Plugins are the best way to extend your blogs effectiveness and to make it a much more powerful SEO tool. It’s no secret that my favorite blogging platform is WordPress. Which plugins do I like to install in my WordPress blogs? In my opinion, these are the best WordPress plugins that I recommend…
- Akismet: This is your spam blocker that will filter out the spam comments. It works really well. It comes with most WordPress installs; you just need to activate it. For personal use it is absolutely free, for business use they ask you to make a small donation.
- All in One SEO Pack: This is your SEO plugin that once you set it up will automatically configure your Title tags, etc… or you can manually set them for each page and post. Prevent duplicate content by setting “noindex” for categories, archives and tags in your set-up.
- Google XML Sitemaps: Generates your XML sitemap to make for easy spidering of all your articles, postings and pages by the search engines. Updates your XML sitemap every-time you do a new blog post.Essential to make sure your site is always being indexed.
- Broken link checker: Detects and allows for ultra-easy management of broken links in your blog postings. Checks comments and content for any broken links which is a common problem as your blog ages. Broken links are a “rankings killer”.
- WP Super Cache: This plugin speeds up your page load time. Worried that your blog may get featured on Digg or Stumbleupon and you won’t be able to handle that spike in traffic? After an HTML file is generated your web-server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more server intensive WordPress PHP scripts.
- WP-DBManager: Automatically schedule weekly backups. Ever worry that as you are editing your theme or doing one of the regular backups that something could go wrong and you could lose everything? Now you can set your backups and forget it. Also has repair, database optimization and restore capabilities.
- Google Analyticator: This plugin allows you to view your Google Analytics from within the blog dashboard without the need of logging into your Google Analytics account each time. Supports standard Google Analytics tracking via the latest async tracking methods.
- WPTouch: Today you must make your website and blog mobile compatible. Make your blog mobile friendly with this plugin. Transform your blog into an application like theme. Customize many aspects of your site appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to touch mobile visitors
- WP to Twitter: Easily Tweet when you post to your WordPress blog. This uses your URL shortening service and provides a link back to your post from Twitter.
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: One of the best ways to lower the bounce rate (which is frequently high with blogs) is to provide a list of links to your other relevant blog postings. This is exactly what this plugin does.