Using wordpress can be daunting if you do not know where to begin. There is so much information, much of it confusing to the layperson. If you do not know how to maximize your results with wordpress, you have come to the right place. The following ideas can help you successfully navigate wordpress.

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.

If your post has a long title, clean up its permalink. Something like, “The Top 5 Ways Parents Discipline their Children” is a little too lengthy. Use just your keywords and improve your search engine rankings.

Make use of a landing page. Instead of coming directly to current posts, users will pass through this landing page first. You can use this for a variety of reasons, whether for promoting a product or promoting yourself. Many themes feature a landing page; however, there are also paid options.

Regularly check your site and content. All your plugins and everything else you work with needs to be current. This will help ensure that your visitors have a seamless experience on your site. If you have trouble remembering to do this, consider setting your phone to alert you once a month to perform this task.

You can insert media into your posts just by pasting the URL where you’d like the media to appear. For example, paste in a YouTube video just by putting the URL within the text where you want the video to play. Be sure that the URL doesn’t turn blue – if it does, highlight it and click the unlink button.

Do not forget about Facebook. Visitors to your site should be able to leave comments or register with your site through their Facebook account. There are plugins that will help you getting things rolling on your page, and they are easy to download and use. Since so many people are on Facebook, it is important to ensure that your page incorporates the social media site in some way.

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.

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. That also makes them the most important. If you want more control, try using the SEO program, Scribe. This lets you edit pages to gain more readers.

Use images properly on your WordPress site. They can add everything from beauty to interest to your pages. Use their alternative text tags and title tags properly. Don’t settle for generic descriptions. You need to make them specific so that your visitors know exactly what they are. This also helps them figure out what your site is about.

Choose a focused keyword for each post or page you create. What would someone be searching for if this is the exact content they wanted? Be sure to make your key phrases targeted as simple queries, such as “sailing tips”, are already overrun by thousands of competitors and their websites.

Always back your files up! It is important for your blog to be backed up regularly. Use a plugin like Xcloner to help you with the process. For added security, use plugins to make backup copies of your blog on several different locations. It could be devastating to lose your whole blog.

Remember that social media is integral to the success of both blogs and websites today, so you should install social networking plugins which allow you to share your content through your accounts. Facebook Connect is one example of an excellent tool to use to repost your content to your Facebook account.

Does your WordPress dashboard look like a cluttered mess? Want to clean it up? Use the Screen Options link on that page to choose which boxes you want to appear and remove those which aren’t helpful to you. This will ensure that your dashboard experience is streamlined in the future.

You don’t have to manually approve comments anymore. Akismet is great for this. You’ll be emailed once there’s a comment, but you should uncheck manual approval so that the authors get to post comments without delay. If you do not do this, you will waste lots of time.

When linking internally, you don’t have to enter your domain name into the URL field. Instead, just include the information which comes after the first /, such as /index.html. Don’t forget to also insert an SEO keyword-rich title so that you can get even more bang for your search rank.

The only way to learn WordPress is by practicing it. You can sign up for a free account in WordPress.com and start experimenting with its multitude of features. Change images, background color, font sizes, etc. The more you get your hands on it, the more comfortable you will feel about using it.

Looking for a way to increase your page views? Pick up a plugin in or widget that shows related posts. When your visitors are reading your current post, they’ll be treated in the sidebar (or the end of the post) with a few related articles that they may love as well. This definitely increases your readership.

WordPress comes with a anti-spam plugin called Akismet. This usually works to block the spam comments from posting on your blog, but some people find it lacking. If you want extra spam protection, install Growmap. This plugin adds a check-box for the poster to click to confirm that it is not a bot.

For the novice wordpress user, this article was chock full of new ideas. Now that you have read it, you ought to have a better idea of how to make your site more appealing. Implement these suggestions into your site. You will notice that your traffic increases and you will get more return visitors.