Publishing Article Success – The Do’s and Don’ts of WordPress and Google

ADDING MEDIA

The inclusion of media in an article is as important as words themselves.  In fact, there is probably a very large segment of readers that would never consider reading the article without pictures, and for this reason, too much is better than too little.  Our practice is to include an abundance of photographs in our articles, all of which are normally taken by the author and look as professional as possible.  In doing so, many ‘best practices’ have been identified that may help the new author along:

1. LIGHTING – In taking photographs, the best light one can use is natural light with no fluorescent light overshadowing the object.  Natural light, even on a cloudy day, gives an object a very natural look and can also be enhanced very easily, if necessary in MS Office Picture editor;
2. FORMAT – unless photographing a particular piece of the article being reviewed, ensure you include background that can be reduced when cropping image dimensions for placement;
3. BACKGROUND – ensure the photo background conforms to your website theme.  In the case of our website, we try to avoid white backgrounds in pictures against our dark WordPress theme as it drowns out the subject of the picture itself.  In such a setting, it is very reflective of a very mild eclipse.  Quite honestly, we prefer creativity and have used everything from a black stereo shelf, to shirts stretched over a table, and most recently, even a ladies python purse;
4. DIMENSIONS – for the most part, the typical site can get away with pictures of few dimensions that can be used in their ‘Featured’ placement as well as throughout the article.  We typically use 8×10 for our ‘Featured’ photos, these photos being shown on the front page and either 3×5 or 4×6 for inclusions within the article. There are even times when we include a photo in the top left portion of the article front page, this normally being the featured picture.  If one uses MS Office, Word Picture Editor is great for cropping in standard sizes and even enhancing the picture (Edit Pictures/Crop);
5. COMPRESSION – Uploading high resolutions to any website for publishing can result in much frustration down the road.  Not only can it reduce the page load time of your article, but it will inevitably result in less than optimum SEO and lower search rankings.  Our ‘best practice’ for all charts and photographs is a compressed image that is always below 350kb.  We accomplish this through MS Office Picture Editor/Edit Pictures/Compress Pictures/Compress for Documents;
6. UPLOADING – NEVER copy and paste directly into the article as we have encountered a very problematic situation on several occasions where the pasted picture was pasted totally as it’s code and not uploaded to the media directory.  If you view as html, you will notice that this is a minimum of two pages of just code and, on publishing, your page loads extremely slowly as a result.  Always upload the photograph through WordPress.  Many people compile their articles in Word (as I am doing right now in fact) and simply cut and paste the article, not realizing that photos will be places as code and not uploaded as is necessary with WordPress. Media must always be uploaded properly; and
7. UPLOAD FORMATTING – Once the picture is uploaded, the author has many options that, once again, may be key to article success:
   1. Ensure the picture has a proper name identifying the subject as it will be picked up by Google and enhance your traffic;
   2. Ensure the link leads to the location of the picture as one cannot click on the photo for a higher resolution copy without this;
   3. For full width photographs or charts, select highest resolution, reduce to 60%, ensure center is selected, save and then simply stretch the picture to the edge of the Content Management System (CMS)
   4. For two pictures side by side, simply choose the center 300 x ? resolution, select left or right for each picture, save and adjust.

This is probably the easiest way to input media effectively and, once one has become proficient, they can experiment and learn how to reduce pictures with placement, having the text on the left or right of the picture.

KEYWORDS

Keywords are words within the article that will be repeated and allow search engines to recognize them and find the proper placement within their search results.  A ‘best practice’ is to ensure your main keyword (or phrase) is present in the title, first line, last paragraph and consistently throughout the article.  For example, if we were to publish a solid state drive report, Google would assess a much value higher to the repeated use of SSD than it would if we started calling it a device throughout.  Remember what we were saying before about general terms?

TAGS

Tags are words that search engines use as search terms to arrive at your website.  They are as important as the title of the article itself and should consist of unique identifying words or terms specific to the subject of the article.  Specific to the example of the Intel solid state drive above, the capacity ‘240GB’ could be used as a tag if it is not within the title.  Within the title, it will be picked up in any case.  Consider tags additional opportunities to be found within search results.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Taking a quick glance at the bottom right of my screen, I see that this quick ‘best practice’ report has grown several pages longer than originally intended.  If you followed along throughout, thank you for that compliment and we hope what seems to be working for us works for you as well.  Understanding SEO and WordPress just a bit better can guarantee that your website will be home to many more than you would ever have imagined.  Enjoy and feel free to return with questions, or even further ‘best practices’ for our readers.