WordPress by itself is a great blogging platform but along with a few plugins you can take this open-source software to a new level. Here’s a list of WordPress Plugins you should have installed to have a SEO friendly, community building, and easy to navigate blog.
Search Engine Friendly:
All in One SEO: This is the plugin you need to make sure your WordPress Blog is SEO friendly. This does it all from Meta Tags to Titles.
Robots Meta: It’s important to make sure that you minimize duplicate content on your blog as much as possible. This plugin make it extremely simple to do it.
Google Analyticator: Creating goals, and checking your stats is important and Google Analytics is a great tool to do just that. This plugin makes it easy to add the Analytics code to your blog.
Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator: Making sure Google knows about your blog and all it’s pages is important for good ranking. Submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools to see any crawl errors and index stats.
Security Scan: With this plugin you can make sure your WordPress blog is secure; getting hacked sucks and can lead to an exclusion from Google or at least a drop in rank.
Build a Community:
Contact Form: This plugin makes it easy for your readers to get in contact with you. This makes your blog more personable and makes you seem like a friend instead of the “guy behind the computer”.
Akismet: Few things will destroy a blog faster than spam. Akismet is the best way to stop the spam.
Get Recent Comments: Showing the recent comments can make your site seem like it’s more active than it really might be.
Brian’s Threaded Comments: Threaded comments are great. This way readers can respond to other comments and build a discussion.
Top Commentators: It’s great to reward your top commentators, and this plugin is a great way to do it.
User Friendly:
Super Cache: An inaccessible site is definetly not user friendly. This plugin makes your site static incase you receive a huge influx of readers. (This can help stave off the “digg effect”)
Feedburner Feedsmith: If you’re not using feedburner, you should be. Feedsmith will make your regular WordPress RSS feed redirect to your Feedburner Feed.
Post Plugin: This plugin doesn’t really do anything, but it’s needed for the Similar Posts and Recent Posts plugins.
Similar Posts: Add this plugin, include it at the bottom of your single posts, and watch as your bounce rate drop.
Recent Posts: I like keeping this at the top of all my posts so that users can see other posts I’ve written lately too. This will help lower your bounce rate and make users stay longer too.
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