.com /?p=2406

This does not help the search engines to find these pages and posts so we need to change the settings in Permlinks.

From the Settings menu in your WordPress dashboard, goto Permalinks.

You’ll see a list of Common Settings.

The default is something like:

http://www.myhealthydomain/?p=123

There are various options but I like ‘Month and name’ which looks something like:

http://www. myhealthydomain.com/2010/03/sample-post

You’ll see under Custom Structure that you can create your own parameters but for SEO the month and name option is perfect.

You’ll see that instead of the page ID there is something that is far more descriptive… and that is the ‘slug’.

Pages, posts and categories automatically have slugs created for them but you can override those slugs with your own more descriptive variety.  So we’ll look at ‘slugs’ (I hope you’re not squeamish).

Let’s go edit the Healthy Recipes page.

You can change Permlinks / Slugs either by editing the Page or Post or using the Quick Edit function.  We’ll choose Edit.

You’ll notice at the top of the page, just under the page title, it shows something like:

- Using default Permalink settings:

Permalink: http://www.myhealthydomain.com/?page_id=662[Change Permalinks]

- Using Month and name Permalink settings:

Permalink: http://www.myhealthydomain.com/healthy-recipes[Edit]

By changing the Permalinks to ‘Month and name’, the URL already looks more friendly to the search engines.  You can glean a lot more from ‘healthy-recipes’ than you can from page_id=662… but of course you can be even more descriptive.

Click on [Edit]

This opens up the ‘slug’ for editing. Instead of ‘healthy-recipes’, let’s change it to ‘healthy organic vegetarian recipes’. Then click OK.  You’ll notice that WordPress automatically replaces the spaces between the words with a hyphen.

Let’s do the same with the example post.

By changing the Permalink settings, the URL for ‘Meet Mavis Stewart’ will have changed from:

‘http://www. myhealthydomain.com /?p=2406 to:

http://www. myhealthydomain.com /meet-mavis-stewart

Edit the Permlink to something like ‘nutrition-for-health-and-wellness-mavis-stewart-bio’

Remember, what you’re looking to achieve is to emulate what your potential visitors will be search for.  The Search Engines know that people don’t search for ‘meet mavis stewart’ but might be looking for nutrition for health and wellness.  It’s your job to be creative with the page and post slugs.

Once you have the right Theme and your Permalinks and Slugs are in order, then it’s time to start Blogging.  Search Engines love blogs and are constantly crawling the web for new content.  Blog posts get found fast.

As you will have read in earlier articles, Pages are for static information like About Us, Mission Statement, Contact Us etc., whereas Posts are for dynamic information… articles, travel-logs, knowledge bases and more… information that is always changing, growing and evolving.  Posts are organized in Categories.  See article on Posts and Categories to learn how to best organize them.

Once you have written your blog post or article, re-read it.  If you’re using dynamic content within the post, ensure that the links are active. For example, you may be embedding a video from YouTube into your post.  If that video is not yours, check regularly to ensure it’s still active otherwise broken links will start to creep into your site.  Bad news for SEO.

Use Keywords in your Post titles and within the articles themselves but remember to use phrases too.  Many visitors will search for a product or service by description and location, so when you blog, ensure that you include all the keywords and phrases that make your post attractive to the search engines.

You might write an article about local Farmer’s Markets.  Include descriptive phrases and keywords so that people looking for say a (Farmer’s Market in Springfield, Ohio specializing in organic produce or preservative free / hormone free milk), will find your article.  Title your posts well and constantly check that all pages and posts are working.

When you’re actually editing or writing a blog/post always use the ‘Excerpt’ feature below the post itself.  This is a way to describe or summarize your post.  Don’t just take a paragraph from the post itself as search engines don’t like seeing the same content repeated.  Write something unique for them to find.

Link to other sites and get other sites linking to you.  If you are discussing a specific topic (like farmer’s markets), put a link to external farmer’s market resources or a Wikipedia article.

You can further optimize blog posts using SEO plugins.  I recommend ‘all in one SEO pack’ which can be downloaded from the WordPress.org resource site.  Goto to their Extend menu, then plugins and search for SEO.  This plugin allow you to optimize every post as though it were a unique website.

WordPress features a Blogroll or Links menu.  This will be discussed in a future article but it allows you to create a menu to link with other sites.  You should use this and get other site to link to you in return.

There is a lot more you can do to enhance your visibility which will be dealt with in a future (advanced) article but if you carry out these fairly simple processes, you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.

© 2010 – Christine Ely

Posts and Pages make up most of the content in WordPress. If you’re wondering how you add content to the side panels, headers, footers then stayed tuned for the next article on Widgets. So in Article One, we created a series of Pages which would hold the static content of our site. We also learned how to upload and insert a picture into a page. The next step is to make pages actually do something more than just show pictures and information, so let’s go back to the ‘Contact Us’ Page.

Open your WordPress Dashboard Menu and click Pages. The Pages we created previously should be listed. If you haven’t done so already, create a Page called ‘Contact Us’. Otherwise just click on the Edit option for the ‘Contact Us’ Page.

Let’s list a few ways to make contact so start by thanking your visitor for his or her interest.

Type:

“Thank you for your interest in our services. You can contact us in a numbers of ways.

• By phone: (555) 972 5555
• By fax: (866) 555 9722
• By email: info@mydomain.com”

Now it might be that we would like to create a link on the email address so that by clicking on that link, the visitor’s email client will automatically load. To do this, highlight the text of the email address. When you do that, you’ll notice that a couple of the icons (buttons) on the main icon bar become focused. These are the Insert/Edit Link and Unlink buttons. So now, with the email address highlighted, click on the Insert/Edit Link icon.

A popup window will appear requesting a Link URL. If you were just linking another page to this page, you would go with the “http://” prefix as is defaulted in the popup. But for email addresses, you should prefix with ‘mailto:’… so where you see :http://” in the ‘Link URL’ box, replace that with ‘mailto:info@mydomain.com’. At this time, don’t change anything else in the popup. Click the Insert button to activate that link.

Once you have completed updating your ‘Contact Us’ page, click the ‘Update’ button (or Publish button if you’re creating this page for the first time) to publish your contact page.

Once published. Check the page in a live browser window to see how the page looks and behaves. Clicking on the email address should launch your default email client.

Now for many websites, a contact form is a preferred choice to just entering an email address… and with a little add-in called a ‘Plugin’, WordPress makes this so easy, ‘even a caveman could do it’. And with WordPress you can definitely save 15% (100%?) or more over traditional websites.

Plugins are little programs or files that enhance or add to the functionality of WordPress. There are thousands of them and most of them are free. Visit www.wordpress.org then go to the Extend section… you’ll see a menu that gives you access to all the ‘plugins’ (and ‘themes’ for that matter). We’re going to look for a ‘Contact Form’ plugin. My personal favorite, for its functionality and simplicity of use, is called ‘Contact Form 7’… so from the ‘Plugins Menu’ on the WordPress.org site, search for ‘Contact Form 7’. Select it and download it.

Note: There are several ways to find and install Plugins but my preference is to download them to a ‘plugins’ folder so that I can keep a library of my favorites for future use. Plugins download in a ‘zipped’ format and also get installed that way.

Once downloaded, go back to your WordPress Dashboard and you’ll see a menu choice ‘Add New’ on the Plugins Menu. Click on ‘Add New’.

You will see the ‘Install Plugins’ menu in the WordPress main window. Select ‘upload’.

Browse to where you downloaded the plugin, select it and click ‘install now’.

Once installed, click ‘Activate’.

Most plugins create a link that will take you to the website of the ‘plugin’ creator. There you’ll find full instructions on how to use the plugin. Many also create a new menu choice on the Dashboard. Contact Form 7 creates a mini ‘control panel’ for the plugin in the Tools Menu. So before integrating this contact form into your ‘Contact Us’ page, let’s visit the ‘Contact Form 7’ page in the Dashboard ‘Tools’ menu.

You’ll see at the top of the page a snippet of code to paste onto your page or post. Under that is a page of ‘code’ that creates the contact form ‘fields’ (the information you want to gather from your site visitor), and under that you can insert the email address where you’d like the completed contact form results to be sent.

For now, just copy that snippet of code from the top of the page.  Now go back to Pages and click ‘Edit’ to edit the ‘Contact Us’ page.

You should have already entered some contact information so under that, enter some additional text:

“Please complete the following form and we will get back to you as soon as possible”.

Now paste that snippet of code:

Click ‘Update’ to update the page.

Now try going ‘live’ and check out the form. Fill out the details of the form and click ‘Send’. You should now be receiving an email from yourself.

Thousands of Plugins are available and can extend WordPress in a multitude of ways. There are Plugins for slideshows, photo galleries, eCommerce, Paypal, and much more more. We’ll be going into greater depth on Plugins in a future article.

My next article will deal with embedding code from external sites like YouTube, directly into your Posts, Pages and Widgets.

© 2010 – Christine Ely

WordPress 101 – Part 2:

So — Pages and Posts make up the content of your WordPress website and blog.  They are similar in how you create content for them but very different in how WordPress handles them.

WordPress ‘Page’ titles not only title the page but also create the menu heading for the ‘Pages’ menu bar… Posts however are different.  Posts are effectively database records and stored under Categories.

A Category is really a subject heading.  Posts get organized by Category and Sub Category, so it’s important to structure your Categories.  You can create complete hierarchies with Categories going from Parent Categories, Sub Categories, Sub-Sub Categories etc.

Note: Not all themes work the same.  The suggestions expressed in these articles assume a well developed theme.  Most of our websites are based around the ‘Studiopress’ premium themes; which are professional, very solid and highly customizable.

Let’s assume you’ve read the previous article and your WordPress site now has a set of menus created from Static Pages.  The Page’s menu bar displays ‘Home’, ‘Services’, ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact Us’ with associated drop down menus from the Child Pages.

Now we want to introduce dynamic content to the mix.  Remember, you can title a Post however you want but it will be organized by Category and not the Post title.

So let’s create come Categories.

You can create new Categories from the main Dashboard ‘Posts’ menu or directly while creating a Post.  The Posts menu shows, Edit, Add New, Post Tags and Categories.  So, choose Categories.

As WordPress began its life as a blogging tool, let’s start by creating a Category called ‘Blogs’.

For Category Name enter: Blogs

For Category Slug enter: author-blogs
(note: the category slug is for creating user friendly URLs.  The default for a WordPress URL would be something like www.mydomain.com/?cat=187 but with your Permalinks (more on those later) set to Friendly URLs, your Post’s URL would be www.mydomain.com/author-blogs; which is way more effective to the search engines.

Leave Category Parent as None

WordPress is a multi user system which enables you to assign many contributors to your website/blog.  To facilitate these blogs, you can create several users for your WordPress system and assign each one a Sub Category in which to post their Blog.  We’ll come back to Sub Categories shortly.

Now let’s create a Category called ‘Articles’… Again we’ll be creating Sub Categories shortly.

Now a Category called ‘Events’…

You can create as many categories as you wish but they will not appear on your website until you assign live Posts to them.  So you can effectively create the whole structure and plan your site before you write your first article or blog post.

Remember that WordPress stores Posts as database records; which is important as it means there are no limits to the number of Posts that can be created and organized.

Posts are organized chronologically within Categories.  The newest Post is on top and moves down the list as new Posts are created.  The Time and Date stamps of Posts can be changed which effectively reorders the Posts within a Category.  Posts can also be scheduled to appear at a later date. (More on that later).

Now, if you create a lot of Posts and just put them all in the Blogs Category, they would be ordered by Date but nothing more.  Regardless of subject matter, newest would be on top and oldest on the bottom.  That’s not what you want, so this is why we create Sub Categories.

Ok, Let’s say we have 3 ‘Authors’ that we want on our blog.

Their names are:

‘John Doe’, ‘Jane Smith’ and ‘Cathy Taylor’.

We can create a Sub Category for each of these.

Back to the Categories menu.

• Create a new Category: John Doe
• Slug: john-doe
• Category Parent: Select Blogs from drop down list.

• Create a category for Jane Smith
• slug: jane-smith
• Parent: Blogs

• Create a category for Cathy Taylor
• slug: cathy-taylor
• Parent: Blogs

By assigning a Category to a Parent Category, it automatically becomes a Sub Category.

Now let’s create a couple of Posts and allocate them to the Categories.

From the Posts Menu, select Add New.

Creating a Post is just like creating a Page.  You have the same interface and tools for editing.

Give your Post a Title:  ‘Hiking Mt Rainier’.  Enter some text…

Once you have entered the content for the Post, you can allocate it to a Category.  You’ll see to the right of the Post, there are 3 areas to update, (although the location can be changed under ‘Screen Options’).  These are Publish, Post Tags and Categories.  If you look at the Categories section, you’ll see the Categories you created earlier.  The Sub Categories are indented under the Parent Categories.  For this Post check the John Doe check box.

Once the Post is as you want it, click the Publish button.

Now create another Post called ‘Mountain Biking’. Enter some text, allocate to ‘John Doe’ Sub Category and Publish.

Let’s now create another Post called ‘Theater in Seattle’, enter some text then allocate to ‘Cathy Taylor’ and Publish.

One more Post called ‘Cloud Computing’, enter text, allocate to ‘Jane Smith’ and Publish.

When you publish a Post or a Page from WordPress, it goes live onto the Web.  Remember, this is ‘cloud computing’.  When you create, update and publish, you are doing so live to the web.

So check out the live version of the website.  You see that four Posts have been published but they are organized by Category and Sub Category.  Two posts appear chronologically in the John Doe Category and one each for Cathy Taylor and Jane Smith.

The same could be done for the ‘Articles’ and ‘Events’ Categories.  If you were creating a series of events, each Post could be allocated to the Event Type.  For example, you could create Sub Categories for Biznik Events, BNI Events, Meet Up Events and so on.  As you post to the Categories, the Posts will appear chronologically within their respective Sub Categories.  WordPress makes the organization of these Posts a total breeze.

So to recap.  Pages are for static content.  Posts are for dynamic content.  Both are created in a similar manner but handled and organized differently by WordPress.  If you want to create a lot of content which will be constantly updated or added to, do that with Posts.

In WordPress 101 – Part 3, I’ll expand on Pages and Posts and how you can create a dynamically updatable Home Page.  I’ll also cover video embedding, Slide Shows, Plugins and Widgets.

© 2010 by Christine Ely

WordPress is a state-of-the-art web development and publishing platform. It is comprehensive, extensible and free. WordPress adheres to all major web standards and so is compatible with all modern browsers. It is a cloud based (online) system so is independent of operating systems; you view it, update it and develop it through your browser. So whether you use Mac OS, Windows or Linux, WordPress is the ideal solution for you.

WordPress and other OpenSource technologies are giving non technical and technical people alike incredible tools to communicate and interact with the rest of the world as never before. Ask anyone in the know and they will tell you… WordPress is one of the most important technologies on the web today!

So what is WordPress?

A WordPress web/blog site is a full development platform for your online presence. WordPress gives you the tools to maintain and update your site without having to hire expensive web developers, graphic designers and consultants. It just takes a little imagination and some computer know-how.

Your WordPress site can reside anywhere, just like a regular website. Most people using non WordPress.com version of WordPress now do so as their primary website but it can also be used to complement and enhance an existing site with blogging technology.

For most of us there are 2 versions of WordPress that are freely available.

1. A blog/website available at WordPress.com
2. An independent web and blog site using the downloadable WordPress software available from WordPress.org

This article deals with the WordPress.org edition although there are many crossover and similar features.

From the outside WordPress looks very much like any other website but inside it is very different.  The primary difference is that WordPress sits on top of a database.  Behind every WordPress website sits MySQL, the open source database that powers a huge proportion of online activity and processing.  In days past, having this amount of intrinsic power would have cost a fortune and required skilled developers to manage.  Not so anymore.  WordPress harnesses and manages that power through a clearly defined and easily learned ‘Dashboard’.

So, you have WordPress installed.  (This article does not cover WordPress Installation).

So let’s log in.

To access the dashboard, simply add /wp-admin to the web address. E.g. http://www.mydomain.com/wp-admin/

You will then be asked for your user name – default: admin and your password.

The WordPress Dashboard is the mechanism that allows you to turn your creativity into a real tangible website and blog that can potentially be viewed my countless millions of people.

At the heart of WordPress are Themes (which interpret the WordPress engine and provide an Interface that your visitors will see), Pages and Posts.

Choosing a Theme is important, in fact it’s crucial.  There are literally thousands of themes available but are of mixed quality, support and documentation. More later…

WordPress manages content through Pages and Posts; which are created in a similar manner but are handled in a fundamentally different way.

Pages are like regular web pages.  They are static.  You can have one page per subject heading.  You’ll see the difference when I discuss Posts. However, static though they may be, they are still way cleverer than the average web page.  So let’s say you are going to create a web page.

From your ‘dashboard’ you’ll see a menu down the left hand side (I’m assuming here that you’ll all be using an up to date version of WordPress) and half way down is a heading that says Pages. Each menu is collapsible so you may just see Pages.  You should open the menu and then you’ll see Pages, Edit, Add New.

So let’s add a Page.

Adding a New Page should land you in familiar territory.  It looks like a Word Processor interface.  You’ll see an icon bar with various buttons (icons) to help format your page.  If you see only one line of icons, you can expand this by clicking on the ‘Show/Hide Kitchen Sink’ icon which opens/closes the second line.

You’ll also notice that there are two tabs in the edit window, the first one being ‘Visual’ and the second being ‘HTML’.  Right now you’ll work in the Visual tab.

Start typing something into the page.

You’ll notice that it behaves very much like a regular word processor.  You can bold, underline, and italicize your text and more.  You can use bullets, number lists and styles.  But it may be that you prefer write your copy using Microsoft’s Word (or an open source equivalent).  No problem with WordPress.  There is an icon for taking Word formatted documents and pasting them into the page.  Just look on the second line of the icon bar for ‘Paste from Word’.  Pasting a Word document directly into a WordPress page can and invariably does lead to highly unpredictable results.  Use the ‘Paste from Word’ option!

Once you have created a page, just click to the HTML tab and you’ll notice that WordPress has converted everything you have typed and formatted into ‘HTML’, the native language of the web browser.

Let’s go back to the Visual tab.  WordPress also enables uploading of pictures directly into a WordPress page.  You’ll see above the icon bar it says Upload/Insert followed by a series of small icons; the first being ‘Add an Image’.  Let’s do that…

Click on the icon and you’ll see a number of choices of how you can insert an image.  This article only deals with the first of these, Select Files (From Computer).  Click Select Files and browse your computer for a picture you’d like to include on your page.

(Important Note: your website doesn’t need massive pictures being uploaded.  The average digital camera nowadays can take 12+ mega pixel pictures.  They are huge and cannot possibly be viewed on the average computer monitor.  Keep your pictures under 1024 pixels wide. A huge proportion of the visitors to your site still have a monitor that only displays 1024 x 768 pixels, and with Netbooks and smart phones, that is even less. The bigger the image, the longer it takes to load and WordPress has to deal with storing and crunching it. So in the case of pictures, Less is More…  Keep the size down).

WordPress has a built in FTP (File Transfer Protocol) facility that allows you to upload images (and for that matter, whatever else you may wish to upload), so no external programs are required to get your images into your web pages.  There are tools that can enhance WordPress, which will be dealt with later.

Once uploaded, you can format the picture directly from WordPress.  You can change the size, you can justify to the left, right or center.  You can place a caption on the image and you can create a link so that when a visitor clicks on that image, it will take them to another or another website.

Everything you need to do to create visually pleasing content that communicates with your target audience and other sites, is contained within the Page Editor but of course there is much more.

The Page Titles (in most themes) create the Menu Heading for the page.  So for example, if you want to create an ‘About Us’ page, you’ll title the page ‘About Us’ and that’s what the menu will show.  Of course, you could easily run out of space on your website if you displayed each page horizontally… so WordPress has the Parent/Child page relationship.

Let’s say you create a page called ‘About Us’ but you also want a page about each individual member of the company.  You wouldn’t want them all displayed next to each other.  So you create the ‘About Us’ page as a Parent Page then the page about the individual would be created as a ‘Child’ of the ‘About Us’ page.

Using the system of Parent/Child Pages gives true structure and organization to your pages.

A simple example:

Parent Pages

• Home | Philosophy | About Us | Contact Us

Child Pages

• Mission Statement – Child of Philosophy
• Company Ethics – Child of Philosophy
• Locations – Child of About Us
• Key Personnel – Child of About Us
• Etc…

The Child Pages become drop down menus of the Parent Pages.

WordPress contains a treasure chest of features that allow you to create, modify and manage your website and blog.  This series of articles will cover many of those features.

Part 2 of this article will bring Posts and Blogging into the mix as well as the use of Plugins and Embedded Code to enhance pages.

© 2010 by Christine Ely