Wordpress Plugins – Which Ones Do I Need?
We’ve already gone over a few of the Wordpress plugins you should have in your blog. In this article I’d like to give you a list of the ones I use as a base for all my blogs. Sometimes I have a few more than these, but each blog I do contains at least this base set. Workamping by blogging on the internet gets easier if you have the right tools. These are listed here in alphabetical order, each with a brief explanation.
All-In-One-SEO-Pack
This is one of the best SEO plugins I’ve found. It has just about all the Wordpress modification needed to optimize your blog and make it as SEO friendly as possible. It’s updated regularly and gives you serious control over what the search engines see.
Configurable-Tag-Cloud-Widget
Personally, I seldom use tags. I prefer to use categories instead. There’s a lot of discussion at the moment among SEO gurus (self-proclaimed and otherwise) as to whether tags are good or bad from an SEO standpoint. WorkFromYourRV.com uses tags. I’m doing it as an experiment to see the result compared to TheRVStargazer.com, the test site we started as a demonstration for this blog. Yes, that’s a real site I kept going and will continue to develop as time goes on. If you do use tags, this is a better widget than the one that comes packaged with Wordpress.
Gocodes
Gocodes is a handy plugin to let you occasionally generate those cute little short URLs needed by iPods and such. If you’ve ever used the TinyURL service to generate a short URL for someone, this is a great alternative. It lets you generate a URL like www.workfromyourrv.com/go/blogging so you can give it to someone over the phone or use it in a video. That’s much easier to communicate verbally than www.workfromyourrv.com/blogging-whats-it-all-about. Infact, if you try those 2 URLs you’ll see they lead to the same place. I use Gocodes in this blog.
Google-Sitemap-Generator
Clearly the best sitemap and submission plugin available in my opinion. It’s not limited to Google either. Any time you change your blog, it generates a new sitemap and submits it to Google, Yahoo, MAS and Ask.
Link-Cloaking-Plugin
This is a MUST HAVE if you are going to put affiliate ads in your blog posts. Google doesn’t like affiliate sites. One way they determine you are an affiliate site is by analyzing your outgoing links. If you have a lot of outgoing links that point to affiliates they’ll hurt you. This plugin cloaks those and makes them look like a link internally to your site so Google wont penalize you.
Si-Captcha-For-Wordpress
Another MUST HAVE for blog sites that encourage comments from unauthenticated readers. This makes sure human beings leave comments. There are several “black hat” SEO programs out there that automate garbage comments to blogs just to get the back links. This will at least make sure the commenter is a human being that can read those annoying captcha codes. Check out any of the comments block on my site to see what it looks like.
Sociable-Zyblog-Edition
This puts those cute little icons for the social networking sites at the bottom of your posts. These are great for back links if your readers use these services.
What-Would-Seth-Godin-Do
Strange name, but handy plugin. Named after Seth Godin, this adds a statement at the top of your posts reminding people to join your RSS feed.
Wp-Google-Analytics
If you haven’t set up a Google account for Analytics yet, do it. This plugin makes adding in your Analytics code easy. Google Analytics will give you a wealth of information about your traffic and search habits of your visitors.
Of course, there are hundreds more plugins available for Wordpress. That’s one of the things that makes it a great blogging platform. Many of these plugins are very useful for specific needs. We’ll cover some of the others I use occasionally as we finish up this series. These I’ve listed should be in every blog you set up.
