How To Write a Blog Post For Beginners

Have you written your first blog post yet? Adding content is a bit like writing an email or using a word document.

There’s no coding involved as WordPress automatically generate all the coding needed for the different functions and features you add to your blog posts.

Blog posts usually have comments fields beneath them, are included in your site’s RSS feed and can be filed under a related category.

To write a new blog post:

1. Log in to your WordPress Dashboard (This is your administration panel or backend as some call it)
2. Click the Posts tab.
3. Click the Add New Sub Tab
4. Click +Add New Category, add Tags if you wish (Try and use relevant keywords).
5. Click Save Draft after you add more content
6. Click Preview before you publish your final post
7. When you are finished, click Publish.

Categories: The overall relevant topic of the post should be used as the category. The category you decide on will also be shown in the permalink which you can see just below your post title.

This can be edited to make your post URL more search engine friendly or for a number of other reasons which include reducing the length of your permalink (unique post URL) address.

Permalink: After you save your post, the Permalink below the Title shows the URL (Unique address) for the post, as long as you have permalinks enabled. (To enable permalinks, go to Settings > Permalinks.)

The URL is generated from your post title and may be changed as mentioned above. It is recommended that you change your permalink from the default permalink to a custom permalink.

Click on Settings ? Permalinks where you can choose one of the “common” structures or enter your own in the “Custom structure” field. It is suggested you use/%category%/%postname%/ rather than the default structure.

Result: /how-to-blog/blog-post/ how-to-blog is the category part of the permalink and blog-post/ is the post title part of the permalink (Unique post address or URL). http://wpsites.net/blogging/blog-post/ is the full post URL or unique post address (Permalink) to this post.

Warning!

Title: The main title of your post should be relevant to the general topic of your post. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems.

You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hypens/dashes, and other typical symbols in the post like “How-To Write a Blog Post For Beginners”.

WordPress automatically creates a post slug from your title.

Example: /blog-post/ This auto generated Slug which forms part of your unique post address (Permalink), can be changed for many reasons.

Typically you may want to change it if your post title is too long or to make a more search engine freindly Permalink using a relevant keyword or keywords.

Blog Post Tags: Are Categories for your blog, similar to including index entries for a page. Posts with the same tags are linked together when a user clicks one of the tags.

Tags are not always used and some of the biggest bloggers don’t use them. You can always add then at a later date.

It is highly recommended that you use relevant keywords as your tags to help increase your search engine results.

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