1. A logo. Your site or company name in plain text says "amateur" like nothing else. Your site's logo is the most important visual element, your trademark, carrying with it a high recognition factor. Thus, it's imperative to invest in a professional logo if possible, or at least thoughtfully create your own using graphics software or one of the many free logo generating sites. Having professionals make your logo doesn't have to be expensive, costing as little as 69 USD with logodesignteam.com, for example. If you elect to make your own, remember that your design has to reflect what your company or site is about, and to keep it clean and simple. Gimp, a very sophisticated but totally free graphics program, has everything you need, although it might take a while to learn how to it. Alternatively, there's lots of free logo design tools online. One I particularly liked is flamingtext.com.

2. A favicon. This is the tiny icon that appears next to your site's name in the browser's bookmarks, history, and location bar. Much like the logo, it helps distinguish your site from every other. Nothing could be worse than having the WordPress default icon displayed instead of a custom one. Although tiny, the icon should resemble your logo as much as possible, or failing that, mimicks the site's theme. The easiest way to create a favicon is to use one of the many free online tools. One I recommend is favicongenerator.com. You upload an image and it derives the favicon from it.

3. Images. If your posts are all text, your blog will be monotonous and put your readers to sleep. Adding relevant images to an article makes it much more tantalizing. You don't have to go out and snap digitals, or steal images from other sites, as there's plenty of royalty free photos and graphics you can download from numerous image archive sites. One that I use that's particularly good is sxc.hu.

4. A blogroll in your sidebar. This is your strongest bargaining tool for doing link exchanges, as sidebar blogrolls give other bloggers very credible backlinks, and are much more propitious to getting clicks from visitors to your site. Links in a separate links page aren't as likely to be seen and may be ignored by the crawlers of major search engines, especially if you name that page "links". That said, don't let that blogroll grow too big or it'll wind-up being treated as link spam. The best policy is to put those who added you to their blogroll in yours, and the rest in a resource page.

5. A RSS feed. Crawlers often do a poor job of extracting text from your pages, whereas a RSS feed will give them the titles and excerpts you want them to index. If you're using a content management system such as Wordpress, you 'll have a RSS feed by default.

6. A XML sitemap: This is a xml document that tells some major search engine spiders about all the pages on your site, but also ranks each for its relative importance. Googlebot looks for this document, so having one is a big asset. If you use Wordpress, there's plugins that will automatically generate a sitemap every time you add content. The "Google XML Sitemaps" plugin is one I highly recommend.

7. A contact form: A "mailto" link is a very bad idea since it will wind-up being crawled by spam bots, and also because a lot of your visitors will use webmail rather than email software. Rather than putting some trumped-up robot-foiling email address on screen, the correct way to handle this situation is to have a contact form they can fill out, and you'll get the data via email without your address being seen by the outside world. With Wordpress, an easy and flexible contact form plugin is "Contact Form 7" which requires the plugin " Really Simple Captcha". Never have a contact or other type of mailing form without a captcha (the image with text which only humans can "see"), as you'll get lots of spam.

8. Spam protection for comments. Even if your site has no visitors, you'll get oodles of spam if you accept comments. Ways to protect against this is to add a captcha to the comment form or require that users be logged-in, or use Akismet. I prefer the latter, as it's been 100% effective in stopping comment spam on my web sites. In Wordpress, the Akismet plugin is installed by default. You'll need to get a free registration key from the Akismet site before you can activate it.

9. A site map page. This isn't the same as sitemap.xml, as it's meant to be read by humans, giving them a quick way to find interesting posts or pages from your blog, and giving you more page views. A good Wordpress plugin that generates a site map is "WP Archive-Sitemap Generator".

10. A search form. Whether it be a Google search form or the default one in your blog software, this is a critical feature as people are pressed for time and want to find what interests them quickly.

Do all of the above and then you can spend more time writing great posts!

Tom Germain is a Canadian who in 2001 decided he wasn't going to put up with any more winters and moved to Mexico. He never looked back and moved around the world every couple years, making his home in Argentina, the Canary Islands, Mauritius, and now Colombia. In his 2 blogs, Permatourist ( http://www.permatourist.com ) and Ocolombia ( http://www.ocolombia.com ) he tells of his experiences and offers invaluable tips on how you can live the life of a "permatourist".