A successful blog site, like a wordpress publication, takes knowledge and work. If you are willing to learn more about wordpress, you have come to the right place. Here are several tips to increase the usability and appearance of your site. Implement them and you will be amazed at the difference in your traffic.
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.
When uploading images, use alt and title text. This allows you to add words to your images. You can put SEO phrases in these places, and those people that can’t see pictures on your site will know what should have been there.
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.
If you want to create a line break, but not a paragraph break, hold shift while you press the enter key. This moves the cursor down to the next line without including any blank space. If you want to put a letterhead-type address on your page, this should make it a snap.
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.
Be sure to choose unique, difficult to hack passwords and keep them secure. It doesn’t matter if you are a free WordPress blogger of a paid, self-hosted WordPress blogger: it is important to keep your passwords strong and secure. In this way, you will not have to waste valuable time cleaning up sabotage and changing passwords. This will help ensure that your blog is a success.
Allow your users to access your articles easily by email. This is essential for sharing purposes, since not everyone uses Twitter or Facebook while working. You can use the Email plugin in WordPress to do this.
Keep close track of visitors to your blog. This is the only way you will be able to improve it to please your reader more. Free WordPress bloggers can use Jetpack stats to do this. Both free and paid bloggers can use Google Analytics. Be sure to make good use of both services if you can because they offer slightly different advantages.
Know that you can write posts and send them in the future via WordPress. All you need to do is change the post from “Publish Immediately” to a specific date and time in the future. This way you can write posts and have them set up to go out even while you are on vacation!
Choose a focused keyword for each post or page you create. What would someone be searching for if this is the exact content they wanted? Be sure to make your key phrases targeted as simple queries, such as “sailing tips”, are already overrun by thousands of competitors and their websites.
Never forget to properly setup your WordPress page’s timezone. Under the General Settings page, take a moment and make sure that your timezone properly represents where you reside. This can be very important as the times and dates are published along with your posts. Not having the proper date stamp can leave you in a time warp.
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.
Now you have more knowledge about how to use wordpress. Knowledge about the right plugins and how to format your pages is essential for getting more traffic to your site. Start using these suggestions to make your blog more appealing. You will be amazed at the difference it makes in visitor count.