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Tire Maintenance

Every mechanic will recommend you to periodically check your tires to ensure full safety to your car and to your passengers. Tires are the most important element for our safety but if you ask someone what kind of maintenance he does for his tires he'll probably answer if not "I replace them when they're worn out".

There's a lot more you can do for your tires: paying attention to your tires won't cost you a dime, you should really be caring more about them.
This is what you should do:

Tire Pressure is very important for your safety as well as for gas consumption

Tires should always be inflated as recommended on you vehicle service book. This will make your tires last a lot longer and wear regularly on all sides rather than just outside or inside: driving with underinflated tires reduces the contact area between the tire thread and the ground because the central part of the tire is pushed upwards so the edges will wear faster. Underinflated tires cause higher fuel consumption and may produce noise and vibrations. Overinflated tires will cause the central part of the thread to wear faster.

A correct tire inflation gives you and your passengers the best safety in any driving condition. You should check tire pressure each two - four weeks and before any long trip.

You should keep an eye open on your tire walls.
Tire wall damages happen hitting the pavement with a tire when you're parking.
The tire wall may present cuts and bubbles.
If your car has been exposed to hot and cold weather, or if tires are old you may also find cracks on your tire walls.
You should replace old tires even if there's still have enough thread left as a safety measure

Make sure that your tires wear regularly: completely rotate the steering wheel to the extreme right or left and check if both the edges are worn equally. If tires are more worn on the inside or outside go to a garage and let them know, they'll fix your tires alignment, or you may just have your tires under/overinflated.

When the tread lugs are worn to the point that the wear bars connect across the lugs, your tires are completely worn and you should absolutely take them out of service. They won't be able to grant you any safety with minimal rain.

Most tires today have a rotation direction shown on the tire wall, make sure your mechanic mounted them correctly ( you would be surprised to see how many times they mount tires in the wrong direction )
Tires are made to rotate in that direction, opposed rotation could be dangerous in case of rain or high speed.
Thread lugs wouldn't be able to push water out.

Front tires wear a lot quicker than rear ones due to steering while parking and braking weight effect. This happens even more on 2wd cars.

Rotating tires will make them last longer and in better shape, otherwise you'll have your front tires fully worn and your rear ones still in good condition.

You can to this yourself or go at your usual garage and have them do it for you.

If you own more than one tire set you'll always have some tires to store in your garage or somewhere else. Wrong storage can badly damage your tires. Store your tires in horizontal stacks. If you store them vertical they will quickly get oval shape.

As you can see tire maintenance isn't rocket science, just few things to consider that will add to your safety.