What are some useful WordPress plugins? My right brain asked my left brain. My left brain, make a soft coughing noise, then say, You know what, I know 16 ridiculously useful Wordpress plugins. These are all the plugins that I had used through the years that had helped me improve my blogs (my other blogs, since this one is still pretty new). They have helped me in optimizing my pages, increasing my readerships, bringing traffic to my site, building a community, or just allowing my site to be more accessible for my visitors. [NB: Click on each headings to visit the plug-in download sites]
1. All in One SEO Pack
If, like me you find SEO is messy and annoying, some good bloke out there have just created a Wordpress plugin to simplify the process. This could definitely be one of the best plugins you could use to optimize your page to gain higher Google ranking. The ‘ultimate power’ of this tool is in how you could put the title and the descriptions of your article that would appear in Google search totally different from the actual title and descriptions of your article. For example:
The actual title of your article: Stamp Collecting Guide.
But then, you realize that the keywords have too many competitors. Don’t worry. Choose a fewer competitors keywords then put it in the SEO Pack Title. For example,
The SEO Pack Title: Stamp Collecting Manuscript.
Simple, yet effective.
2. Google XML Sitemaps
Do you want Google to notice every time you do an update to your site? Do you want Google to always updating your site’s status in their database? Then, you need XML Sitemap. By placing a formatted xml file with site map in your web server, you enable Search Engine crawlers (from Google, Yahoo, etc) to find out what pages are currently present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.
3. Social Bookmarks
Social Media websites have become the main spotlight in recent years, with the emergence of Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook, and other sites. This plug-in would allow your users to bookmark the articles they like and share them with others to more than 50 social bookmarking sites, which include Squidoo, Stumble Upon, Digg, Yahoo! Bookmarks, and lots of others.
4. Top Commentators
As a gamer, I know how powerful leader board could be in order to build a community. I have spent unprecedented amount of hours to climb the ranking ladder of my favorite shooting games. But how do you simulate this in a blogging environment? You use the Top Commentators plug-in. This plug-in would track which users have the most comments every day and ranked them in leader board kind of way.
5. Akismet
Web Marketer Depot received more than 10 spam comments each day. Without Akismet, this site would have ended up as yet another spam’s victim website. But fortunately, we now have this powerful plug-in that would delete, or at least contained, spammy comments automatically. It is now integrated with Wordpress by default. You should already have it when you install WordPress to your site, although you still need to enter your API key to activate it.
6. Yet Another Related Post
Increase the amount of post views in your site by using this plug-in. Every time you put a new post, Yet Another Related Post plugin would automatically generate any related posts to your current article on the bottom of that post. It did this by tracking the keywords located in the body, tags, categories, or title of the post.
7. Google Analytics for WordPress
Track your visitors and study them, like some sort of lab experiments >Kidding<. But, in all seriousness, this plug-in integrate Analytics with your blog. Through Analytics, we could gather a lot of cool info regarding the behavior of the visitors of our site, from what page they are visiting, how much time they spent on the site, and a whole lot more.
8. Feedburner
Allow your visitors to read your blog through RSS feed and monetize on them using Feedburner. This plugin is totally free and you could integrate Google Adsense with it.
9. Adsense Deluxe
Integrate Adsense easily with your blog, that’s the whole idea of this plug-in.
10. Internal Link Building
The reason why Wikipedia always ranked on the top spots in Google is because of its strong internal linking. Use this plug-in to link between all the posts in your site, by first specifying the linking keywords. Links would be automatically created for all the posts with those keywords in them.
11. WP – Post Views
We all love popular things. It is definitely in our nature to join the crowds. Hey, isn’t that the recipe of success of those famous Twitter marketers? When you already have 12,000 followers, it is easy to add another 1,000. The hardest part is getting started. One of the ways to implement this knowledge in a blog is by showing your most popular posts, complete with the amount of views they had gotten. The more views a particular post had, the more views it will gain. At least that’s what happen in most blogs.
12. Tweet Meme
Twitter is not the Next Big Thing anymore, it is The Big Thing! And any plugin that helps you performed better in Twitter is great. Tweet Meme not only allows your visitors or readers to easily tweet your message, it also allows you to track your tweets. Absolutely fantastic!
13. WP – Page Navi
What could you do if you already have quite a bit of posts and want all those posts to ‘kind of’ appear in the homepage? Then you might want to consider WP – Page Navi. It allows your visitors to browse your sites as if they are flipping the pages of a book.
14. Tiny MCE Advanced
I could simulate Microsoft Word experience in my Wordpress?! Thought that was just a dream. Tiny MCE Advanced comes with, as the name suggested, advanced features that allows you to do all sort of cool things without having to know HTML. It comes with advanced link options, advanced image options, emotions (Smilies), table feature, and a lot more.
15. Get Recent Comments
Have you ever go into a forum or comment section of a blog with no intention of contributing? But, then, all of a sudden, you saw a comment or a reply that just hit your nerves. You absolutely disagree his view and believe that you have to do something to end his stupidity. With absolute anger, you typed a reply. There are times when our ideas just aligned or clashed with others at ridiculous proportion. And when that happen, we feel the urge to do something about it. In this case, it means replying to a comment or a forum post. And believe it or not, it helps in building an active online community. To encourage this behavior, you might want to try this Get Recent Comments plugin. It allows you to show the latest comments in your blog(as sidebar).
16. Clean Archives Reloaded
What if you don’t feel like putting an archives section in your sidebar or footer? You find that they just look tacky and ugly. Maybe because you have too much contents, too many categories, and too many months of archives. How could you deal with this problem? Create an archives page. And the best archives page plugin that I have used so far seems to be this one. It allows you to sort your archives by month in which you could easily expand or collapse. Very useful if you have a lot of contents.
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I am always looking for new plugins to add or look into for my blog. I haven’t heard about clean archives reloaded before! Will be looking into them in just a few minutes. Great list Andi!
I’ve been hunting for some of these exact plug-ins for a while, but couldnt find any that worked how I wanted them to. It looks like these might actually do the trick
Blake @ Props Blog Reviews´s last blog ..10 Guidelines To Making A User Friendly Website
NEVER HEARD OF THE Tiny MCE Advanced…
THINK ILL TRY THAT ONE…
THANKS FOR THE HEAD-UP
-Nhoel of http://keywordspeak.com
Nhoel´s last blog ..Foods You Can Eat While You’re On Your PC