Essential Steps When Starting A WordPress Blog

Essential Steps When Starting A WordPress Blog

• Good Quality Content -> Content is the King . If you want to earn money from adsense the content must be unique and user friendly. Make sure you have, at the very least, 10 quality posts, but aim for around 30 ideally. By "quality", I mean 400 words or more of your own original content. Never copy content from elsewhere, like these mountains of autoblogs do with our MakeUseOf content.

• Get A Domain -> Spend a whole $10 on a unique, short as you can, relevant domain name – even if you're hosting your blog on a free WordPress.com or Blogger account. Get this right from the beginning and you will save yourself a world of hurt later.

Don't be tempted to make up a "cool" domain unless you have a rock-solid web service and a VC investment to the tune of a million dollars to market it; and absolutely don't get a free domain like .

• Establish A Good Permalink Structure

Don't promote your blog if your URLs still look like webname.com/blog?id=1324. Take a minute to go the permalink options in your WordPress settings. Something like webname.com/my-article is great. You might also want to consider installing an SEO slugs type plugin, which reduces the length of your permalink URLs by removing common words such as a, the, or. Shorter URLs are better.

• Change The Tagline -> It's just embarrassing to find a blog that still has "Just another WordPress blog" in the title or on the theme. You can change it from Settings -> General to something more relevant to your site. Apart from the fact that many themes feature the tagline prominently in the header, it's also often used in the meta-titles of your homepage and therefore shown to everyone who finds your site through Google.
• Set Up Google Analytics -> Google Analytics is a free traffic report for your website. But what's the point of installing Analytics if you don't actually have any traffic yet? Well firstly, motivation. If you have accurate feedback that shows a clear, progressive growth in traffic then you are far less likely to give up. Don't wait until you think you have some traffic – get real feedback, right now.
• Google Sitemaps Plugin -> This isn't essential, but as far I'm concerned any helping hand you can give Google to index your blog is a good thing. Get a sitemap generator such as this, set it up correctly to automatically generate whenever you post something, and you're halfway sorted.
• Webmaster Tools -> This is a useful, free set of tools from Google. It has a number of functions, one of which involves submitting sitemaps to be indexed. It also keeps a track of 404 errors, and alerts you to malware security issues and even if WordPress updates are available. You could get by without it, but it's a nice tool to have under your belt.
• SEO Friendly Images -> The power of image search should absolutely not be underestimated. Put simply, this plugin will add ALT and TITLE tags to your images. You can do this using the WordPress image uploader, but I don't know many people who actually bother to do that – so this plugin does it automatically. By adding these to your image tags, you may find a huge influx of traffic from Google Image search.
• Join A Forum -> Find a forum related to your particular topic and establish a presence there. Introduce yourself, make some good quality comments or advice on other threads, help some people out. After that, change your signature to include a link to your website, and repeat. This should give you a small trickle of visitors.
• Social Networks -> Be sure to announce your articles on your own social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and StumbleUpon – but don't fall into the trap of promoting absolutely everything you write. Pick one or two of your best posts to promote, and you'll be far more likely to get a good response and not piss people off in the process.

  Done all that? Awesome, you should start seeing results soon. Got any other essential first steps or WordPress plugins you always install? Let us know in the comments!
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