Successful bloggers everywhere are familiar with the ability of WordPress to provide an easy way to produce straightforward, valuable sites. However, if you are new to the world of blogs, you may still need to educate yourself on this particular platform. Keep on reading to get some great information on the fundamentals of WordPress.
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.
With WordPress you have lots of choices in themes so you can have a really good looking blog. Take plenty of time to peruse all of your choices so that you can select just the right one to suit your style and your topic. For a truly unique theme, select a premium theme. This will really help your blog stand out from the crowd.
Learn about WordPress before you install it. It’s best to start WordPress when you have an understanding of how it works and a general idea of which plugins will work best for you. Learn about SEO, content creation, and how WordPress can best be used to your advantage.
Eliminate any content that is not adding value to your blog. That will help you to keep the site friendly to people who are looking at it. You can filter spam every day with the plugin known as Akismet.
If you are new to WordPress, make sure to keep your sidebar simple. Make sure that it only has the essentials. Your visitors shouldn’t have to weed through a ton of ads and banners to find the links they want to click on. Try removing the items in Appearance & Widgets that don’t contribute anything to your cause or business.
Encourage your users to share your site with their friends, family and loved ones on the top social media sites. Twitter and Facebook are the most optimal sites that come to mind, as this can get your name across to millions of different people. A social sharing plugin can be used to facilitate this.
Download Akismet immediately with a fresh WordPress install. Akismet is a plugin for WordPress that basically blocks spam comments as they come in. If you don’t have it installed, you may be inundated with tons of spam. You’ll need to get a free key from the Akismet website to finalize the install.
Make sure that your wordpress site loads as fast as possible for your visitors. This is vital, as a site that crashes or takes too long will discourage your users from visiting it. A fast site will put your users in a good mood when they come there on a daily basis.
Look into other themes for your WordPress blog. Sure WordPress comes preinstalled with a few excellent themes, but there are many more options out there. Many are free and then there are premium themes as well. These premium themes are very well designed and let you add more advanced aspects to your blog with ease, such as e-commerce plugins.
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.
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.
If you want a post to stay at the top of the page, there is no need to set it’s date way in the future any longer. Instead, go to the post and click on Edit under Visibility. Choose the option which allows you to make the post sticky and enjoy!
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.
Bloggers have long seen the great value and utility inherent in the platform known as WordPress. If you are planning to begin blogging yourself, you owe it to yourself to take a close look at what WordPress can do for you, provided you understand how to use it well. The information above ought to have given you a great start.