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!

All of the buzz on the Internet today is zeroing in on a new potential Google-killer called Cuil. Sure, there have been plenty legitimate attempts to dethrone the search king in the past, but none of the start-ups have been run by Google alumni. I’ve had a chance to play around with it and see what it is offering, so here’s the breakdown.

The Good

• It looks great. The main page of the site is extremely simple, just like it’s big brother Google, but its dark design really helps it stand out in a crowd of other wannabe Google competitors.
• Right on the front page they are brutally honest about the number of sites that they currently have indexed (121,617,892,992 at the time of this post), which is refreshing to see.
• Finally, someone rethought how search results are displayed. No more generic-looking list of websites from one to infinity. Pages are listed in columns almost looking like a news paper or magazine. You can adjust it to display 2 or 3 columns and next to many of the listings and image related to the site appears along side the description of the site.
• Search suggestions are in-place to help you find what you’re looking for, but I haven’t yet noticed much difference between what Cuil offers and Google’s parallel feature.
• Unlike the Big Brother search engines we’re all used to, Cuil supposedly tracks absolutely none of what you do. This is great to hear for those that love their Internet anonymity.

The Bad

• Where are the key features that keep me coming back to Google? If they want to become my primary search engine, they’re going to have to integrate image and product search features.
• I mentioned earlier that along side most of the search results appears what is supposed to be a relevant image. Problem is, most of the images are in no way relevant or even taken from the site listed.
• Allow more columns! I really like how the search is displayed, but for those of us with a wide screen and high resolution, three columns still leaves a huge chunk of white on the right hand side of the screen when I’m searching. I can probably fit 4-5 columns of search results on my 20″ iMac.
• Speed. This one’s a throw-away complaint. It’s a bit sluggish thus far, but it’s also presumably getting completely pounded with traffic, so that’s to be expected. To be honest, I’m surprised it hasn’t crashed, so I guess this belongs somewhere inbetween the good and the bad. We’ll see how they hold up once the initial rush dies down.

The Ugly

• The algorithm needs desperately to be tweaked. Earlier today if I did a search for “Primakow” a few pages of this site would show up, but not the main page, whereas a search for “Evan Primakow” yielded no results. Already a few hours later “Evan Primakow” brings up a few pages of this site, but mostly random posts and not the main page.

Ultimately, it has a ton of potential. In my opinion the only thing really holding it back is the algorithm. New features will presumably be added and I’m sure even now they’re tweaking the algorithm as traffic flows through. This is the first new search engine in a very long time that really has the potential to compete with the big boys – and I hope it does just that. The industry needs a fresh look and fresh ideas, so hopefully Cuil can live up to the Internet’s expectations.

Firefox is easily the best web browser available today, but part of what makes it great is the expandability that it offers its users in the form of add-on extensions. So, without further ado, here are some of my favorite add-ons in no particular order.

• Adblock Plus – I’ve not no issues with a few random text or graphical ads on the websites I visit, but the recent trend of flashing, page-covering, music playing and over all annoying ads is getting out of control. In comes Adblock Plus. Install it and you will rarely ever see another ad as long as you surf the web.
• Forecastfox – How’s the weather outside? Install this and you’ll always know. It’s extremely customizable: You can change where in the browser it appears, what information it tells you, how many days ahead it’ll list, and of course, which city to report the weather on. You can even easily pull up a radar to see the weather coming your way.
• StumbleUpon – Quite possibly the absolute best time waster ever invented. You create and account, choose what categories you like, and click the stumble button that will appear on Firefox. Every time you click that little “SU” button, a random new website will load up. Like the site? Click the thumbs up and you’ll see more like it. Don’t like it? Click the thumbs down. Just like prescription drug commercials, side effects include insomnia and dry eyes.
• Flagfox – It’s extremely simple and straightforward: A little icon will display for every site you visit showing you the flag of the country in which the site is hosted. If you right click the flag icon, it’ll give you a few more options including pulling up the wikipedia article on that country, copying the site’s ip address, and more.
• FireFTP – It’s not the most advanced FTP client ever, but for quick FTP uploads or downloads it has a nice clean interface, is easy to use, and can bookmark the sites you access so you don’t have to type in the account info each time.

After a few years of using Firefox, I’ve learned some fun tricks that you can do to it to make your Internet browsing experience even better. If you use Firefox, I highly suggest reading through this and doing some of the things listed.

• Multiple Tabs As Your Homepage
  A while ago I accidentally discovered that you can easily have your homepage set with multiple pages, so when you open Firefox or click on the home button, it automatically opens each page in a different tab. The easiest way to do this is to open a tab for each page you want to have set as your home page, arrange the tabs the way you want them to appear each time, open up your main preferences, and click on “Use Current Pages” under home page. That’s it!
• Quick Find
  Looking for a specific word on a page? Hit the “/” key and you’ll notice that a little box on the bottom pops up that says “Quick Find”. Type what you want to find and it’ll instantly navigate you to that point on the page.
• Auto-Complete Addresses
  Type Control+L to get to the address bar, or just click on it. Type just the word that goes between the “www.” and the “.com/net/org”. If you hit Control+Enter, it will automatically fill it in with “.com”, Shift+Enter will automatically fill it in with “.net”, and Control+Shift+Enter will fill it in with “.org”.
• Navigating Tabs
  Hate having to click around with your mouse to navigate between the tabs you’ve got open? Here’s the keyboard shortcuts:
  • Control+Tab (Rotate forward through the tabs)
  • Control+Shift+Tab (Rotate backwards through the tabs)
  • Control+1-9 (Jump to any of the first nine tabs)
• Delete a URL From Your History
  You’ve probably noticed that as you type in a URL in the address bar, it shows you a list of similar links you’ve been to as you type. If you (for some unknown reason) want and/or need to remove one of those links, just use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to highlight, then simply hit the delete key and *poof* it’s gone.
• Got Broadband? Speed up Firefox
  If you have a broadband Internet connection (who doesn’t?), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. Basically, this allows Firefox to simultaneously load multiple items on a page, instead of the default setting of one at a time. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit enter. Then, type “network.http” in the filter field at the top of the page and change the following settings by double-clicking on them to change them.
  • Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number of around 20-30 (depending on how fast your broadband is). This will allow it to make up to that many requests at once.
  • Last, but not least, right-click anywhere on the window and select New -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set the value to “0″. This is the amount of time the browser waits before it will act on the data it receives.

• Edit the “Close Tab” Button
  Ever click on a tab to open it an accidentally clicked the [x] to close it? I know I have. Open up about:config and type “browser.tabs.closeButtons” in the filter. There are 4 values you can enter in to change how they will appear:
  • 0 – Only display the [x] on the tab at the forefront.
  • 1 – [Default] Display the [x] on all tabs.
  • 2 – Don’t display the [x] on any tabs (Control+W or middle click on the tab will still close it).
  • 3 – Display a single [x] at the far right of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x Style).

I hope this was all helpful!