How To Blog and Start a Business

43 Blogger Tips – What you should do after installing WordPress

by Andrew Rondeau on March 15, 2010

wordpress tips

After installing WordPress these are the best blogger tips I can share. I am assuming as you have installed WordPress you have already carried out your keyword research, so this blog post doesn’t cover the crucial stage of keyword research.

If you want more visitors, more natural traffic, a more ‘sticky’ (i.e. visitors stay longer) site and quickly indexed by Google, then check out this useful list.

(Please note there are many alternatives to the plugins mentioned – I just mention the ones I use).

Tidy up/Design

1. Adjust your time zone under ‘general’ settings.

2. Change “Other comment settings” and check the “Enable threaded (nested) comments 5 levels deep”, in ‘Discussion’ settings. This helps highlight any replies to any comments and is easier for the visitor to read.

3. Get yourself a Gravatar that will be displayed whenever you comment. Having a Gravatar helps promote you and your brand across the internet.

4. Get and install a personally designed header banner. Personally designed header banners make your blog stand out.

5. Change the “Display name publicly as” field to your name – under the “Users” menu tab. Doing this will display your name as the author of the blog posts you publish.

6. Delete the default “Blogroll links” and “Mr WordPress comment” – Under the “Blogroll” and “Comments” menu tabs.

7. Set up and install Google Analytics. The best free tool around to monitor your traffic stats.

8. Create an About Me page. You want to share a little about you and what you can do for your visitors.

9. Create a Contact page, so visitors can easily make contact with you.

10. Have a Favicon designed and installed – it’s all about your personal branding.

11. Delete the “hello world” default blog post.

12. Add a Privacy page. This is the page where you tell your visitor what you do with any data they give you.

13. Add a Disclaimer page. You also need to add a ‘Disclaimer’ page. This is the page that stipulates what you mention on your blog may not suit everyone and not everyone will get the same results.

14. Add an Affiliate Disclosure page. I believe in being totally open and honest with my visitors. If I am going to make some income from someone clicking on a link on my site, I like to tell them and so should you. This page should tell your visitors that you make an income using affiliate links on your blog.

15. Move to a premium theme. Those free WordPress themes are very ‘clunky’ – hard to change, difficult to maintain and restrictive in their design. For the best premium themes check out this post: Premium WordPress Themes

SEO

16. Add a blog title and tagline that includes your primary keyword phrase in the ‘General’ settings.

17. Change the ‘permalinks’ (‘permalinks’ under ‘settings’) structure to a custom structure: /%post_id%/%postname%/ This structure is deemed the best for SEO purposes.

18. Set up your categories using your keyword phrases. Again this helps with SEO.

19. By using the Google Webmaster tools, you can quickly get your blog indexed. Verifying ownership of your Blog via the Google Webmaster Tools.

Traffic

21. Change the ‘Update Service’ under the ‘Writing settings’ to include the following sites:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.bloglines.com/ping

http://ping.feedburner.com/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://bblog.com/ping.php

All the above sites will be updated when you publish a blog post.

22. Add a FeedBurner RSS Feed so visitors can be automatically informed when you add a blog post.

23. Also allow subscription to your blog via email.

24. RSS Directories. Performing this will make your blog index quicker in the search engines and can provide a steady stream of organic traffic. RSS Directories hold millions of links to websites and blogs and are some of the most visited websites on the internet.

By adding your blog’s RSS feed to the RSS Directories, every future blog post you add to your blog, will automatically be added to the RSS Directory. And that means it could potentially be seen by thousands of visitors and your blog will receive a powerful backlink from the RSS Directory.

You only have to add your blog’s RSS feed to the RSS directory once and everything is set up to work automatically.

One of the best RSS Directories for rankings is: http://feedagg.com

25. Start building your list by giving something of quality, away.

26. Start adding valuable comments on other blogs – get your name out there.

27. Add unique blog posts as least 3 times a week to your blog.

Security

28. If you have used FTP to upload WordPress – store/remember your ftp login details. You can waste hours looking for access details.

29. Change the password of your WordPress Admin login. Some hosting sites provide the password when you first install WordPress – change it – you just never know who has also seen it.

30. Change the WordPress admin username – most hackers know that ‘admin’ is the username and then they only have to guess the password. Make it twice as hard and change the admin username to something other than ‘admin’

31. Keep WordPress and your plugins up to date. Often WordPress and plugins are updated due to security reasons. Keep your site updated on the latest versions. Make sure you backup before you upgrade and test after your upgrade.

Must Have Plugins

32. Add the Akismet and WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam plugins to reduce the amount of spam comments you receive.

33. Install the ‘Subscribe to comments’ plugin so visitors return and can reply to other commenters.

34. Show some Google Link Luv by installing the CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and DoFollow plugins.

35. Install the All-In-One-SEO plugin and include your primary keyword phrase in the ‘Home Title, ‘Home Description’ and ‘Home Keywords’.

36. Install the Google XML Sitemap plugin and manually build your sitemap. It helps get your site indexed.

37. Add the WP-DBManager plugin and schedule backups to be created everyday.

38. Make Better Use of the 404 Page – automatically redirect the reader to a list of your best posts or you can present them your entire post archives. The  404 SEO plugin will help.

39. Improve the security of your blog by installing Login Lockdown.

40. Install a caching plugin like WP-Super-Cache to make your blog load faster.

41. Install SexyBookMarks plugin so visitors can easily socially bookmark your blog posts.

42. Install the “SEO Friendly Images” plugin. SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with extra search engine optimization functionality.

43. By installing the “MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer” plugin, when you create a new blog post, your blog will ping and notify all the ping services that it has been updated. This encourages search engines and different blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly.

So there you have 43 blogger tips which will help your blog receive more visitors, more natural traffic, be a more ‘sticky’ (i.e. visitors stay longer) site and quickly indexed by Google.

What are your views? What have I missed? Share your views in the comments below.

This post is part of our Guest Blogging contest, if you like it then why not sharing it with your friends by retweeting it? this will give credits to the author and a better chance to win one of our awesome prizes.  By the way.. you also can participate in our contest, it’s not late!

Image credit: Peregrino

Andrew is a full-time Internet Marketing Specialist and blogger from the UK. At his blog he shares all his knowledge and experience on how to make a blog .

Website → How to make a blog and a blog income

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