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HOW TO: Add / Edit a Post in WordPress (Ex: to Your News & Updates or Blog Page)

NC Land & Farm Billy's Blog
  1. Posts are the entries that display in reverse chronological order on your home page or within your site. The content is constantly updated at the top of the page, instead of the whole page staying relatively the same over time – like the pages of your main navigation. Posts are more like your “News” page with new information posted at the top regularly. In contrast to pages, posts usually have comments fields beneath them and are included in your site’s RSS feed.
  2. You can add a new entry by clicking the [+NEW] button in the top bar and selecting New Post, or by clicking “Add New” under the subheading Posts in the left sidebar.
  3. If you have a latest posts widget enabled on the homepage, excerpts of the most recent entries will appear there, and all new posts will appear at the top of your blog page. They will all be archived as well.
  4. Enter the title at the top of the page. Right below the title you will see the permalink. This is what the link to the website page with the blog post will be named. Generally you can leave this as whatever it fills in for you as default. Any relevant words in this URL will help your SEO.
  5. Next is your WYSIWYG editor. (What You See Is What You Get) Which means you can see the edits you are making – as opposed to making changes in the HTML code. Here you type in the content of your post. You can use bold and italics, etc.
  6. If you want to make a headline or subheadline, use the formatting drop down menu – it says “format” (in a drop down option) and select paragraph or Headline 1, Headline 2, etc. Making an item a headline or subheadline will give those words extra SEO power (as opposed to using bold and size to make it just visually stand out on the page). Also, using the Headline tags will keep everything consistently styled on the site.
  7. To add a link, select the text within your post that you want to turn into a link (for example: “click here”). Once the text is selected, click the link button (looks like a chain link) in the WYSIWIG toolbar.
  8. A window pops up where you can type in the URL of the page you would like to link to. Check the box if you would like this link to open in a new window (recommended for any links leading off of your main website). If you want to link to a page already within your site, the pages are listed below – simply select one instead of entering a URL.
  9. Below this is the SEO (search engine optimization) box. You don’t have to fill in anything – site-wide defaults will be included if you leave these blank. If you want specific keywords added to a specific post, add them here. You can see what the page listing will look like on Google, and it is clear what to add where in this section.
  10. In the right column you can select what category the post belongs to (news, events, etc.) Normally you will only have one blog on your site and all posts in all categories will display on the main blog page – but should you decide one day to split your posts into categories, it will be convenient to have all old posts already tagged. Also, when someone views your posts they can click on the category it is in and see similar posts.
  11. If you want to add an image or a featured image to a page, see our page Working with Images in WordPress.
    Lastly, at the top right is the Publish section. Click Publish to make the post live. If it was already live and you just modified it, click Update to make the changes live.