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13 Essential Wordpress Plug-ins for Every Wordpress Installation

Guest post by: Donna Gunter

Article Overview: Over the last several years, a multitude of Wordpress plug-ins have been developed, which adds extra flexibility to tweak the capabilities of your Wordpress blog. Because there are thousands of plug-ins out there, it's difficult for newbies to figure out which ones are essential. These 13 Wordpress plug-ins seem to come the most highly recommended:

13 Essential Wordpress Plug-ins for Every Wordpress Installation

I'm just now jumping on the Wordpress bandwagon and am starting to convert many of my sites to Wordpress. Now that I've decided to use this platform, I needed to determine which plug-ins were most essential to my site's success. If you don't carefully select your plug-ins, you can

accidentally subject your site to some virus or malware and have to spend many, many hours troubleshooting the problem.

Over the last several years, a multitude of plug-ins have been developed, which adds extra flexibility to tweak the capabilities of your Wordpress blog. Because there are thousands of plug-ins out there, it's difficult for newbies to figure out which ones are essential.

These 13 Wordpress plug-ins seem to come the most highly recommended:

1. Akismet: Helps you deal with comment and trackback spam. One of my sites was inundated with these fake messages until I installed the Askimet

plug-in. Akismet checks comments and trackbacks against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam. If they appear to be bogus, they're automatically moved to your WordPress installation's spam folder and you don't have to see them at all.

2. All in One SEO Pack: Lets you get your blogsite SEO-ready. You can give your page an SEO-friendly title (which shows up at the top of a Web browser), homepage description (which appears beneath your URL when people search for it via Google or other engine), and keywords related to your topic.

3. Broken Link Checker: Goes through all of your blog's comments to determine if you have any broken links. You don't have to return to edit each individual post to remove or edit the broken link, as this plug-in permits you to take action right from its report.

4. Disqus Comment System: Replaces your Wordpress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. I like the fact that Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive because it connects web sites and commenters across communities.

5. Ultimate Google Analytics: Adds JavaScript to each page (without making any changes to your template) so that you can use your Google Analytics account to track outbound links, downloads from your own site, and more without requiring you to install the code manually.

6. Google XML Sitemaps: Generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. A sitemap makes it much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. And, it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

7. ShareThis: Enables sharing across social networks and email. This plug-in makes it simple to share a post by clicking the "ShareThis" icon.

8. WP-DB-Backup: Backs up all of your files to either your server, desktop, or inbox once you select the frequency (hourly, twice daily, once daily, or weekly). The speed with which your file is restored depends on the amount of content that's been backed up.

9. WP-Sticky: Enables you to make a blog post "sticky," or featured as the top post in your blog.

10. SEO Friendly Images: Lets you give your uploaded images the proper ALT and TITLE attributes to help with your SEO efforts. This feature

provides an image description to search engines and helps create a match when someone makes a search query.

11. SEO Smart Links: Lets you automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags already on your site. After installation, simply enter the keywords you use the most often and the links or associated articles with which you want to associate to them.

12. WP Super Cache: Makes your pages load way very quickly. Second, since it stores static versions of your site, it requires much less CPU processing than using WordPress all by itself.

13. WordPress Related Posts: Helps you recommend related posts on the same or similar topic to your readers.

All of these plug-ins are available for download from the Wordpress Plug-in Directory. If you're getting started on converting to Wordpress, add

these plug-ins to your site. Your blogsite will thank you!

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Article Tags: Donna Gunter, Get More Clients Online, OnlineBizUcom, Wordpress, Wordpress plugins



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Re: Poll: Blogger or Wordpress Blog? - Blogger is a good place to start blogging simply because it is so easy to set up a blog and go. However, Wordpress has a lot more to offer. I recently set up a membership site in about five minutes flat on a Wordpress blog on one of my websites. I haven't had time to develop it yet, but the point is, you can do that sort of thing on Wordpress but not on Blogger. That is just one example of the versatility of Wordpress.
Re: What are the ways to start a business with a small capital? - Great tips, everyone! I totally agree that blogging is the way to go. You can help brand yourself and be seen as an expert in your niche, and it's more personalized. GT, that's very possible. I can believe that their blog would get shut down over too many affiliate links. Does Wordpress specifically have terms about this, though? I have a self-hosted Wordpress blog, and since it's on your own server, you have complete control over it. There is no one to tell you what you can and can't do with it. A Wordpress-hosted blog, however, would be under Wordpress's terms of service. That would be interesting to know since I was considering starting a blog on Wordpress. Alan
how do I get started with Wordpress blog? - Hello All, It's time for me to get serious about a blog - which I have definitely been resisting. I've read some posts here in the forum that suggests Wordpress Blog is the best and it's interactive. I am currently set up on blogpspot.com but haven't been active for a long time, so it's not problem for me to switch. Where do I begin with Wordpress and after I make a blog post can anyone comment back? Can I monitor the comments? How is Wordpress different or better than blogspot.com? Thanks, Nancy
Re: how do I get started with Wordpress blog? - I agree that anybody thinking about starting a Wordpress blog should buy a domain name and set up a hosting account. When choosing a hosting account, make sure it is one that is set up for Wordpress and includes an easy installation script such as "Simple Scripts". Two web hosts I'd particularly recommend for Wordpress are Bluehost and Hostgator.
Hey Thanks! - That's one cool blog - even made a comment for you! I appreciate that my blog (above) looks a bit basic - and that's just as far as I've gotten right now! First stage - make it work. Next up is working out how to customize it. I like to understand the bare bones of things first time round - then the next one is so much easier! I love blogging. In fact on another website, I have blogged for over 4 years, in one form or another. What I love about Wordpress and now I'm getting the hang of it, Fantastico, is that I can have unlimited ones as well as update remotely. The previous blog was PC based and a bit irritating for that. I also love that you can set your own ping directories with Wordpress too - a whole range of Plugins are waiting for me. I have also just bought (I know, I know...), WordpressAdsenseSystem by Gobala Krishnan at the website of that name, if anyone is interested. I truly love the immediacy of writing blogs (as well as articles), using day-to-day metaphors and experiences, and I now want to get a way forward to generate some income from it. Then there's the whole Web 2.0 thing that is a whole subculture I'd never considered until like this week...


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