The most successful blogs in the world are the ones that provide the best information, link to outside sources and have great images throughout their respective sites. These can sound like daunting tasks for people new to blogging, but WordPress makes it extremely easy to add these types of features to your blog. In this article, we will show you exactly how to do it.
Adding Images to Blog Posts
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. A relevant image that adds something to the article can be worth much more than that. Whether you need to illustrate a point or you simply want a picture to draw attention to your post, having an image (or more) attached to your post can be very helpful.
So, how do you do it? First, go into the area in the WordPress administration panel when you can write a new blog post. This can be accessed by the button near the top-right corner or via the navigational links in the sidebar.
When you are in the “Write Post” area, you’ll notice that there are a series of icons located between the title text area and the body text areas. When you hover over the first of these, you’ll discover that it is used to upload and insert images. Click on this icon.
In doing so, you’ll see a new dialog box appear on the screen with three tabs at the top: from computer, from URL, and media library. The first of these allows you to upload an image file (JPGs and PNGs are usually best) from your computer. You can then go through some of the available options for sizes, alternate text, alignment, and so on.
The “From URL” tab allows you to embed an image that is already located somewhere else on the Internet and the “Media Library” tab lets you choose images that have already been uploaded and associated with the blog post.
Linking to Internal and External Sources
A blog post never really exists in isolation, so it is important for a myriad of reasons to link to both your own articles and to resources outside of your website. This helps to give context to your articles, as well as supporting materials and related reading.
There are several different ways for creating these links. If you are familiar with HTML, then you will likely want to deactivate the “visual editor” in WordPress (you can do that in the user profile options). You can then use basic HTML tags for creating your links.
If you are not as familiar with HTML, that’s okay too. WordPress has been designed to be as approachable and easy to use as possible. Going back to the area where you can write a new blog post, you’ll notice a “link” button above the main body text area.
Clicking on this will create a pop-up window asking for the URL that you’d like to link to. Copy the URL in there and click OK. Type in the “anchor text” (the actual text in the area that will be linked to the URL), then click in the “/link” button to “close” the tag. That’s one way to do it.
Another way to do it is to highlight the text in your article that you would like to be linked, then click on the same “link” button. You once again enter the target URL and click OK. This creates the same result as the method described above.
Organizing Content with Tags and Categories
Just as you have folders on your computer to help organize all your different files, you can create a similar type of organization in your blog to manage all your different blog posts.
There are two systems that are built into every WordPress installation: categories and tags. These work in a similar fashion, but you’ll likely want to use both for optimal performance. Categories act like folders on your computer, while post tags are like keywords related to your post.
Along the right side of the area where you can write (and edit) your blog posts, you’ll see fields for choosing your post categories and post tags. For most sites, you’ll want to keep the number of categories relatively low (less than 20), but you can usually use more tags, assigning several to every blog post.
In doing so, it is easier for readers of your blog to find related content. If you wrote on your experience with your new iPhone, for example, it might fall under your Technology category and it could be associated with tags like Apple, AT&T, and smartphone. Visitors can then look up other posts using the same tags or categories to find related content on your blog.
Providing the Best Information
This is perhaps the hardest part of blogging! With so many blogs on the Internet, it can sometimes be difficult to get noticed. That’s why it’s so important to provide the best possible content that you can, giving value to your readers that they won’t find anywhere else.
How can you help your content get noticed? We’ll go over some possibilities in the next few sections.
0 comments:
Post a Comment