7 Things You Must Do Everytime You Set Up A New WordPress Blog

In order to make my WordPress installations run as smooth as possible I devised a checklist for when I set up a new blog. This is a great starting point to ensure the blog is search engine optimized and reasonably well guarded against spam attacks amongst other things.

1. Fantastico. To make the wordpress install as quick and painless as possible I will go to my hosting accounts Cpanel and select Fantastico. From there I will simply install WordPress directly on the server. If you don’t have a clue how this Fantastico business works then take a look at this tutorial for using Fantastico to install wordpress on your website. Even better there is a video at the bottom of this page.
2. Theme. I have often spent hours trawling the net looking for a theme, but there have been some great looking themes available from within the WordPress install lately. One of my current favorites is the Arras Theme. This is a highly configurable magazine style theme that can be used to make a basic blog look like a highly interactive website.
3. SEO. One of the best methods for improving the SEO of the blog is to use this nifty FREE traffic getting software by Jeff Johnson. This basically performs some tweaks that will make SEO for your blog a piece of cake.
4. Plugins. Once you install the SEO software you are presented a list of plugins to install that are required to make the tweaks. I usually install all except the ‘sociable’ plugin. For this I use AddThis WordPress plugin. I also add the Google Analyticator plugin. This will allow you to enter your Google Analytics tracking code so you can analyse where your blog traffic is coming from. ‘There are thousands of extra plugins that can be used depending what you are trying to do with the blog. More on the extra ones I use later.
5. Akismet API key. This is a very important step. You need to have registered an account with wordpress.com to get your API key. Once you have it enter it into into the box on the akismet page in your blog admin area. This will track spam comments that are posted. One time I neglected to activate the akismet and the blog came under attack from spam comments at a rate of 1 every second. There were over 17 thousand spam comments pointing to viagra sites. I had manually go into the SQL database and delete all the entries.
6. Optimize The Blog. Using Jeff Johnsons blog software I optimize the blog. This will fix up any tweaks that are required after installing any plugins. Also enter in your blog headers and keywords using the SEO for wordpress plugin that was installed.
7. Fix Permalinks. The optimizing that Jeff Johnsons software does include changing the permalinks to/%post_id%/%postname%/.

   I prefer the format

   /%category%/%postname%/

   as this includes more words for the search engines to pick up. Maybe I’m being a bit over the top with my SEO, but post id only gives us numbers instead of words. Please note that once you optimize the blog again using Jeff Johnsons software it will change your permalinks back to the post_id format. This will lose any inbound links to existing posts in the category format.

Once all these are done I’m pretty much ready to start posting and will add custom plugins and widgets as required depending on the blog.