10 Must Have Plugins for Wordpress bloggers
What’s a blog without plugins?
Its almost the same thing as a artist without imagination, a road without cars or a job without payment. Many blog owners who are successful knows the power of these small little files known as plugins and usually those who fail at blogging are the ones that never experimented with plugins.
Which is why you must know about your possibilities and expansion into the blogging world. Wordpress is a excellent open source platform and the best fact about it that their are endless possibilities for creating your ‘dream blog’ with wordpress and getting almost any feature you want working in a wordpress blog and all this is possible because of plugins and widgets.
So i prepared this list of 10 most useful and must have plugins for any wordpress blogger. Also i have included 5 bonus plugins which are not a ‘must’ but helps in enhancing your blogs!
[Please note that the list is arranged alphabetically and all plugins are equally important]
1 . Akismet
Akismet is from the creators of wordpress itself and it is already available to you by default, i can’t imagine surviving without akismet. Akismet blocks and stops Spam in your blog which is a necessity for any active blog!
Akismet is free to use and it requires a API key for it to work, you need to register at wordpress.com and get a account, this account also grants you a AIP key to use with akismet anywhere on a wordpress blog.
2. Add to Any : Share/Bookmark/Email Button
This is one of my favorite plugin, this plugin is has been powering my blog and spreading it viraly since the start. The best part about is that its not ‘visibly abusing’ to your visitors and just a small button on the end of each post which has resulted in so many sharing and caring for my posts. I recommend this plugin to any blogger because it is a viral one!
This plugin is the backbone of my blog, its the life of my works because this is the plugin that has been generating endless amount of organic google friendly traffic for me every month.
AIOS pack enables you to easily add keywords, title, description and meta tags to your post making it very search engine friendly, this plugin is a MUST if you want to generate organic Search engine traffic.
Using this plugin i am ranking in top 10 on google for many keywords and my search engine traffic is never less then 300 unique every month from google for those keywords, which is a very big thing for me considering that this blog is only 2 months old.
4. Comment Luv
Spread the luv!
Comment luv is a plugin that enables you to give back to your readers, using this plugin the people who comment on your post has the ability to use a snippet of their own blogs feed, which means that they would love to comment on your blog! This plugin helps you get social – in few short words it will increase your comments count because their are people who loves comment luv blogs.
You need to register on the comment luv website to get it, but its free so welcome to the community!
Ever wondered how to get loyal visitors? or increase the amount of your RSS subscribers? or better yet thank your visitors for participating on your site?
Well Comment Relish does just that! It will send a automated personalized message, just like a auto-responder from aweber or getresponse, the best thing about it is that it won’t spam your commentators, it only sends the message once per email. So that means you can thank them for commenting on your blog when they do it for the first time only!
I use comment relish to remind those readers of subscribing to my RSS feeds and to follow me on twitter, this is working like a charm and is really helping in the growth of my blog at the same time not spamming the commentators to death.This plugin is also free.
This is a must have plugin for every blog, specially for every new blog!
Contact form solves a very big issue among wordpress bloggers which is having a ‘contact form’ using which your visitors could contact you, it builds your own branded contact form which does the job very well, you can add and include custom fields and can have a form about anything you want, be it feedback forms, contact us form or selling advertising on your site. Plus its really easy to use and insert on your pages.
If you don’t have this plugin in your blog then you rather stop blogging right now!
Google analytics plugin easily connects your google analytics account and wordpress blog, this plugin is important because you want to know each and everything that is happening with your blog and the outside world. Tracking your visitors and then optimizing yourself to perform better is what every successful blogger does and this is the sole reason why you need to use google analytic.
Since Search Engine traffic what matters most for any blogger, you need to provide the search engines with a ‘passage’ to each and every corner of your blog!
This is where this plugin comes into play, smartly designed this plugin creates XML site maps which tells the google bot of the whereabouts of your pages, posts and every single corner of your site, the more the bot crawls the more higher are your chances of SE traffic and higher rankings!
Twitter is perhaps the most viral social media till now and its really easy to take advantage of this!
Tweetmeme button makes it easy for your visitors to tweet/retweet your blog posts and spread the word, the one thing i noticed is that tweetmeme button gets more attention then any other share/save buttons which makes it viral and infectious! This is also used by industry giants such as mashable and techcrunch and it usually creates a twitter trend for them, so why not take advantage of this?
10. Digg this Button
Digg is very well known to everyone, which is why you need a ‘digg this’ button to get your articles and blog posts on the top!
The best use of digg this button is getting your posts indexed fast, believe it or not but search engines loves ’social buzz’ and digg has helped me to get some of my posts indexed in less then 12 hours which is very good and welcoming news for us bloggers!
Bonus Plugins
These plugins are not a ‘must have’ but their use are really fantastic which is why they are making to this list!
This plugin removes the evil ‘nofollow’ tags from your blog and thus increasing the amount of attention and comments you get on your blog, but be warned you need to use ‘akismet’ if you want to use this one because it will double the amount of spam comments you receive!
Feeds are the heart of any blog and having subscribers to your feeds is important! This plugin detects all possible ways to access your feeds and redirects them to feed burner making it easy for you to track your subscribers.
This plugin gives the option to your visitors to subscribe to other comments on a blog, thus increasing the amount of comments and social interaction among your readers.
More like a widget then a plugin but you need the plugin installed and activated in order for the widget to work, it enables you to show your top 5,10 or any number of commentators on your blog, this creates a competitive spirit among your readers and increases the amount of social interaction and comments on your blog. The widget can be displayed easily on your sidebar, footer or any widgetized space using the widget tools from your blog dashboard.
5. WP-Cumulus
Evey wordpress blog uses tags, but displaying those tags in your sidebars looks very ugly.This plugin makes your tags look more organized and cool, by displaying them in a flash embedded 3-d space.
That’s all for the top plugins but remember you need to add them to your plugin directory and adjust the settings of each individually, and respect the copyrights of the plugins.
Also many plugins might not go with your current themes so you will have to test them before that, and some themes requires certain plugins to be functional such as limit post plugins or page navigation plugins, these plugins are common which is why they are not included in the list, these plugins are supplied by the theme owner/designer.
P.S i don’t like spam and i don’t recommend you to abuse any of these plugins and spam!
Have a great day,
SJ
hi sameer,
once again very useful post i did not know there are so many useful plugins for wordpres i will definitely try the wp-cumulus as it looks good and google plugin for site maps
thanks again
Hello. Thank you for this great info! Keep up the good job!
thank you! I really liked this post!
I don‘t know If I said it already but …Excellent site, keep up the good work. I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say I’m glad I found your blog. Thanks,
…..Frank Scurley
Awesome blog!
I thought about starting my own blog too but I’m just too lazy so, I guess I‘ll just have to keep checking yours out.
LOL,
Hey savannah,
its not that hard to start a blog trust me:P but its very hard to maintain one. Let me know if you need any help in starting your first blog, hope to see you around more
Thanks for the cool blog, it’s nice to read things that makes sense or have a point unlike a lot of geberish blogs. I do read a lot of those too
sometimes it’s just fun. Keep it coming.
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MY TIPS AND SUGGESTIONS:
1- KEYWORDS
Watch position and density in every section of yuor content.
2- CONTENT
Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. BACK LINKS
Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link.
All of these above are increadible inter connected.
LAST but more important tip:
THE FIRST TOP LEFT PORTION OF THE SCREEN is the section of your web page where you need to concentrate your space for; keywords, related content, links.
Pasquale
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