Adding a post

To add a new post, click on the ‘Add New’ link in the Posts panel on the left-hand side of your screen. If you can’t see the ‘Add New’ link, click on the expand/contract triangle that appears to the right of the word ‘Posts’. Refer to the thumbnail below (click on it to enlarge).

You will now be at the ‘Add New Post’ panel. At the very top, you will see an empty field with the words ‘Add New Post’ above it. Place your cursor in the field and give your post a meaningful title (refer to the image below). What do we mean by ‘meaningful’?

Your title should contain at least one of the keywords or phrases that will appear in your post. This improves your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This means that Google, Yahoo and all other search engines have some key words to work with. In this way, people will be able to find your post when they do a search in a search engine. Don’t make your title too long.

Decide on your title before you start writing your post. If your page is published and then the title is changed, it could affect the SEO and cause problems with the site’s navigation. So make sure your title is going to stay the same.

Below this field is the toolbar for the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) text editor. You will use these buttons to select heading levels and to make any words bold, italic, strikethrough etc. This editor works the same way as your word processing editor. There are six levels of headings that you can use.

Adding tags

Tags are the key words or phrases that describe the content of your post. They are extremely important because these tags are used by the search engines. Aim to have between two and six tags per post. Remember, if you want others to find your post via a search engine, it is important to enter meaningful tags.
Your tags must be the same as they appear in your post. This is another factor that affects SEO. For example, since this example post describes search engine optimization, we would enter the tag phrase as ’search energy optimization’ since this is exactly the way it appears in the body of this post. Writing the tag phrase as ’search engine’ or ‘optimizing for search engines’ is not good enough.
Try to use the same tags throughout all of your posts. The more often a tag appears on a website, the more significance it has for the search engines.
Your tags should be words or phrases that you think people might enter into the search field of a search engine. For example, a tag phrase such as ‘eating dirt’ is not likely to be entered into a search engine!

To add your tags, go to the right of your screen. Enter your tags or tag phrases in the field provided and make sure you separate each entry with a comma. When you have finished adding your tags, simply press the ‘Add’ button. After clicking on the ‘Add’ button, you should see your tags listed below the field. Refer to the thumbnail below (click on it to enlarge).

Selecting a category

Once you have written your post and added your tags, choose a category that best describes the content of your post. For example, if your post is a joke, you would click in the ‘Jokes’ checkbox, which has as its parent the category ‘Humour’. If your post is about your interaction with a government department, and you were happy with the service you received, you would click in the ‘Astounding’ checkbox, which has as its parent the category ‘Government’. Refer to the thumbnail below (click on it to enlarge). For further information about Categories, click here or see the page Help > Categories.

Allowing comments

At the bottom of the screen, you will see a menu item labelled ‘Discussion’. The choices you make here control whether others can submit a comment about your post. The default is to allow comments. This is because this site promotes discussion among its members. There are also SEO advantages to allowing comments. If you do not wish to allow comments to this particular post, simply uncheck the checkbox.

Publishing your post

Ok, you have decided what you are going to write about, you have selected a title for your post that is hopefully not going to change and you have written the content. You have also selected the category and written the tags for your post. You are therefore ready to publish your post. Publishing the post means that it will appear on the website for all the world and search engines to see. Press the ‘Publish’ button on the right of the screen. There you go! Your 15 minutes of fame in life.

‘But,’ you say, ‘I don’t have a “Publish” button, I have a “Submit for Review’ button!’

Sad but true. When you first register, you are assigned the role of ‘Contributor’. As a contributor you can edit your own posts but cannot publish them. Once a post is approved by an administrator or an editor, you are no longer able to edit it. If you really want to make changes to a published post, send an email via the form that appears in the Contact > General page. For a more detailed explanation of the roles that can be assigned to a registered member, click here or see the Help > WordPress Roles page.