The more I get to learn about Wordpress and the use of Plugins, the more I start loving and appreciate the ease of them. There are a few plugins that I use on a regular base because they make blogging life just so much easier, so I wanted to share them with you. Please keep in mind that most plugins mentioned below are WordPress plugins, sorry for that guys, I only talk about what I know!
If you are not familiar with plugins and how to get them to work, please read this short introduction: Putting Your Plugins to Work before you start dowloading them.
If you are already familiar with plugins, here goes my list of my top 15 plugins I use on different blogs and almost couldn´t live without in the blogsphere!
Plugins to Improve SEO of your blog
This one automatically optimizes titles for search engines, generates Meta tags and avoids duplicate content found on wordpress blogs. If you are running wordpress 2.3 or up you don´t even have to look at the options, but you can of course override and title and set any meta description and keywords you want.
This plugin is really neat because it shows the last 5 contextually related posts after every single blog post, making it easier for visitors to find related material if they liked the one they just read, but it will also bring forward older posts, thus improving the deeplinking of your blog.
This plugin generates a fully customizable sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator that is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Once installed and activated, all you need to do is go to the Settings page inside your WP control panel, click on the DD Sitemap and choose your preference. Once your preference are set, you create a new page and in the html you add the following code where you want the sitemap to show up:
<!– ddsitemapgen –>
Why is this plugin good for SEO? Apart from giving your visitor an easier way to navigate and find things on your site, you are again providing extra links to all your posts.
To see this plugin in action, visit my sitemap page.
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog that is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
I am using this plugin to easily show the posts that were most commented all together on one page, but you can also set it to show the most visited posts in your blog. This will again bring extra link attention to your most popular post plus it gives your visitor a short list of most interesting posts on your blog.
Redirects variations of identical domain requests to a consistent uri to ensure http://www.easymoneyzine.com and http://easymoneyzine.com are not regarded as two different domains by the search engines.
Important Plugins you really need to install
After having had a problem with another blog, losing all content because of my own stupidity, I have this plugin installed to make sure I get a database backup emailed to me weekly so I won´t have to worry about that anymore.
Save your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. Did you know that the new Wordpress version already is set to ping http://rpc.pingomatic.com/? (You can find which services you are pinging by going to Settings in your controlpanel and then choose Writing. You can modify the services you want to ping everytime a post comes out at the bottom of that page).
Did you also know that everytime you edit a published post, you are sending another ping to the pinging services and that this might get your blog banned because it is considered spamming if you ping too often for the same post? And another little known fact is that when dating your posts in order to have different posts going public in the future, you will loose the value of these pingservices, because as soon as you hit the publish button, they will start searching your post, and guess what, they won´t find it if you have set the date to the future!
The cool thing about this plugin is that you can actually date posts that you have written and only ping once they are published online. Plus, you can edit your post without the danger of continuously pinging every time you change something in an already existing post. After installing the plugin, just activate it and go to the Settings in your controlpanel to make sure you register the plugin in order for it to work and start avoiding spamming pingers and getting blocked from their services.
If you are looking for an easy way to be able to see how your website is doing, how much traffic you are receiving, where people are coming from, how long they stay and which keywords brought visitors to your blog you might want to open a Google Analytics account for free. Once you have your account you will have to implement some code in order for Google to track your traffic. Now, instead of starting to muddle in the code of your template (and then having to do that again whenever you change to another template) you can use this plugin to easily put in the code. Once installed, just activate it and go to the analytics plugin you can find in Settings, and add the code in order for the plugin to start doing it´s job.
Add some spice to your blog with the following Plugins
I only recently found this plugin and have been using it with great pleasure so far. One of the most important things when running a blog (and probably one that will give you the biggest advantages when it comes to the success of your blog) is updating very regularly. But, since we are all human and sometime life get´s in the way, there are always moments that inspiration lacks or we just don´t have the time to add posts. This plugin will allow other people to post articles to your blog, much in the same way article directories receive their articles, without losing control over the content, since you can have them posted as draft versions and you just need to approve the article (or delete it if it does not represent what you agree with).
This Article Wizard is a monthly service to help with your article marketing strategies, sending your articles to all different article directories in a unique version, but separate from that, they offer a free plugin you can easily install in order to receive articles you can publish on your blog for (they support all different sorts of blog platforms, not just wordpress).
You can directly download the plugin here.
I am using this plugin at the moment to add some interesting products that I am using, to the bottom of all of my posts but there are of course other things you can do with this plugin without having to change things in the core code. It supports up to three different signature templates so you have an easier way of adding something to the end of all of your posts, whether it be a special message (like for example, “if you liked this post, please leave a comment or digg/stumble it”) or maybe some adsense code or affiliate link.
Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites so make it easier to be bookmarked in case a post was really enjoyed. Whenever I use the Sociable plugin, I prefer using the hacked version called Antisocial, which prevents losing linkjuice to social bookmarking sites.
This plugin shows a link to the last post from the commentator´s blog in their comment. Just activate and it´s ready. Currently parses with wordpress, blogspot, typepad and blogs that have a feed link in the head section of their page. I like this plugin a lot; it has already lead me to many interesting blogs I would not have found otherwise.
WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. In the message it sends to you it gives the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referrer. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+ and you can see it in action here. After activation of the plug, just go to Settings in your controlpanel and then to the enhanced wp contactform in order to configure your preference (like where you want the email to be sent to), once done, all you need to do is set up a new page and add the following code to the html wherever you want the contactform to appear:
<!–contact form–>
This plugin allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry, making it easier to keep track of certain comments and dialogues.
