I’ve installed 2 WordPress blogs lately, my wife’s blog and the photo blog. I’ll just share some of the things I setup when I installed them. This will serve as my reference when I install another WordPress blog in the future.
1. Delete the default admin account. After initially logging in as an administrator with an admin username, I always create another user with an admin privilege and delete the default admin account. Why? For security purposes. Read more info on this. 😉
2. Settings. Here are some of the settings I changed after initial install. Those that are not mentioned are set by default. Some explanations in italic.
General Settings
- Timezone: UTC +8. To reflect Philippine time.
- Week Starts On: Sunday
Discussion Settings
- Uncheck: Break comments into pages with… To avoid duplicate content.
- Uncheck all options on: Before a comment appears… so that people can already comment without my intervention.
Permalink Settings
- Custom Structure: /%category%/%postname%/
3. Themes. Installed an SEO-friendly WordPress theme.
4. Install Plugins. I installed and activated the following plugins.
- WP-Super-Cache. For caching, obviously.
- Add-Meta-Tags plugin. For including description and keyword meta tag for each post.
- Related Entries plugin. For including related entries after the post. Good for SEO internal linking.
- Sitemap Generator. For generating sitemap compatible with the 3 search engines.
- Login Lockdown. For extra security.
- Akismet. Spam protection.
5. Edit .htaccess file.
- Disabled hotlinking of images to conserve bandwidth.
- Disabled directory browsing.
- Blocked some IP addresses with history of attacking my sites.
- Blocked known bad bots from accessing my site.
6. Edit robots.txt.
Blocked Google bots from indexing my feeds and URL with question mark (?) in it, to avoid duplicate content.
More things I plan to do later.
7. Install the Global Translator plugin.
8. Submit to blog directories.
9. Exchange links.
10. Google Adsense placement testing.
11. Install a captcha plugin for more spam protection.
Just follow the links for specific steps. Basically, those are how I setup my WordPress blog.
About the permalink structure, I just don’t like messing my permalink structure on this blog, that’s why it’s different from the one I recommended above.
