The Final Tasks Before You Publish
Your First post looks good and you are ready for the world to see it, but how will the world find that first post? You do WANT the world to find you, right? Your final tasks before you publish will both organize your posts, and provide valuable SEO (Search Engine Optimization) structure to your website.
Choose Your Category
Categories are important, they help people and search engines find the topics of your blog posts. I’m sure you’ve noticed the category box to your right as you’ve been writing your post. The default category is “uncategorized.” If you do not add categories and choose the categories for your post, that’s where it goes. You DON’T want that. For a new main category, click Add New Category link and just type the name in the box, then click the add new category button. It will now appear in your category list. Once you start adding categories you can have both parent and child categories. You can have your posts appear in more than one category if you like, just click the checkboxes for each category you want your post to be associated with. Note. If you are wanting to set up your category structure for your entire blog, you can add your categories and sub categories through the category MENU on the left while NOT editing a post.
Excerpts
The next item down from the editing pane is and Excerpt box. Excerpts allow you to create a brief summary of your article that can be used in your theme. They are not required, but you may want to see how they work. The excerpt box is located directly below the post editing page. Just type in your excerpt and it will be updated when you save your draft and publish
SEO
ONE MORE TASK and it has to do with something we all want SEO. SEO is “Search Engine Optimization” Traffic is key in web land! If you want people to find you you need Search Engine Optimization. This is why we install an important plug in on all of the blogs we create titled ” All In One SEO” If you scroll down below the excerpts, the trackback section and custom fields, you’ll see the boxes for the “All In One SEO Pack.” This little plugin is great! Enter a headline. This will now be the page title that appears at the very top of the browser window. Search engines read this. It does not HAVE to be the same headline that you used in your article.
Next summarize you article to entice search engine users to visit your page! This is the summary of the site you see anytime you use a search engine for a keyword. Its what YOU use.. to decide whether or not the information you are looking for is on that site.
Finally add keywords. As many as you can think of that pertain to your article. If you’ve quoted someone, enter their name, if you’ve mentioned a city or place? enter that name, an event? put it in there, as well as any other keywords that may help people find you.
All of these settings: categories, excerpts, SEO pack are saved anytime you save your draft or update your post. So now you are ready to publish that post. Congratulations!
Hit that publish button!
If you already did, like way before you did any of the things in this article? all you have to do, is go back and edit the page with the information above. You can do this anytime, you need to.
