Have you ever looked at your URL after you post in WordPress and noticed that it’s way too long or has odd characters that seem to make no sense?

Recently, I took a look at a post and it’s URL looked like this..

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/04/franklin-lamb-bellemare%e2%80%99s-stl-%e2%80%98procedural%e2%80%99-problems/

What’s with all the “%” characters?  Way too long and does NOT seem to be SEO friendly at all.

When I took a longer look at the post, I noticed that it used the title of the article and created the URL.  It just happens that this title has quoatation marks and thus WordPress used the “%” character to represent the quotation marks. Ouch!  Ugly!  Google is going to hate this!

That’s right, search engines hate parameters and they are a turn off to average readers too.  It’s messy and yes, it’s bad for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  That’s a confirmation!  In other words, search engines ie… Google, Bing, etc… will NOT like them as much as say a shorter URL with specific keywords that more represent the article itself.

SOLUTION

1. Before you hit the PUBLISH button, take a look just under the title where you see the linke “Permalink”. 
2. Click on the EDIT button where you see the URL.
3. Edit the URL into something that is short concise with solid keywords.   Take out words ie… “and” and “a” and other non keywords. 
4. Click OK
5. Done!  Congrats!  URL is changed!

In this case, let’s take this URL and change it to something that make more sense.

• OLD URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/04/franklin-lamb-bellemare%e2%80%99s-stl-%e2%80%98procedural%e2%80%99-problems/
• NEW URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/04/franklin-lamb-bellemare-stl-procedure-problems/

Much cleaner, shorter, and SEO friendly.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT change URLs after you post them because many people may have linked them up already and you’ll mess them up big time and reduce your traffic. In other words, when people go to sites that have your link posted and they click, they will get an error page.  Not cool folks!  So always check your URL before you post and edit as needed in advance.  Then publish the post. 

Check out the image below for a visual on how to edit your URL in wordpress

For more clarity on URLs and SEO, view some the video below..

Don’t you hate those ugly long URLs when you are reading a post.  Yeah, me too…no one likes them!  So don’t compromise when you want a reader to visit another web page.  Link it up properly….

Example:

• Bad:  http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/01/the-united-states-postal-service-takes-another-small-step-toward-its-demise/
• Good:  The United States Postal Service Takes Another Small Step Toward its Demise 

Bessides, putting in a full URL web address into a post is UGLY and demonstrates a novice posting and we want our posts to be taken very seriously so….kick it up and make it great!  And search engines ie.. Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL etc…always put linked up text with relevant keywards up the rankings within their algorithms. 

So do it right!  Always put link up the text instead of posting that long ugly URL

Watch the 2 minute video to learn how to do in wordpress.  For re-enforcement, check out the other 2 videos posted so that you can really master it…..

BONUS:   How to Add a Link to an Image

Are you seeing “Dead Space” in your WordPress post?

If you see “dead space” in your WordPress post but cannot remove it using the Editorial Toolbar, then check the HTML code.  You have some wild and crazy code in there that needs to go bye-bye! >>>>>

For example, do you see the “Dead Space” on the post post represented in the image below?

Okay, so you see the “Dead Space”.

Go into your Admin panel, find the post, click on edit, and click on the HTML tab so you can see the code in full.

Looks like we have some ugly errant code that got in there!  How you may ask?  Many ways….you could have clicked on some formatting too many times or double clicked by accident.  You could have pasted from a Word Document or some other site.  Who knows?  The point is that its’ there and it needs to go!

Okay, so in the example below, the code is cleaned up and ready to be republished. 

Check it out……

Have you ever made a post in WordPress and the FONT just looks weird?
You may have some errant code in your post causing it to look odd and not uniform.

Take a look below at image. Do you see the first paragraph that looks different from the rest?
Yeah, it’s TIMES ROMAN font and not the default font used by the site. Also, there is an errant “bold” on the word “In”

Here’s how to check and fix it.

1. Go into HTML tab
2. Find errant code.
3. Remove it.

These things usually happen when posters copy from another site or WORD which may bring in code with it. And so it get’s messed up. For me, I always use a plain text editor before I copy into a WordPress site.

You can see the fixed article here.”American Bribe Stinks;….”

HTML tab is where all the code fixing goes on………take a look!
It’s scary at first but once you get it, it’s not too hard to figure out.
Give it a try…

When a reader hovers over an image, they see a small yellow box pop up with info.  That info is the title of the image.  This title, in WordPress, comes from the EDIT IMAGE TITLE box in the IMAGE uploader.

So if you upload an image that is called “7898892234house.jpg”, the image title will automatically be “7898892234house”.  Now, do you want readers to scroll over your image and see that weird meaningless title?  NO!  So change the file name either before you upload or change it after using the EDIT IMAGE TITLE box.

To change TITLE using the IMAGE TITLE BOX, here’s how;

1. Click on the image and open up the IMAGE UPLOADER
2. Look for EDIT IMAGE TITLE field and enter a title that makes sense so that readers can understand what the image is all about like “APPLY FOR VA LOANS NOW” instead of “7965-55valoans” or something like that…. ask for an action or put in something that the reader can get a more detailed presentation.

Check out the visuals below for suggestions and yes, scroll over them to see their titles……

Is your image flush with the text on your post using WordPress?  Does it seem smushed against the text?  Okay, use spacing and make it look great!

When you enter a caption on an image using the Image editoe/uploader, it automatically puts in a border and spacing so that the image is NOT flush with text. So it always looks good.

However, if you do NOT use a caption with your image, then the system will put your image flush with the text which makes the post look strange and ugly on the eye to enjoy.

 
SOLUTION

Make sure to use a BORDER and SPACING when posting an image.  I suggest try using a ”1″ for the border and a “10″ for bot the vertical and horizontal space.

Here’s how

1. Open up the image editor in WordPress
2. Click on the ADVANCED SETTINGS tab at the top of the window
3. Look for IMAGE PROPERTIES and enter a value for BORDER and values for HORIZONTAL and VERTICAL in their respective boxes
4. Click update

 
(See the Image below for a visual)

If you find that your image does NOT quite fit within your post, use the EDIT IMAGE function built-in to WordPress.

Here’s how

1. Within the WordPress Editor, just click on the image where you have the image posted
2. You will see an icon in the top left of the image that looks like a sky/landscape thing.
3. Click on it and it will open up the image uploader/editor in a new window
4. In the new window, click on the percentage that you want the image reduced by
5. Then click on UPDATE. 

That is it…..give it a try! (see images below for visual presentation)

Site load speed is mission critical to net success. So to insure faster load speeds, please pay attention to the size of your images you upload.
 
For example, on the site www.VeteransToday.com, the maximum size size allowed is 640 in width
So no need to upload bigger images because they don’t fit anyway.
 
Many times I see images uploaded that are over 1500 wide and even more.  Opps!  They are huge in terms byte file size
To use them, the poster must use the editor toolbar/image uploader to reduce the image.
 
But even when we use the resizer tool within the editor toolbar / image uploader, it does NOT change the byte sizes
So the server is forced to “download” a huge image and present that to the reader thus creating a slow load.
 
In other words, huge image files stink! 
Don’t do it!  Very Bad!  Readers hate slow site speed and run away. Slow loading is very bad for readers.

SOLUTION

Upload images that are smaller than 640 wide and have small byte sizes and pay attention to the size of the files in terms of bytes.
 
If you need help reducing image sizes, just click here http://resizeimage.org and use this tool online. It’s super easy

1. You just upload your image
2. Choose “small” or “medium” and it will change the size for you.
3. Right click over the “new” image and save it to your hard drive.

Boom, size is reduced and bytes are reduced
Winner!  Pass Go and Collect Faster Site Speed!