Disclaimer: This article is written considering the reader is going to use WordPress platform and has registered a domain. FYI, I have a deep hatred for people who host their websites on Blogger platform (or any other platform for that matter).

Eventually an interested blogger starts off his blogging at platforms such as Blogspot or free WordPress. However, when the blogger is ready to get serious on his blog and earn money from it he should shift to self-hosted WordPress. I have given below a check-list to mark out everything a webmaster needs to do before his blog goes live. Careful, these are killer tips and may cause your site to exceed bandwidth limits.

Checklist before you Launch Your Blog:

Change Your Permalink Structure

Its amazing how so few people do it. It is one of the most important ways for Search Engine Optimization. Mainly because Google crawls your URL as well. Follow below-

1. From the Admin panel, select settings > permalinks
2. Under “Custom Structure” paste this: /%category%/%postname%/
3. Click “Save Changes”

Setup a Sitemap

A sitemap is a broad overlay of the structure of your site and all the content in it. This basically makes it easy for Google to crawl the data on your site, in return improving you natural search engine ranking. You can create your sitemap using the WordPress Google Sitemap Generator plugin.

Register Your Social Media Accounts

Suppose the name of your website is Collegefallout.com (haha! I already have this killer name registered for myself). Then make accounts for (i) Twitter – twitter.com/collegefallout (ii) Facebook – facebook.com/collegefallout (iii) YouTube – youtube.com/collegefallout etc. I guess you got the hang of it.

Alternatively, you can check out the availability at usernamecheck.com.

Setup Blog Stats

This is another crucial plugin that will allow you to check for the most popular pages on your blogs, your best sources of traffic and basically help you in the overall development and growth for the site. I personally find the plugin WP-Stats as the best for a good look at my blog statistics. Google Analytics is a popular option.

Register Your Feed

One of the most important steps that is often procrastinated. Setup a feedburner account and create a feed for your blog. Illustration – feeds.feedburner.com/Collegefallout

Sculpt Your About Page

Make sure your blog doesn’t go anonymously like mine. Make sure you have an About section on the site so that visitors can know who the genius/sadist is behind the awesome/sucker content of your blog. Good or bad blog – About page is a must. At least you have an idea about the kind of person you are commending/abusing.

I hope you don’t apply any of the checklist given above so that my blog can continue to enjoy its great Alexa ranking and awesome page rank. I obviously do not want any unnecessary competition from you guys! If you have any comments (though I doubt!) list it below.