I was putting together a list of essential plug-ins, tips, and tricks for a friend who is starting a new WordPress-based blog and was looking for advice, but I figured this can help more than just him, so I’m publishing it here. The following guide will help you get your new blog off the ground, recommend some essential plug-ins, help you get your blog listed in search engines, and some basic WordPress SEO tips. I’m writing this guide assuming that you’ve already download and installed WordPress and everything is already working fine. If you haven’t even gotten that far yet, you should probably take some time and read through this guide.

Section 1: Plug-ins
The following list are a few highly popular plug-ins that anyone who’s serious about their blog should have installed. Each plug-in has great documentation and support, so they’re good for beginners and essential for the most seasoned WordPress veterans.

• WordPress.com Stats
  If you’re at all concerned over who your readers are, what brought them to your blog, how many people read your blog, or what search terms people are typing to to search engines to find it, then this plug-in is absolutely essential. It’ll tell you pretty much everything you need to know about your blog’s visitor statistics.
• Akismet
  If you don’t plan on having comments enabled, then you can completely ignore this plug-in. If, however, you do want your readers to be able to leave comments on your posts, then this is an absolute must. As far as comment spam filtering goes, there is absolutely nothing better than Akismet. It is extremely accurate and only maybe once or twice since I first started using it has there been true spam that got through and I had to delete or a false positive that I had to approve.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  This excellent SEO-related plug-in automatically generates a Google-compatible sitemap file of every single post and page on your blog. Every single time you create a new post or page, it will automatically recreate an updated sitemap for search engines to index. As if that isn’t awesome enough, it will then automatically ping Ask.com, Google, Bing, and Yahoo letting them know that your sitemap has been updated and that they should re-check it. Just having this installed and running is enough to start getting your site indexed by all of the major search engines.
• All in One SEO Pack
  The All in One SEO Pack has pretty consistently been the most popular WordPress plug-in of all time. To be honest, some if not all of it’s features should just be built in to WordPress, but because they aren’t it is still around. I can’t even begin to list all of the great SEO features that this offers, so just visit the download page to view them.

Section 2: Themes
You’ve got WordPress installed and you’ve added some key plug-ins to make it work even better and help with SEO, but now that it works great behind the scenes, you want it to look awesome to your readers. Here’s are some great theme resources to check out, all of which are free.

• Official WordPress Themes Directory
• Top WordPress Themes
• FreeWPThemes.net
• 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes – Smashing Magazine
• 40 Excellent Free WordPress Themes – Six Revisions

Section 3: Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (commonly called SEO) is key to getting your blog noticed by the search engines and ranked will for certain search terms or keywords. There are entire books written on the subject that still don’t cover the subject, which is constantly evolving, so I’m not going to attempt to teach everything there is to know in this small paragraph. What I will instead do is offer some tricks to getting your blog recognized by search engines, quickly indexed, and some basic tips to improving the ranking of your blog.

• Link Structure – You’ve probably been to some websites and noticed that they have long hard to understand links, whereas others have shorter links that are easy to read and often have the title of the post in the link. If you look under the settings section of the admin section of your WordPress blog, you will notice a link that says “Permalinks”. If you click this, it will bring you to a page where, if your web server supports it (most do, ask your webhost if you’re unsure), you can change your link structure. The default is the “ugly” style of links, but I prefer the “Month and name” or the “Day and name” setting. Play around and find a link structure you like, but be aware that once you choose one, you should stick with it.
• Search Engine Submission – Many search engines have a submission page where you can enter your URL and it will be added to a presumably very long list of websites for their spiders to crawl. This works, but isn’t always the best solution. Pinging the search engines with your sitemap, as I described earlier, is a good way to get them to recognize your site. The best way for search engines to find your site, however, is for them to find a link to your site on other sites. Talk to your friends with their own blogs and ask them to put a link to your site on theirs (if you’re really nice, you’ll do the same for them). Add a link to your website in your signature or profile page on any social networks you’re a member of as well as any forums you post on. Not only will some people see the link and visit your site, but the search engines will see it and start to be aware of your blog. My last little trick is to click this link, type in your URL, click submit, and then click every link in the list that will appear on the next page.
• Anchor Text – When you’re adding your link to the places I mentioned previously, be sure to choose a good anchor text where you can. The anchor text is the what text appears as a link. For example: Chai Life is a link to this blog. The anchor text for that link is “Chai Life”. The more consistent you are with your links’ anchor text, the better you will rank in search engines when someone searches for that term. Using a few different anchor texts will help you rank better for those different keywords, but I would recommend choosing only a few keywords and sticking with them. Too many will saturate your results and not really be any help.
• Content – Having original content is very important. For most blogs, this isn’t really an issue because you’re writing your own posts. Keep in mind, however, than most search engines, Google included, will essentially just regard your blog as trash if it has duplicate content (articles, blog posts, etc) from other sites on other domains.

Well, there you have it. Is this guide the definitive guide to starting your blog and increasing it’s popularity? No way. Is it missing stuff that I didn’t go in to or could have done in more detail? Probably. Will it help someone who is new to WordPress, SEO, and blogging get started? I sure hope so!