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Article by Andrew Rondeau

Andrew Rondeau is the author of the free guide "The Income Blogging Blueprint". You can grab your complimentary copy of his blogging guide at http://www.webuildyourblog.com today.

Andrew has written 7 awesome articles for us at FamousBloggers.net

Twitter: @andrewrondeau

43 Blogger Tips – What you should do after installing WordPress

by Andrew Rondeau on March 15, 2010 in  How To Blog
187 Comments

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 Pageautomatically 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

{ 158 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Brian from Charleston Marketing Firm @
(22 comments)
August 30, 2010 at 10:39 pm

Hi Andrew, extremely informative post! One of my favorite plugins is intensedebate. It creates a very well formatted commenting area. It incorporates commentluv, facebook/twitter logins, subscriptions, and even embedded video responses. It is all styled in a very professional manner for the design conscience.

One question I was wondering was about regards a blog feature I have seen here at Famousbloggers as well as a few other large sites. What is the plugin used that allows for pictures to hold off on loading until the visitor scrolls to its location? I feel this is a very beneficial feature for many image heavy blogs. Thanks!

Reply

2 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
August 31, 2010 at 1:25 pm

Brian,

I’ve never used intensedebate but it sounds a cool piece of software.

Hesham should answer your question as I am not aware of such a plugin.

Thanks.

Andrew

Reply

3 Kate Toon from copywriter @
(1 comments)
August 27, 2010 at 5:28 am

A fantastic post, I’m going to double check my blog tomorrow using your checklist.
A couple more plug ins I love include:
- All in One SEO Pack – great for creating unique title and description tags for every post and page
- Contextual Related Posts – Creates links at the bottom of each post providing a nice way for users so surf through your site.
Exclude Pages from Navigation – lets you hide boring but important pages (like sitemap and privacy) from your primary nav and link to them from widgets in your footer instead.

Thanks Andrew
Kate

Reply

4 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
August 27, 2010 at 1:13 pm

Kate,

I’m glad you like the post.

Thanks for sharing the extra plugins – I’m always interested to learn from others and what they suggest.

Andrew

Reply

5 Hieu Martin from Blog Tips @
(86 comments)
August 25, 2010 at 2:04 am

Thanks for the list website for ping blog.
i alway use pingoat.com .
Maybe it will help you more when you make ping

Reply

6 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
August 25, 2010 at 2:20 pm

Hieu,

I don’t think you need to use PinGoat once you have set up the points 21 and 43.

Andrew

Reply

7 Wendell Wilkins @
(2 comments)
August 24, 2010 at 9:17 am

Andrew,
Thanks for all your helpful information. I have a problem and I need your help. My comment button will not allow one to comment. It directs to 404 error. I have checked all the appropiate comment boxes that you suggested. Help

Wendell

Reply

8 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
August 25, 2010 at 2:17 pm

Wendell

It must have something to do with the Theme you are using. I suggest you go back to the theme creator and ask for some advice.

Andrew

Reply

9 Hung | JVPRIME @
(33 comments)
August 24, 2010 at 5:09 am

Wow!
This list is very useful for us.That’s like a check list although we don’t follow all of these

Reply

10 Tasman Hayes from Smart Web Developer @
(1 comments)
August 18, 2010 at 12:28 am

Andrew,

Thanks for the great article!

I was surprised by tip 17, which suggests the best link format was /%post_id%/%postname%/.

The post_id is a number (e.g. 12), which doesn’t have any SEO value.

If categories are named well for SEO, then including the category at the beginning of the post, i.e. /%category%/%postname%/, would probably be best for SEO in general.

For example, on my site I have the post Take a Screenshot of an Entire Tall Webpage filed under the category Screenshots.

Using the category in the link structure emphasises to search engines that the post is on the subject of screenshots, which is good for SEO: http://smartwebdeveloper.com/screenshots/take-a-screenshot-of-an-entire-tall-webpage.

I understand using the post_id does have value for performance, as WordPress can find the post in the database very quickly using the post id. Is there any other reason you chose post_id over category?

Thanks,
Tas

Reply

11 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
August 18, 2010 at 3:16 am

Tasman

I understand exactly what you are saying but there are two reasons I pick post-id over category:

1. Using post-id will make the url unique. In theory if you use the category in the url, you could end up with the same url name.

2. In the future, you may wish to change your category names. You can’t if you have used them in the url.

Andrew

Reply

12 TJ McDowell from Photographer Education Blog (15 comments) August 26, 2010 at 5:39 pm

For right now, I left mine as /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ . When I’m reading other blogs, I know I like to see based on the url when the post was written. I guess that’s why they have the custom options – each blog owner has their own preferences.

Reply

13 Paul @
(4 comments)
August 5, 2010 at 11:05 am

Great list! I could have used this when I was setting up my Wordpress blog. I have done most things on the list, but it did take some time. Ah well, if I setup any more I can use this list to ensure I don’t forget anything.

Reply

14 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
August 7, 2010 at 12:15 am

Paul,

I am pleased the list helped you (and will do in the future).

Andrew

Reply

15 Felicia from No deposit poker (9 comments) July 29, 2010 at 2:32 am

I am new to WordPress and I have some difficulties on how to navigate, customize and make my blog presentable and readable to other people. My personal blog isn’t a do follow yet because I only have a few articles written there. I have saved this page in my computer because I know this will truly be very helpful for me. Thank you very much Mr. Andrew for this very useful and comprehensive post!

Reply

16 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
July 29, 2010 at 2:43 am

Felicia

I hope the post helps and if you have any questions just contact me and ask – I’ll do my best to answer.

Good luck!

Andrew

Reply

17 Daisy from Weekly Pregnancy @
(2 comments)
July 27, 2010 at 12:16 am

Thank you for such a valuable post! It’s a great checklist for setting up new blogs. Question: What’s the plugin used on this blog for the comments? I like that it’s possible to add the Twitter id.

Reply

18 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
July 29, 2010 at 2:42 am

Daisy,

It could be this plugin: http://comluv.com/download/twitterlink-comments/

Andrew

Reply

19 Daisy from Weekly Pregnancy @
(2 comments)
July 29, 2010 at 11:41 am

That is what I’m looking for! Thank you Andrew!

Reply

20 Julie-Inspired to Write @
(3 comments)
July 22, 2010 at 9:14 pm

Great resource!! This is a definite bookmark for reference!

Reply

21 Wendell wilkins @
(2 comments)
July 13, 2010 at 10:38 am

Andrew thanks so much for giving us these 43 aliuable blogging tips. i have spreaded the word to all my blogging audience.

Reply

22 Andrew from Blogging Advice @
(2 comments)
July 14, 2010 at 3:33 am

Thanks, Wendell – I appreciate the promotion.

Andrew

Reply

23 Monique Hrebeniuk @
(1 comments)
July 13, 2010 at 9:55 am

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the great tips. I have one questions for you? What is a favicon?

Reply

24 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
July 14, 2010 at 3:32 am

Monique

A Favicon is the small design / pic in the corner of the “tab” of the site you are visiting. I don’t know how to explain it better thn that!

Andrew

Reply

25 Mark Aylward from onlinemarketingdegree @
(1 comments)
July 7, 2010 at 3:52 pm

Andrew
Great post. Fortunately I am doing most of these (because I read your free guide!!), new stuff comes around every day. Now I have a checklist to build from.

Thanks again!
Mark

BTW how does that famous bloggers thing work?

Reply

26 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
July 8, 2010 at 3:40 am

Thanks, Mark. I’m glad you found the free guide useful.

Andrew

Reply

27 AIDY @
(7 comments)
July 4, 2010 at 10:01 am

If only I read this while constructing my site. Suffering a bit of downtime and researching how to improve my blog when the migration process is complete! I have come across some valuable info here @famousbloggers

*sequels like a fan girl*

:D

Reply

28 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
July 4, 2010 at 10:06 am

Aidy,

Just takes as many as the points as possible and change your blog now. Then remember them if / when you build a new one.

Andrew

Reply

29 Jakes from Blog-Jakes (3 comments) July 3, 2010 at 10:52 am

This is by far the most informative and useful post I ever read.. Did almost all the steps mentioned here. But couldn’t afford for a premium theme ;)

Reply

30 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
July 4, 2010 at 2:42 am

Thanks, Jakes.

Perhaps you could enter and win Famous Blogger’s current competition…then buy a new premium theme.

Andrew

Reply

31 Jakes from Blog-Jakes (3 comments) July 11, 2010 at 12:52 am

Nice suggestion, Andrew.

I did a revamp of a free theme. Now am doing to include some dynamic widgets into sidebar. Please do visit my blog & tell me your suggestions

Reply

32 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
July 11, 2010 at 1:35 am

Jakes,

I wasn’t too sure what your blog was about when I visited. When people visit a blog for the first time, you want people to know what it is about straight away.

Plus I would add some links to other posts in your side bars – make the blog a bit more ’sticky’ for your visitors.

Andrew

Reply

33 gouthami.b (1 comments) June 30, 2010 at 1:50 am

excellent tips for wordpress beginners.this post helped me a lot..

Reply

34 Kok Siong from Blogging Guide @
(1 comments)
June 29, 2010 at 8:44 pm

Hi Andrew! Another good guest post from you. This is a great guideline for those who is new in Wordpress. We can use this as a checklist when installing a new Wordpress blog too. Thanks a lot Andrew!

Reply

35 Andrew from Blogging Guide @
(199 comments)
June 30, 2010 at 2:43 am

Kok,

You are welcome – I hope it comes in handy!

Andrew

Reply

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