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.
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.
Take the time to learn about WordPress before beginning to use it. Adequate planning will save you time in the long run. Research SEO, WordPress and content generation before starting to develop your site.
Make a schedule for your posts. By knowing when you need to post, you will be more motivated. You can make your posts all at once and schedule them to upload at a specified time.
Clean up comments and content that don’t add anything to your website. This will help ensure that your site remains user-friendly. You can filter spam every day with the plugin known as Akismet.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t forget to spellcheck your WordPress story. WordPress makes that easy through a spellcheck button on the editor itself. Look for a button that has the letters “ABC” on it. It’ll then scan your post for spelling and common grammatical errors. Check any word or phrase that has a red squiggly line under it.
When you are choosing a WordPress template to use, pick something that gets frequent updates. You do not want to use a template whose creator has abandoned updates because sometimes you have to address security issues. A creator who is proactive in updating his template will give you a better product.
Be sure to back up your site often! The best way to do this is to have your host back up your site every day for you. If they don’t offer this service, instead back it up yourself. There are plugins which will do the job for you, or you can just download it to your own computer.
When looking for a template, look for one that has the basic layout and design that you desire for your site. This way, you would not have to customize it too much in order to give it the look that you want. This will cut down on your site development time.
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.
Your first WordPress plugin install should be Jetpack. The plugin extends the usability of WordPress in a lot of important ways. For instance, it gives you some basic analytics on the main page of the dashboard. It also increases your social media options for your website and adds in contact form options.
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.
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.