Though it’s a bad idea from an SEO perspective, I’m building a new blog from scratch. WordPress is a great platform and makes updating things very easy, but it’s grown a lot in the past few years and I’d do things differently now.

Some of the decisions I made before were valid then but now is now and it’s time to take a look at things from the beginning.

Now, however, I’m going to document a lot of the steps I’m taking in case it might help someone else set up a new WP blog.

There are a lot of things to do before this post every gets published, but I’m going to start listing them here as I go.

Our Litigious Society

One of the first things is, unfortunately, legal stuff. The number of disclosures and policies that a blogger needs just keeps growing and growing. It’s gotten to the point where it’s hard to list them all and still meet the standards for visibility.

Security

Security is very important. This starts when the blog is first installed. I don’t use the standard login name of admin. I change it to another name. While I don’t particularly think I’m going to be the target of hackers, it’s a simple step and could have benefits.

Permalinks

Next is the start of SEO. One of, in my opinion anyway, the most important is setting the permalink structure before any posts get posted. That way, the search engines don’t get ‘confused’ when the link they first found isn’t there anymore. The WP documentation says that the permalink should start with a number for better and faster performance, but pretty much all of the SEO folks I listen to say it should contain just the postname. The permalink I use is %postname%

Ping

Being found by the search engines is important if you want anyone to actually find and read your blog. WP handles this by sending an update message to various services that alert the search engines that the site was updated. However, pinging to often is bad and you might get dinged or banned for ping spamming. This can happen especially if it isn’t a new post but an update to an existing post. In order to help prevent this, I use a plugin called MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer with a long list of ping sites.

Preventing Spam

There are two types of spam that I want to take care of. The first is comment spam. For this I use WP-SpamFree. While the plugin that comes with WP is good, I find this one meets my needs better. It’s no longer being update so I am watching for a new method.

The other type of spam is email spam. I want readers to be able to contact me, but I don’t want spammers harvesting my email address from the site. To solve this, I use Fast Secure Contact Form. This is a good plugin that let’s me have multiple contact forms for different purposes.

Categories

I like to set up the broad strokes of my categories up front. This is for two reasons.

One, they’re already there when I’m creating a post and I don’t need to interrupt myself to add a new one.

Two, it helps me solidify what my intentions are for the blog.

There are two ‘extra’ categories that I’m adding. At some point, I’ll be adding a slider to the blog so I’m adding the category Featured to support that. The other category is My WordPress Setup. This will be continuing series of post that continue this thread so they can be found easily.

More SEO

Search Engine Optimization is very important, if no one can find you, no one can read you. There are several plugins I use for various parts of SEO, but the first one is always ALL In One SEO Pack. This is almost ready to go as soon as it’s installed and the domain info is added.

That’s enough to get started. There is still some more to do (and write about), but as Mike Littman says, “You don’t have to get right, you just have to get it going”

Happy Blogging!