Start Blogging Today With These Wordpress Tips

Wordpress is an incredibly valuable platform, largely because of the amazing accessibility it provides to a wide range of potential bloggers. Its ease of use is truly remarkable, but that is not to say that some amount of education is unnecessary before putting it to work. Use the information below to get a good grounding in Wordpress so that you can get started blogging today.

Make your theme current on your website to draw more traffic. Switch to a new theme that accentuates your colors and logos. Also, you may want to opt for a more professional theme if you are planning on showing your site off to a high volume of potential customers each day.

Make sure your sidebar is not too cluttered. The sidebars on most WordPress blogs are a chaotic mess, full of social media icons and ads and links. Prioritize what goes in your sidebar. Make sure visitors to your blog don't have to search for anything they might be looking for.

Add page numbers at the bottom of your comments section if you have a very active community. This is important as it will allow your users to be able to sort through the material and information easier. Make sure that the page numbers are easy to see for the viewers.

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.

Enable different types of avatars on your website. This will make your site very fun and friendly for the users who visit it. Also, it will allow you to get across your personality in a better way. To find this component, visit the discussion area on your dashboard under settings.

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.

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.

When you use different tags for the topics on your blog, keep in mind that these are strictly for searching the content on your blog. These can't be used by search engines. If you want your pages to be searchable on Google, you have to install an SEO type plug-in such as Headspace.

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.

The URLs of your blog posts should not have special characters. Special characters make it more difficult for search engines to index your site. While utilizing keywords, make sure you keep those URLs short as well.

As you can see, wordpress does not have to be intimidating. If you follow these suggestions, you can learn how wordpress works. Once you have that knowledge, you can create a successful site. Your visitors will be impressed with the navigability of your blog. The return traffic created by the professional appearance is just what you need.