Since this blog is using Wordpress blogging software, and many other blogs on the net use it too, I thought I would put together a list of stuff that you should probably do to WP to make your blog as successful as possible. This is basically how to optimize your blog (and blogging) to get more visitors, be more useful, and cut down on some work for the blogger.

Here’s what I do:

Change the Default Link Structure - the reason you do this is that it is very easy to change the linking structure to something that the search engines LOVE. Just go to the “Permalinks” section under options and change it to get rid of all the PHP parameters and what not.

Change the code that generates the page titles (good for SEO), and throw in some unique meta tags for each page. You can do this all by installing the “All in One SEO Pack” which you can get here. It’s a must have for Wordpress users.

Other plugins that you will definitely want to install are:

Askimet - this will knock out 99% of your comment spam

WP Contact Form - this creates a contact form on a page so you don’t have to post your email address (thus protecting it from spambots). You can then nominate which email address the form sends messages to.

WP Cache - when your blog starts to get some visitors, you will start to hit the databases very hard. In fact I have had it crash shared hosting several times and my host threaten to terminate my account. This plugin will help with these problems.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - you need to sign up for an account at feedburner.com, and then install this plugin. It will direct your visitors all to your feedburner feed if they want to use your XML/RSS feed. Feedburner has stats and this is about the only way to get accurate stats for your RSS subscribers.

Social Bookmarking Plugin - there are a few different ones that are all good. The one I use is called Sociable. It allows your visitors to bookmark your site on any of several different bookmarking sites more easily. This results in more links to your blog post and more traffic as a result of the bookmark directly and the search engine juice that incoming links give. You can see an example of this in use at the bottom of every blog post on this site.


A Few Other Things You Should Do

Tagging - In the beginning, you should tag all of your posts with technorati tags. If you don’t know what this means, then check out technorati.com - a tag is basically a linked word at the bottom of your blog post linking to a page on technorati that will list all blog posts tagged with that same word. After you start getting a reasonable amount of traffic you can lay off the tagging, but it’s good in the early days to get some traffic and it helps with SEO.

Pinging - you will want to let WordPress tell all the blog tracking services when you have written a new blog. Just go to Options>Writing in your blog and copy and paste the list here into the list of services you want to ping.

Trackback - a trackback is an electronic message that lets another blog know that you are talking about them. If you talk about another person’s blog post, then send a trackback. It will place a link on THEIR blog in the comments section that links to your blog post. In WP, there is a little box to put the URL of posts that you want to trackback. Or you can do it in the Performancing tool.

OnlyWire - go to this site and sign up for an account. It will bookmark your site on all of the other bookmarking sites that it mentions. Then you need to sign up at EVERY site it lists. This will take you about an hour, but it will get you hundreds of unique visitors in your first few days. Then simply bookmark every post you make in the first few days of blogging.

Stats - all stats are good. I use Google Analytics and Extreme Tracker. They are both good and free and easy to use!

When I launch a blog, I sit down for a few hours with an excel spreadsheet and collect the URLs and email addresses of similar blogs. I then email each of them individually to tell them about my new blog. This usually results in a bunch of people blogging about my new site, tons of back links and a Google listing within a few weeks.

After all of that it is basically a matter of writing good content and generally promoting the blog as you would a normal site (posting in forums, posting on blog comments, link building, writing articles, writing press releases etc etc).

Good Luck.