Tips And Tricks For Improving Your WordPress Skills

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.

Check out add-ons to find simple tools which will make your site or blog better. For example, you could add a calendar to your side menu bar in order to share events which would be interesting to your readers. You can also find many great add-ons which provide control for advertising, turning your site into a revenue maker.

Does one of your posts have a lengthy title? If so, use permalink to clean it up. For instance, “101 Ways for Smart People to Manage Their Children” is way too long for a URL. Instead, you could use something like: “Smart Parents Control Kids” if it works with your SEO strategy.

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.

Make sure you have a unique greeting. Not only does this personalize your website, it welcomes guests based on how they found your blog. In this way, your page will seem more human, and it will be accessible via the plugin called WP Greet Box.

As you begin getting comments on your posts, consider allowing people to post with an avatar. It helps your site feel like more of a community, and it only takes a minute to do. Simply go to the settings area of your dashboard and then click on “discussion.” You should see the option there to enable avatars.

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.

Connect posts with the internal linking plugin. This will help your readers find content they like. This type of plugin adds 3-5 links beneath your posts based on their tags’ relevancy.

So, what is the difference between tags and categories and why should I care? Categories are broad and house many posts which fall into the same genre, such as “cleaning tips”. Tags are more targeted, detailed words which describe what is in the content of a post, such as “removing blood stains” or “getting out grass stains”.

Remember that social media is integral to the success of both blogs and websites today, so you should install social networking plugins which allow you to share your content through your accounts. Facebook Connect is one example of an excellent tool to use to repost your content to your Facebook account.

Does your WordPress dashboard look like a cluttered mess? Want to clean it up? Use the Screen Options link on that page to choose which boxes you want to appear and remove those which aren’t helpful to you. This will ensure that your dashboard experience is streamlined in the future.

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.

Want to create a new link in your post? There is no need to click the link icon any longer. Use ctrl-shift-A instead to start the link creation process using the keyboard and not the mouse. When you create many links within your content, this can shave time off the creation process.

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.

If you just want to dabble in WordPress without installing it on your web hosting account, consider opening an account with WordPress.com. You will get a subdomain to the WordPress domain, and your blog is hosting by WordPress for free. This is a good way to get your feet wet into blogging.

If you want to improve traffic to your own domain, you should host your WordPress blog in your web account instead of using WordPress.com as the host. When you install WordPress yourself, you have more control over what features you can install and customize. Any visitor will be counted as traffic in your domain and not in WordPress.com’s domain.

Get a webhost that is able to install WordPress by simply clicking a button. This will help you save the trouble of creating a separate database. The one “click” can enable you to have your domain setup as well as your database.

Make sure your WordPress site has a great theme. A theme can actually make or break or your site when it comes to attracting or repelling visitors. There are many great free themes out there. You can also find affordable premium themes. Just make sure your themes don’t have a ton of messy code that makes loading too slow or that isn’t compatible with WordPress’s current versions.

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.

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.