Hello Everyone,
I think you’re already following our tutorials on “Setting up a wordPress Blog in 4 Steps”. The final step is to do some tweaks and publishing your blog to world.
WordPress is the largest and the best CMS online and it gives you the ability to do almost anything with your blog.
These include getting various plugins, making the right settings for your blog.
Basics
1. Design – Premium Theme
There are plenty of WordPress Themes available to choose from but the only thing that matters is that the Theme you choose is suitable for your Blog or not.
- User friendly
- SEO Optimization
- Soical Sharing Plugins/ Widgets
- Themes updated at regular basis
The recently published post here at wpkube dot com, How To Choose a Best WordPress Theme for your blog has some great tips to choose a best wordpress theme for your blog, you should check it out if you still haven’t.
2. About Page – Add a about page to your blog.
3. Contact Page – Add a contact page to your blog. You can use Contact Form 7 Plugin.
4. Delete the default “Blogroll links”.
5. Add tracking code. It is necessary to to track performance of your site. For this you can add Google analytics, Stat counter or any other. Stat counter is reliable and loads fast as per my knowledge and experience.
6. Sign-up for Feedburner. There are various ways by which we can promote our Blog. Best way is to your RSS Feed.
7. Have a Favicon designed and installed.
8. Custom 404 Page. Add things like your Top Posts, or Most Actively Discussed Items to the 404 page to give them options to consume your content. A 404 page doesn’t have to be a death-sentence. Give the visitor options and she won’t leave your blog just yet.
Settings
9. Set Permalinks. Before start writing or publishing your content it is better to “edit Permalinks” of your post. In Settings >> Permalinks I use the custom option and type %postname%.
10. Change the Domain. Again, by default, WordPress just includes your blog’s domain name here. If you plan to be giving out your link as www.mydomain.com, then you should change it now on your blog.
11. Enable threaded (nested) comments. Go to Settings >> Discussion> > other comments settings and Enable threaded (nested) comments 5 levels deep.
Must Have Plugins
12. Akismet – This comes default with WordPress. Register yourself at WordPress.com to get your API key which is required to activate Anti-spam comment’s plugin.
13. Digg Digg - WordPress plugin is a ‘all-in-one’ social vote / shared count button generator, which include Digg, Reddit, Dzone, Yahoo Buzz, TweetMeme (twitter), Facebook Share , Polladium, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Post Comments, Google Buzz, Designbump, Designfloat, The web blend.
14. W3 Total Cache - As your first step to speed your wordpress blog, Install W3 Total Cache plugin which I think is very simple to do like any other plugin installation and then activate it.
15. Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address.
16. CommentLuv - This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
17. All-In-One-SEO - Install the All-In-One-SEO plugin and include your primary keyword phrase in the ‘Home Title, ‘Home Description’ and ‘Home Keywords’.
18. Nofollow Case by Case – As long as you do nothing Nofollow Case by Case automatically strips nofollow from all your comment links and comment author links.
19. Google XML Sitemap - Google Sitemap is plugin available to create a sitemap of your blog whenever a post is published on your blog.
20. WordPress Related Posts – If a reader enjoys one of your articles then one of the best things that you can do is to put some more articles in front of them to keep them digging through your site.
21. Login Lockdown - Improve the security of your blog by installing this plugin.
22. WP-DBManager - Add this plugin and get schedule backups to be created everyday.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Related posts:
