Helping You Better Understand WordPress With These Simple To Follow Tips

Blogging is the new black for the Internet. Blogging with WordPress is quickly becoming the standard by which most bloggers get their start and earn their bread and butter. If you want to learn how to make WordPress work for you in your personal blogging or Internet marketing efforts, continue reading.

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.

Set a publishing time for your blog posts. When editing an article for publication, you can select when it will be published. It’s a good idea to set regular updates for a specific date and time. To really stay on top of keeping your blog up to date, put your blog posts in ahead of time and let WordPress post them to your blog for you.

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.

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.

Make use of a landing page. Instead of coming directly to current posts, users will pass through this landing page first. You can use this for a variety of reasons, whether for promoting a product or promoting yourself. Many themes feature a landing page; however, there are also paid options.

Remember to make good use of the footer area at the bottom of your WordPress blog pages. In this area you can include additional information about yourself and/or your copyright. You can also add a link to another page if you wish. Different themes give you more use of this area, so choose your themes carefully to maximize the value of your page footers.

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.

Regularly check your site and content. All your plugins and everything else you work with needs to be current. This will help ensure that your visitors have a seamless experience on your site. If you have trouble remembering to do this, consider setting your phone to alert you once a month to perform this task.

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.

Back up your blog. It’s important to make sure you don’t lose any valuable information. There are some WordPress plugins available for this purpose, such as Xcloner. The actual plugin doesn’t really matter, as long as it is something that you can use relatively easily. It would be a tragedy to lose your whole blog.

To keep tabs on comments, you don’t need to visit each post separately. Instead, use your dashboard’s comments section to see what has been posted recently. You should check this page daily so that you know what people are saying and can reply if anyone requests more information or asks a question.

Some visitors may want to share one of your posts with friends or family members through their email. Unless you have a plugin in specifically for that purpose, the user may not find the process very easy. Therefore, install one ahead of time so that your visitors are not frustrated.

When you upload images into the media gallery, try to keep the image file sizes down. Large image files take much longer to upload. When you use an image like that in your website, it will delay the load time of your page. This may discourage your visitors to stay and browse.

Try using different authoring tools for your blog. Do you dislike WordPress’s dashboard? Try blog authoring applications that work well with WordPress. Lots of tools can work well in conjunction with WordPress in this way. Try using a couple of them and find one you like.

Try to tag all of your blog posts. Splitting posts up into categories isn’t enough. This is especially true if your blog is growing and contains many posts. Categories are often broad. If someone visiting your blog is looking for a post on a specific subject, tags will help a lot with refining their search.

As you are learning how to customize a WordPress template, choose a template that is highly flexible and which is updated constantly. Current updates means that the developers are active in improving the template. If you choose a high-quality template for your foundation, you will practically have unlimited choices in how you can customize this into your own unique design.

With blogging taking on such a large role across the Internet, it might be the time you want to get started. This article has laid out some great ideas to make the most of WordPress and help you understand how to make it work for you. Don’t wait for the right time, make NOW the time.