Editing WordPress Content

Page Contents

• Create a WordPress Static Home Page
• Edit WordPress Static Page Properties
• Upload, Add and Edit WordPress Images
• Status, Visibility and Publish Options

Create a WordPress Static Home Page

A WordPress static page is a normal website page, as opposed to a Blog posting. With an optimized WordPress theme, the proper plugins and configuration these pages can be highly SEO optimized – as long as you add SEO friendly content. SEO friendly URL’s can also be created by WordPress.

To create your website home page you first need to add a new static page. Login to WordPress then click the menu tabs Pages > Add New. Once you are on a new page you can edit all page properties and page content.

Next you need to designate this new static page as your home page. Here’s how:

1. Click the menu items Settings > Reading
2. In the ‘Front page displays’ section, for Front page select the page you just created as your website and WordPress home page
3. Click the Save Changes button

To edit an existing Static Page click the menu items Pages > Edit and click the page you want to edit. Then you can edit all of its page properties.

Edit WordPress Static Page Properties

To edit an existing Static Page click the menu tabs Pages > Edit and click the page you want to edit. Then you can edit all of its page properties.

The following editing instructions assume you have installed all of the recommended WordPress SEO plugins. To edit static page content follow the instructions below:

1. Add the page Title
2. Add page content into the Page box. There are 2 modes that you can edit the content in: Visual and HTML mode. HTML mode requires knowledge of HTML and will not be focused on in this tutorial.
3. In visual mode you can edit in full screen by clicking the Toggle Full Screen Mode icon.
4. You can add an image by clicking the Add an Image icon. See the uploading images topic below for more details of this process.
5. Once the main body content is added you can complete all of the other fields. Click HeadSpace then add page title, meta-description and meta-keyword information.
6. Make sure you don’t have stop words in the page or post slug. Stop words are innocuous words like the, or, it, and, etc. The page slug is the WordPress name of the page at the end of the URL. You can edit the slug. It is at the top of the page next to the Permalink: label. If it doesn’t contain the keywords or persuasive expression that you feel is optimal to draw clicks then you should change it.
7. Select the template you want for this page.
8. There are multiple options to Save the page once you are done editing.
9. You can ignore the following:
   1. The Page Menu Label is only used if we automatically generate navigation so you'll probably not use this item.
   2. Page Link Title Attribute – same as above.
   3. Custom Fields
   4. Comments & Pings
   5. Password Protect This Page
   6. Page Parent
   7. Page Order
   8. Page Revisions – this is automatically populated as you make changes to the page
   9. Robots Meta

Upload, Add and Edit WordPress Images

Adding images to a page is a 3-step process:

1. upload images to the website server
2. edit image information
3. add image to page

To add images first select the location on the page where you want the image to be inserted, then click the Add Image icon (small box) on the editor toolbar. In the Add an Image dialog click either the Flash uploader or the Browser uploader to upload a file to the website server. In doing so you need to be sure to name the files very descriptively and ideally with your targeted SEO keywords so you can search on them later and they’ll assist in your search engine rankings. You should probably upload images in groups of no more than 10 to avoid problems.

Once the image is uploaded it is added to the page Gallery. The Gallery tab then shows how many images are placed into it – like Gallery (8). It is also added to the Media Library. The Media Library contains all images in the website. Click the Media Library tab to see all images in it. You can search for images by typing into the text box to the left of the Search Media button.

Wordpress Image Editor

To add the image to a page, in either the Gallery or Media Library click the Show link by the image. This opens up a dialog allowing you to specify all of the image attributes before you add it to the page. Below is the Image Properties Editing screen that WordPress presents in a lightbox:

You can edit properties like:

• Title – the title is used for the image alt attribute – very important for SEO.
• Caption – this is the text that appears below the image on the page
• Description – not used in the page content, but may be important for your own reference
• Alignment – none, left, center or right
• Size – thumbnail, medium, large or full size

When you have completed editing the image properties click the Save All Changes button to do just that, then the Insert into Post button to add the image into your page content where the cursor was when you started the image insert process.

If you want the image to be linked to a bigger version of it, and to allow the user to click to see that image then do the following:

• after adding the image to the page as described above, click the image in Visual view
• click the Edit Image icon that pops up in the image
• click the Link to Image button
• click the Update button

Status, Visibility and Publish Options

There are 3 different options to save a page:

• Status
  • Draft – initial writing stages, not sent to reviewer
  • Pending Review. This status assumes login permissions include a final editor. This topic is not covered any further in this tutorial.
• Visibility
  • Public
  • Password Protected
  • Private
• Publish
  • Immediately – once the page is complete and integrated into the sites navigation (if needed). This allows others to see it.
  • By Date – Select a date that the page will be automatically published by WordPress. If you use automatic navigation then this page will appear in the navigation on that date.

Here is the Publish box with all options collapsed:

Here is the Publish box with all options open: