Setting up a new blog: plugins

Here’s the deal with WordPress plugins: there are a lot of plugins, and they are not all equally good. Some of them don’t do what you need. More plugins are not better. Sometimes having multiple plugins means that none of them work, or there may be unpredictable results.

When deciding to get a plugin, search on what you need to see what is available. Look at several to see which one seems to fit your needs the best before deciding to download. Read how to use it on the plugin site. After you install and activate it, look for a settings or configuration panel to see if you need to configure it. Then check to see if it is doing what you needed it to do. If you don’t like the plugin, you can deactivate it and try a different one.

Seo, keywords, description, etc.

The most effective SEO comes from having different keywords and description for each post, as well as a unique description and keywords for your homepage. If you have the exact same description and keywords for every page, you won’t get any more mojo from google than if you had none at all.

By the way, your pages will still get indexed if you don’t have these, but it is probably more efficient to have them.

robots.txt file

A robots.txt file tells bots what to index and what not to index. Without a robots.txt file, the bots will generally just index everything. You can exclude certain bots if you know you don’t want them on your site. You can also exclude certain pages from being indexed and links from being followed. If you really have no preferences, the following code will permit all bots and spiders to index your site:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

That’s it.