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Before blogs were around people just thought about giant fiber supplements

After I did that blogging webinar, I received the feedback from the people who attended. It turns out a lot of you out there in MyAIMStore land haven’t blogged before. That means my presentation about linking through and SEO formatting sort of fell on frustrated and bored ears. Some good news.  In August, Keith Duff and I will be holding a presentation on blogging for beginners. Keith hasn’t blogged ever, and I will help him set up his blog during this presentation. He’ll take blogging baby steps, and I’ll be there to hold his figurative hand.  In the meantime, I figured I’d toss a post on this site about the basic anatomy of a blog post. So if you’re rip-roaring to get  some writing done, then I can hopefully help you with the very basic steps.

The Title:

The title goes in the white bar above the main body of the post. It is best to put a keyword in the title. This helps Google find your blog post. A keyword is a word or phrase someone might type into a search browser. For example: Health Benefits of Beets, Green Barley Grass or All-natural health supplements. A good title would be BarleyLife: The Best Green Barley Juice on the Market.

PHP/Permalink

Underneath the title space is the permalink editor. Usually, the permalink will just be your site’s base name and a date and your post’s title. Sometimes, you might find yourself writing about subject matter that doesn’t have a keyword-laden title. Stories about athletes on the Red Rush Blog will usually contain the name of the athlete and probably the sport they compete in but will have nothing about beet juice. That means, someone who searches for runners and beet juice will not be able to find that post as easy. The simplest solution is to keep the title relevant while changing the permalink name.

For the Martin Benning interview, I changed the php name to something someone might be more likely to search for:

http://theredrushblog.com/2014/06/03/athletes-who-use-red-rush-martin-benning (athletes who use Red Rush)

That makes my blog post easier to find.

The Photo

When you upload a photo, you will be asked to title it. You should give it a relevant title.  When someone puts their cursor over the picture, they will be able to read the title and that title adds context.

The alternate title allows search engines to index your picture, making it just as important as the picture’s actual title.

BOLD SUBHEADINGS

If you look at the mess of symbols in your tool box at the top of the Edit/New Post page, you’ll see a big B. Pressing that B will turn what you write bold. ( The I stands for italics for those of you looking to write about ship names.) If you separate your paragraphs with bold subheads, it allows you to break up your information into more presentable chunklets. It also allows you to put a few more keywords into your post and search engines can find your blog easier.

Lists are a very popular form of blogging.

My Favorite Juices

1. Beets

Beets are good. I like them. Beets are good.

2. Green Barley

3. Carrots

By making the listed items bold, it allows the reader to get the main points quickly. That way they can get an overview and decide whether or not to read deeper.  You can add more information underneath the subheads to increase the value to your overall blog post, though.

Quotations

You can find a quotation mark in your tool box. The quotation tool is used to denote that the information was supplied by a different website. I like to use the quotation tool for scientific articles because those articles are written with precision and use jargon, making it hard to put into my own words.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

—Abe Lincoln

Linking Back

Whenever you quote a source, it is always polite and useful to link back to that source.  To link back, select an appropriate place to insert a link. For example: Dr. Mary Lou Robinson says…The words Mary Lou and Robinson are an appropriate place to link back to the source where Mary Lou Robinson wrote or said those words. So highlight Mary Lou Robinson by left clicking and dragging the cursor across the name and then leave those words highlighted.  Scroll up to your tool box and click the thing that looks like a paper clip.  You will see a prompt for a URL code. It will have http://there.

Erase the http:// in the paper-clip symbol’s URL code box and simply paste the source link (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Robinson) in there.  If you don’t remove the original http:// in the paper clip URL prompt you will get a code that looks like http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Robinson and that will not work because of the extra http://

Related Posts

A great way to get more traffic to your older posts is to suggest them at the end of your latest post.

For example:

More Posts About Blogging:

Blogging Tips

Privileges of AIM Membership

This allows you to put more keywords in your text and also buffs the searchability of those older posts. And if people like what they’ve read in the latest post, they will probably want to read more.

Tags

Before you publish your post, you’ll probably see a box marked tags. Tags have two purposes. The first is to help index your blog. For example, if you write a post about how the body turns beets into nitric oxide, then you should probably use the tags beets and nitric oxide. That way, all articles about nitric oxide will be indexed if you click a nitric oxide tag or search for nitric oxide within your blog.

The other kind of tags are long-tail tags. For example, you might use the phrase “how the body converts beets to nitric oxide” as a tag. This will make it more likely for your blog post to be found by a search engine when compared to someone who didn’t use a tag like that.