The importance of a good post title, category, and tags

How much time do you spend on post titles? Do you give it much thought? I have read the post title should be a snippet of what your contribution entails while making it an attention grabber. I’m not the world’s best when it comes to giving my posts the later. I’m fairly confident a clever, catchy post title is mostly effective for those who stumble on your post while doing Internet searches but your readers will appreciate the extra effort. Your post title could intrigue someone who otherwise would not give your blog a second thought. For those, including myself, who routinely join daily blog hops don’t just use the hop name as your title. That certainly helps if you’re a multi-post contributor to guide your readers to those particular segments but beyond that the title is going to act as a teaser to lure the outsider in. Get creative with your post titles!

I have to admit, I didn’t always understand the purpose ‘CATEGORY’ blog element. The best way to explain it is a way for you to organize your content. This makes it easier for your readers to find precisely what they want. When I created this blog, I set up the category “Nuts & Bolts”. The posts I write basically are built around the idea of things that hold your blog together or perhaps you can even saying the workings of this blog but the point is I have a specific category used for a specific type of article. On my other blogs I have various categories covering nearly all of my daily participation.

The post title and category should be all that’s needed but that’s not quite true. Until I started blogging I didn’t know just how important keywords are to any website. Tags/labels are essential for not only your readers to find stuff on your site but for search engines to gather your info properly for others around the world to see. The more tags/labels you have associated to your post, the more searchable it becomes but remember to use tags that relate specifically to your post. The tags I instinctively will include for this post will include post title, category, and tags. I wouldn’t use automobile as one of my tags because this article isn’t about cars, right? However, since it’s Monday and well…Mondays is all about the music, I surely will include music as a tag along with the song title and artist. Use tags wisely to draw new readers to your blog without misleading them. Let’s be honest, that will only tick them off.

Alrighty, that’s my thoughts on the subject. I hope in some small way these little tidbits help to improve your blog. I’ll end things with an invite to hop over to Curious as a Cathy to join the Monday’s Music Moves Me dance floor along with my song choice from a movie that we watched on Hulu The Mountain Between Us *⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ over the weekend by Zayn featuring Sia. Please hit play to listen to Dust Till Dawn.

*Star Rating Systems

1 Horrible – too political
2 Too slow/uninteresting
3 average – not the worse or best but okay
4 better than most – worth seeing
5 excellent – highly recommend

Where are my comments?

Is this a question you’re asking yourself? It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out or have fallen behind on WordPress platform changes or perhaps it’s simply an oversight. Let’s make sure we get this area covered properly.

First thing to do is is notice the image below. The back side of your blog will look something like this. We need to make sure your comments are enabled. On the left side where all the WordPress options are listed you’ll see SETTINGS highlighted. Once you click on Settings you’ll see it has four options: General, Performance, Writing, and Discussion.

The Discussion tab is where you set up how you comments are communicated to you or how they appear on your blog. The most critical section is BEFORE A COMMENT APPEARS. I have this site set up to automatically display anyone’s comments who have a previously approved comment. I will warn you, sometimes WordPress will throw people you know into your Spam folder. Keep a close eye out for this to pop up every once in awhile.

Okay, you know how to get your comments to display. On the occasion, as I mentioned WordPress will throw someone you know into your ‘SPAM’ folder. If you’re not looking for it or used to checking this you need to retrain yourself to check your PENDING and SPAM folders.

In my example below, I don’t have anyone in my PENDING or SPAM folders but this is how you get there to know what to look for. On the left side bar, click COMMENTS. Yours will look similar to this. I first look at SPAM. If it’s obvious junk comments then I will delete them without prejudice. They are easy to pick out. Sometimes, I have found people I know that’s got sucked into this folder. I select ‘NOT SPAM’ and those comments are then moved to your PENDING folder to approve.

I hope this short step by step guide helps to resolve any problem you’re having with making sure your comments are displaying properly on your WordPress blog. An easy fix, eh? What problems are you having that you’d like further explanation or how-tos on? Just let me know and I’m happy to try to help you.

Thanks for joining me, now let’s take a little boogie break by hitting the 4M dance floor to celebrate Marie’s upcoming birthday with one of her favorite groups, The Bee Gees. Enjoy their 1969 #17 USA hit To Love Somebody!

Widgets

Widgets are little programs that you can plug-in to various spots on your blog. Let me step you through the process of how I came to add mine to my side menu. Click on Appearance, then Widgets. Under the Widgets pane, you will find a list of Available Widgets. You can make all changes at this level or if you prefer to add widgets using the Manage with Live Preview then click that option. The live preview allows you to see what you’re doing without having to first publish those changes. That’s really a nice way to do it. I didn’t notice the option when I setup my widgets in my side menu.

In planning which Widgets I felt the most essential to me, I thought about the things I look for when visiting other blogs. For those I really connect with, I liked getting an email notification sent to me every time the blog author publishes a new post. I wanted to give my readers the option to subscribe to LA2C by email. I found the ‘Follow Blog‘ feature that reference email subscription, clicked the drop down menu, selected the first option ‘Sidebar. Do you see it in my sidebar at the top? The widget comes with standard verbiage, but I choose to personalize mine. After I got the wording right I ‘Saved‘ the changes. While I’m on the topic of followers, although I do not have any social media platforms ie Twitter, Facebook, etc. tied to this blog you may want to include the ‘Social Icon‘ widget somewhere on your site.

The next widget in my sidebar is ‘Recent Posts‘. Why is this one important to me? I find this feature particularly helpful when visiting a blogger who cranks out multiple daily posts. This cuts the frustration down in finding the post I want. Once I found the Recent Posts widget, I clicked to add it just like I did above, then I customize the settings within it to display 5 posts but you can make this as many or little as you want. Also, I checked the box to include the date the post published beside each listing.

How many times have you been to a site where you can’t find what you’re looking for? Usually this isn’t a problem with big company websites. Your blog shouldn’t be any different. Make it easy to find any or all posts by adding a ‘Search‘ bar to your site. This is my third widget. There isn’t anything to customize except where you want to place the widget. I’m scratching my head now, wondering why I put this important widget here. Next time, more than likely you will find the ‘Search’ box at the top of the sidebar.

For all posts that aren’t current, but you’d like for your reader to access that content easily then you may want to add the ‘Archive‘ widget. I renamed it Past Posts. That seems less formal and friendlier sounding. This one offers two settings. You can choose to have a drop down menu and for it to display the number of posts. If you click on mine, you’ll see the month and year with a number in parentheses. I like this set up because it doesn’t take up any visible space until the user requests to see that info and then it closes when they click elsewhere.

Next, I added the Follow widget for other registered WordPress subscribers to follow me. I don’t focus on this aspect like I did in the early days but for many want to grow their social network presences and if this is something you’re seeking then you’ll want to add the ‘Following‘ widget. This allows anyone with a WordPress account the sign up so they can read post with the WordPress internal reader feed.

The last widget in my side bar is ‘Blog Stats‘. This widget tracks traffic to my site. Right now, it’s very low but if or when I become more active then this number will increase. Knowing how many hits your blog receives is useful should you want to earn income through your site from perspective companies looking for product reviewers or advertisers. Some folks have capitalized quite well going this route. I half tried using my primary blog to entice the big dogs but didn’t get any bites, other than some small foreign companies triggering mentally red flags to turn down those offers. Earning money through my blog just isn’t meant to be. I will continue to enjoy what I’m doing as before without any compensation other than knowing I’m possibly helping someone.

At the bottom of my blog in the ‘Footer’ menu, I used the ‘Text‘ widget to included my copyright the year with the name of this blog. I’m not a lawyer and I know very little about the law but I under that bloggers are protected without having to go through the red tape of actually registering through the copyright channels. According to this article, scroll down to read the section Can Bloggers Protect Their IP Without Registering? to learn ways to protect your blog content.

This is a baby blog as far as getting the setup goes. I am sure to adjust my present widgets but for now I’m comfortable with the handful of quick links available just a mouse click away for my readers.

I hope you enjoyed today’s Nuts & Bolts edition. Next week, I want to talk a little about post titles and tags. I am adding this post to the mid-week hop — Wild Wednesdays the linky party where just about anything goes that I host on Curious as a Cathy. Here’s a bit of eye candy for you.

Photograph of my late MIL’s flower garden many years ago taken with my first point n’ shoot digital camera, a Canon Powershot SD880. Not being one to resist photo-editing, I used Pixelmator Pro to reinvent my image.

Personalizing your blog

Last week, I did some hurried changes to get this blog in place as I explained in Getting Started. After I got my theme and handful of widgets added to my site, I began personalizing my layout. My home page I added a header. You can do the same with any image. Once I decided on mine, I used Pixelmator Pro to add my blog title and tag line. Remember to keep your header in range of the suggested header dimensions 1440 x 600 pixels.

To begin, click on WP Amin, then select Appearance. You’ll see a list of themes. Yours will show active status. Click Customize, then Header. Follow the prompt to upload and crop your image as desired. Simple enough, don’t you agree?

One thing I discovered is that I can use a different Header image for each Page I setup. I found two vintage pinup girl designs to represent the Page theme perfectly. Other than adding a personalized header on my Home page and subsequent pages, I merely change the background color, font color, and font style to suit my overall blog design. To make changes to these features you will find them also under the Appearance/Customize settings.

We’re the third of the way into winter. Last week’s snowy weather alert didn’t yield any worries for us. There was barely a trace of snow on the leaves the follow morning. However, my heart yearns for the return of vibrant colors and new life. Many years ago, I snapped this Rose of Sharon photo with little point n’ shoot digital camera, Canon Powershot SD880 from my late mother-in-law’s flower garden. I’m a sucker for photo-editing on occasion and this is one of them in which I used Pixelmator Pro adding an Ethereal filter giving my image a dreamy effect.

I hope you enjoyed this blogging nuts & bolts edition. Next time, I want to touch a little more on Widgets and their usefulness. I’m linking up on Wild Wednedays hop found my primary WP blog home and perhaps you’d like to join the mid-week party where just about anything goes!

Getting Started

Hello! Thanks for joining me. I’m here to learn from the ground up how to develop a WordPress blog. My main WP blog was initially launched by Brent at LinkyTools. He is an Arvixe (hosting site) affiliate. It would’ve taken forever to move my old Blogspot data in blocks over to Curious as a Cathy, so I allowed him to migrate the content and set up some basics for an easier transition.

That being said let’s get started. The first thing to do with any blog is to make it yours. From my behind the scenes the WordPress Dashboard gives me options. I clicked “Appearance“, then “Themes“. This may change but for now, I’m using “Independent Publisher 2” Theme. I will create a header later for my site but for right now I added a few “Widgets” to my blog’s side menu and footer and removed the social media icons.

The weather forecast is calling for snow this evening with an alert of little to no accumulation. That’s what they said in December and got several inches of heavy wet snow. That’ll do it this time.