Recommended WordPress Plugins – Day 6

I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves and want to discuss some recommended WordPress plugins. WordPress plugins are key to any successful WordPress blog as they enable you to do so much more in alot less time. In fact typically the plugins are a one time setup and let them run by themselves sort of thing.

There are hundreds and thousands of plugins available, although you only need around 5 – 10 to really achieve some great results.  They can do everything from optimizing your blog correctly, to making sure that your blog ping’s the correct sources. Let’s get familiar with the necessary plugins to make sure your blog is performing at 100% of  its capability.

These plugins that I’m going to list and go into a little detail are compliant with WordPress 2.5 and 2.6 as I’m as they are with the earlier ones as well. Any future updates for WordPress I will have to revisit this post and edit them accordingly.

All In One SEO Pack

Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines. By optimizing your titles for search engines, generating META tag’s automatically and eliminates the duplicate content penalty. This a work out of the box plugin, just install it like you would a normal plug in and you are good to go! You also have the ability to redo and override any title, META tag, META description that you want to. I always make sure that I install this first so that my blog is optimized from the get go. All In One SEO Pack.

Google Analyticator

Since I’m a huge fan of Google’s visitor tracking software I will always use this plug-in. If you don’t want to use Google’s Analytics tracking software then I will suggest an alternative below, but keep in mind I haven’t used the other one. I feel that Google’s tracking software is fantastic, allowing for a comprehensive outlook and tracking of my visitors. They literally track just about everything and anything you can think of, such a lifesaver. I can find out exactly what keywords people are coming to my page from, where they are coming from, how long they stay, and where they go. Essential to any serious blogger! Go ahead and sign up for the Google Analytics then head over to get the Google Analyticator plug-in.

WordPress.com Stats

Can it compare to Google’s Analyticator? I don’t think it could, but if you aren’t a fan of Google or are paranoid they are going to take over the world then so be it. WordPress overs a stats system, as I said before I have no experience with this plug in and am offering it as an alternative to the Google Analyticator plug in referred to above. For more information about this plug in refer to the WordPress plug in page.

Google XML Sitemaps

Very crucial plugin. This is another one of my immediate installs after setting up a new blog. This will set up a sitemap for Google and some other popular search engines. This will let the search engines know how to ‘view’ and rate your website when they come to crawl it. It will also notify them of the recency of change that will occur and when they should come back to ‘spider’ your page again. Once you install the plugin you will need to have the program setup the XML sitemap. It’s crucially important that you do that after you install the plugin. You can find that option under the Settings Tab -> XML-Sitemaps -> Generate Sitemap. Google XML Sitemap.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

You want to notify different websites that your blog has been updated so that they know to index your blog and posts correctly. WordPress’ automatic ping utility only pings a very limited amount of websites and will ping them too often as well. Risking you to get banned from the websites pinging function all together. If you edit, and save a blog post it will ping the different websites automatically. This isn’t what you want to do. You only want to notify a pinging website once after you have submitted a post, not after modifying or saving a post. Ping Optimizer allows you to add more websites to ping as well as setting up when you want to ping. After you install the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plug in you will want to add the following list for notification. You can add this list under the Settings -> MBP Optimizer ->  Enter them here (make sure to save after)

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

ShareThis

Sharethis is another essential plugin that everyone should have, do you see the ShareThis green button at the bottom of this and all my other posts? Go ahead and click that real quick to give it a try out for yourself. What it will do is let most of the most popular social bookmarking websites know that you bookmarked my website. Very cool huh? It will help with your social bookmarking rankings like we talked about yesterday. ShareThis Plugin.

Akismet

I’m not going to go deep into this one as it is typically automatically installed and activated with most WordPress installs. This plug in captures all the spam you are going to get in the comments and blocks them. I’m sure you probably have this installed already though.

That’s pretty much about all the essential ones that you will need. I will recommend one more though, if you are wanting to generate some money with your blog via Google’s Adsense then you will need an Adsense plugin to help with the implementing the Adsense in your blogs and sidebars. Go ahead and check out the AdSense Manager for all that and more.

Oh, one more thing. I know you have heard me talk about the Auto Social Poster before but I need to absolutely put it in this section too since its discussing crucial and essential WordPress plugins. Auto Social Poster is a plug in that will allow your blog to automatically notify over 40 different social bookmarking websites AUTOMATICALLY. You can even create multiple users as well, letting multiple users notify the websites about your blog. I have already seen HUGE results from this program and honestly think it is worth every penny, especially with the support they have.

Auto Social Poster

$$$Automatically Bookmark Your Blog Post via 40 Bookmarking Websites$$$

[tags]Recommended wordpress plugins, best wordpress plugins, wordpress plugins, wordpress plug-ins[/tags]