How to Use WordPress Pages: Slug/URL, Title and Content (Part 2 of 3)

So now, after reading part 1 (WordPress pages vs posts) you know why we create site or personal informational content with pages, and actual articles for posts. Now lets cover how to use WordPress pages in detail. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. Your WordPress page title
2. Your WordPress Page URL and WordPress page slug
3. Your WordPress page content

Let’s take my contact page as an example during this exercise, this is a pretty straightforward page to make so it will serve as a good example. First of all, lets look at the WordPress page title. If you look at ‘Figure 1’ you will see a large area for text entry where I have written ‘Contact Me’, this is your page title. If you want your pages to be found by the search engines then this title should include the keywords that you want to rank for. It is not usually important to try to rank your pages in the search engines but there may be exceptions so bear this in mind before you ever hit the publish button!

Once you have typed your Title into WordPress you should next click on the area where we will enter the content of our page, this will update the latter part of the WordPress page URL (the slug) to include the words we typed into the title area. (See figure 1 Purple box) The area in the green box cannot be changed, this is of course your actual website name and will always precede the rest of your URL permalink structure for all of your WordPress pages, posts, category pages, tag pages and so on.

Whatever is written in the latter part of your WordPress page URL (the slug) should also include any keywords that you are trying to rank for. If you make a mistake and click in the content area first, you may find that this area fills itself in with information that you didn’t specify. Don’t panic! Just click the edit button to the right of the permalink and delete everything and then either copy and paste the title into the text entry box that has opened or type it in manually. Be careful to get it right if you do the latter! The final entry after you click ‘publish’ will be the URL that people will use to find your page. (See Figure 2)

Next up we need to enter our content into the text area. This is just a simple(?) case of typing in what you want to say to your readers.

Again, if you want to rank well in the search engines you should include the phrases that you want to rank for within the WordPress page content. If, like me you are just creating web pages mainly for informational or legal reasons then this will not be of concern and we can concentrate more on the SEO aspect in part 3 when we learn how to create WordPress posts.

Final checklist:

• Is your WordPress Title correct, including your keyword phrase and perhaps a long tail keyword version?*
• Is your WordPress slug in the permalink correct? Again, including keywords of interest.*
• Are your keywords included in the actual content of your page?*
• Did you hit the preview button to see how the page will actually look and read after publication?
• Then go ahead and hit the ‘publish’ button. (Figure 3)
• Sit back with a beer and admire your work. 😉

*Again, keywords only need be included in pages rarely, a WordPress page name is just for informational/navigational purposes rather than for SEO.

Another point:

At any time you can click the ‘save draft’ button and come back to work on your post at a later date, when using WordPress make sure you do if you have to switch off your computer or your work may be lost!

Next up lets look into how to post on WordPress in a way that helps visitors find us using Search Engine Optimization. (SEO)