My Top 10 Must Have WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
So, you have a WordPress blog and you keep hearing about a little term called WordPress plugins. Well, I am here to save you a ton of time and research and give you a list of the most important WordPress plugins that you need to run a successful blog. Not only are there thousands of plugins available, some free and some paid, most plugins act as a way to cut corners without have to design strategies yourself. Hmm….maybe strategies isn't the right word….WordPress plugins are more of time savers, they keep you from having to design some program to accomplish something so simple as installing a tweetme button on your page.
Have you ever gone to someone else's blog and said to yourself, "That's cool how he has that thingy pop up over his blog, I wonder how he does it?" Well, 9 times out of 10, closer to 10 it's probably a plugin. Or you find some fancy side bar gadgets on the side of the blog, yep, probably some kind of WordPress plugins.
Ready for my must have WordPress Plugins?
1. SEOPressor – A MUST have for all your SEO needs. No reason to write a post if no one can find you, but you know you probably hate the thought of figuring out SEO. If you are or were anything like me you thought about outsourcing the SEO jog. Well with SEOPressor you don't need to outsource anything. Once this plugin is installed, you just type in the keyword you are going after and a nice little check box appear on the right of your post to make sure you covered ALL the requirements for an optimized post. Every post I have written has landed me on the first page of Google, all by using SEOPressor.
2. FT Signature Manager – The WordPress plugin allows each author on your blog to include a signature at the end of their posts.Check out the bottom of my blog post here. That's the beauty of FT Signature Manager. You can add a picture, lead capture page links, Facebook fan page links, and just about anything else. The FT Signature Manager is easy to use and fully customizable.
3. Sexy Bookmarks (Shareaholic) – Again peek down below my blog post and see where it says Sharing is Sexy? That's Sexy Bookmarks. Sexy Bookmarks reduces the clutter of trying to install all the social book marketing sites on your blog. This is one wordpress plugin with all the popular and not so popular places you can choose to share your posts out to and your viewers can also. What does that mean for you? Power! Backlinks! That's what you need if you want a powerful SEO blog post.
4. W3 Total Cache – A must to have on your blog the company claims they are the highest rated and most complete WordPress performance plugin. This plugin dramatically improves the speed and user experience of your site. Here's what I know, sometimes it takes forever for a page to load and you don't want that happening when someone is visiting your blog or else they will just leave as I would since I am impatient. WordPress plugins are a must to avoid the slow loading pages through a cache process.
5. CommentLuv – Look down and hey leave a comment too, that way you can really see the power in CommentLuv. You reward your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. It encourages people to comment knowing they can link back to their blog. Yes, that's a good thing for SEO purposes. Coolest comment wordpress plugin by far that I have seen.
6. Google XML Sitemaps – I have to be honest, no clue here just was told it works! This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
7. Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin – Very simple plugin that adds a client side generated checkbox to the comment form requesting that the user clicks it to prove they are not a spammer. Bots wont see it so their spam comment will be discarded.
8. WordPress Related Posts – Generate a related posts list via tags of WordPress. These posts will show up under your current post as related with links. Again….great for SEO
9. Tweetmeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.
10. Top Commentator Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site.
So there you have it, my top 10 WordPress plugins I personally use for my own blogs. Most are geared towards sharing content and SEO purposes. I mean, you didn't think for a second I enjoyed just writing for fun, did you? Well, sure I do but if I am going to do it there should be a good purpose behind it.
Hopefully you enjoyed these WordPress plugins options and if so show some love & leave me a comment.
