Fran’s 10 Best WordPress Plugins

Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Wordpress by Fran on October 15, 2009 | 2 Comments

Welcome to Buzz Words.

Got a blog? Plan on building one? Well, with Technorati tracking over 112.8 million blogs (not to mention the 72.82 million Chinese blogs counted by The China Internet Network Information Center) there’s a lot of competition in the blogosphere.  One essential tactic that will ensure you have at least a fighting chance to get users to visit your blog is to use robust, open source blog software. This is a no brainer – go directly to WordPress and sign up now. No need to thank me .

I fully admit to being a WordPress addict. WordPress makes life a pleasure. It’s flexible and simple to use and if you don’t know the first thing about coding – no problems – WordPress plugins will save the day. Plugins are cool mini computer programs that interact with a host application (in this case WordPress) to provide a very specific function. In other words, you can add incredible features to your blog without the need for a programmer. G-d bless WordPress – many of these plugins are absolutely free. I’ve created a list of the 10 Best WordPress Plugins – some of my favorites – I know you’ll come to love them too.

Without further ado here’s an essential list of the 10 Best WordPress Plugins

All-In-One-SEO-Pack: A must have, this cool, out-of-the-box plugin babysits even the newest newbie through many key search engine optimization (SEO) requirements including automatically generating Meta Tags and optimizing Title Tags. Advanced users can modify features for greater SEO juice.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button: This social media tool lets users share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, including the biggies like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 other social bookmarking and sharing sites.

Akismet: This anti-spam plug-in is usually built right into your WordPress template’s plug-in menu. All you have to do is activate it. I’m always awed at this plugin’s ability to siphon the good from the spam. According to Akismet’s WordPress description it differentiates itself from the competition because “it checks the content of the comment anonymously with an online server, to determine whether it is spam or not.” Bottom line – it’s highly effective at ridding my blogs of spam.

Breadcrumb Navigation XT: Breadcrumb trails are often found near the top of web pages and show users where they are currently located within the site hierarchy. An example of a breadcrumb may look like this: “Women > Skirts > Pencil Skirts”. Breadcrumb trails aren’t just a nice feature for users but are a great way to boost SEO and rankings. This simple plug-in takes care of the work for you.

Sociable: Aptly named, this awesome social tool automatically adds links to the top 99 social bookmarking sites from your posts and in your RSS feed.

Google Integration Toolkit: It may lack the glamour of some of the other plug-ins but this no-nonsense tool allows you to check how your site is indexed in some of Google’s most important tools including Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Adsense.

Google XML Sitemaps: One of the fundamentals in kick-starting SEO is ensuring that you have an xml sitemap in place. This handy plug-in automatically generate a compliant google xml sitemap. It updates the sitemap – and get this – it notifies ask.com, google, MSN Search and Yahoo after every new post!

Simple Tags: In every Internet Marketer’s back pocket, there are a couple of good tricks. Here’s one. This groovy little tool gives you more opportunities to tag your blog. It automatically extracts relevant tags from Yahoo, Tag The Net and Local Tags and more giving you an extra SEO boost.

Redirection: There’s nothing more frustrating than encountering a broken link. Users get frustrated and search spiders hit a dead end. Redirection is an excellent tool to manage 301 redirections and 404 errors.

WP Page Numbers: Make it easy for users to navigate your blog. Get rid of “next” and “previous” links, your readers can find what they want quickly. It’s also another great “back pocket” SEO trick because it helps to build a strong inner site structure.