Archives for September 2016

How to Embed Social Media in your WordPress pages or posts

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Adding social media content along side your website’s content is a great way to showcase social commentary, display testimonials or highlight something that your own clients have recently shared. It’s also incredibly easy to do thanks to the WordPress’ oEmbed feature.

Let’s get into this simple WordPress social media tip.

Here’s how to do it

First, go to the page or post that you want to add the social content to. In the content editor, create a new line where the inserted social content can go.

Then, go to the content that you aim to embed. It might be a tweet, or perhaps an Instagram image. Copy the URL from the browser. Paste it into the content area in WordPress but be sure it is not hyperlinked. If it is an Instagram post, a tweet from Twitter or content from Vine, Reddit, or YouTube, WordPress will automatically turn the URL into an embed, you will see the content right in your WordPress editor.

Here’s an example, a tweet from us back in January that we’ve embedded here.

Be aware that some social media content is only available to you, perhaps because your a friends with the publisher. Always test the embedded content before publishing it. To test that the content is available generally try accessing your blog post in a web browser that is not signed in to your social accounts.

From time to time WordPress will update the social sites that it support these embeds from. To see the latest list of social media platforms that allow for this automatic embed, visit the WordPress codex and navigate to “Okay, So What Sites Can I Embed From?”

You can use this same method to display video inside your WordPress site, check out this article right here to learn more about that.

Better Google rankings by optimising images for SEO

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It might not be widely known but image searches on Google generate a substantial amount of traffic to websites. Optimising images for SEO is quick and easy to do, in this post we present a few simple tips to get you started.

Optimise file names

When saving the file name of the image on your computer, try to use your SEO keywords to improve webpage ranking. For example if using an image of a red apples on a webpage, use more descriptive and keyword rich file name like “red-fuji-apples-on-tree.jpg”. It makes the file name keyword rich and easy for Google to understand. Try to also keep the words in sequence of how one would search for the image. Never user files names like IMG0001.jpg!

Use keywords in alternative text function

Alternative text also commonly known as an Alt tag is the term used to refer to the Alt attribute within an image tag. This provides a clear text alternative to screen reader users.

Using the above example again, when creating an Alt tag simply select the image and a tool bar will appear. Select the pen icon to edit, see below image.

Editing an image in WordPress
Editing an image in the WordPress editor

Once you have clicked edit, the image details will appear and within the Alternative text box is where you add the unique keyword description for the image, see below image.

Optimising for SEO with ALT tags
How to change the ALT tag of an image in WordPress

It really is as simple as that but also don’t forget to use keywords in the Caption and hit “Save Draft’ so that these changes will be implemented.

Why this is so important

This exercise is a simple way to generate traffic to your website and in turn generate more leads and sales.  When someone searches for the term ‘red apple fuji on trees’ under Google Images and they stumble upon your image. When they select your image, your website information comes up!

Optimising images for better SEO
Image on Google images when searching for red fuji apple on trees

You have spent enough time creating the perfect post so why not optimise your images for maximum search benefit. Using the steps shown, should take you no more than a few minutes to implement and start to watch your traffic grow.

More WordPress SEO help?

We write regularly about search engine optimisation, specifically for WordPress – visit our archive here to learn more.

Hope you have found these tips and steps useful. Please don’t forget to share or comment if you have any other tips or questions.

Building Travel Websites with WordPress

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Over the years we have launched WordPress websites across many many different industries. If you stick around long enough though you end up coming around to the same industry over and over. Sometimes this is word of mouth, people recommending us to their peers. We regularly see enquiries where a prospective client sees our work, they are in the same field so contact us to do something similar for them. We find ourselves doing lots of financial services website projects, regular projects in the wedding industry and the topic of this article, websites for the travel industry.

What makes a good travel website?

I think the stand out feature of any travel website is great imagery. People want to come to a site and be swept away in the possibilities of where that next holiday might take them. There’s nothing like excellent photos to get this job done.

Of course, like any other website you have to ensure that it loads quickly, that’s important both for user experience and for your search engine optimisation. Having an image heavy site load quickly is not an impossible but it does required some extra attention.

When we finalise our WordPress projects we deliver a training session to show our client how to drive the website. Part of this is discussing the optimal way to display images on the site. Cropping them to the exact size, using JPG compression are things that we as developers take for granted. It’s important that the user that is adding content to the site on a regular basis also is across these techniques.

Hosting that’ll make a website fly!

(ok that is a relatively bad travel joke… )

Sites that are big on images need to also ensure that the hosting environment is doing as much as it can to deliver the images quickly. WordPress hosting that serves content from a CDN can make a world of difference to websites like this. In short a CDN delivers static content (like images) from multiple servers located around the globe. Read my blog post “WordPress hosting; time to add a CDN?” to learn more about Content Distribution Networks.

Why WordPress for travel sites?

Like many websites, a travel site will need some standard pages, about the business, the contact page etc.. These sites also contain content like tour itineraries and this is where a little customisation can go a long way.

Different layouts and content require different approaches inside WordPress. In years gone by all content for a specific page would probably end up in the WordPress main editor.

The WordPress post editor

The problem with this approach is that it provides very little structure for the content. It’s all just there. When different users comes to add content to the site there is little or no visual cue as to where things go. The result of this is that the content displayed on the site will, over time, become inconsistent.

WordPress has matured, along with the ecosystem of plugins that surround it so that there is a lot of different options for the setup of content. Now, here we are talking about travel sites but the same is true for sites covering different subject matters.

potter-travel-wordpress-website-1200px

This week we relaunched PotterTravel.com.au – it’s a good example of how WordPress can be customised to showcase specific content types.

The site features a number of tours with itineraries. Instead of putting all the content in the default page editor, we have build a bespoke interface that makes it a lot easier to use. A user that is new to the site could easily step through the various fields presented and add a new tour to the website.

Below is a screen shot, showing our customisations.

Customising the WordPress editor

When this page of content is displayed each of the fields are treated in a specific way. The screenshot below show the finished product. The result is constant across many users editing and adding to website content.

WordPress showing a tour itinerary

If you’d like to check our some of our work in this field, certainly start with PotterTravel.com.au. Also see South Australian based Aussie Getaways. It’s a project we launched a couple of years back but still looks great today.