Woohoo, this is my first post and what better subject to cover than optimzing a new blog which I have just done myself.
Hopefully I can remember everything that I did, here goes:
I downloaded and installed the latest version of WordPress since it is the platform of choice for most bloggers so you can optimise the time you spend doing the important stuff such as posting content and not be bothered much sorting out technical issues.
Also, Wordpress lends itself to easy SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The first step is to head for the “Options” and change the permalink structure to “%postname%”. This gets rid of the question mark in the URLs and replaces it with the keywords of your blog post titles which you can manually alter too in the “Post Slug” tab when you are writing a post.
After saving the changes to the options you will be prompted to save a .htaccess file to the root of your blog install directory. This works with the apache server on your hosting to re-write the urls to the search-engine-friendly ones.
Next, I changed the category stub from “categories” (which nobody is likely to search for to “optimization”. Then the category urls can be made to be in a keyword rich string such as “optimize/website”. Get the idea? So the category urls are not dead meat duplicate content candidates that you wish weren’t there.
Then, throw some more ping sites into your ping list in the writing options. But, bear in mind that content harvesting sites will be out to get you to add them to your ping list so that they can instantly republish your content! If there is a long delay, then the search engines should log your site as the original source of your content, but who knows, if there is just a few milliseconds between the posts?
Also, I make the RSS feed a snippet rather than a full feed. I think it’s madness to do a full feed unless you are embedding links and Ads in your feed that benefits you having your full feed republished.
For comments, I am starting out by requiring at least one approved comment before the posts are immediately published. This should stop most of the spam getting published and the comments will still come in but with some potential irritation to new found fans.
The blog roll can be wiped to start with. Later, it can be used to shock bloggers with related but not quite so good sites that finally somebody is linking to them and magnetize them to your site.
The template is very important but can be changed later. I design my own since I don’t want every page on my site linking to a theme author’s site, but I do like the idea of sharing my blog theme to get the links coming my way.
The template should be structured so that the content is as close to the top of the html code as possible. That’s why you often see the navigation and junk at the right hand side of blogs. This helps the search engines find the content easily.
Then, you should ensure that titles of posts are in an H1 or H2 tag. On this site, my site name is important to me so I gave it an H1 tag and the post titles get an H2 tag.
The actual title tag is hyper important. That is the title text you see in the top left corner of your browser. We already got the keywords showing in the url of posts. Next we need to ensure that they are in the title tag, which they normally are, but move them to the left. Many sites have their site name to the left. Switch them around in your template to get the most important words (the post titles) to the left.
This is where I am now, the blog is set up and I am writing the first post. Notice it is quite long and useful. The next stage will be to go out into the wastelands of the web and seek out other related blogs to do some synergy with 
I think that’s about all I can recall now about optimizing the setup of a new Wordpress blog. So please subscribe to this site and look forward to more optimization tips covering all aspects of webmastery.
Best regards,
Mr MultiVar
p.s. if there is anything you would like me to clarify, please say so in the comments …