This is a great wrap up!
I was surprised to learn I hadn't missed a single trick on my own blog. I routinely set up a lot of this stuff for clients as well without thinking much about it, like the ping list and permalinks. I'm sure they've benefitted.
I've bookmarked this and the url is going in the "Your site is done, and now here's some stuff you can do to promote yourself." email I send out at the end of a job.
One tip I can add for WordPress. There's optimized header code you can use to give you good title tags without having to install a plugin. A friend snagged it off the WP forum so I can't claim credit for it, but I can tell you it's a standard bit of code I use in every one of my and my clients' WP themes. Open header.php and find the title tag section and replace it with this:
Code:
<title>
<?php if (is_home () ) {
bloginfo('name');
} elseif ( is_category() ) {
bloginfo('name'); echo " - "; single_cat_title();
} elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) {
single_post_title();
} elseif (is_search() ) {
bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s);
} else { wp_title('',true); }
?>
</title>
Enjoy!