To-Do after installing WordPress – Maintenance
This post is in continuance from the previous post, which was about customizing the visual appearance of the WordPress blog. After I finished ensuring the my blog was looking fairly good, I moved on to combat the next biggest problem with WordPress – Comment Spam.
Any blog, which has a good Google Page Rank, suffers from trackback and comment spam. There are various marketers who find this as the easiest way of improving their link popularity and getting free traffic. The best way to get rid of this spam is to activate the Akismet plug-in, which is included by default with the WordPress installation. From the Akismet website:
Akismet is a contraction of Automattic Kismet. Our favorite definition of kismet is "Kismet (principle), the magnetic attractive force that actualizes the playing out of karma; often used in the positive sense."
Use of Akismet requires a key, which can be obtained by registering for an account with WordPress.com. The plug-in is good to go after its activated, however advanced users may change settings to please their geek nerves.
The only other thing required now, before actually starting to write to the blog, is to ensure that the Search Engines can find the blog easily and they can also index it well. WordPress has 2 popular plug-ins, All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps Generator. These two plug-ins also work out-of-the-box. There are no changes required, however options are available if you want to customize them.
With this done, the blog is ready for posts. I guess there are a few more customizations and optimizations that are possible and we can discuss them in the posts to come. Do write in if you have any suggestions or best practices.
Tags: akismet, all in one seo pack, google sitemap generator, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, spam, wordpress customization, wordpress installation, wordpress plugins