WordPress is the most popular blogging website for a reason. The program is easy to use and provides so many options for making your blog stand out and look just the way you want it to. However, you need to know how to use the site to get the most from your experience. Follow the simple tips below to make WordPress work for you.
Try to use a landing page when you are using wordpress on your site. This is a great alternative to displaying your current posts as it gives your site flavor and pizzazz. You can even use Premise for WordPress, which is a premium solution that can get you started with the process.
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.
If your post title is really long, cut down the length of the web page permalink. For example, “Ten Ways for Smart Parents to Tame Their Kids” would appear as a long, cumbersome URL. Be sure to select only the keywords from your long titles to create your permalinks.
Try learning all the options and tools you can when you blog on WordPress. For example, if you click on the KITCHEN SINK button, you will get lots of extra choices in importing and formatting that can really make your posts unique.Additionally, you will probably notice the SCREEN OPTIONS tab on your admin pages. Use that to control all kinds of formatting elements.
Do not let your theme get stale. The first thing you should do if you notice a decrease in traffic is check and see when you last changed your theme. As your site grows and changes, the theme should as well. Make sure that it accurately reflects your brand, and you should see a rise in traffic.
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.
Remember to make good use of the footer area at the bottom of your WordPress blog pages. In this area you can include additional information about yourself and/or your copyright. You can also add a link to another page if you wish. Different themes give you more use of this area, so choose your themes carefully to maximize the value of your page footers.
Many people are responding to video blogs, so consider this option. Video blogging is not only becoming more popular, it is also becoming much easier to use. WordPress, in its current version, makes the use of video blogging easy. This can really increase traffic by drawing those who are less inclined to read.
Constantly work on improving your permalinks. As WordPress becomes more popular, your traffic may decline. Change the URLs of your WordPress articles and incorporate higher quality keywords. You can minimize the amount of keywords as long as their value increases. This can be a nice boost to the traffic you see.
Titles and targeted descriptions ought to be used. These are likely the first things visitors see when discovering your site from an Internet search. This makes these aspects very important. Scribe is a good kind of SEO software you can use to gain control over this. With its help, you can edit this sort of item within your pages to make them more attractive.
Take the time to log out of your site every once in a while. Go back and look at it as a visitor. Doing so could allow you to see something that you are missing when you are logged in as an administrator. This step will not take very long, but it should set your mind at ease that everything is functioning the way that it should be.
Use images properly on your WordPress site. They can add everything from beauty to interest to your pages. Use their alternative text tags and title tags properly. Don’t settle for generic descriptions. You need to make them specific so that your visitors know exactly what they are. This also helps them figure out what your site is about.
Remember that social media is integral to the success of both blogs and websites today, so you should install social networking plugins which allow you to share your content through your accounts. Facebook Connect is one example of an excellent tool to use to repost your content to your Facebook account.
Be sure to use a robust spam plug-in to filter out spam and bad content. People with ill-intentions are always looking for ways to spam a blog for link building purposes. This kind of spam will create a bad impression on your blog because your legitimate readers will think that your blog has security issues.
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.
Did you spend a lot of time making changes to your blog, only to check it out and see none of the changes took effect? Do not fret, you just need to clear your cache. Find out how to clear the cache on the browser you are using, clear it and the changes should show up.
As stated above, there is a reason WordPress has become the leader in blogging websites. The many options and easy experience makes the website more popular than the competitors. Use the tips above to learn how to use the platform. They also help ensure that you are getting the most from the popular blogging website.
