WordPress 101: Everything You Need To Know

Are you a WordPress novice, or someone who has put this tool to work for a number of years? Regardless of your experience level, there are certainly new and exciting things about WordPress about which you should be aware. The tips and guidance found below will help you get the absolute most from this wonderful platform.

Be sure to add an author biography to each blog post on boards where many bloggers are posting. In this way, each blogger gets proper credit and it is easier for readers to know who posted what at a glance. Furthermore, readers will tend to stay on your page if they can get all the information they need in one place.

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If you plan to start a WordPress blog, make sure that you offer readers more than just content. Even if you say many useful things, it may be quite difficult to engage readers with text. It would be a great idea to implement videos and pictures since this is a great attention grabber.

With WordPress you have lots of choices in themes so you can have a really good looking blog. Take plenty of time to peruse all of your choices so that you can select just the right one to suit your style and your topic. For a truly unique theme, select a premium theme. This will really help your blog stand out from the crowd.

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.

If you spend more time on your pictures, your search engine ranking will increase. You should incorporate title tags to your photos. If someone pins you to Pinterest, for example, the title you put in will pop up.

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.

You are unable to change the images sizes yourself if your site has its own gallery plugin. The gallery plugin automatically sets the sizes of the images, and you don’t actually have any control over this. If you really need the image sizes changed, ask your developer to help you change the settings.

If you upload changes to your WordPress site, but they don’t appear to have taken effect, try to refresh from a clear cache. Hold shift as you click the reload icon in your browser, or hold shift-ctrl-r at the same time. This will give you a clean version of your site which should be updated.

Include useful links at your footer. The footer is located at the bottom of your site. Most sites include contact information, copyright information and links to other sites in the footer. By including useful information in your footer, you can increase the sales, referrals and traffic to your site.

Be sure you backup your blog. This has to be done regularly. There are some WordPress plugins available for this purpose, such as Xcloner. Pick whichever plugin or site you would like to use. However, have it backed up in numerous locations. It would be terrible to lose your whole blog.

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 phrase is “best pizza in Toronto”, you could create a title such as “For the Best Pizza in Toronto, Only Spring Water Will Do!”

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”.

Most visitors to your WordPress site will have some type of social media account, whether it is Facebook or Twitter. If they see something and want to share it on their accounts, you want to make that process as easy as possible. Therefore, download a plugin that allows for social sharing.

It may be that you have been a long-time WordPress user who thought you already knew everything there was to know about it. However, the above article has likely demonstrated the fact that there are many great things you may not have realized about WordPress, which you can start putting to use right away. Best wishes as you keep improving your online presence.

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