As anyone involved in the world of online publishing will gladly attest, WordPress can be an incredibly valuable tool. Unfortunately, not everyone has sufficient knowledge of this platform to really get optimal results. This article is meant to provide useful information for anyone interested in getting great results with WordPress.
Make sure your sidebar is not too cluttered. The sidebars on most WordPress blogs are a chaotic mess, full of social media icons and ads and links. Prioritize what goes in your sidebar. Make sure visitors to your blog don’t have to search for anything they might be looking for.
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.
WordPress is full of options, features and tools that you can use to improve your blogging site. For instance, clicking on the button called KITCHEN SINK provides you with many options with regard to formatting and importing that can help you to customize your posts. SCREEN OPTIONS is another tab you are likely to see on the admin pages. Use that to control all kinds of formatting elements.
Use your footers wisely. People often scroll to the bottom of a page to find out who runs the site, how to contact the owner or to see how fresh the content is based on a copyright date. You can even include a short biography or other information you feel is pertinent.
Get rid of the special characters in your post URL’s. These characters can make things a real hassle. Use keywords and short URLs.
Make sure you have a unique greeting. That makes for a better connection with visitors, since you will be able to personalize a message. A possible plugin to use is WP Greet Box; using this will make the things feel less robotic.
If you want a post to stay at the top of the page, there is no need to set it’s date way in the future any longer. Instead, go to the post and click on Edit under Visibility. Choose the option which allows you to make the post sticky and enjoy!
Use an internal linking plugin to connect your posts together, giving the reader more content to enjoy on your site. These plugins add lists between three and five links beneath the posts based on your tag’s relevancy to each post.
So, what is the difference between tags and categories and why should I care? Categories are broad and house many posts which fall into the same genre, such as “cleaning tips”. Tags are more targeted, detailed words which describe what is in the content of a post, such as “removing blood stains” or “getting out grass stains”.
To keep tabs on comments, you don’t need to visit each post separately. Instead, use your dashboard’s comments section to see what has been posted recently. You should check this page daily so that you know what people are saying and can reply if anyone requests more information or asks a question.
Write blog posts in advance and then schedule them to be posted later. You can easily schedule the publication of your posts regardless of where you are. Find the Publish option from your Edit screen. If you choose to publish immediately, all of your blog posts will be published the minute you submit them. Input the military time, day, month, and year that you want your post to be published. Pick OK. When your screen shows “Schedule For”, check this option and then hit the “Schedule” option if it is right.
There are quicker ways to add a header to your post than using the menu. You should use keyboard shortcuts instead. Press Ctrl and single number from one to six for several options. This will save you time if you’re constantly using headers.
Do you have too much going on with the functions in WordPress? You can easily remedy this by closing out anything that is getting in your way. Click Screen Options. Click this and you will see a drop-down menu. This lets you choose the boxes you want to see.
If you want to improve traffic to your own domain, you should host your WordPress blog in your web account instead of using WordPress.com as the host. When you install WordPress yourself, you have more control over what features you can install and customize. Any visitor will be counted as traffic in your domain and not in WordPress.com’s domain.
When linking internally, you don’t have to enter your domain name into the URL field. Instead, just include the information which comes after the first /, such as /index.html. Don’t forget to also insert an SEO keyword-rich title so that you can get even more bang for your search rank.
Try installing a caching plugin in your WordPress site. There are many out there, but a popular one is W3 Total Cache. This plugin simply caches the website and keeps it from reloading each time a page is reloaded. This makes your site faster. It speeds things up because every file isn’t being called every time a page reloads.
Highlight comments that are made by the post’s author. Users tend to ask questions and write concerns in the comments section. With all of the comments in this area, you may not even see questions that have been asked. Be sure an author’s comments are highlighted in a contrasting color. Using this method will make the comment section easier to read.
Join an online forum full of WordPress users. This way you can brainstorm ideas and get suggestions for your site. People are going to be happy to help you avoid their own WordPress mistakes. Just do a little reading to get some information, and you’ll find that a good forum is better than buying a lot of books.
The potential that WordPress offers bloggers these days really is boundless. The key, however, to really making it work well is to acquire a good amount of knowledge before attempting to put it to use. Hopefully this article has provided a terrific starting point for those interested in producing great blogs.