Setting up a new WordPress blog is usually a mystery for many users as they are immediately faced with hundreds of options and possible plugins. But the truth is that only a few steps are involved for an good blog setup.
This article combines all the 'powerful' plugin recommendations in one place, with a special accent on SEO concepts.
Setting up permalinks
Right after you installed the blog, first thing should be to set the permalink structure. This is done in Settings->Permalinks menu by choosing "Custom Structure" option.
My favorite setting is just "/%postname" which will make your URLs look something like "yourblog.com/post-title".
Recently I am more inclined to think that using %category%/%postname% may yield you better results if category names contain keywords you want to rank for.
Setting up plugin installation
Next comes the installation of standard plugins. These plugins will help you with every day blog tasks and generally make your job easier.
I always install Plugin central plugin first, as it allows me to easily install all other plugins, with just a few clicks.
Installing plugins
Set of plugins I use allow the blog to start working immediately. The plugin generally work out of box and in most cases you should just visit the configuration pages to see what is going on there.
- All in One SEO Pack is widely spread plugin that will automatically create SEO friendly titles. I use it usually if i want to setup a blog quickly - otherwise I usually manually optimize the theme. This is a topic for another article.
- Google Analyticator allows me to quickly add Information for Google Analytics. You can not run a successful site without an insight to the website analytics.
- Google XML Sitemaps allows me to automatically generate sitemaps and submit it to different search engines. This equals old method of manually submitting your site URL to the search engine, only it is much more effective in terms of what it does for your site. Good and easy install&forget plugin.
- Plugin Central makes the work of installing new plugins and updating old a breeze.
- SEO Friendly Images automatically optimizes all images on the site so I do not have to worry about it.
- Similar Posts allows my posts to have automatically links to the similar posts. This is good for both the reader and the search engines. Requires Post-Plugin library to be installed.
- Theme Test Drive - Usually I will be trying several themes for the new site so I use Theme Test Drive plugin to make the job easier
- WP-SpamFree is anti-spam plugin that unlike the popular Akismet plugin, requires no key to use. That means it is convenient for quick setups. It creates good results but for prolonged uses I ultimately like using them both together.
Additional plugins to consider
After setting up the blog with basic plugins I after install a couple of other plugins that are not SEO related but help the life of the blog.
- Instant Upgrade makes updating WordPress couple of clicks away. Will automatically download and install the latest version of WordPress for you.
- WP-DBManager manages backups. Key features are automatic regular backups to your email and periodic database optimizations.
- WP Super Cache make the blog less susceptible to high traffic and CPU consumption issues by caching the WordPress output.
- FeedBurner Feedsmith is a plugin that automatically links your feeds to Feedburner service
- Inisghts make blog posting a breeze by adding direct access to Youtube, Flickr, Search and Google maps services
Conclusion
This article points out several key plugins and setup options for a typical, if a little bit advanced, blogging setup. Different bloggers use different tools but the methods and plugins presented here fullfil mostly used tasks in an everyday blogging environment.
Continue reading:
- SEO Smart Links and Category Search plugins
- Why you should nofollow and noindex your category pages
- Wordpress Plugins
Posted in: SEO, WordPress
TAGS:blog setup different views, blog setup wordpress, create wordpress blog scratch, default wordpress plugins, install wordpress, seo images, seo smart links cpu, setup wordpress, theme test drive, wordpress email config howto, wordpress google news installation, wordpress guest author, wordpress guest author setup, wordpress life blog everyday, wordpress mail config, wordpress ping configuration, wordpress seo, wordpress setup
Hi! My name is Vladimir Prelovac. I am a computer engineer by profession and an adventurer by state of mind.
45 Comments
Hi, I think you have one of the best sites on wordpress SEO, I find your articles extremely useful.
I have A quick question about new sites. If I was to buy a new domain name and setup a wordpress site what is the fastest time that google index my new sites on new domains. (assuming that i submitted correct XML sitemap and optimised pages as per your advice).
Fastest way would be linking to it from another blog / site.
tnx for these valuable information
me i have the source code for a better world but i guess it ll be boring to see only good things and there ll be no balance btw things :)
Where did you get the source code? ;)
in this book that i bought when i was on vacation at planet mars
:)
Thankyou so much dear sir! Although my blog is not really striving to be the next big blog, (its just a personal portfolio) i found much of this information quite enlightening! Thankyou for taking the time to set this gem of an article up. :D
I tried the permalink thing and it broke my existing posts. How can I implement that without anything breaking?
Oh, a silly question, I thought no more having to enter email addresses?
Thank you. This worked perfectly. =]
I always set my permalinks to /%postname%/ when ever I start a new blog so I don't have to worry about broken links and error pages. It seems like a few reader are worried to change things with their established sites.
I seem to recall that there was a plugin called permalinks redirect that would solve this issue. Do you know anything about that Vlad?
Cheers,
Steve Anderson
You already know - YOU ROCK! Keep it up, man. You're on fire.
Thanks for this great information. I'm rather a newbie to wordpress and i have to say that this helped me alot.
Hi vladimir,
I have a qestion i like your permalink structure but im afraid to do that.Because im not sure how much it affects my already done SEO as it totally make all my previous pages as 404 error. is it so?any solution for that except the 301 redirect :D ?
Thanks in advance.
Please guide me whats difference between /%postname% and /%postname%/ ?
If you want to feed your Posts into Google News, you should have the postid in your URL. Goggle news requires a three figure ID in post URLs.
using /%postname% will be just fine :)
Hello Vladimir,
I have a question for you on Permalinks. Recently while trying to figure out the best way to handle permalinks I found mention that sometimes using /%postname%/ would cause site problems where you are unable to access some pages. You are using the same except of the trailing / mark. Have you experienced any problems? Also I tend to use /%category%/%postname%/ but again I understand from research that this could be a problem especially if you assign a post to multiple categories. Thoughts? Last question if about the Category Base option in Wordpress and how it is used and the benefits of using it? Thanks!! and Happy New Year 2009!
Thanks for sharing this information Vladimir. I love the features of Plugin Central.
I have noticed that when I try to change the permalink settings to anything other than default, I get an error when I try to use categories. Ideas?
Thanks for the great info. Will definitely incorporate these into my site.
great
thanks for sharing