This is the first paragraph. I can make this post much more appealing to the reader’s eyes by breaking up my paragraphs regularly with a single line. I am doing my best to use proper punctuation, and every now and then I’ll even throw in an exclamation point like this! WordPress suggests keeping my sentences under 20 words, however, it’s okay to break from this rule every now and then.
I held off placing the first photo until after I got to about 70 words. By doing this, it’s much more likely that the square ad that will appear at the top left of this post will not cause a big empty space, because appropriately sized photos will not ever appear next to the ad. Instead, a gap will be there and it’ll look super lame. This looks like a pretty good place to cut my paragraph off. Let’s do it. In the side panel, you’ll see that I selected only one category. Just one. And no more. Choose the most relevant category to your post and leave the others unchecked. This is good for SEO. Notice that the photo below has a caption, but the one above did not. This photo was taken from an Instagram post using the chrome plugin, “Image Downloader for Instagram.” Because the photo is the property of the user, we have to give attribution. The caption links back to the exact place I found the photo, not just Instagram, even though the credit only says “Instagram.” Don’t just link to the homepage of the site, or the profile page, but link to where you found the actual photo you used. Be sure to set all your links including your image credits to open in a new tab. The first photo was in the public domain, which I sourced from Wikimedia Commons. You may not know it, but photos from disaster areas and war zones taken by U.S. photographers in the line of duty can often be found in the public domain. Stock images, like those from Pixabay, Pexels, Unsplash, etc., and public domain photos do not require any attribution, which is great. If we see photos on another site that we want to use, we can reach out to the person who provided them and ask for permission to use them. Most people are thrilled to hear their story is spreading and are happy to grant permission. But we cannot just take photos off other sites, particularly news sites – they may have gotten exclusive permission to use them, paid to license them, or have had a photographer take the photos just for them, in which case, those photos are THEIR property.
In the case that someone has granted us permission to use their photos that were not found on their social media, we do not need to link to anything. We just need to put their name. Above is an example of one whose images were downloaded from MyModernMet after she granted us permission for their use.
A Quick Note About Image Sizes
Notice all the images in this post are the same width. Every single one is 640px wide, but they vary in height. Keeping all the photos the same width helps maintain neatness. 640px isn’t necessary, but a uniform width is ideal. For your featured photo, use a photo that is 1200 x 630px – which is what Facebook likes best.
I rarely ever remember, but all links should open in a new tab. You can click on the link, choose the little “gear” icon, and just check the “Open link in new tab” box. Or you can go old school with it by switching to the “text” tab on the editor box, finding the link, and adding:
target=”_blank”
in the tag. Like this:
<a href=”https://heresafakelink.com” target=”_blank”>Here’s some fake text.</a>
Don’t forget that underscore or it doesn’t work.
A Little About Subheadings
Subheadings are another great way to break up your post. SEO and readability LOVE them, and they’re wonderful for organizing the content of your post. If you’re doing a listicle (a post in the form of a numbered list) then you really ought to use subheadings for each numbered item. We like Heading 3 for our subheadings. If you have subheadings below a subheading, use Heading 2 for the first one, and the nested headings should be Heading 3. Confused? Ask Scott, Dina, or Adri.
We’re Near The End. Let’s Talk About Videos.
Videos drive clicks. The most engaging, most eye-catching content is video content. If your subject has a video, and it can be embedded, ALWAYS 100% all the time EMBED IT. It’s better to put it at the end – most people will not continue to read your post once they watch the video, so to keep their attention longer, put the video at the end. Not every video will embed, and some that have embed codes don’t like WordPress, but if you CAN embed, do. If not, a link near the bottom works fine. Like this. Click here to watch the video at YouTube.
Here’s A Subheading About Crediting At The End…
Here we come now to the end of our post. I am typing this really amazing conclusion. Your mind is blown. Some dog somewhere sheds a single tear, it’s so beautiful. But it’s not the last thing I’m typing. Surprise suckas. More attribution. If this is a story I found on another site, I need to give them props in the form of a hat-tip – just acknowledging that someone else took the time to write this story, and I used some info from it. Sometimes I use multiple sources, I only need to cite one – preferably the one I pulled most of the story from.
For my hat tip, I link to the actual page of the story, not the home page of the website. Then, I hold down shift, hit enter. This eliminates the space between lines so that it looks nice and neat. Then I put my featured image source – again, to the actual image, not the home page of the site. Linking follows the same rules as caption attribution. To keep things nice and neat, if all the images were provided, we can just put something cool like “All images provided by” and eliminate the captions within the post. Center these things.
H/T: OtherWebsite.net
Featured Image: Instagram
Toledo, United States.
