Wordpress is a wonderful thing. It makes creating a website a snap, and its devoted user base has made it so pretty much anything you need to do, you can, by use of a plugin. I don’t go too fancy with my sites, but there are certain plugins that I use everytime I install Wordpress. These are for different reasons; seo, marketing, and ease of use.
Read on for a list of the 7 plugins I use for every blog I make. (Save for one of them, as I only use that when I want image galleries, of course).
Note: I made this list because a lot of lists on the internet are really oudated; it’s 2009 and Wordpress plugins have really become something great. These are all compatible with Wordpress 8.4.
There’s nothing wrong with being listed in Google, that’s for sure. The All-In-One SEO Pack exists to help put you there. Wordpress can be great for search engine optimization, but after you’ve done your permalinks, targeted the keywords you want, and gotten backlinks, what else can you do? Get this plugin. It can rewrite all of your titles (Put the title first, get rid of the blog name, etc etc), add noindex to your duplicate pages, and add meta descriptors and keywords to all of your posts. I never run a blog without it.
This is only for people who want a photo gallery, obviously, but if you want one then there’s no better way to get it than with the NextGen plugin. With ever-so-pretty Lightbox animations and the ability to upload as many pictures as you want into as many different galleries you want it’s very easy to create a portfolio site. Place individual photos or whole topical galleries in a page, a post, or even on the sidebar with a widget.
Social bookmarking has been all the rage for the past few years. Now that there’s Facebook and Twitter there are even more places for your posts to be recommended. Now not everybody is going to read your post, go to a social media website and recommend it to somebody else. That’s a lot of work. Now if you could just click a button to do it, well, that’s a whole new ball game. That’s what Sociable is. Links to share your post on Twitter or Facebook or bookmark it to Digg or StumpleUpon or any number of sites. There are 99 to choose from.
In the same vain as the SEO pack, there’s no reason not to have a plugin that could help you get ranked in Google. There’s debate as to how useful creating a valid XML sitemap and submitting it to Google’s Webmaster Tools is, but it really can’t hurt now can it? This automates the whole process and sends the sitemap to various search engines.
If you get in the habit of installing this plugin when you install a new blog it can save you some time adding your analytics code to the footer. Just install the plugin and put in your UA code and it’s all taken care of.
Twitter is all the rage, I know you use it, so why not add your Twitter updates to your blog? This full-featured plugin will post your updates in a widget, allow you to post to twitter from your dashboard or sidebar, update twitter with new posts, and even shorten your links with bit.ly. Excellent.
Askimet
Askimet comes with Wordpress by default but needs a Wordpress.com API key to be activated. Go through the process of getting this, it only takes a couple minutes, and makes spam annoyance a thing of the past.
What are your favourite Wordpress plugins? Leave a comment.
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Hi Matt,
I’m a big WordPress fan. I already use some of the plugins you mentioned, and will definitely look at the others. I’ve been looking for a good gallery plugin to use occasionally in an informational site — not a portfolio site. Would NextGen be overkill?
Helpful post. Thanks!
NextGen can be as simple or as complex as you’d like it to be. I use it for bigger portfolios but also if I want to put a few screenshots of something in. I’m a big fan of it all for purposes just because it can be used for simple tasks, but then if you need to do something a little bigger it can handle that as well.
Other than the ones you’ve mentioned, my two favorite plugins are:
1) “no self pings” (this used to drive me nuts)
and
2) the auto upgrade plugin. I realize this is no longer necessary (since Wordpress now upgrades itself), but it saved my life (and prevented lots of hair-pulling) when I had to go from 2.6.1 to 2.8.4 in one fell swoop!
A really good list.
For me, the 2009 winner is the TweetMeme Button plugin. It encourages your visitors to ‘tweet’ your post. Excellent plugin for gaining more traffic.
Andrew
I wrote this post before I found out about the Tweet Meme plugin and have to agree. It’s very useful and nice looking. Highly recommended.
Good read, always on the lookout for free seo software.
Dumb question, but is there a plug-in similar to Twitter Tools that will post your messages to other social networking sites at the same time?
Not to say something like that isn't out there, but I've never seen one.
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