Posts

 
WordPress PostsPosts are what you use for adding additional information to your site as time passes, aka blogging, with the most recent post being displayed for people at the top of the screen. You cannot change the order of posts (unless there’s a plugin for that – there seems to be plugin for most everything!).

Unlike Pages, Posts can be put into categories. And the categories can have subcategories. And subcategories can have sub-sub-categories (is that even a word?), and so on. So you can put your posts into categories like this:

Dogs > Large Breed > Poodles > Standard

Dogs > Large Breed > Poodles > Miniature

Dogs > Large Breed > Poodles > Toy

And so forth.

post categories and tagsUnlike Pages, Posts can have tags. If you are not familiar with tags, these are keywords. If you’re writing a post (not a page) about dogs, and that particular post is about Poodles, you would add the tags dogs and poodles. When people read your post about poodles, they can click on the tag titled Poodles and get a list of all the posts that you wrote about poodles. And click on the word Dog and get a list of all the posts that you wrote about dogs. WordPress comes with a widget that allows you to display a list of your tags. People love tags. It makes it easy for them to find topics on your site that they want to read about. I talk more about widgets in a little bit.

When you write your pages and posts, try to use key words AKA keywords in the title and in the body. Think about what keywords you would enter if you were trying to find your website in a search engine and use those keywords when you write. You can also do some research on keywords. If you’re writing about how to to home school kids, research which word people search for more often, kids or children. Think about compound words (or what people might think should be a compound word). For example, what are people typing in Google’s search box more often: homeschool, homeschooling, home school, home schooling, etc.. This will help you rank higher in the search engines. But keep in mind, using keywords too often in your writing can actually hurt your rankings. It’s called keyword stuffing. Write for the reader, not the search engines.

You’ll find the forms for categorizing your post and adding tags to your posts right next to the text editor you use to write your post. You can even add a New Category and New Tags right there on that screen. Convenient, no?