How to Add New Posts at Your Free Website – Part 2

Hi there, it’s Lesley here again from FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz, a project brought to you by Aliarts Website Marketing. This tutorial has been split into two, so you are more easily able to find the information you need.

Welcome back to part 2 of tutorial 3 in the series.

Visit Free Website Design to view in high quality.

Can’t watch video? Here is a transcript of the audio.

If you wish to format any of the text into a link, either to another part of your website, or to any other website, you do this a little differently. Go ahead and highlight the text you wish to create as a website link. Up here in the WYSIWYG editor, you will see a little link icon. Click this, and a text box will appear.

Say I wanted to link this text to the homepage of my website. I would go ahead and enter my website address in the Link URL textarea. Next option you have is target. You can either have this link open into a new window, or you can have it open into the same window, it is up to you. If it is a link to someone else’s website, I advise to always choose open link in new window. This will open a new browser window for the new site. You want customers to stay at your site as long as possible before leaving, so never send them away from your site without at least leaving one avenue for them to come back.

For this example I am linking to the homepage of my own site, so I will choose, open link in the same window.

The next option you have is the Title. This is what will appear when your customer hovers over a link on your website, like so. You want to pack as many keywords as possible into any title you are able to, so place something meaningful about where the page is going here as well. The class option chooses where the link is aligned, so there is no need to change this for now.

Then you can go ahead and insert your link.

Now, if we start to scroll down the page, I will introduce you to what some of these other options mean, and how powerful they can be when it comes to properly optimising your site for the search engines. You will see a number of places to enter information, most of which work behind the scenes and are important to us in the setup, but not so much to you in the daily upkeep of your site. These can be opened and closed to show more information about what the options mean.

So what I have done, is to only leave open the options you are advised to look at and to change to suit your needs. For example, here, under the discussion tab, you have the option to ‘Allow comments on this post.’ I personally leave this option ticked, as this provides a text area in which your visitors can comment, and add content to your site. People like to feel they are part of something, and this encourages customers to become part of the discussion at your site, involving them in your business. I also leave ‘Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this post,’ as this is what notifies the search engines there has been updates to your site. Very important.

The next very important option for you to fill in is the All in One SEO Pack.

This fills in the title you find at the top of your page (one of the most important ranking factors), the description that shows in the search engine results and the keywords to tell the search engines what this page is about.

Most importantly however, is this is where you get to choose what is going to show up in the listing for your business in the search engine results. For example, let’s head over to Google. I’m going to Google the the name of our business, which is Aliarts Website Marketing.

The title of your post that appears in the search engine listings, is integral in getting customers to click in and visit your website. This is what will get customers to choose your link over all the others they have to choose from. Put as much thought into this title as you would for a print ad, or anything you put out there to encourage customers to use your services. This can be changed, but once it is indexed, your stuck with it until your page is indexed again. Think of power words that make your customers sit up and take notice. Free offers are a great one. Put all your best marketing skills to work with this title.

Next up, back at your dashboard, we have the description textarea, where you get to choose the excerpt from your post that appears in the search engine listing. This is why I mentioned earlier about making your first paragraph a good one, as that way, you can simply use the first paragraph in your description. Not only does it compel the customer to click in and visit your listing, their curiosity is up, and they want to read more about the services you have to offer.

As you can see here, we started our listing with ‘We create websites that make you money,’ pretty powerful stuff, as most businesses would like to be making more money. We then continue on to introduce our free offer. By now the customer probably wants to see more, so they will click in to view our website. Once inside, we show them a few examples of our work, and fill them in with more of what we have to offer.

So back to the dashboard. In here now, you know you need a meaningful title that is going to appear in the search engines. Follow this, by cutting and pasting your first paragraph from your listing, or you can write a totally new one, it’s up to you. We don’t need to supply individual keywords for the post if we don’t want to as we have another tool that takes care of that, but if you want to, you can add 6-7 meaningful keywords in here, to tell the search engines what this page is all about.

You will find the auto-tagger here at the bottom of the page. I suggest unticking Auto-tag post on save, and clicking suggest tags. This is give you a range of keywords up here, taken from the post to show the search engines what the post is about. If you think any of the options don’t apply to this post, simply click the cross and they will disappear. If you don’t think any of them apply, then you always have the keywords you entered in the All in One SEO Pack to go in their place.

Last of all, we need to choose the category in which this post is going to appear. I have created a category especially for your homepage posts, and I have titled it ‘Latest News.’ Untick any other category you have automatically been placed in, and tick the category ‘Latest News.’ There is another tutorial coming up in the series about adding new categories, and also about formatting them in the tutorial about NAVT Lists. You are simply adding to this category for the time being, so more on that later.

Now, we are ready to publish this post.

Go ahead and click the publish post button you see here. If you click over to the website to preview, you will see the post you have just added is now on the front page of your website. Your valuable content has not disappeared however, all your work is still there in an archive which can be accessed when visitors click on the ‘Latest News’ category, and is still visible to the search engines.

So that’s it. All you need to know to add new posts to the homepage of your website. If any of this is unlcear, or you need to go through it with me, please feel free to let me know on any of the numbers at www.FreeWebsiteDesign.co.nz, or Aliarts.co.nz.

Thanks again, and I’ll see you in tutorial 4.