Tips And Tricks For Getting The Most From WordPress
Following your instincts and navigating your way will get you pretty far with WordPress as a blogging platform. However, even a user-friendly WordPress can be much easier to comprehend if you have some extra instruction. After all, there are a plethora of options available to you when using WordPress, and this article is going to help bring some of them to your attention.
Check out add-ons to find simple tools which will make your site or blog better. For example, you could add a calendar to your side menu bar in order to share events which would be interesting to your readers. You can also find many great add-ons which provide control for advertising, turning your site into a revenue maker.
Create smart URLs! Don’t use a lot of keywords in the URL, and keep the whole thing simple and straightforward. Avoid excessive verbiage. You want to create smart permalinks that are easy to look at and easy to understand. This helps make your blog more user friendly and comprehensible.
Remember to make your sidebar as concise and clean as possible. You don’t want it to be full of 100 links, ads and buttons. Instead, only put what is important in your sidebar and, if you need more links, put them into submenus which appear when the user mouses over your main menu.
Add page numbers at the bottom of your comments section if you have a very active community. This is important as it will allow your users to be able to sort through the material and information easier. Make sure that the page numbers are easy to see for the viewers.
Keep your permalinks clean and understandable. That means you should look at the permalink box every time you put up a new post. Does the title in the URL make sense? Does it help from an SEO standpoint? If not, click on it and alter it until it is perfect.
Images make your blog look beautiful; however, the images can also help your site rank higher among search engines. One of the easiest ways to do this is to add keywords to your title tag and alternate tags. Both of these tags should contain precise keywords in order to rank your site appropriately.
WordPress has many keyboard shortcuts which make working with posts a snap. For example, ctrl-c allows you to copy text, while ctrl-x lets you cut it. Ctrl-v will paste it somewhere else. Ctrl-b is bold, ctrl-i is italic and ctrl-u is underline. These basic keyboard shortcuts will save you a lot of time if you memorize them.
Having a theme for your WordPress site can make it much more professional. There are plenty of websites that allow you to download themes for free. However, it is very important that you download themes from a trusted source. Not doing so can result in you installing outdated or malicious codes.
Your username should not be generic. Having terms like administrator or admin as your name will make your blog much more attractive to bots who will attack and access your site. This is a huge security risk. Eliminate admin type user names altogether. Find creative user names that you can remember.
Use Google Analytics to keep tabs on who is visiting your site and where they come from. It is important that you know where you are getting visitors from so that you can work harder to bring in more readers. The more you pay attention to your statistics, the bigger your site will become.
Always use targeted titles and descriptions. When people use search engines to find your pages, these elements are usually seen first. They are crucial to your site. Check out Scribe, which is an SEO software that gives you power on your site. This lets you edit pages to gain more readers.
If you find that writing new posts is cluttered and confusing because of all the stuff on your page, clean it up! Use the Screen Options link to choose what shows up on the composition page and what remains hidden. Many of your plugins may add content you don’t want, so remove it there.
Back up your content on your WordPress blog. Sure WordPress is a very well-known and stable platform, but things still do go wrong from time to time. You don’t want to be caught without a content backup if somethings gone the wrong way. You can simply copy and paste your articles into Evernote or another notes platform.
Do you feel like you’ve gained some valuable information about using WordPress. You are now ready to see what you can do using this top-notch blogging platform. WordPress is very unique and provides users with so many different opportunities and options. So begin your journey now by implementing the strategies learned.