Since then I've had a lot of lightning strikes of good ideas for blogs and other websites. I've learned a lot about Wordpress, and I use it for every type of site I create, from blogs to sales sites to eCommerce. But most importantly, I've learned to set up a new site in an afternoon, and the site has all the essentials I need to make sure I'm maximizing traffic and conversions.



Here is the list of my six "must-haves" for a new website.

1. An outstanding template

I'm artistic in the sense that I can recognize good art when I see it. But try as I might, I cannot develop a Wordpress site that looks sharp. Fortunately, there are people who live, eat, and breathe web design just as I live, eat, and breathe Internet business development. It costs around $60 plus 30 minutes or so to go to Template Monster and select a template. I think the results outweigh the cost by an immeasurable factor. An attractive, professional template sets the tone. Within the first second of somebody landing on your page, they know that you are a quality person and that this is a quality website.

I've tried the free templates out there. In the end, I spend much more time looking around, and when I get them, I always find problems with them that I have to tweak. And once I start tweaking templates, it's hard to stop. Some of them end up worse off after the tweaking and I'm back to searching. I learned early on: buy a template.

2. Essential Wordpress plugins

For me, the absolute musts are: Akismet, All-in-one SEO Pack, Custom-morelink, Dean's FCK Editor for Wordpress, Feedburner FeedSmith, and Google Sitemaps.

Akismet keeps out comment spam.

The All-in-one SEO Pack gives you all kinds of options to increase the search-engine friendliness of your site. It takes a little time to add additional info for your blog posts but anything that helps increase passive traffic is worth it.

Custom-morelink lets me control how users go to the full article when they click "Read more" after reading the excerpt of the article. Sometimes I like them to pick up where they left off, but other times it is more convenient to start the article from the top.

I cannot edit my entries without FCK Editor. I won't even start with Wordpress until this is in.

I will discuss Feedburner in the next bullet point.

Google Sitemaps is a plugin that constantly keeps a sitemap file up to date to make Google's life easier. This sitemap is not a visual one for the users to find their way around; it's an XML file that Google will occasionally check to see the contents of your blog. Again, this is a simple way to make it easier to get more search engine traffic.

3. Feedburner

RSS is the easy way for people (and machines) to keep tags on your blog. By adding your RSS feed to their newsreader, they can easily see when you've added a new post and they can read it using their newsreader or by visiting your site.

The problem is, how do you know how many people have subscribed to your RSS feed? This is where Feedburner comes in. Set up an account with Feedburner and add your RSS feed. From that point on, Feedburner will let you know how many people read your feed every day, plus a lot of other interesting statistics. Furthermore, they have tools that help you publicize your blog and, if you get enough readership, to monetize your blog.

Now that Feedburner is part of Google, you can log in with your Google account. Once you set up Feedburner, don't forget to change your settings for the Feedburner FeedSmith plugin.

4. Google Analytics

This is a free tool provided by Google which will help you analyze what kind of traffic you get. It will chart it out by which pages were visited, where the visitors came from, and many other ways. Set up a Google Analytics account and get your tracking code. Put the tracking code right before the tag in the footer of your template. I've seen plugins for this but they haven't always been reliable on my setup.

5. Statcounter

As much as I love Google Analytics, there are a few features that I miss. One is instantaneous reporting; Analytics is usually updated only every few hours (it used to be once a day!). I also use Statcounter to track traffic. They have a different interface that is sometimes easier for me to use. I like the Recent Page Loads menu item. And they update every time you get a hit.

6. Google Webmaster Tools

This toolkit gives you an interface to see how Google sees your site. It will show you how other sites are linking to your pages, what keywords are relevant on your pages, and much more. It also lets you tell Google where your site's sitemap is (which we set up with the Google Sitemaps plugin).

Depending upon the type of site I'm setting up, there are plenty of other things I can do to make it ready for storming the Internet. But I will always make sure these six essential tools are in place.

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