How to Create a Post on WordPress

(Our friends at First Site Guide actually made this video to help you see a walk-through of how to set up a post for yourself. Hope you enjoy!)

It’s time to write your first post! Hover over “Posts” on the sidebar and select “Add New.”

The first box you are presented with is the title of the post, and by default, whatever name you give it also becomes the URL. So if I name the post “How to create a post on WordPress” the URL will most likely be http://old.ratzpackmedia.com/how-to-create-a-post-on-wordpress/. Of course, the URL can also be edited if you wanted to, by simply clicking edit and changing it to whatever you want. By default a space will be replaced with a “-”.

The big text box underneath is where you write your content. It is where you put anything you want to appear on the page. You will notice there are two ways of typing the content (the options show up on the top right of the box) either in Visual or Text format. Text format is where you can put everything in code format, and visual is for the beginner. However, if you plan to copy any code (like embedding a video from YouTube, or a tweet from twitter) you will have to copy the code into the Text section for it to work, it will not work in the visual editor.

In the Visual section WordPress gives you some very basic options like Bold, Italics, Strikethrough, and other things, like list, hyperlink (linking the words of your post to another web page, either on your site or on a different website).

Below this box (assuming you installed it) is the Yoast SEO plugin. Since we spent so much time learning how to set it all up, we might as well use the main feature of the product.

Here the plugin shows you the preview of how the website will look on Google search. There was a recent update to this plugin so instead of having each section labeled you simply hover the section you want to edit and start typing. In the snippet editor there are three sections. The big blue text is the title, the green text is how the URL will show in search engines and the small black text is the description of the post. To edit them, simply hover over any of them, and click the pencil to edit.

For the title, for most pages, it makes sense to keep the original title (but this is a great feature for Pages, which we will discuss in a later post.) In most cases I would keep the URL the same as the actual link. Below the URL is the meta description, this is the text that the search engine will show. By default the search engine will grab the first 160 characters of text, but many times this doesn’t sum up what you are trying to say in the article, so it makes a lot of sense to write a description.

In the focus keyword section you write the main words you are trying to rank for on a search engine. Based on this text the plugin will give fantastic suggestions on how to make the post better to show up for this keyword. The Yoast plugin is probably the most powerful tool you will use for SEO within WordPress, and it has all of the tips built right in. Thanks to the new version, 3.0, you no longer need to refresh the page, the plugin will update automatically to show you what else you can fix to appear higher in search engines.

All social media platforms grab the same data by default that you create in the Yoast Plugin, but sometimes changing the title, description, and image (simply because Facebook uses a specific image ratio of 1.9:1) here. A good example of why you would do this is if your Title is too long then by default Facebook will cut off words from your description, so it makes sense to shorten the title so that you can get more words in the description.

On the left of the plugin there are three images, a traffic light, a gear, and a share button. The gear will bring us to the advanced section where you can decide if you want this post to appear on search engine, if you want the links of this post to count towards your ranking, and to place your canonical URL. Without going into too much depth, search engines are looking for unique content when they give results. To find unique content the first thing they do is find double content and eliminate that from the results. So if you have a single press release and it appears on 20 website, there is a good chance none of them will appear in a search engine. So, if you want to help the search engines find the original piece of content you need to tell them to ignore the duplicate and include the original. To do this you should include the link to the original post in the canonical URL of the duplicate post. If you have no idea what I am talking about, just ignore it, we will hopefully cover SEO in the future. If you want to learn more about canonical URLs, read more on Moz.

In the last section you will be able to edit the social media settings for this post.

Now you might ask, why don’t I just make the changes when I am uploading the post onto Facebook? The reason to edit it here is so that when anyone in the world shares it the default is based on how you set it up.For example. For this post the SEO title will be “How to Create a Post on WordPress – Ratz Pack Media.” This text is too long for Facebook, and will result in Facebook cutting off words from my meta description. To fix this I can simply write “How to Create a Post on WordPress” into the Facebook title and then it will no longer cut off the description. Also, if you want to resize images to fit better into each specific platform this is a great place to do that.

(Also, since Facebook has opened the search graph for all public posts, you can use keywords that people may be searching on Facebook to show up in search there. Facebook is slowly turning into it’s own search engine, and with the changes they have been making, I won’t be surprised if in a few years there will be Facebook search ads, and more searches per day on Facebook than on Google.)

There are more features on the Post page that we will explore in later posts.