5 WordPress Tricks That Will Make Your Blogg Better

WordPress is a cornucopia of plugins, themes, and countless different techniques that are supposed to help you beat the competition. Yet all these additions are getting massive, bigger and, to be honest, not exactly simple to use. Have you been searching for simpler ways to use WP but without success, for far too long? 

411 Locals will help you with some of the easiest WP hacks for blogging:

You Can Master the art Of Coding without Actually Coding

It’s about time for you to learn how to use shortcodes! They are special tags you can insert in the body of your post, which make a suggestion for more complicated coding. Whenever WordPress checks one of these tags in a post, it automatically replaces it with the corresponding HTML equivalent. Check out the examples:

• [ audio ]– embeds an audio file and displays a basic audio player in the page
• [ gallery ]– creates a basic gallery based on a set of images
• [ video ]– embeds a locally-hosted video in the page

Get Rid Of “Uncategorized” Posts

“Uncategorized” is your default category & as such, it adds no value to your posts. Proceed with this: From the left-hand menu, go to Settings > Writing, and switch the Default Post Category to whatever you want – for instance, your most frequently used one. Alternatively, you can rename the default category itself. This way, you can alter the category of your previous “uncategorized” tagged posts.

Get The Perfect Image Size With Ease

The most irritating experience when you create your blog post (apart from starting it) is to see how your image doesn’t fit, making your work amateurish. Instead of resizing, re-previewing, rechecking and what else not, you can use the following trick, provided by 411 Locals: 

You should simply change the default media size for your uploaded images.

When you opt for “Thumbnail,” “Medium,” or “Large,” WordPress pulls those pre-set image sizes from your blog settings. The “Large” category can fit the full width of your post layout. Do the following – from the left-hand WordPress menu, choose Settings > Media, and adjust the “Max Width” and “Max Height” settings to fit your blog sizes. You can also set the “Medium” size to take up 1/3 of your post layout, then use these “Medium” images such as featured images for your posts, by aligning them to the right, and set the “Large” size to fill the full width of your post layout. When you have questions you just might check the specialized sources. 

Use  the “Inspect Element” option in your Chrome browser to determine the maximum width.

Right-click anywhere inside the text of your post, and choose “Inspect Element.” Here, you can access the web code of your page. Point your mouse at the highlighted separate parts of your blog design, along with a display of height and width of the element. You can judge the right post size from here. Even more, you can go on the right-hand side of this new code window and click the tab for “Computed.” You should see a graphic of boxes with numbers in the middle. They show the size of your post, with the first number indicating the width.

4 Mistakes That Make Your WordPress SEO Inefficient

You're convinced that your writing talent and impeccable design skills will make your WP blog the next big thing? You think that covering viral topics, finding awesome images and using the social media to spread the word is all that it takes?

Running a blog like 411Locals takes more than the aforementioned efforts. Small WordPress details can cast a big shadow – you can boost the rankings of your posts or on the contrary, lose the advantage and remain unnoticed. More often than not, it is all about ignoring opportunities. Here are the WP features that you shouldn't miss:

Ignoring XML Sitemap

As Google clearly indicates, sitemaps are telling the search engine which pages to crawl. Moreover, not using a sitemap means that some of your site's pages can remain undiscovered. Sitemap's features allow you as a webmaster to point out how often you update your pages. This works well for relatively new sites and ones with too few backlinks pointing towards them. Building and updating a sitemap is quick and automated. The usual options are those two plugins: Google XML Sitemaps and WordPress Seo by Yoast.

Ignoring Categories And Tags

Categories and tags are usually referred to as taxonomies. Their role is to increase engagement and traffic. The wrong use of taxonomies makes your WP site less user-friendly. The cause is that basically a site category works as a table of content and tags are the site's index. Taxonomies also give a good impression of the keywords that are important to your site.

Ignoring Canonical URL Defining

Instead of awaiting Google to determine which version of your page is meant to index and rank, you can deal with this problem by setting a canonical URL. It is a simple process that requires three steps: telling WP what URL represents your site; setting the URL as you want it in the options of Google Search Console; use WordPress Seo by Yoast to set each and every canonical URL of your site;

Ignoring The CTR Features Of Your Posts

To make sure that users see where your post is only half the job done. The rest is to suggest what they are going to see by telling Google how to describe it. You can optimize the latter easily by using a plugin like Add Meta Tags or the well-known WordPress SEO by Yoast. Those plugins give you control of the content that appears on the results page. It is all about the titles and the description of your page. Creating a custom meta title will put a text that will be displayed on the SERPs in place of any headline you choose for the post onsite. In addition, making your description more than a random combination of sentences will lead to a better click-through rate.