I came across an article by Patrick Bennett (owner and head web developer of http://www.modernblue.com) some time ago entitled 8 Must Do’s To Start a Successful WordPress Blog. I found it extremely useful when I set up my first blog and hopefully you will too.

In brief he recommended that you should:

1. Set up Permalinks
2. Add the Plugin Akismet
3. Add Google Sitemaps
4. Add the All-in-One SEO Pack
5. Add a Web Feed Management Service
6. Add a Contact Form
7. Add Tags to a post
8. Keep the Design Simple

Below I outline what I have implemented on my blog and how I have done it:

Permalinks

This is the very first thing that I did before creating any posts or pages. Permalinks will give your posts and pages a meaningful name. If you don’t set up permalinks, WordPress will name the post/page with an identifier such as yourdomainname/?p=5. This will not help the posts and pages to be found in searches. By setting the permalinks to name the post or page url to be the same as the title, it will greatly improve the Search Engine Optimization. For example this post will be have a url of http://www.hotvasoftware.com/8-must-dos-for-a-successful-wordpress-blog.html. If someone searches for help on what you must do to set up a successful blog then my blog is more likely to appear in the search results than a post with the url www.hotvasoftware.com/?p=5.

To set your permalinks go to Settings > Permalinks > Common Settings > Click on custom structure and add /%postname%.html. Patrick’s article stated to add /%postname% but I later read an article stating that adding the .html will allow the pages to be indexed quicker.

You must be aware that no blog post can have the same title.

Akismet Plugin

The Akismet plugin is a MUST. Akismet checks user comments to see if they contain spam or not. So far all my comments have been spam, so this is a lifesaver. The comments are moved into a spam folder for you to check.

When I downloaded WordPress 2.8 and looked at the Plugins, Akismet was already there and required activation. To activate it you require an AKI key that is provided by WordPress when you sign up for an account.

Where can I find my AKI key?

To find your AKI key log into your www.wordpress.com Account. Go to My Account > Edit Profile and your key will be displayed at the top of the page.

Google Sitemaps

As blogs are always changing, Google Sitemaps is an extremely useful plugin. It will keep an updated sitemap file of your blog. This contains links to all your WordPress posts. This will help search engines like Google to crawl and index your blog pages more intelligently.

Google Sitemaps can be found at the WordPress site. You must have knowledge of using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) in order to upload the plugin file to your web server. It was easy to download and I was able to generate a sitemap immediately. Google sitemaps will automatically update the sitemap according to the settings.

All-in-One SEO Pack

I decided not to add this as I found there were too many negative comments about it. Here’s the link All in-One SEO Pack for you to make up your own mind.

Add a Web Feed Management Service

I have recently done this and it was extremely easy. A web feed management provider will allow people to subscribe to your blog. They will then receive all the content from your blog without actually revisiting the blog.

FeedBurner is a free web feed management provider owned by Google. You will need to create an account (unless you already have a Google account) and then enter your blog URL and add “/feed/rss2/” at the end of it if you changed the permalinks as described above. If not, you can add “/wp-rss2.php” at the end of your blog URL. You are then given instructions on how you go about putting a link on your blog. Feedburner will provide you with information such as how many people have subscribed to your blog and what posts have been read. You can also add adsense to your feeds.

There are services available that allow you to see the content of multiple blogs in one program. One such service is Google Reader and if you already have a Google account just sign in with those account details.

Contact Form

I was glad to find out there was a plugin contact form to use, as I had so many problems in the past with finding contact form scripts and also spam. It is really easy to set up and can be found here. The user filling out the contact form has to answer a question set by you.

Add Tags to Post

Tags are basically keywords that relate to your page or post content. It is advisable to use tags from the start. They are micro-categories for your blog. If a user clicks on one of your tags then posts with similar tags will show. So how many tags do you add to your post? At the start I went a bit mad with tags and included every topic covered in the post. I have since discovered top affiliate marketers (or the SEO plugin they use) use about 5 tags for a post. I have just figured out that you can delete tags by using the Quick Edit feature.

Keep the Design Simple

There are so many free WordPress templates about. If you decide to go down this route then look at the code before you start. I recently did a project and gave my client the option of using a free WordPress Blog template or having a customised website created. The WordPress blog was the cheaper option and this is what my client opted for. I selected a number of templates for her to choose from but didn’t look at the code. When I came to updating the template that she chose I found the code was very difficult to understand. In my opinion, this is not good code.

This blog was created using a WordPress Theme from Brian Gardner that I decided to purchase after reading Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. The code was really easy to understand and it was well worth paying £37.29 GBP ($59.95 USD).

Good luck with your first blog and if you have any questions please ask.