(My Original Blog Post:
http://mywebmastertips.com/properly-set-up-wordpress-blog-for-seo-speed-monetization-traffic-minimum-required-plugins-sites/)

Let’s face it, we all love
Wordpress to death, right? But out of the box, it isn’t completely set up to its fullest yet because the standard settings aren’t the absolute best settings for your blog plus a few needed plugins are required in order to make sure your blog is search engine friendly.
Account settings to modify:Let’s start off with some basic Wordpress account settings you are going to want to update first. Go to
Settings in your Wordpress back office and click on
General. Make sure you blog’s web URL doesn’t have a www before it. This is not needed, so if you have a new site, don’t use www.
Next, click on
Reading under
Settings and change blog pages show at most from 10 to 5 or less. This will dramatically speed up your blog.
Next, go to
Privacy, make sure your blog is visible to everyone.
Finally, go to
Permalinks and make sure to check
Custom Structure and put in this:
/%postname%/
Doing so will make sure there are no unneeded dates in your blog post URLs as well as making your URLs look pretty.
Websites you should have an account with:
Let’s move on to websites you should have an account with. For Google sites use your gmail email address for all of them so you’ll be able to link your accounts together easily.
Google Analytics - Tracks visitors to your website, how long they were on your site, keywords they used to get to your sites, where they came from, etc… It’s an excellent free tool that comes with a
Google Adwords account. Highly recommended and will help you immensely.
Google Adsense - This is the best way to monetize your blog to show relevant ads on your site and you’ll get paid per click.
Feedburner - This will replace your feed and you can link your Google Adsense and Feeburner accounts together to increase income and track your subscribers better. Make sure subscribes can subscribe via email in your settings.
Google Webmaster Tools - You will want a webmaster account to check stats and see how many pages of your website are indexed in Google. When submitting your site, make sure to give them website with no www and specify this in your site’s settings.
Yahoo Site Explorer - Yahoo’s webmaster center to see what pages are indexed with them.
Bing Webmaster Central - Bing’s webmaster center to see what pages are indexed.
Plugins you should be using:
So, let’s move on to needed plugins to make your blog search engine friendly and more profitable.
All in One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert - This allows you to give every page and blog post on your website a unique title, description, keywords, and canonical link. A must have for every wordpress blog.
Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold - This awesome plugin automatically generates and updates your sitemap for search engines and pings out to the 3 major search engines every time you publish a new blog post.
General Header by David Gibbs - If you’re not programmer savvy, this plugin gives you the ability to add unique code to the header and footer of your site. You will want to put your Google Analytics code in the footer to track your visitors and length of time on your site. You can also add a unique favicon to your header, this is optional of course.
FD Feedburner Plugin by John Watson - The generic Wordpress feed you get with the standard installation doesn’t give you the ability to monetize your feed and allow email subscriptions. This plugin makes it easy to link your Feedburner account to replace the generic feed.
WP SpamFree by WP-SpamFree - You won’t need this right away, but once your blog starts getting out there, the spammers will come knocking at your door with tons of spam. So this plugin will block a majority of this for you to save you time.
WP Greet Box by Thaya Kareeson - This plugin will increase subscribers to your blog by recognizing where visitors came from before they went to your site and offering them to subscribe if they are new or not logged in.
Placing Google Adsense on your blog:
Yes, there are plugins that will do this for you, but in my experience off them stealing my clicks leads me to never want to use them again. So I will quickly show you how to manually add Google Adsense to your blog. You can only have 3 ads per page, don’t break those rules or your Adsense account could get deleted.
I would first go ahead and add a google ad to one or more of your sidebars. To do this, in your Wordpress back office simply go to
Appearance, then
Widgets. Make a new Text widget and simply copy the Google ad code in and save it.
Now modify your template by going to
Appearance, then
Editor. This is the template files for your current theme. I would add one to
single.php and
page.php. If you only have an
index.php, then I would add the Google code to this file, do so right after the:
<div id="content">
That’s what I did for this site. Just wrap the Google ad in a paragraph tag like so
<p align="center">Google Adsense code goes here</p>
Now you should have all the required tools to make your Wordpress blog a successful one. The final thing I would like to note is the titles of your blog posts are so important. Make sure they are descriptive as possible and use good keywords and link to those keywords whenever you can. It's also a good habit to make sure external links open in a new window and internal links open in the same window.
I know I didn't go into too much depth on each individual task, but it is pretty self explanatory and I know you'll be able to figure everything else out after getting introduced to these various products and services.