How To Use Your WordPress Blog Effectively

One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is that it comes with an easy to use blog posts section which you can (and really should) use to publish articles about your business or any information you think might be interesting to your visitors.

It is not only a great tool to communicate with potential clients but it also helps your website with search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Search engines prioritize websites who up update their content on a regular basis, especially if the content is interesting and unique.

You can use it to post about specials, upcoming events, introducing new services or products, the possibilities only stop with your imagination and best of all you can easily share them on social media for double exposure.

1. Post Contents

Our most important tip is that the content of your post should be your own. Don’t just copy & paste something you found on another website or on social media and if you do please make sure that your have permission from the original author and to add a link to the original post. This applies to both text and any media files like photos and videos you use.

The topic should be also interesting for the audience you are targeting. As an example lets say you own a restaurant so in this case an interesting topic would be to post a recipe you are willing to share or your best technique to peel tomatoes. You can also easily add photos or videos to the post to make it even more appealing

2. Use Post Categories & Tags

WordPress supports both post categories and post tags. Internally they are called taxonomies and can help you to better organize your blog so it is easier to navigate and search engines always love a well structured website. They also have their own hyperlinks so you can easily link to them from almost any part of your website including the menu, pages and other post types.

The main difference between the both is that categories are hierarchical and tags are not. This means with the categories you can have a parent category with one or several child categories, you can even have a child in a child category.

Tags can be used to further refine the content of your posts. You could for example add tags like “Organic” or “Gluten free” to your posts about food.

There is also a third taxonomy called “Post Format” which in our experience has not as much of an impact and also depends if your theme actually supports it. The general idea is to give different types of post their own look. Here are the currently available post formats:

1. Standard – The default format
2. Aside – For note like posts, usually without title.
3. Gallery – For photo galleries.
4. Link – For links to other sites.
5. Image – For images or photos
6. Quote – For quotations.
7. Status – For short status updates
8. Video – For posts containing video
9. Audio – For audio files.
10. Chat – chat transcripts

To check if your theme supports post formats preview it in different ones to see if they change their look.

3. Content Formatting

There is probably nothing worse for your visitors then to be greeted by a “wall of text” when trying to read a blog post on your website. Use line breaks (click shift + enter), paragraphs (click enter), sub headings, ordered and unordered lists to make your post more reader friendly. Make it look pretty, your readers will appreciate it.

Pro Tip: If you use Microsoft Word or copy and paste your text from an external source use the “Paste as Text” button in the extended tool bar to remove the external formatting because it can introduce unnecessary white space and even break your sites layout or make it look weird.

You also should avoid images that take too much space, especially huge vertical images can be annoying when trying to read an article.  WordPress allows you to inset images in different sizes and there a free plugins available so your readers can enlarge the images by just clicking on it or use the gallery feature (Add Media > Create Gallery) if you have multiple photos you want to add.

4. Post Tiles and Slug

The post title should be as descriptive but also as short as possible. Together with the slug (permalink) it plays a big role in SEO. Pick a tile you think is a good search phrase that people might use to find your article. For example instead of using “How we peel tomatoes in our restaurant” use “Best way to peel tomatoes”

The slug is usually auto generated after you save your first draft so make sure to get the title right the first time to avoid having to adjust the slug manually later.

5. Drafts & Preview

The moment you hit the “Publish” button your post will be visible to the public so to avoid any unnecessary embarrassment you should use the “Save Draft” button to save your post and the “Preview Changes”  to see how it will look to the public. Saving your post as a draft also allows you to come back later to finish the post and WordPress saves one automatically every 60 seconds.