Using WordPress may seem a little overwhelming at first. That is because there is so much you can do with the blogging platform. Luckily, it is fairly simple to learn all the ins and outs of the platform. Use these tips when using the popular blogging site to make WordPress work for you.
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.
Make the most of your titles and your descriptions. Any time you share posts on social media sites a description and title may be required. These are important in terms of good search engine optimization, so don’t just toss out titles and descriptions in a random fashion. Give it some thought and optimize with good keywords.
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.
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.
Review your content for irrelevant material and remove it. This makes your website more user-friendly. You can use a plugin called Akismet to filter spam on your website.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Include your SEO-based keywords in the titles of your posts. In fact, make them the first few words of the title. For example, if your key phrases is “best pizza in Toronto”, you could create a title such as “For the Best Pizza in Toronto, Only Spring Water Will Do!”
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.
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.
Do not keep the default sidebar. Go in and customize both the titles and sections in the theme directory. This will ensure that your site is unique. In addition, while you can have different sidebars on different pages of the site, you may want to consider keeping everything uniform for your visitors.
Although WordPress seems overwhelming to begin with, it really is not all that complicated to use. You just have to get used to the controls and tools available on the blogging site. Remember the helpful tips above when using WordPress and keep yourself updated to have the best experience with WordPress.