If you are interested in starting a blog, you need to learn about the different blogging tools that are available. One of the best and most powerful tools out there is WordPress. This program has many powerful features, yet it is also easy to learn. Keep reading to see how you can start using it.
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.
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.
Most templates come with a landing page built in, so make use of it. This stripped down page allows you to focus their intention on exactly what you want them to look at, be it a sign-up form or a “Buy Now” link. This ensures they take the actions you want them to.
One reason WordPress is so great to work with is that its plug-ins offer a dazzling array of functions. Be that as it may, you want to be careful when selecting plug-ins. Don’t just start downloading them willy-nilly. Begin with the essential plug-ins: WP DataBase BackUp, All-In-One SEO Pack and WP Optimize. Choose others with care to get precisely what you need.
You might work hard to alter your blog and erroneously believe that your changes have not been saved. That’s most likely false. Clear your cache to see if that fixes the problem. When you refresh your browser, hold the “shift” key.
You can increase your rank by including keywords with your pictures. Make sure to give titles, as well as alternate text tags. If your image goes on Pinterest, you will get more exposure.
Always back up your blog. This is an important step in ensuring that you don’t lose your entire blog. Plugins, such as Xcloner, are important to use. Use the plugin or site you’re confident in for blog backup, but be sure to backup in a lot of places. It would be a shame to lose your whole blog.
Use the Easy Tweet Embed program to create links for readers to tweet the content of your posts to their followers. It does the work of creating the tweet content for you, so you don’t have to manually create it every time you draft a post, saving you a ton of time.
Let people comment on your site. This will help foster a community feeling and will allow you to get to know your readers better. You can even use plugins to have the power to approve comments prior to their publication so you can avoid spammers.
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.
If your imagery on your WordPress website is rather bulky and slowing your site down, try using WP Smush.It. It basically compresses all of those images down to much easier sizes for browsers to deal with. It can speed up your website quite a bit. The best part is, it can run in the background once you have it installed. So new images are always smushed!
The plugin Broken Link Checker makes finding broken links on your site an easy task. Why don’t you want broken links? They make your content appear dated, and that can lose your reader’s interest. When you update or remove broken links, they’ll never realize how old your posts might be.
Learn how to make your WordPress blog posts more SEO-friendly. There is a free plugin called Yoast that can do this for you. It does auto checks of your pages’ SEO, canonical, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, permalink, and more. Using the data that it provides, it teaches you how to optimize your blog posts properly.
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.
This article has shared many great tips and tricks about using WordPress to blog. However, there is a lot more information out there that will be of use to you. Use the advice that you have read here as a starting point, but keep looking for more tips about using WordPress.