Wordpress is a powerful blogging platform in its native form, but with some plugins and tweaking, you can really make your blog kick butt. Here are 10 ways to make your Wordpress blog better:

1. Make it fast! - Wordpress is dynamic and database driven. This is great except when you get a massive wave of traffic. Generating a dynamic page takes resources, and your web server can easily get overwhelmed. Nobody likes a slow loading site. The solution is to use a plugin that will cache your dynamic pages to static html and then only update them on a periodic basis. This will greatly reduce page load times and will increase the amount of load your Wordpress site can handle. I use WP Super Cache.

2. Provide a static home page. Blogs are great, but they don’t always make great homepages. Recent versions of Wordpress added the ability to assign a static front page. Just create your page in Wordpress, then click Settings and then Reading. On the Reading Settings page, select a static page for Front Page Displays. Now Wordpress can serve as a traditional website AND a blog!

3. Make it search engine friendly. Enable permalinks (Settings / Permalinks) and change the Common Settings to use Day and Name. Use a Wordpress SEO plugin. I use All in One SEO. Use Google Webmaster tools to identify any problems, especially duplicate content and duplicate META tags. Use your keywords in your page and post titles. Submit site maps to popular search engines. I use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create my sitemaps.

4. Encourage your readers to contact you. Avoid using mailto: links as contact links. Many people do not use mail clients any more, and mailto: links only confuse webmail users. A better solution is to use a contact form. Several Wordpress plugins exist for this purpose, but I use Enhanced WP-ContactForm.

5. Allow readers to subscribe to comments. You can bring your readers back to your site if they know when you or someone else has commented on a post that they have subscribed to. I use the Subscribe To Comments plugin.

6. Make it easy for readers to share your site with others. I use the WP-EMail plugin to make it easy for readers to email my pages and posts to their friends. I also use the Add Me Dichev plugin to provide social bookmark buttons (including Digg and Facebook) at the end of each post.

7. Use Feedburner to your advantage. Though Wordpress offers RSS2 support by default, it’s hard to beat the features Feedburner brings to the table. Once you create a Feedburner feed for your site, your can use the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin to redirect your RSS2 feed to your new Feedburner feed. When this is done, you can add high-profile links where readers can subscribe via an RSS reader or even by email! Now that’s powerful. Also be sure to set up ping sites in Feedburner so content syndications sites will be notified when you post new content.

8. Make it easy for readers to link back to you. I use the Link to Me Textbox plugin to provide preformatted HTML links that readers can copy and paste into their own sites.

9. Tweet your blog posts. Twitter is gaining popularity, and the Twitter updater plugin automatically updates Twitter as you work on your blog. With a little work, you can then push these updates from Twitter to Facebook, MySpace and other sites.

10. If you offer files for download (and you should offer a free download of some sort), then you can use the Wordpress Download Monitor plugin to create your downloads, manage download pages and catagories, and you and your readers can see what’s popular based on how many times items have been downloaded.

Now go trick your blog!

Did you find this information helpful? I’d love to hear what other Wordpress users think of these tips.