Have you been thinking about starting a site on wordpress? Do you already have one but, are uncertain how to make it better? Either way, you have come to the right place. Here are some suggestions to help you understand what the pros know. A successful site can be yours if you use these ideas.
If you are doing a WordPress blog for professional or search engine optimization purporses, don’t let WordPress actually host your blog. Put your blog on a different host and then just use the WordPress application there. Blogs at WordPress’ website are sometimes deleted for being too commercial or deemed spammy in content.
If you want to easily be able to search through the media you upload, such as videos or photos, put it all into a single folder through WordPress. To do this, go into Settings & Media and then uncheck the box which sets WP to sort your media into folders based on the date.
Does one of your posts have a lengthy title? If so, use permalink to clean it up. Avoid cumbersome URLs like “The Ten Ways Intelligent Parents Manage Their Children.” Instead, you could change the permalink to “tips-parents-unruly-kids” or something similar based on your SEO keywords.
Remember that the title and description of each page on your site is what many other sites will use to categorize your link and share it with the world. For example, it will be what Google shows when someone searches for a site such as your own. Fill them with SEO key phrases and make sure there are no typos.
When you use different tags for the topics on your blog, keep in mind that these are strictly for searching the content on your blog. These can’t be used by search engines. If you want your pages to be searchable on Google, you have to install an SEO type plug-in such as Headspace.
Get rid of extraneous characters from URLs. Spiderbots may have difficulty with them. While utilizing keywords, make sure you keep those URLs short as well.
If you haven’t customized your WordPress sidebar, it could be cluttered with useless items that are doing nothing but confusing your readers. Your sidebar should only contain things you actually want visitors to click on. Navigate to Appearance & Widgets to edit the appearance of your sidebar and remove anything there that doesn’t actually benefit you or your visitors directly.
You can insert media into your posts just by pasting the URL where you’d like the media to appear. For example, paste in a YouTube video just by putting the URL within the text where you want the video to play. Be sure that the URL doesn’t turn blue – if it does, highlight it and click the unlink button.
Get to know your WordPress WYSIWYG editor. When you write a new post, you’ll see a small bar that goes across the text input area. This is your WYSIWYG editor – meaning whatever you push will happen to whatever text you have highlighted. If you choose bold in the editor, the text you have chosen will become bold. It’s similar to using Microsoft Word.
Include useful links at your footer. The footer is located at the bottom of your site. Most sites include contact information, copyright information and links to other sites in the footer. By including useful information in your footer, you can increase the sales, referrals and traffic to your site.
As you begin getting comments on your posts, consider allowing people to post with an avatar. It helps your site feel like more of a community, and it only takes a minute to do. Simply go to the settings area of your dashboard and then click on “discussion.” You should see the option there to enable avatars.
Keep your WordPress website updated. Updates usually contain patches that solve security issues and get rid of vulnerabilities. Older versions of WordPress leave you vulnerable to attack by malware. Install every update possible that you can.
If you want to have a landing page as the front page of your site, you will first need to create a “home” page and then a second page for your blog. Next, go into Reading Settings and click the static page radio button. Choose your home page for the front page and your blog page for the posts page.
Use a security plugin. Keeping your blog secure is important, and there are plenty of plugins out there that promise to do just that. Try a plugin you feel you can trust. Wordfence is a good choice. It offers a firewall, does virus scans, blocks any malicious networks, and is free.
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.
You can easily get rid of external text formatting in WordPress. You may need to copy text from Word. Many times, it inserts characters that don’t display properly, even with “Paste from Word” option. Select the “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink” option to show another row of buttons. Highlight the problematic text. Click on a button called “Remove Formatting” to fix it.
If you want to put two images side by side, try using an invisible table in your WordPress post. You can create a one row/two column table via your post editor and then embed a photo into each cell. You could take the next step and add another row underneath to add captions below each photo.
You now know more about how to operate a wordpress site successfully. These ideas are a great way to improve an existing blog or start a brand new one. Bookmark this page. Return to it frequently as you work on your site. Soon, you will have a noticeable gain in site visitors.
