Section #1: Speed!

Install WP Super Cache
Move .htaccess directives to your server config (if possible!)
and disable .htaccess parsing!

Combine CSS files into one big CSS file
Same goes for JavaScript, which should be loaded in the footer

Use CSS sprites
Ask your developer if you don’t know what this is.

Add a PHP opcode cache

Kill some plugins…
And try to replace them for similar ones. Some plugins are god awful

Still slow? Switch to better hosting.
West-Host (aff link)

Set Pretty Permanlinks
Why do people still forget this?
Make Categories short (add post-id in URL if using Google-News)

Switch Blog name and Post Title
The format should be post-title – blog-title

Give Robots directions
Noindex wp-admin, login, and register pages etc.

Write better titles
Use HeadSpace2, or even All in one SEO (HeadSpace2 rocks)

Create proper pagination
using wp-pagenavi by Lester Chan, f/i.

Disable paged comments
They suck.

Read&IMplement everything in my WP seo guide

Sect #3 Maintenance

Backup your database every few hours
Use Lester Chans WP-DBM-Manager plugin

Optimize your database every day
also WP-DBManager plugin
remove spam-comments regularly

Backup you files every day
Use WordPress Backup:
www.blogtrafficexchange.com/wordpress-backup

Check your Queries
Use the debug Queries plugin to check for plugins gone mad
http://wordpress.org/extended/plugins/debug-queries/

Run Akismet
Kill those spam comments.

Check the referrers for comments
http://tools.davidnaylor.co.uk/

Remove those nonsense widgets
Technorati rank? Well…. OK
Blog value: nonsense.

Track your uptime
Use Pingdom, or another tool, but be the first to know when your blog is down.

Check 404’s
Use the 404 notifier:

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/404-notifier/ and fix them using Redirection (plugin)

Remove unneccesary meta info

remove_action (‚wp-head‘, ‚rad-link‘);

‚wlwmanifest_link‘

‚wp_generator‘

Section #4 Social

Allow& encourage people to submit your content (Use Sociable, damn it 😉

Doing newsletter?
Add a refer a friend button on the thank you page
Or… Use my Comment Redirect plugin, and add the refer a friend there!

Use WP Greet Box, even useful on „normal“ sites
Very useful (knows referer)

Make sure your comments are gravatar enabled.!! (do google search on how to…)

Do the Twitter thing. It’s an absurd traffic driver.

Use Google Analytics (and my plugin for it)

Use RSS link tagger (rebelic.nl/rsslinktagger)

Track traffic coming from Twitter yoast.com/twitter-analytics/

Install canonical URLs so your Analytics doesn’t interfere with your SEO

Use comment redirect to track first time commenters (make thankyou page as Goal in Google Analytics)

Use on onclick javascript with a minor delay to track all comments as goal

Track RSS subscribers the same way

(feedburner very unreliable at this time)

Start optimizing:
which traffic leads to more subscribers?
And yes that means forgetting about Digg.

Use my blog metrics plugin
Improve yourself each month!

Addition: Original slides of the 40 Tips for WordPress Optimization are now online