I helped a family member get going on WordPress, basically move from hand-coded HTML setup on DreamWeaver to set up, configure, publish & manage from a self-hosted WordPress for his career blog site – www.amalbala.com. New version of the site is not officially v1.0 yet. As we were finetuning his site, I sent a few pointers to him by e-mail that I thought made even more sense published as a blog post. So here it is below, using the www.amalbala.com (as of 08/24/09) site as reference:
- Add something to your HTML title “the district”. Like “the district // home of amal bala” or whatever makes sense. Presently, title (“the district”) is too generic for SEO friendliness. Nice to have: create a favicon for your site using free services such as Dynamic Drive – FavIcon Generator or favicon.ico Generator.
- Install All-in-One SEO pack plugin for WordPress
- Make it a point to write an “excerpt” for all your posts inside the WP edit-post screen. Very important for SEO and mashups with Facebook etc
- Make it a point to to populate the fields (keywords, etc) under the All-in-One SEO module for each post. You can choose the dynamically generate keywords option
- Get a Twitter account and install a Twitter plug-in so that all your posts are automatically tweeted when you publish or update. Better, if you can publish with a hashtag. If your Twitter account is mashed up with your Facebook account even better. Your distribution improves many folds.
- Twitter plugins I use are Twitter for WordPress and Tweetly Updater. Former pulls in Twitter feed into my blog in the form of a sidebar widget while the latter can be configured to automatically tweet whenever you publish a blog post.
- Add a “Stay Connected” widget to summarize your various Social Media profiles. See this for icons you can use — http://www.instantshift.com/2008/12/10/20-free-social-media-icon-sets-for-bloggers/
- www.instantshift.com seems to be a nice site for web designers and developers. You will see lots of useful pointers there. Nice to have: you can increase the coolness of your blog with this WordPress plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/. It allows you to display your tags and categories as a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D.
- Get a Google Analytics account (you can register with your gmail account). Install this plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/ – to integrate with Google Analytics. Track your site! If you need realtime tracking, you can try a Freemium service such as StatCounter as information from Google is delayed by a day.
- Add social bookmarking tools to your blog. Try Share This.
- Add a Blog Roll section to your site. List only those blogs that are valuable to you and you want to connect and back link with. Do not dilute yourself
- Start commenting on meaningful external blogs with linkbacks to your site. You have to do it subtly (and not overtly) so that it does not look like shameless plugs
- See if this tool – http://www.wibiya.com/ – makes sense for you. Try out such new social tools, plug-ins, etc. Blog about your experience if you can. My own example here — http://www.inderstadt.net/2008/12/06/inderstadt-a-complete-makeover/
- Install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress. This will improve search engine indexing of your site.
- Burn the RSS feed of your blog through FeedBurner. Google owns FeedBurner now and I say it is beneficial to have your feed aggregated by this service.
- Get your blog listed on directories such as Technorati and BlogCatalog. See this blog’s listing on Technorati and BlogCatalog.
- ENJOY!
Hope someone finds the above useful ;=)
![Yíhé Yuán, del Sol [2/2]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7018/6598785693_871de66fff_s.jpg)
![Yíhé Yuán, del Sol [1/2]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7005/6598770751_501e709ac3_s.jpg)
