Transcript:
Yes, hello everybody, it’s Ralph Stulgies from F1RST. Today I just wanted to give a quick tutorial on how to post a blog post on your WordPress website. So, it’s very simple. First of all, a good starting point is an article that you can find on our blog. It’s called ‘How To Create The Perfect Post Or Page‘ and in this article it has lots of useful information about how to write for a blog for your own business website and also how to structure, how long it should be, things to think about to add, the writing style and so on.
So, there’s a fair bit of useful information there, as I said. You can find this on our blog. So, if we get started, first of all, what we need for our blog post is some content, so basically, I’m using Microsoft Word here to write my text. And it’s nice in word if you can structure your page. You don’t need any formatting on your actual page because the formatting will be added later on by the website. So, just the plain formatting how Word comes out of the box is working fine for us. Now you can structure your text.
Basically, the first headline will be a heading 1 and further down the hierarchy the headings will then be heading 2 heading 3 and so on. So, just to give the headings, a hierarchy is good because then, later on, there will be translated to the markup of your website and that will also aid your search engine optimisation if the hierarchy of your headings is correct.
Now, for other elements, you can basically use paragraphs to subdivide text and can also use lists. So, there’s basically these numbered or ordered lists, and you can also use bulleted lists, and that will then also later be inherited to the actual HTML code that will be generated.
Um, so we’re using a couple of different tools here. Basically, we use Word Microsoft Word – for writing our texts. Now, that already does a fair bit of spelling checks and also checks simple grammatical things and also your punctuation and different things. So that’s fairly good. There is a very useful plugin called Grammarly and Grammarly is a plugin that you can basically use as a plugin for Microsoft Office. You can also use it as a stand-alone version just running on your operating system. So, basically, a Windows app. And you can also use it as a browser plug-in for your web browser. So, here we have it as an Office add-in but you can also have it as an add-in here in your browser, and it’s really a great tool. There is a free version, and of course, for our purposes here at F1RST we are using the professional subscription version as that offers a fair few more functionalities and features.
But anyways, the free version is still very helpful. So, what we do here is we have written our text and have given it a basic formatting. Now I’ll just quickly go through it and open Grammarly and just see what is going to be shown here.
So, there’s a couple of things that we can correct in our page here. The really important things are the things that are underlined in red. So, we see here ‘usebility’ – there is a misspelled word. We just correct that. Not a problem.
There are some other suggestions here. Basically, Grammarly doesn’t like the short versions like ‘wouldn’t’ and ‘don’t’ and ‘won’t’, and so on and so it just suggests here the full extended versions with ‘will not’ and ‘would not’ and so on but basically, we will just leave our text how it is because it reads nicely, and we just leave it like that. There’s a few other things which we at this stage just ignore. So, basically, our text is ready now what we will also need for our blog post is an image. So you can take your own photos, you can use stock images. So, what we have here, we’ve just chosen an image. We just use this image for our article and yeah so basically what we do now is we simply go to our WordPress website, and we will log in to the site, and your web designer will be able to give you login details and set you up with an account. So, what I’m doing here is I’m just logging in with this account that I have created. Which is like an account that I would provide to a client which is an ‘editor’ account for WordPress.
There is the ‘admin’ account which has full access to all features of the website, but that is actually only really useful for a web designer and people who know what they’re doing. An editor account is far more safe has a few more limited options, but you can basically not really break the site by making any mistakes. So, that’s fairly safe to use, and you can be confident with what you’re doing. So, what we do here is we are in the administration side of our WordPress website. What we’re going to do now is just click here on ‘posts’, and we see a list of all our different posts that we have basically created over the various months. I just click here ‘all posts’ so these are all the different posts that we’ve created. Now, what we will do is we add a new post, and we will simply just finish this we will just simply copy and paste our text from our Word document. So, basically you just press Ctrl + C to copy, you change over to your WordPress website, you click into this content window here, and you just click Ctrl + V to paste, and it pastes the content into here. Now, this is our main heading for the article, so I would just remove that in this position here because the actual title in WordPress goes up here.
Now, what we will also do is we can add a few more things. For example, sort it into some categories. So, in this case, our article is about web designers, so I will add it to the category ‘web design’, and there’s also a fair bit of talking about multimedia in our article so I will add that as well. Now, we see here ‘web design’ is our primary category and down here we can add tags. Tags are basically different keywords that we can add to our article and later on you can search for those particular keywords and then you can for example view all the articles that have the tag ‘web design’ or something like that or all the articles that have to tag ‘Coffs Harbour’ attached to it. So, what I will do now is I will just add some tags here. So, you can just simply do that just by typing them in. ‘Web design’ – and add it here. I’ve just prepared a few tags already here, so I will just use those. Just to save us a little bit of time. So, I’ll remove this one and just add our tags here.
Now, we have to add our featured image. What we will basically do is we can upload files here. So, we just go to ‘upload files’ on this tab up here we select our files, and then we can go to the files or the image files that we or the photos – that we want to use. Now, in this case, I’ve already uploaded the image that I want to use. And here it is.
So, basically, I will just add this and set this as the featured image to our article. Down here we’re using a plugin called ‘Yoast SEO’ that basically ensures that the article will be search engine optimised. Now, up here I will just change this. It is basically the link that your article, later on, will be available at. So, I will just make it nice and short. Keep it very simple. I will just call it ‘web designer’ and that will be the link to this article now. So, it’s our domain for our website, forward slash and then a few words that form the link to your article.
Now, what I’m going to do is I will save this as a draft. So, at this stage, the article is not published yet, and I can still work on it and refine it. And what this does it just basically adds all the different things here. So, with our Yoast SEO plug-in, we will also add a focus keyword. In this case, it is also ‘web designer’, and we are getting here some feedback on how this article will perform in terms of the keyword ‘web designer’ so we see here, ‘good’, there’s a fair few things that are good about this article. It’s got a nice length. The keyword density is good and also the keyword appears in the first paragraph.
And so, on there’s a few little things that we can take care of later on to make further improvements. For example, add some links. That’s always nice so what we might do later on is add some links to the content. And there’s basically two types of links.
You can link to other content within your own website. It’s an internal link. Or you can also link to other websites which are external links. And that sometimes is good practice we have both of those links in your blog post.
That just shows search engines that your website is basically making use of the link features and that basically aids your search engine optimisation. Now, what I will do is I will preview this post.
And we can see what it will look like on our website. So, I have a quick look – yeah, it looks fairly good. Just scroll down here we got our tags down here, and this is the text. That all looks fairly good. Our featured image – yeah, that looks all good to go.
So, now what we can just do is either just hit the publish button and publish it immediately, or we can also set a certain time and schedule the article to be published at a certain date and time.
And this comes in quite handy if you want to write a whole lot of articles in one go and then you can schedule them for kind of even spread over the weeks and months. And that way you can continuously update your website, but you don’t actually have to sit there every week and publish your article. You can pretty much automate it with this schedule and scheduling feature. So, what we will do in this case is we will just publish immediately. So, this is what we do. We publish the article, and so now at this URL, the article is available to the public. There we go.
And depending on your website there might be different ways how your blog posts will be integrated into the overall website. In our case, we have in the footer here a small overview of the latest articles. So, it appears here as we can see it as our featured image and our headline. We got the date when it was published which is today. And – yeah, and also if we just click here on ‘news’ or I’ll hover over ‘news’ we see it’s here the first in our list of links also if we click on news we can see that the article appears here it is even a feature here and here we can see the article and – yeah, so, basically, this is it. – How you publish an article.
There’s a few things you need to know, but overall, it’s not very difficult. You can fairly easily do that and – yeah, it’s great for your website. Content is king. The more published content you have on your website and the larger your website is, the better it will do in search engines. Of course, it is good if your articles are relevant to your business. And it’s also good if you focus on one particular topic or one service that you offer or one aspect of your business and just focus on that article and optimise your article for that particular keyword or set of keywords and – yeah, then you can basically plug away at all the different aspects of your business or all your different services in various articles and – yeah, those articles can then be entry points to your website as not only your main page of your website will be listed in search engines but also all the different articles and subpages. And they can also be fantastic entry points or landing pages to your website.
All right, so, thank you very much for watching my video. I hope it was a bit useful and – yeah, I will keep you posted with further updates and other tutorials. Thank you very much.
