One of our readers, Max Pool, was kind enough to send a guest post with 40 practical tips to setup and optimize your blog. All the tips are actually links to previously published articles on Daily Blog Tips. Enjoy!
WordPress Setup
- Do your homework first and read about others’ mistakes
- Choose a reliable web host
- Choose a good domain name
- If you need inspiration, check this list
- Register and keep your domain name with a registrar
- Always install WordPress in the root directory
- Update your ping list
Themes & Design
- Choose a professional theme
- Remove unnecessary information from your theme
- Add a favicon
- Place an RSS icon at the end of single posts
- Create a functional footer for your blog
- Organize your categories
- Optimize the “About” page
- Speed up your site
Check & Validate
- Make sure your blog works in different browsers
- Check the load time of your site
- Test the SEO aspects
- Validate your website
- Keep a maintenance checklist
Plugins
- Install Akismet
- Install WordPress Database Backup
- Install Subscribe to Comments but leave it unchecked
- Install Chunk URLs
- Install Related Enteries and consider setting it to 3
- Install Custom Query String
- Install Jerome’s Keywords
SEO & Analytics
- Install Google Sitemap Generator
- Install Enforce www Preference
- Optimize your Meta Description Tag
- Setup an optimal URL structure
- Make category pages display excerpts
- Setup any needed 301 Redirects
- Create a robots.txt file (and here is a collection of different ones)
- Modify your title tag to be optimal
- Remove the hyperlink from the single post titles
- Offer email subscriptions
- Install the Feedburner Replacement plugin
- Add the Google Analytics plugin and track your stats
Max Pool is a software engineer by day – aspiring SEO expert by night. More ideas can be found at his blog codesqueeze.com.
The very first one caught my eye.
“Do your homework first and read about others’ mistakes”
It’s good to learn from your mistakes but it is even better to learn from other people’s mistakes.
I also liked your list of plugins a few of which I never heard of.
Thanks!
Thanks for the complete tips with complete categories.
Thanks for the tips, very useful..
Thanks a lot! Very helpful.
Max, great article! I would also suggest installing Bad Behavior to keep the spam at a minimum. The ping list is very nice but it will bring in a lot of spammers especially as your page rank increases. Akismet will catch a lot of the spam but not all of it.
In addition, I would suggest putting together articles (5-10) before you install your blog. Then after the install immediately post the articles. The most spiders & bots will appear after the install and grab the content (and index it). This gives you a rush of traffic to your site.
Good Luck!
If you are looking for detailed steps on creating sites that run themselves check out my ebook called “WordPress on AutoPilot: Get Your Blog to Automatically Find Content, Traffic, and Sales”.
Here is a link:
Wow,
I’ll definetely bookmark this. It’s great to have it all down in one place like that.
One Man. One Year. $100,000 online. How’s he doing it?