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.
Allow all of the users that visit your site the ability to comment using Facebook. This is a very important tool that will get your name across to hundreds of thousands of people. The Simple Facebook Connect plugin can be used if you want to install this feature on your site.
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.
Create a members only section to your website to make it more exclusive to the people who visit your site on a daily basis. This will allow them to actively engage in discussions with other members who have the same level of intensity. This will develop a solid bond between your top visitors.
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.
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.
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.
Do not use something generic like “admin” when it comes to your username. The more simple your user name, the easier it is for your site to be hacked. That’s a security risk. Go to your “user” page and erase anything that has to do with usernames that contain “administrator” or “admin”. Select a different user name.
Organize your permalinks. You need to make your links easy for the search engines to find your important information. You should learn proper SEO to do this. In the meantime, you can use WordPress‘s included permalink form to clean up links before publication. Cut words down to only the most important ones. Also, try cleverly adding your keywords to your descriptions.
Security is crucial for a site built with WordPress, so always keep your passwords secure. Before installing plugins, make sure to read reviews. When your site ends up hacked or attacked by malware, you’ll lose all that you’ve built.
Incorporate a social sharing plugin for your WordPress blog. Integrating social media with your blog will be a great boon to your traffic. Your users can instantly share your article through Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Look for a plugin that will allow liking and sharing, since both will be beneficial.
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”.
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.
Make sure that you keep any plugins or themes you are using on your blog up to date. Exploits and general weaknesses in the security of a plugin or theme are almost always found eventually. Updates will keep them running smoothly and securely, but it’s important that you remember to keep them updated.
Always back up your Wordpress files and database regularly. Although your website has backups, they may not do backups as frequently as you would like. You can find plugins that can make the back up process much easier. When you have your files and database backed up, you can easily restore your site if anything happens to it.
Sticky the posts the you want to stay at the top of your page. If there are posts you want your visitors to see first, sticky them by going to the ‘visibility’ option on the ‘edit posts’ screen. Choose to sticky the selected messages to the first page, and that is it.
For a more customizable commenting system, try using CommentLuv. This system si a premium plugin that is pretty popular with bloggers. It makes commenting on other blogs easy. You can set it up to leave a link that connects automatically to your latest post. This is ideal for things like giveaways since it lets more people know about it.
Allow users to comment on your website. People will feel more involved and you can learn about them as well. You can get plugins that allow you to filter content from others.
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.
