Better articles in WordPress
Some people are writing articles/posts directly in WordPress, some in different text editors because of additional content editing before publishing, grammar check etc. Then they will paste it from eg Word to WordPress. It can cause issues and it does.
WordPress has a set font type in CSS file (let’s say in human language a ‘general design file’ which is part of a WP theme). After a year you might decide to use a different font; which you can change in WP Theme settings. But your articles won’t change their font. You must go through each article and change the font manually. Why?
Pasting text from Word will also copy style formatting from this editor – font type, size, colours and other formatting data.
Paste text with no mess
How to get rid of this text formatting data? To keep consistent font formatting in your WordPress theme design just copy the content as plain text. For this purpose there’s a great plugin TinyMCE Advanced – a classic ‘must have’.
Just go to Plugins – Add new in your WordPress dashboard. On right side type ‘TinyMCE Advanced’ in search field and install it in the standard way. Go to Settings – TinyMCE Advanced also in your WP dashboard on left side and on settings page drag and drop into the main editor button ‘T – Paste as text’. From this moment this button will be available every time, when you make a new or editing existing post / article or page.
Before you paste text from Word, simply click on ‘T’ button, paste your text and start formatting on WordPress.
Small tip: never use the font type button in any article, use default font and make font changes through theme font settings.
Good text formatting is good SEO
So you’ve pasted text as plain text. Click anywhere in the text field and select Paragraph. Your whole text will now be in one long paragraph. Use Enter key to split blocks of text and text for headings and/or other elements (sub-headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on). Now click in the first line of text which I guess will be a nice heading and in editor select Heading.
You will see in editor Heading 1, Heading 2, … Heading 6. These options are usually providing different font sizes and making invisible codes which are important for search engines about relevancy of headings. H1 is more important than H2, of course. Heading 1 should be the only one on the page, but feel free to use more of Heading 2; also think of using keywords when you will create sentences. It is important to have good headings for SEO. As you know, headings are an important part of content.
Keep an article nice
What does a good heading look like? Just look at mine. I am using keywords which should outline the content of my web site and the main theme of this article: articles, wordpress, formatting, seo. Also your heading should have some sense, point, and/or marketing thrust.
Also enjoy using bold font for your important words, or groups of words. Bold doesn’t mean only visual font weight – Google will recognise that word as important. Use underline and italic font too if you think it is good and a relevant idea for your content, but do it elegantly – don’t destroy the visual look of your article.
One more tip: when you insert an image into your article, always use the ALT tag. The ALT tag adds a text description to an image and should be used for all images including image design elements. Search engines will know what is in your image and your image will be indexed properly.