5 Essential WordPress Tips for Beginners

Having a hard time figuring out all the tricks of WordPress posting. Well you don’t need to look farther. Because I’m going to give you some quick and easy steps which you can remember and apply to get your WordPress posting up and running. Soon, you will experience an elusive “Ah-ha!” moment.

1. Schedule Blog Posts for the Future

It’s important to have a scheduled posting time like once a month, once a week or once a day. But that doesn’t mean you need to be in front of your computer when the post goes live. You can just schedule it. Here’s how.

In the WordPress backend, go to the Edit screen for the post you wish to schedule.

ü  In the top-right of the page, look for a box titled “Publish,” where you’ll find an option that says “Publish immediately.”

ü  Click the blue “Edit” text next to “Publish immediately” and select the month, date, year and time you want your post to be published. Remember to use military time (3:00 p.m. would be 15:00).

ü  Click the gray “OK” button. The “Publish immediately” text should now change to “Schedule for,” with whatever date and time you have chosen.

ü  If you’re ready to go, click the blue “Schedule” button (formerly “Publish”). Your post is set to go.

2. Change Your Page and Blog Post URLs

WordPress usually takes care of the trouble of creating URLs for your pages or posts. In some cases you need to adjust and here’s why:

1. Your page or post URL contains special characters like %, &, $, @, or *. These characters make it difficult for search engines to read and can be problematic for browsers, potentially preventing some of your pages from loading.

2. Your post or page title is really long and contains words not optimized for search.Search engines prefer shorter URLs, so it’s worth removing words that won’t help the posts or page’s ranking.

If you happen to face any of the situation listed above, here’s how to change it:

ü  In the WordPress backend, go to the Edit screen for the post or page you wish to edit.

ü  Just below the title, click the gray “Edit” button next to the permalink. If instead of “Edit,” you see a button that says “Change Permalinks,” Click that button and click the “Post name” radio button on the “Permalink Settings” page. Then click the blue “Save Changes” button. Go back to the post or page you wish to edit and you should see the “Edit” button.

ü  When you click “Edit,” the URL will change to a text box, ready for you to alter. Remove special characters and any words that could hurt your search engine rankings. Make sure you also separate each word with a dash (-).

ü  Click the gray “OK” button.

ü  Click the blue “Publish” or “Update” button to save your changes.

3. WordPress Editor Tips

Even though you have managed to post a blog, chances are, you haven’t realized its full potential yet. Here’s some WordPress tool you to speed up your workflow and eliminate misspellings and website styling issues.

vSpellcheck in the WordPress Editor

vRemove Formatting from Copied Text

vShift + Return Creates a Line Break

vUse WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts

For a full list of WordPress “Hotkeys,” click the “Help” button with the question mark on the WordPress editor, then click the “Hotkeys” tab.

4. Easily Embed Videos, Tweets and Other Media

You can easily embed content from popular websites likeYouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Hulu, Flickr and Viddler. Here’s how.

ü  Put your cursor wherever you want to insert the media.

ü  Go to the media’s source site and copy the URL for the media you’d like to insert.

ü  Now go back to the WordPress editor and paste the URL into the main content area of the page.

ü  If the URL you pasted appears in the main content area of the editor as a blue link, you need to unlink it. Click within the URL text, then click the broken link icon at the top of the main content area. The text should unlink.

ü  Click the gray “Preview Changes” button on the top-right of the page to make sure the media has embedded correctly. You’ll see the YouTube video we embedded now displays within our content.

5. Change Blog Post Authors Simply

With WordPress, you can easily change authors for your posts. Here’s how:

ü  Go to the Edit screen for the blog post that need an author change.

ü  In the top-right of the page, click the “Screen Options” tab and a list of options will drop down.

ü  Check the box that says “Author.”  A new box on the page should display, titled “Author” and containing a drop-down box to choose the author of the post.

ü  Click the blue “Publish” or “Update” button to save the post under the new author.

If you follow these basic steps at the beginning, you will soon find more advanced options to create your own style of posting.