As a WordPress web designer and freelance Internet marketing consultant, I have some advice about writing articles for your blog that will show up on search engines and capture your reader’s interest.

First of all, you need a WordPress blog… If you don’t have one I can help with that shameless plug I know!

Secondly, you need to have a topic that you want to write about AND something that will mean something to your reader, add value to your business by offering sage advice or new information for your existing clients AND a topic that you anticipate will be worthy of people using search engines trying to find useful information about what you have on your mind.

This may sound like good old fashioned common sense, but in practice its not that easy. The reason is that as an expert in your field and as a small business owner with a WordPress blog, you may find yourself gurgling with an abundance of information, confusing concepts to the layman or worse yet – wasting your time explaining something in great detail that is totally worthwhile info, yet you can’t wrap it up and present the blog article in such a way that it can be found on a search engine, or that people don’t click on because the blog post title or excerpt is not appealing.

So what’s the secret to writing effective blog articles? Well – Honestly there is no secret to writing effective blog articles. There is only hard work and honing your writing skills, so that the blog articles you write for your small business make sense, are on topic and contain the key phrases you hope to get found on search engines for! Try, try again…

When writing blog articles to attract visitors to your website, you should be thinking of the people you want to find and read your blog article, then hopefully they look over your website and even better yet – they might call you or email you because they need what you offer. Think about their needs and how you can help them with that. Its called SOLUTION SELLING. In other words, your potential customers have a problem and YOU have the solution. Of course, you’ll need to identify what their problem might be and be confident you can help them with their problem once its identified and your potential customer realizes they have a problem which needs to be solved.

For example, in THIS blog post I’m obviously addressing the problem of how to write effective blog articles for your small business. Chances are very good that if you are reading this article, especially if you found it on your favorite search engine, that YOU probably have a small business and your problem is that you have to figure out how to write effective blog articles. Simple enough right?

So ~ If you were captivated, (or at least mildly interested in), by my WordPress Blog Article on “How To Write Effective Blog Articles for Your Small Business”, lets examine why you found my blog article, clicked on my blog article and are now reading my blog article…

1. You had a problem: You were trying to learn how to write blog articles.
2. I had a solution to your problem: I know how to write blog articles.
3. I wanted you to find my blog article.
4. I wanted you to click on my blog article.
5. I wanted to give you free blog writing advice.
6. I wanted to expose you to my blog web design services.
7. I wrote a blog article about how to write a blog article.

Moving right along…

Now that you understand that your need is learning how to write effective blog articles, and you’re aware that I can teach you how to write effective blog articles, lets examine how effective blog articles are composed, structured and authored.

I’ll sort of go through this briefly, so you can see how to write a blog article step by step (the quick version covering just the basic things you need to do to write effective blog articles).

• EDIT POST PAGE: Lets assume you have logged into your WordPress blog, (yoursite.com/wp-admin) and you’re now staring blankly at the New Post page after clicking the “Add New Post” button.
• BLOG POST TITLE: The first field you should be concentrating on is the TITLE, which is the black field below the thumbtack and “Edit Post” verbiage near the top of your screen. Creating a good title for your blog article is super important. Its the first thing a search engine will see, the most weighted textual content that the search engine will consider and it should accurately reflect the blog article, while at the same time acting as a headline to grab attention.
• BLOG POST PERMALINK: Underneath the TITLE, is something called a “Permalink”. This will be the actual URL address of your blog article. You should have your WordPress Permalink Options set so that it displays the post title. If you don’t know how to setup your WordPress Permalink Options, just send me an email. If you’re writing blog articles for a WordPress website I built for you, this option is already setup and you may notice that your “Permalink” contains today’s date, followed by the great Blog Post Title you just created.
• BLOG POST ADD IMAGE: The next thing you want to do is consider adding a photo or image of some sort. C’mon… Everybody loves a picture book more than one with just words. You want a photo or illustration that helps reinforce the topic of your effective blog article. BEFORE you upload and insert the photo, rename it to be more on topic with the blog post as well, because yes… search engines also search pictures, by name “________.jpg”, as well as by ALT TAG which is the alternate verbiae that appears if the picture is unavailable or takes a while to download. The alternate tag is displayed in what is called an image placeholder, (little red box with an X in it), should the photo download fail or delay.

I know you’re anxious to start writing your blog article, especially now that it has that cool picture and has a good title, but whoa there pardner… There’s still a few more fundamental things I need to explain first, so you can learn how to write effective blog articles all by yourself.

• BLOG POST CATEGORIES: Every blog post should be categorized, or associated with related blog categories. You will see the “Categories” towards the right side of the Edit Post page. If I setup your WordPress blog, chances are I have already added some on-topic categories for you to select. Simply check the box next to the categories that relate to this effective blog article. Search engines connect the blog categories to the article and it will give the blog post a boost in search results if they match.
• BLOG POST TAGS: Every blog post needs Post Tags. You’ll see the “Post Tags” underneath the Categories on the right side of the Edit Post page. Think of tags like key words and key phrases. You want them to match your blog post title and also include the major on-topic key phrases that are in the textual content of the blog articles.
• ALL IN ONE SEO PLUGIN: If you’re writing blog articles for a WordPress blog I built for you, it will have the “All In One SEO” Plugin installed and you will notice three or more extra fields towards the bottom of the Edit Post page. In the fields, you will simply repeat your Blog Post Title, add a description of the blog post article and add key words and key phrases that relate to the blog article. If you don’t have All In One SEO Pack Plugin, I recommend installing it.

Woo Hoo ~ So we are finally ready to start writing our effective blog article for our small business! Here is where the fun begins.

Some folks love writing and others do not. As for me, I love writing and I tend to ramble or interject some humor here and there. Other folks just want to write what they have to say and get on with it. Either way is fine. Your blog is YOURS and it should reflect YOUR personality, style, professionalism, expertism, or whatever “ism” you are trying to portray. Just try to be honest. Don’t rant, nobody likes a whiner. Say what you say confidently because you have done your research and your experience and success proves your point.

Since I tortured you already with the rigorous, tedious, yet necessary exercises of creating a Blog Post Title, Blog Post Permalink, Blog Post Categories, Blog Post Tags and then repeated that drudgery with the All in One SEO Title, Description and Key words, you should have a fairly clear idea of “what” exactly your blog post will be about by now.

You might not know exactly what you’re going to say yet, but you know what the topic will be, (that’s your Title and main key phrases), you know basically what the article will be about, (that’s the description and categories). Most importantly you know what WORDS and PHRASES you will be using.

After doing SEO since 2002, this comes naturally to me, but for for beginners here is what I suggest: Copy and paste your Blog Post Title into the area where you will be composing your effective blog article. Paste it a few more times… Paste it in there about 5 times in separate paragraphs. Next, copy and paste or type your Categories and Post Tags. Copy and paste them a few times in a few different paragraphs.

At this point, if you’ve followed my advice your blog post is almost ready to publish. It has a title, permalink, categories, post tags, and the SEO meta tags. It has a cool picture and several paragraphs that contain your title, categories and tags. The only problem now is that its not an EFFECTIVE BLOG ARTICLE yet, because it makes no sense right? Now,  you will need to start weaving all the words together. For a perfect example of what I mean by weaving it together, you can study this blog post “How To Write Effective Blog Articles For Your Small  Business”.

Basically you want to get your main ideas across, while utilizing the key phrases that people would search for the information by. In this instance, I knew I wanted to write a blog article to help my clients with WordPress blogs to better their blog writing skills. In case you were sleeping, I’ll bullet point some of the key phrases I used throughout my blog article:

1. How To Write Effective Blog Articles
2. Effective Blog Articles
3. WordPress Blog Articles
4. WordPress Blogs
5. Writing Blog Article
6. Effective Blog Article

I also included a myriad of combination’s, you can see the syntax and how my key words “effective”, “blog”, “articles”, “wordpress”, etc. are all tied in with natural, organic sentences and paragraphs that make sense.

If your first blog articles are lacking don’t sweat it, because they will still add valuable content to your wordpress website and you need the practice… The important thing is that you keep writing blog articles. With each one try to narrow the focus of your topic and tighten up the Title, Categories and Post Tags.

Happy Writing

In this article I’ll try to briefly explain website templates in layman’s terms. The reason for the article is two-fold. First I happen to get a lot of visitors to my website who are looking for information or resources that might help them build their own website, so this will help them understand what a website template is, (or is not), and how to use a website template. Second, since I build websites from templates, it helps my clients understand how I use website templates to build a website.

Website Templates

What website templates are: I’m not sure if there is an actual definition for website template. The term website template is used rather loosely in my opinion and to make matters worse, there are definitions for website template, or rather explanations of what a website template  is, which are actually more deceptive than anything else. For example I found  a wikipedia article that attempts to give  a definition for website template:

A web template is a tool used to separate content from presentation in web design, and for mass-production of web documents. It is a basic component of a web template system. Web templates can be used to set up any type of website. In its simplest sense, a web template operates similarly to a form letter for use in setting up a website.

The above definition for website template is inaccurate in my opinion, because while a website template is a tool used for producing web documents, it does not necessarily “separate content from design”, because the design and content of a site are most often integral. Its not limited to mass production of web documents either, because a website template can and should be setup for every website, regardless of the site being two pages or 2 million pages. Really the only thing remotely accurate about this definition is that web templates can be used to setup any type of website. The last part of the definition which would lead someone to believe that a website template operates like a form letter is completely wrong however, because they certainly do not. As a matter of fact, this is most likely the biggest source of confusion for do it yourself website builders.

I will try to explain what a website template is so that my readers can get a better understanding of it:

A website template is actually just a website. Its an electronic document made to be visible on the World Wide Web. Its written in code called “html” which stands for hyper text markup language. A company or designer who produces the website template is producing something which looks and feels just like a website, because it is a website. The only difference between a website template and a website is that the website template it typically populated with generic text that reads something like “Lorem Ispum, blah, blah, blah” and it has stock photography and artwork instead of photos, logos and artwork that are made for a specific company or business. Many of the links on a website template don’t link to anything either. Aside from that, you can upload a website template to a web hosting server and it will look and feel like a website.

How to use a website template

In essence, a website template can be used “as-is”, or only used as the skeleton or layout for a website. This latter method is how I use website templates. Selecting a website template to use for website project is a matter of finding a template that best suits the design goals of the project in terms of the layout and general aesthetics. Other than that, the website template will most likely need to be customized for the web project. Sometimes there is very little customization, other times a great deal of it. From the width of the template to the graphics, photos and color scheme used in it, many aspects of it will most likely be changed. Page names and navigation also obviously change. For example, by the time a web designer gets done with the website template customization, you may not even recognize it as the website template that was originally selected for the design.

Example of Website Template Customization

To provide a better visual idea of how website templates can be customized to suit a particular design goal, look at the following websites which all look markedly different, yet are all based on the same website template, (actually the same template that is shown on the top of this article).

Creating web pages from a website template

Perhaps the most confusing part of all for a non-designer, is figuring out that the template they just downloaded can’t simply be used as the generic definition of website template suggests… Like a form letter or like you just somehow open  some program, fill in fields and then publish the whole thing to the web. There is a whole bunch more to it than that and here is why:

To open and customize a website template, you need software to do it. You’ll need a website design software, which allows you to see both the html code as well as the design view. For example, I use Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.0. With the website design software, you will create editable regions, or designate certain areas of the website as something which can be altered, like a certain area of text or a photo. The web design software will also enable you to convert the template design into an actual template that you can apply to the various pages within a website. In other words, after the template is customized, it has to be “saved as” a template, so that brand new pages can be made based on the template design.

The web design software will most often also have a built in file transfer device so you can connect to your web hosting server and upload the files. The web design software also allows you to make changes and updates to the website and synchronize the local version with the remote version of the website.

Customizing a Website Template Using Graphics, Images and Photographs…

You’ll also need graphics software to work with the artwork, graphics and photos in a website template or on the individual new pages created from the website template design. For example, I use Macromedia Fireworks to produce and modify graphic images. I used my graphics program to create the images you see throughout this website and in this article as well.

Defining a Website As A Website… Directories and Publicly Accessible Pages…

So far, you’ve learned that a website template is actually just a website that someone made which contains generic information. In order to be used, the template must be customized and then saved as a template, allowing the web designer to create new pages built on that template’s design. While this is all necessary, by no means does it result in a website – the way most people envision a website, which is a group of web pages that all share the same design look and feel and link to each other with a “home page”, “about us page”, etc.

In order to create a website, a web designer uses their website editing and designing software to “define” a directory and all the cohesive web pages contained in that directory which make up the “website”. Then, the web pages and all the various image files that make up that website are transferred to a web hosting server where they are publicly accessible and can be visited when someone types in or clicks on the URL or domain name of the website.

Where to find a website template

There are literally 1000′s pf places online to find website templates. The main thing that needs to be considered is what type of website template you’ll need, (For example, in most cases I employ transitional html, CSS based templates). There are also website templates for Flash Websites, Joomla Websites, WordPress Websites, etc. The other thing you’ll have to consider is how much you’re willing to spend on a website template. There are free website templates and premium website templates. The free website templates are – well – FREE. In some cases they are pretty decent and in other cases they are junk. Premium website templates might be great or just as crummy as a free template, the exception is that you are paying for the right to use that template design with what’s referred to as a user license. Premium templates typically come with some level of technical support in case there is something wrong with the template. They won’t tutor you on how to use a website template of course, but they will offer a fresh download or an updated version of the template if something is technically wrong with it. Expect to pay $50 – $150 for a single use license for a premium website template. There are also companies and freelancers who offer templates you can buy the copyright to, (this means that you can literally purchase the template design and they don’t resell it to others). Expect to pay $2000 – $3000 for the copyright. Lastly, there are also designers who will design a website template for you. Expect to pay $2000 – $5000 for a custom designed website template from a freelancer.

Website Template Based Editors and WYSIWYG website builders

As one last note, I’ll mention that this article focuses on website templates as they are most often used; a pre-designed website that can be customized, modified and used to create a website. To add to this dizzying array of choices and information surrounding traditional website templates, its important to note that there are also website template based editors and template based WYSIWYG, (what you see is what you get), web builder softwares. Some examples of this would be Intuit’s homestead websites, GoDaddy Website Tonight websites, Netfusion Websites, Yahoo Websites and there are more… Lots more. There are also “theme” based websites, such as WordPress websites. The template based editors are primarily focused on the do it yourself market and I don’t recommend them for commercial use, although they can be used this way if you’re willing to put up with the pros and cons of template based editors. In the future, perhaps I will dedicate an article to the template based website builders.

I hope that this article on website templates provides you with some answers to questions you may have had.