Knowledge gives you the power to accomplish great things. This saying is very true, especially when it comes to running a successful website. This article is the perfect place to learn more about WordPress. Use these suggestions to begin. It pays to take a few notes as you read.
Devote some time to learning about the various options and tools that you have at your fingertips when you use WordPress for blogging. You will get more choices when you do this. It will make your posts different than others. You should also see a Screen Options on the Admin page. You can make use of this to control many elements of formatting.
Gather as much information as you can before installing WordPress. Adequate planning will save you time in the long run. Find out all you can about creating great content, powerful SEO strategies and the best way to work with WordPress to give yourself an advantage when you actual begin your work.
If you’re serious about keeping up with your blog, make a posting schedule for yourself. You can stay motivated when you know how to post. You might want to create posts up to a week ahead of time, then set the posts to upload on a schedule.
Get rid of the special characters in your post URL’s. This can hassle those search engines, so the characters are best removed. You also need to abbreviate URLs so they do not overwhelm readers.
Unless you modify it, all posts will be in chronological order. In order to rearrange things, dates will need to be changed. You can see the date when you open up a post. Change the date by clicking on it, and be sure to save the post in the right order.
Are there a lot of commenters to your posts? If they do, it is hard to go through all of the comments. Use a plugin to insert page numbers in the comments area. Your site will have more visual appeal and be easier for visitors to navigate.
If there is content or comments that aren’t of value, remove them. In this way, your site will be inviting and comfortable for your users. One great plugin to filter spam is Akismet.
Rank higher with the search engines by paying careful attention to the images that you upload. Always add in title and alternate text tags. If someone decides to pin your image to Pinterest, your title is what will display on the screen.
Create the best greeting for the top of your WordPress website. That makes for a better connection with visitors, since you will be able to personalize a message. This will make your site look much more inviting.
Allow your users to access your articles easily by email. This is important for sharing purposes as well, as many users may not be able to access Facebook or Twitter at work but may want to share your articles with friends. You can do this by using a WP-Email plugin.
Remove special characters from your blog post URLs. Their presence can cause problems for the search engine spiders, so omitting them entirely is your best bet. Try shortening all URLs to avoid overwhelming visitors. Try using only keywords.
Don’t use “admin” for your username. Having terms like administrator or admin as your name will make your blog much more attractive to bots who will attack and access your site. Using these usernames can put your site at risk. Go to your account page and delete usernames that are generic. Choose a new username.
Titles and targeted descriptions are important. These are some of the first items that your prospective audience sees when finding your pages via search engines. Because of this, they are extremely critical. You can use Scribe, which will help you control this on WordPress. You will be able to edit them to your heart’s content and draw more people in to your pages.
Make sure your media library isn’t too confusing. You might be tempted to simply put images right in, but you will find it gets cluttered fast. Instead, make folders and organize your pictures that way. This will make it easy to find images when you wish to use them again.
You might spend some time making changes, only to see that they haven’t taken effect. Most likely, this is not the case. See if clearing the browser’s cache resolves the issue. Just press and hold your “shift” key while refreshing your browser and your changes should appear.
Only install the plugins that you really need. While they can be very valuable, they also have a tendency to make your load time much longer. This can slow things greatly and affect your search engine ranking. Slow websites do not rank very well in the search engines when compared to sites that are optimized to load quickly.
Don’t forget to back up your blog. This should be done regularly. There is a plugin called Xcloner that will make it easy to backup your blog. Use whatever site or plugin you’re comfortable with to back up your blog, but make sure you back it up in more than one location. It would be very unfortunate if you lost your blog.
After reading this piece, you should know a good deal more about WordPress. Make use of it on your site right away. The impact it has will astound you. Before you know it, you can expect more web traffic to your site. They’ll likely come back for the professional content you’re making.
Unless you dictate differently, your posts always show up in a chronological order. To change it, modify the date. Open a post and look at the upper right hand corner. There you will find the date. Click the date, edit it, and save it to reorder its position.