A familiar thing that pops-up at every WeBlogMCR event, meet-up and social is WordPress! Most of us use it, some of us don't, but there's no denying it's the most widely used platform for bloggers and has lots of amazing integration potential. But who knows how to use it?! Not all of us, that's for sure.
So we thought we'd put together some WordPress tips...some essential need-to-knows for WordPress beginners. Hope they help!
WordPress Tips
So you've decided to go with WordPress? Once installed, here are some tips to help ensure you use it to its full advantage:
1.Edit your Permalinks
Make sure you edit the permalink so your URL reads nicely and so that it's not just a mass of random numbers and letters. You can remove any "stop words" like "and", "to", "for" to make it even neater. Think about your key words here too!
2. Upload Images
So most of us incorporate images or photos into our blog posts. So think about how you want these to be viewed. Some blogs work well with having the images one after the other, but this does take more scrolling. So perhaps if you have lots of images, consider using the WordPress 'Gallery' tool. Some templates will have an automatic 'Gallery' button that you can click and populate with images. If not, head to the "Add Media" button at the top of your post and then the 'Create Gallery' button on the top left.
3. Link your social accounts
There are a few ways of doing this for WordPress and it's certainly worth it. It makes it simpler to encourage sharing of posts and therefore increases your chances of your hard work being seen. I won't go into the number of ways you can do that here, the best thing would be to read this guide.
4. Install Google Analytics
How can you ensure you know who your target audience is? What about knowing when they actually read your posts? Or what posts they seem to spend longer reading? Well Google Analytics is the best way to know all of this and you can set it up to show on your WordPress dashboard. How? Check out this helpful post.
5. Explore Plug-ins
These are essentially apps that you add-on to your WordPress platform, to help you do things more easily, make your blog look cooler and function better. WordPress has thousands of plug-ins for literally everything, with over 48,000 free! You can start an online shop with a plug-in, run a podcast, build a directory or gallery...there's literally a plug-in for everything! Checkout the WordPress plug-in directory to see what's on offer.
Rich, MD of digital marketing agency Six & Flow, told us in his SEO workshop, that Yeost SEO is a great plug-in to install to make SEO a simpler task and ensure we're giving our content the best opportunity to be seen!
These are only a few basic tips to get you started-out on your WordPress journey, but the world really is your oyster!
Are you a WordPress user?
