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WordPress Fun #2 – Images Worth 1000 Words

September 20, 2011 by Jeff Davidson 2 Comments

The best thing you can do to your blog post is to add at least one image related to your topic. Of course a couple more couldnt hurt, just dont over do it. Make sure your images flow with your topic in size and subject mater. WordPress makes it so easy to add photos to your blog post. When you are in your blog post writing away you just click the little picture icon.

wordpress insert image

 

 

Next you will get a pop up window with all the goodies. first you just click select files and browse to your image and click ok. After that the fun begins an here are a couple things to remember when setting up your image. First is the title and alternative text, dont just leave what wordpress puts in there (typically the image name). Search engines pick up on this text so be descriptive to the image and include keywords. I typically make both these fields the same. Caption I only use if it benefits the article, this is not always the case, and description I typically leave blank. The next biggie here (at least for me) is the link URL. It will default to the image location. Personally I dont want visitors to click to my image (ceppt on some occasions like below where I’ll allow them to view a larger version). So I will remove all of the link except the root home page, that way if they click on it they still remain on my page and I have some internal links as well. When done with that choose your alignment and size (more on that later), insert into post and your done right? Well in my book not really.

wordpress insert images

You see after all that if you look at your post (and I see a lot of this out there) all your text is crammed up all in your images space, dosent look very nice. Well you can easily fix that (I hope someday wordpress will put it into the insert image menu). Just go back to your image and click on it, you will see another picture insert square and a red circle appear in the upper right of the image, click the picture. you will get another dialog box where I want you to click on ‘Advanced Settings’. Should look like the image below now. See the two boxes I have highlighted well this will give you pixel space around your images and give them room to breath, I typically put in 5-10 in each box. Oh and to the left of those is the border box. If you are not using image caption you can put a number here to give your image a border (1 will work)

wordpress image edit

Image Hint #1: you should pre-size your images to the size and dimensions you wish it to be in your post. If you load up your full size image to the post and then use wordpress to ‘size’ it to fit, your visitors browsers are still trying to download the original large image then resize. Causing slow load speeds! So always crop to the size you wish and then make sure the resolution is at 72dpi (max a monitor can show, all else is wasted and slows download times). There is a plugin for wordpress called WP Smush it that is supposed to help with the squishing of image file sizes. Seems to do ok, but the more you do before you load the image the better.
Image Hint #2: To improve SEO for your post and site name/rename your image using your keywords describing your post. Especially if you are getting your images from a stock account, dont just leave the default name there. Like for my smoothie sites I may have an image of a peach. The default image name from the stock site may be ‘dreamstime001.jpg’ so I would rename it to ‘peach_smoothie.jpg’. These names are searchable in the search engines and will help you rank. Funny thing is one of my top search terms for this site is now ‘RSS icon’ after my post on RSS feeds πŸ™‚

Do you make a point to put at least one image in your post?

Like this post? please share with your twitter and facebook friends!

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: images, photos, wordpress

WordPress Fun #1 – Favorite Plugins for Sharing

September 17, 2011 by Jeff Davidson 4 Comments

wordpress_logoDoesn’t matter if you are creating micro-niche sites or you blog on a daily basis the one thing that fuels the growth of our sites is referrals and sharing of your posts. So why not make it easy on your visitors and give them all the tools to do so. With wordpress its so easy with plugins, no messy coding to deal with. For the start of my WordPress series Im going to start with a couple of my favorite sharing plug-ins that I use on almost all my sites.

Sexy Bookmarks

Just the name should make you want it. It will make your site sexy πŸ™‚ Ok all kidding aside this is one of my all time favorite plugins and have been using it for quite awhile. When configured it will give you little icons for various social media sites that all your visitors have to do is click on one to share your post. It will also give a count by each icon. On the back end you have many many social sites to choose from, just click each one you want then you can click and drag to order them the way you wish them to appear. I keep it just to the main ones, dont want to overwhelm your visitors. It also the option to add a Facebook like button and a google +1 button as well. You can also choose the location, before or after your post as well as left or right (like buttons can be located independently from the sexy bookmarks), Most of the settings are self explanatory and you can just activate and away you go.

Hint: In the settings be sure to scroll down to the twitter options. You will see a text box ‘Configure Custom Tweet Template’ be share to replace the ‘via@shareaholic’ with your own twitter username. I mean thanks shareaholic for the plugin but you want to advertise yourself as much as you can and this way you can see in your mentions feed who is tweeting you πŸ™‚
sexybookmarks

Change the twitter username in Sexy Bookmarks

Thats the plugin on the bottom of this post, ya you can go ahead and test it out, maybe tweet this post?

Share Bar for WordPress

Share Bar for WordPress

Sharebar

Share bar is another great share plugin. Instead of at the end of the post it puts the share bar on the side of your post, and it slides with it as your visitor scrolls down the length of your long winded rants. Thats what I like most of this plugin is that it puts the share buttons always there in the visitors face saying ‘please share me’.

It comes with a few basic buttons already set up but you are able to add others if you wish. That is how I got the new Google +1 button on mine. Another cool feature is if the visitors window is less than 1000px wide it will automatically stick smaller buttons under your post title (this can be turned off and min width adjusted). You can also adjust position of the bar as well as border and background colors to blend in with your site.

Same thing for this one, in the plug in settings click settings at the top right then scroll down to twitter settings. Be sure to enter your own twitter name so you get the promotion.

I only use 3 or 4 of the big ones in this plug in (facebook, twitter, stumble and google +) Β and use sexy for all of them at the bottom.

Others?

Im know there are many others and one of them may be your favorite. I have used many of them and have found these two to be the best in my humble opinion. If you do use another, just like these be sure to change the twitter id from the plugins to your own so you dont lose out on the self promotion. If it dosent allow you to then thats a reason right there to try another.

If you need help with these or anything hosting or wordpress related let me know. I do wordpress installs and hosting and Im pretty damn cheap πŸ™‚

What plugin do you use to help your visitors share your posts?

Like this article? please share! yes use the thing down there that you just learned about.

 

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: facebook, google, sexy, stumble, twitter, wordpress

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